A dank gloom…cigarette smoke invaded Charlotte’s nose to the point where she could have sworn it was also burning her corneas.

Bettina and Mimi were making hurry-up gestures. They had spotted a guy and three girls—upperclassmen, apparently, since they actually looked twenty-one—getting up from a cocktail table not too far from the dance floor. Already Mimi and Bettina were rushing pell-mell to claim the table, jimmying their thighs between back-to-back chairs and sprinkling ’scuse me’s over the cross faces of the students they jostled. Charlotte did her best to keep up. As soon as they sat down, Mimi lit up a cigarette to show that…she belonged! Bettina began moving her torso languidly to the reggae beat to show that…she belonged! Cigarette in one hand, Mimi brought her bottle of beer near her lips, looked at Charlotte, and arched her eyebrows, pantomiming, “Don’t you want something to drink?” which really meant, “Don’t you want to belong?” Charlotte shook her head no, and leaned forward with her forearms braced on the edge of the table, and looked right past Mimi at all the young bodies clumped together. Why? Belonging to—what? What was the point of this clump of humanity eagerly pressed against one another in a beaten-up place like the I.M. on a Friday night? She immediately answered her own question with another. What if I were in my room alone right now? She could feel it…sitting at her desk, staring out the window at the uplit library tower while loneliness scoured out all semblance of hope, ambition, or simple planning. Charlotte Simmons!—removed from all family, all friends, every familiar terrain, every worn and homely object…Did a single other student at Dupont feel as lonely as she had felt?

Her eyes lit upon five girls who were about to squeeze in at a table by the dance floor, just two tables away. They looked just as young as she did, all desperately grinning and laughing. That one—the one sitting practically on the dance floor—the blonde—the one with all the cleavage—the superior air she had, her chin up in the air—the very picture of I’m hot—oh come on, Charlotte! Be honest with yourself! You know she’s hot! The girl had the kind of long, straight, silky blond hair that makes every non-blond female in the world—every one of them without exception—wring her hands over the careless, pointless, offhanded unfairness of Fate.

Bettina had noticed the new arrivals, too. She leaned close to Charlotte, gestured toward them, and said rather superciliously, “Why don’t they just wear a sign around their necks saying, ‘Fuck me, I’m a freshman’?”

Charlotte laughed, but her spirits sank. Why was Charlotte Simmons here? What was this thing the three of them were involved in—herself every bit as much as Bettina and Mimi? The hunt! The hunt! The boyfriend! Necessary as breathing! What academic achievement, what soaring flight of genius, even a Nobel Prize in neuroscience, could ever be as important?

The band had broken into a soulful Bob Marley–style number. The singer was tilting his head way back, so that the microphone he held seemed to be diving right down his gullet. Half a dozen couples were grinding on the dance floor. Specimens, lab animals they were, in a neurobiological environment that triggered certain stimuli, causing them to infuse their mucous membranes with alcohol and nicotine, so overwhelming was the urge to…belong—

For the first time in her two months at Dupont, Charlotte felt like her old self, independent, aloof—aloof from the customs other freshmen accepted as the natural order of things in college life and surrendered to without a peep. Why was it so important for these bright, rich kids—fourteen-ninety average SATs—to buy into what was primitive? This itchy, dilapidated dump as opposed to something stylish or at least slick and spick-and-span…this Caribbean music…

Charlotte Simmons was above them all. They were specimens for her to study. The I.M. was a terrarium full of rich boys and girls in rags, and she was peering down into the terrarium and studying them…the male and female of the species grinding genitals…the swollen…thing, under cotton, searching for…the crevice, under cotton…the Buddha drumming, flailing everything in a nine-foot radius…the caramel singer eating more microphone…but then here was an aberration! A guy was coming onto the dance floor by himself. No, he was merely using the dance floor as a shortcut. Thatchy hair, open button-down shirt, sleeves rolled up, shirttail hanging out over his khakis, limping, but with an arrogant gait, as he strode between the grinding two-backed beasts. He turned his head. A surgical type of bandage was plastered down one side of his jaw, from his ear almost to his chin—

Hoyt.

He was heading toward her. She was acutely conscious of how frantically her heart was beating. He must have been at a table on the other side of the floor all along. How had he even found her in this smoky darkness? How long had he—

Mimi leaned across Bettina and said to Charlotte, “See who’s coming? It’s your lifeguard from the Saint Ray house.”

Charlotte looked up as if she hadn’t noticed him before. Her face was burning. She only hoped it was too dark for Mimi to notice.

Mimi leaned across Bettina again. “What are you going to say to him?” She looked excited.

“I don’t know.” Charlotte’s voice was shaking.

Now he was barely six feet from her, but he didn’t seem to be looking directly at her. Closer and closer—and right past her, without a glance. He was closing in on the table with all the five freshmen crammed in about it. He leaned over the blonde with the cleavage and the Hair. The girl was sitting right on the edge of the dance floor with her back to it. Hoyt tapped her on the shoulder. Charlotte—all this was happening right in her face. The blonde swung her head about with a flourish of all that silky hair. Hoyt’s smug smirk dissolved into a puzzled but sincerely concerned look.

Charlotte couldn’t begin to hear what he was saying to the girl. The band and the increasingly drunken roar of the place drowned out everything else. Nevertheless, a name bubbled up her brain stem: Britney Spears.

The blonde was giggling, giddy with excitement, and blushing—giddy with embarrassment, if Charlotte knew anything about it. Hoyt pulled over one of the small cocktail lounge chairs from the table beyond and sat down beside the blonde. Now Charlotte couldn’t even pretend not to be looking. Hoyt was talking and smiling at the same time, and his quarry was still giggling. Hoyt was leaning in, pouring soul into her eyes with the look that says, “We’re both feeling something we can’t talk about yet, aren’t we.”

Then he began tapping her on the outer surface of her arm, starting up near the shoulder and progressing netherward.

The way Hoyt’s eyebrows were arched, it was obvious he was asking a question. He and the girl stood up. The girl turned her head and displayed an embarrassed, somehow regretful smile at the other girls at her table. Out onto the dance floor they went, Hoyt and the blonde. They locked pelvic saddles, and he began thrusting…himself, grinding…grinding…The band was playing with a slow, hypnotic, syncopated beat. The singer kept repeating the same two lines:

“You must use your strength—

Very sen-si-tive-lee…

Yes, you must use your strength—

Very sen-si-tive-lee…”

Hoyt kept his mouth slightly open in a way that said, “That’s it…that’s it…Just stay in the groove…you’ve got it, baby…yeah, baby…and you’re starting to love it…”

The girl was red in the face. Anybody could see that, even in this smoky, reeking, shrieking, beer-humid, vomit-tangy electro-night-light. But a smile of dawning naughtiness was beginning to steal across that red face, overriding all embarrassment and foreboding.

Hoyt and the blonde left the dance floor and headed through the mob toward the entrance, holding hands; he chattering, she staring straight ahead, unfocused, contemplating the immediate future.