She had never seen a building like this. She and Miss Pennington, like most of the scholars and their mentors, had stayed at a hotel on N Street called the Grosvenor, paid for by the government. They had shared a small room with twin beds, and Miss Pennington snored all night. All the same, it had been exciting. She had never spent a night in a hotel before. For breakfast they had waffles—she had never had waffles before, either, not with real maple syrup instead of artificially flavored Karo. But that was nothing…compared to this! She had an idea. Crissy and Nicole hadn’t seen what she had just discovered.

She hurried back to them. They were still talking away and didn’t notice her or didn’t care to notice her, whichever. She walked right up to Nicole, who seemed like a marginally easier nut than Crissy, and with a smile and bright, wide eyes said, “You have to come see this ho-tel! Right over there”—she pointed—“you look down on this courtyard, with trees and a water fall, and above it there’s this…space, this empty space, and it goes all the way up to the roof, but it’s all inside the building! Y’all oughta come see it!”

The blond Nicole broke off her conversation and gave Charlotte a patient look, bordering on annoyed. “You mean an atrium?”

“Oh,” said Charlotte, “I hadn’t thought a they-at. You mean like in one of those Roman houses? It’s sorta like they-at, but this one goes up—maybe like thirty stories? You oughta come see it!”

“I’ve seen about a dozen of them,” said Nicole, deadpan. “Every Hyatt has one.” Then she turned back to Crissy. “Well anyway, I figured the heels are too high, but like so what? Guys don’t know how to dance anyway, and by the time these guys reach the dance floor, they’ll be like so-oh-oh drunk…”

Charlotte was still staring at Nicole, her mouth slightly open. She felt as if she had just been kicked in the stomach. Her big architectural discovery—it had only revealed, if any further revelation was needed, what a clueless little hick she was. Nicole and Crissy were right in front of her in their perfect jeans, perfect shirts, perfect pointy-toed boots, perfect cocked hips, ignoring her corporeal existence with perfect efficiency.

Hoyt, Vance, and Julian, loaded down with luggage, were walking toward them. Thank God for that. She wouldn’t be left standing here, the lone wayfarer.

Hoyt said cheerily, “Okay, gang, we got the keys. So let’s go on up.” Then he looked at Charlotte. “And oh, hey, babe”—he swung his left side toward her…swung it because he must have had three bags under his left arm—“could you take yours? I feel like my fucking finger’s coming off.”

And there it was, her canvas boat bag, hanging off the crooked little finger of his left hand. She took it. She was too embarrassed to say a word.

“Thanks,” said Hoyt. And then he addressed Crissy and Nicole and laughed. “I thought my fucking finger was coming off!”

And there she was, standing in the lobby of this…this…palace of a hotel—in sneakers, jeans, T-shirt, and cheap, puffy polyurethane-chip-filled jacket that made her look like a tiny walking hand grenade, the complete urchin from the hills, lost in the midst of all this luxury, carrying her belongings in her sole piece of luggage, a little boat bag. In a small, defeated voice she said to Hoyt, “Did you get my key, too?”

“Your key?” He looked nonplussed. Then: “Oh, sure. We got everybody’s keys. Let’s go.”

Crissy looked at Charlotte and gave her the dead smile. Then she said to Nicole, “She’s smart. I don’t know why I brought so much like…stuff.”

Not “Charlotte’s” or even “Charlunnh’s,” but “She’s.”

Charlotte was still sifting all that for Sarc 3—and finding none, although she felt certain it must be there—when Nicole said to her, “What are you wearing tonight?”

Automatically wary, Charlotte didn’t know what to say. Somehow it would come out that she borrowed the dress from Mimi. She didn’t even want to show it to her, either, rolled up—balled up was more like it—in the bottom of her bag. She finally said, “Just a dress and some shoes.”

“A dress and some shoes…” said Nicole. She nodded several times in a ruminating fashion. Then she turned to Crissy and said, “That’s not a bad idea.”

Both sorority girls began nodding, with eyes downcast and serious expressions, as if ruminating upon a remarkable profundity. Charlotte felt devastated. She knew this was classic Sarc 3.

Then Crissy said, “I hope you don’t mind my asking…but what kind of dress?”

What did she care! Obviously she didn’t. She was only interested in more material to nod at Nicole with in mock sagacity. But it didn’t matter. Charlotte had no more fight left. She felt defeated and sad—sad about her own amateurishness, her shortcomings as…a girl. In that respect she had gotten absolutely nowhere since Alleghany High. Self-disappointment, self-pity, abject capitulation to a stronger foe, and that pathetic form of inverse aggression that goes along the lines of Now don’t you feel guilty for what you have reduced me to?—some of which she was quite conscious of—commandeered Charlotte Simmons—she who had been sent forth to do great things—not only to give herself up to an ignorant Lost Province but, with conscious inverse aggression, to exaggerate it: “What kind of dress?” Dreh—ess? “I don’t know what kind.” Kiii—und. “A dress, is all.” The self-abasement gave her what she wanted: a perverse thrill. Was the word masochism? She didn’t know. Up to now that had just been a concept she had picked up when Miss Pennington was telling her about what psychologists were saying way back in the early twentieth century—Freud, Adler, Krafft-Ebing, and all that.

Being on the elevator with Hoyt, who was joking about all the bags he had under both arms, lifted her spirits a bit. Her room turned out to be taken up mainly by two queen-size beds. The beds, plus two side tables, a low wooden bureau, a little commercial reproduction Louis writing table with two chairs, and a big freestanding wooden armoire—housing a gigantic television set—left very little space to walk. Hoyt came in behind her and dumped the luggage on a bed with a big sigh.

“This isn’t too bad,” he said.

“Where’s your room?” said Charlotte.

Blithely: “I’ll be in here, too.”

“But I thought—”

“Hey, we were lucky to get any room at all, Charlotte.”

He couldn’t—it couldn’t be that way—but on the other hand, he had called her by her actual name for the first time on the entire trip.

“Julian and Nicole are rooming with us,” Hoyt said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

A start of panic—but then she realized that it would be better that way. It would be sort of like an encampment. Certainly nothing funny would go on with everybody in the same room. Sort of like an encampment…she kept hanging on to this word encampment, with its overtones of a campfire and a good, tuckered-out sleep in a sleeping bag made from rubber ponchos and blankets.

Soon Julian and Nicole arrived, and Julian dumped his armful of bags on the other bed. Same sort of sigh. “That’s a shitload a luggage. Girl stuff,” he added, smiling at Nicole.

“Where are Vance and Crissy?” said Nicole.

“A couple of doors down the hall,” Hoyt said. Hoyt and Julian and Nicole started chatting, but Charlotte was busy checking out the room. She tried to figure out where the hotel could put the cots. The room was so crowded with stuff already.

“Ohmygod, it’s five-thirty,” said Nicole.

That was another thing, now that Nicole had raised the subject. Dinner was at six-thirty. Where were they all going to change? How were they going to take showers? Four people in a small space, boys and girls, changing clothes, taking showers, fixing their hair—making sure they looked right—

Charlotte sat down on the edge of the bed where Hoyt had dumped all that luggage and crooked her forefinger around her chin and pondered the situation.