“Hello?” Loud rap music in the background.
Terribly embarrassed: “May I speak to Laurie McDowell?”
Hesitation…“This is Laurie…”
Charlotte is elated! Laurie! Why hadn’t she called her in the first place? Laurie will know! Laurie will understand! Shivers of delight. She wants to laugh, she’s so happy. Almost a shriek: “Laurie! You know who this is?”
“No-o-o-o …”
Carried away by joy, she giggled, “Regina Cox.”
“Regina?—Charlotte!”
Shrieks, laughter, interjections, I-can’t-believe-its, more shrieks and laughs. The rap music is banging away. “Knock it on some fox’s box, my cock”—blip: Doctor Dis. Since when was Laurie interested in rap?
“Regina…Charlotte, you are like totally—Ohmygod, I mean the day Regina—where are you?”
“In my room in the dorm.”
“At Dupont?”
“Yeah…at Dupont…”
“I can’t say you sound very excited. What’s it like? I can’t believe this! Like a hundred times I’ve been on the verge of calling you! I totally have!”
“Me, too—same thing.”
“The Dupont girl!” said Laurie. “Tell me everything! I’ve been like totally dying to know. Wait a minute, let me turn down this music. I can hardly hear you.”
Laurie and…all these totally s? The rap band banging in the background began to digit down, and the last thing Charlotte heard distinctly was Doctor Dis making one of those crude rap half rhymes, “…take my testi-culls, suck ’em like a popsi-cull…” For a moment she worried that the distraction would make Laurie forget what they were about to discuss, namely, Dupont. At the same time she didn’t want to pounce right back onto the subject herself, for fear of revealing how eager she was to talk about it.
Laurie returned to the telephone. “Sorry, I didn’t know I had it on so loud. You know who that was, the singer?”
“Doctor Dis,” said Charlotte. She left it at that. She didn’t want things to go off on a tangent about some stupid illiterate singer, if you could call rap singing. At the same time, she had a terrible itch of curiosity. “I didn’t know you liked rap.”
A bit defensive: “I like some of it.”
Dead air. Silence. It was as if the conversation had leaked out a hole. Charlotte ransacked her brain. Finally, “Is it like here? All anybody plays at Dupont is rap and reggae, except for the ones who like classical music and all that. There are a lot of musicians in my class.”
“Rap and reggae are really popular here, too,” said Laurie, “but there are a lot of kids, guys especially, who listen to country and bluegrass? I got enough of that in Sparta. But other’n’at, N.C. State’s like totally cool. It’s big! The first two weeks it liked to drive me crazy, it’s so big.” Liiiiked—sounded almost like locked. It was a relief to Charlotte to know that somebody else was in college with the Sparta accent, the Sparta diction, the Sparta “other’n’at,” the Sparta “liked to” for “almost,” the Sparta declarative sentence that modestly questions itself at the very end. Laurie would understand, if she could ever get her back on the subject. “At Dupont,” Laurie was saying, “do you have to do everything online?”
“Well, a lot of—”
Laurie talked right over the top of her. “Here you register for classes online, you turn in assignments online, if you need to ask a T.A. something about homework, you do it online—but I don’t mind.” With great enthusiasm she proceeded to tell Charlotte about the endless number of things that made N.C. State cool. “Everybody’s always talking about how State is an aggie college and all that? Well, there are a lot of really cool kids here. I’ve made so many friends?” Free-uns. “I’m glad I came here.”
Charlotte didn’t know what to say. Laurie liked it there. Since misery loves company, that was a disappointment.
Laurie said, “Well—what’s up with you? You’ve got to tell me all about Dupont!”
“Oh, it’s great, or I guess it’s great,” said Charlotte. “They sure tell you enough it’s great.”
“What do you mean?”
Charlotte told her about the speech by the dean of Dupont College at the “frosh” convocation, the medieval banners, the flags of forty-three nations, the name-dropping, the Nobel-dropping—
“That’s what they say, and what do you say?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Charlotte. “It probably is that great, but I don’t know what difference it makes.”
“Oh wow,” said Laurie. “You’re sure jumping for joy.”
Charlotte said, “Do you live in a coed dorm?”
“Do I live in a coed dorm? Yeah. Practically everybody does. Do you?”
“Yeah,” said Charlotte. “What do you think of it?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Laurie. “It was weird at first. The guys were totally loud all the time. But now it’s like calmed down. I don’t think about it much anymore.”
“Have you ever heard of sexiling?”
“Yeah…”
“Has it ever happened to you?”
“To me? No, but it happens.”
“Well—it happened to me,” said Charlotte. “My roommate comes in about three o’clock in the morning and—” She proceeded to tell the story. “But the worst thing was the way she made me feel guilty. I was supposed to know that if she gets drunk and picks up some guy somewhere and brings him up to the room, that’s more important than me being able to stay in my room and get some sleep before a test in the morning.”
A pause. “I guess it’s the same way here.”
“At Dupont,” said Charlotte, “everybody thinks you’re some kind of—of—some kind of twisted…uptight…pathetic little goody-goody if you haven’t had sex. Girls will come right out and ask you—girls you hardly even know. They’ll come right out and ask you—in front of other girls—if you’re a V.C., a member of the Virgins Club, and if you’re stupid enough to say yes, it’s an admission, like you have some terrible character defect. They practically sneer. If you don’t have a boyfriend, you’re a loser, and if you want a boyfriend, you have to have sex. There’s something perverted about that. Don’t you agree with me? This is supposed to be this great university, but it’s like if you haven’t ‘given it up,’ as Regina used to say, then you just don’t belong here. I’d say that’s perverted. Am I right—or do I just not get it or something? Is it like that there?”
Pause. “More or less.”
“So what do you do when it comes up? What do you say?”
Long pause. “I guess I like…don’t say anything.”
“Then what do you do?” said Charlotte.
Longer pause. “I guess I try to look at it in a different way. I’ve never lived anywhere but Sparta before. College—I don’t know, I guess I think of college as this opportunity to…to experiment. I needed to like get away from Sparta for a while.”
“Well—me, too,” said Charlotte. She couldn’t imagine why Laurie was saying anything so obvious.
Still longer pause. “You think maybe it’s possible you got away, but you brought a lot of Sparta with you to Dupont?” said Laurie. “Without knowing it?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m just asking…like suppose it’s something to consider. I guess what I really mean is college is like this four-year period you have when you can try anything—and everything—and if it goes wrong, there’s no consequences? You know what I mean? Nobody’s keeping score? You can do things that if you tried them before you got to college, your family would be crying and pulling their hair out and giving you these now-see-what-you’ve-gone-and-done looks?—and everybody in Sparta would be clucking and fuming and having a ball talking behind your back about it?—and if you tried these things after you left college and you’re working, everybody’s gonna fucking blow a fuse, and your boss or whoever will call you in for a—”
—the fucking just slipped out and hit Charlotte in the solar plexus—Laurie!
“—little talk, he’ll call it, or if you have a boyfriend or a husband, he’s gonna totally freak out or crawl off like a dog, which would be just as bad, because it’d make you feel guilty? I mean, look at it that way, Charlotte. College is the only time in your life, or your adult life anyway, when you can really experiment, and at a certain point, when you leave, when you graduate or whatever, everybody’s memory like evaporates. You tried this and this and this and this, and you learned a lot about how things are, but nobody’s gonna remember it? It’s like amnesia, totally, and there’s no record, and you leave college exactly the way you came in, pure as rainwater.”