I Am Charlotte Simmons Read Free

him. “Innermost ring … charmed circle.”
    He was once more vaguely aware that he wasn’t altogether coherent. He only idly noticed the look of panic that stole across Vance’s moonlit face. What was Vance so squirrelly about? He was a Dupont man himself. Hoyt once more gazed lovingly upon the moon-washed kingdom before them. The great library tower … the famous gargoyles, plainly visible in silhouette on the corner of Lapham College … way over there, the dome of the basketball arena … the new glass-and-steel neuroscience center, or whatever it was—even that weird building looked great at this moment … Dupont! Science—Nobel winners! whole stacks of them! … although he couldn’t exactly remember any names … Athletes—giants! national basketball champions! top five in football and lacrosse! … although he found it a bit dorky to go to games and cheer a lot … Scholars—legendary! … even though they were sort of spectral geeks who floated around the edges of collegiate life … Traditions—the greatest!—mischievous oddities passed from generation to generation of … the best people ! A small cloud formed—the rising number of academic geeks, book humpers, homosexuals, flute prodigies,
and other diversoids who were now being admitted … Nevertheless! There’s their Dupont, which is just a diploma with “Dupont” written on it … and there’s the real Dupont—which is ours !
    His heart was so full he wanted to pour it out to Vance. But the coherence problem reasserted itself, and all he could utter was, “It’s ours, Vance, ours.”
    Vance put a hand over his face and moaned almost as pitifully as the little thug on the ground in the Grove. “Hoyt, you are so fucked up.”

1. THAT SINGLE PROMISE
    A lleghany County is perched so high up in the hills of western North Carolina that golfers intrepid enough to go up there to play golf call it mountain golf. The county’s only big cash crop is Christmas trees, Fraser firs mostly, and the main manufacturing that goes on is building houses for summer people. In the entire county, there is only one town. It is called Sparta.
    The summer people are attracted by the primeval beauty of the New River, which forms the county’s western boundary. Primeval is precisely the word for it. Paleontologists reckon that the New River is one of the two or three oldest rivers in the world. According to local lore, it is called New because the first white man to lay eyes on it was Thomas Jefferson’s cousin Peter, and to him its very existence was news. He was leading a team of surveyors up to the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which form part of the Continental Divide. He reached the top, looked down the other side, and saw the same breathtaking sight that enchants outdoorsy outlanders today: a wide, absolutely clear mountain stream flanked by dense, deep green stands of virgin forest set against the immense ashy backdrop of the Blue Ridge, which from a distance really does look blue.
    Not all that long ago the mountains were a wall that cut Alleghany County off from people in the rest of North Carolina so completely, they
called it the Lost Province, when they thought of it at all. Modern highways have made the county accessible, but an air of remoteness, an atmosphere primeval, remains, and that is what the summer people, the campers, the canoers, the fishers, hunters, golfers, and mountain crafts shoppers love about it. There is no mall, no movie house, and not one stockbroker. To the people who lived in Sparta, the term ambition didn’t conjure up a picture of harddriving, hard-grabbing businessmen in dull suits and “interesting” neckties the way it did in Charlotte or Raleigh. Families with children who were juniors or seniors in the one high school, Alleghany High, didn’t get caught up in college mania the way