I Am Charlotte Simmons Read Free Page A

families in the urban areas did—college mania being the ferocious, all-consuming compulsion to get one’s offspring into prestigious universities. What parents in Sparta would even aspire to having a son or daughter go to a university like Dupont? Probably none. In fact, when word got out that a senior at the high school, a girl named Charlotte Simmons, would be going to Dupont in the fall, it was front-page news in The Alleghany News , the weekly newspaper.
    A month or so later, one Saturday morning at the end of May, with the high school’s commencement exercises under way in the gymnasium, that particular girl, Charlotte Simmons, was very much a star. The principal, Mr. Thoms, was at the podium up on the stage at one end of the basketball court. He had already mentioned, in the course of announcing the various citations for excellence, that Charlotte Simmons had won the French prize, the English prize, and the creative writing prize. Now he was introducing her as the student who would deliver the valedictory address.
    â€œ … a young woman who—well, ordinarily we never mention SAT scores here at the school, first, because that’s confidential information, and second, because we don’t like to put that much emphasis on SATs in the first place”—he paused and broke into a broad smile and beamed it across the entire audience—“but just this once, I have to make an exception. I can’t help it. This is a young woman who scored a perfect sixteen hundred on the SAT and perfect fives on four different advanced-placement tests, a young woman who was chosen as one of North Carolina’s two Presidential Scholars and went to Washington, to the White House—along with Martha Pennington of our English department, who was honored as her mentor—and met with the ninety-eight students and their mentors representing the other forty-nine states of our nation and had dinner with the President and shook hands with him, a young woman who, in addition, was one of the stars of our cross-country team, a young woman who—”

    The subject of all this attention sat in a wooden folding chair in the first row of the ranks of the senior class, her heart beating fast as a bird’s. It wasn’t that she was worried about the speech she was about to give. She had gone over it so many times, she had memorized and internalized it just the way she had all those lines when she played Bella in the school play, Gaslight . She was worried about two other matters entirely: her looks and her classmates. All but her face and hair were concealed by the kelly-green gown with a white collar and the kelly-green mortarboard with a gold tassel the school issued for the occasion. Nevertheless, her face and hair—she had spent hours, hours , this morning washing her long straight brown hair, which came down below her shoulders, drying it in the sun, combing it, brushing it, fluffing it, worrying about it, since she thought it was her strongest asset. As for her face, she believed she was pretty but looked too adolescent, too innocent, vulnerable, virginal— virginal— the humiliating term itself flashed through her head … and the girl sitting next to her, Regina Cox, kept sighing after every young woman who . How much did Regina resent her? How many others sitting beside her and behind her in their green gowns resented her? Why did Mr. Thoms have to go on with so many young woman whos ? In this moment of stardom, with practically everybody she knew looking on, she felt almost as much guilt as triumph. But triumph she did feel, and guilt has been defined as the fear of being envied.
    â€œ … a young woman who this fall will become the first graduate of Alleghany High School to attend Dupont University, which has awarded her a full scholarship.” The adults in the rows of folding chairs behind her murmured appreciatively. “Ladies and gentlemen … Charlotte