"What?"
I jumped up and ran out of the dining roam and up to my suite where I buried my face in my pillow to smother my tears and sobs. Although their voices were quite muffled. I could hear
Winston and Mommy having their first hard, loud argument below. Soon afterward I heard Mommy crying and her footsteps on the stairway. A. door slammed, and then all was quiet.
I turned over and looked up at the ceiling. Was I a freak? Was there something wrong with me? Shouldn't I want a boyfriend, someone to be with, more than I did? Did I place too much emphasis on school and not enough on a social life? Maybe I should have been more like the girls at E.TW after all or been more like Phoebe Tremont. I should learn how to niggle more, roll my eyes, turn my shoulders, and stop showing up the boys in my classes. Maybe I should stop fighting what I had come to think of as the Love Game.
Winston didn't come to my room afterward, and neither did Mommy. All of us withdrew to our own private cocoons and the next day tried to pretend none of it had happened. Winston retreated from me somewhat over the next few months and didn't suggest any social activity. He and Mommy returned to a more normal Palm Beach social life, relying mostly on his contacts now. I went sailing only once and then, almost like someone agreeing to take castor oil, encouraged and accepted an invitation to go to dinner with a boy at the junior college. Charlie Packard.
In her eyes I could see that Mommy couldn't have designed a better first college date for me. Charlie had light brown hair and Wedgwood blue eyes and was a firm, six-foot-two-inch young man who happened to be one of the school's basketball stars. I had helped him with a research paper in English. I really didn't think he had any other interest in me even though I was warm and maybe somewhat overly friendly. Even so. I was surprised when he asked me on a date. Just from casual observance of the social scene on campus. I knew he had dated a few other girls. I assumed his failure to develop a longterm relationship with any of them meant he was looking for someone more substantial. As it turned out my assumption was drawn from my well of innocence, inexperience, and expectations that were far too high.
Mommy practically fell over herself welcoming him when he came to pick me up. He wasn't from a family anywhere nearly as wealthy as we were. I could see the look of surprise and astonishment in his eves. Confronted with such affluence, he looked at me through different eyes. I could practically hear his questions forming and anticipated each one.
"How come you're going to this junior college and not one of those fancy ones up north or
something?"
"I chose it because it had the programs I wanted and it was close to my home," I told him.
He shook his head. 'How old are you really?"
He was happy to know I was over eighteen, but why, he wondered, wasn't I off studying in Paris or something? Why wasn't I going out with a prince or the son of a corporate giant? How come I was so modest at school?
"I'm just me, Charlie," I told him. "I don't think I'm some sort of royalty."
I could see he was actually embarrassed by the choice of restaurant he had made for our dinner. "I guess this is like slumming for you. huh?"
"It's fine," I kept telling him. I even said I was tired of eating in stuffy places where you see the same people all the time. I could see he thought I was just trying to be nice. Finally I said. "Really. I'm no princess. Charlie. I'm actually a Navy brat." He didn't understand. so I gave him a quick summary of our lives, which seemed to relax him. After dinner he suggested we drop in on a house party one of the players on the school's team was having.
A number of students from school were there. I could see some surprised faces when I walked in with Charlie. It was a nice house with a good-size living room. but Charlie muttered that the whole house could fit in my living room. Before the night was over he would be telling everyone about me. I thought, and whatever anonymity I had enjoyed at school would soon be blown away.
Apparently there was an understanding between Charlie and his teammate that the upstairs guest bedroom was reserved for him and his date. I even heard his friend say. "Your room awaits." Everyone was drinking. In the kitchen some were snorting coke. Charlie used the scene as a reason for us to get somewhere private. "away from all this immature behavior." I couldn't have agreed more. but I wasn't so sure about fleeing to a strange bedroom.
I kept thinking about how disappointed Mommy was going to be if my date was a failure, so I went up with Charlie, and he sprawled out on the bed and began to talk about all the jerks downstairs and all the girls he knew who didn't have "the longterm view of things." I wasn't sure what he meant, but he kept assuring me I had it.
"You're not only very pretty," he said. "but you're very smart and a lot more mature." Mature seemed to be his catchall word for everyone and everything. "I would have sworn you were at least twenty."
"I don't think there's all that much difference between eighteen, nineteen, and twenty, do you, Charlie?" I asked.
He shrugged. Then without any warning he leaned forward and kissed me on the lips, quickly moving his lips down over my chin to my neck, while his hands began to grope my breasts. He moved so fast I thought he had developed a second set of arms and hands. It was like feeling a hundred spiders crawling all over you. I tried to pull back, but he held me firmly and used his nose and his mouth to pull at my blouse buttons, getting the top two undone with remarkable dexterity and burrowing his mouth and his tongue into my cleavage so fast I gasped.
"You know, you're one of the few girls I know who wear a bra," he said. He said it with a tone of annoyance. "I'm sure you don't need it."
He had most of the remaining buttons of my blouse undone and slipped his hands in and under the bra, lifting it off my breasts with one swift motion. His thumbs stroked my nipples, and he kissed me hard on the lips, forcing me back on the bed.
"I knew you didn't need that bra." he quipped. I heard him unzip his pants.
"Wait," I said.
"It's all right. I practice safe sex." he said, and, like a magician, snapped his fingers to show me a contraceptive. He held it up as if it were some sort of a ticket admitting him to my body.
"I can't," I said.
"Why not?" he asked. grimacing.
"I'm sold out."
"What? What's that, some sort of joke?"