I Am Charlotte Simmons Read Online Free Page A

centuries later, are grateful, too, grateful for the way …”
    She knew it all so completely by heart, the words began to roll out as if on tape, and her mind began to double-track … Try as she might to avoid it, her eyes kept drifting back to her classmates … to Channing Reeves … Why should she even care what Channing and his circle of friends and admirers thought of her? Channing had come on to her twice, and only twice—and why should she care? Channing wasn’t going to any college in the fall. He’d probably spend the rest of his days chewing and spitting Red Man while he pumped gasoline at the Mobil station or, when he lost that job from shiftlessness, working out in the Christmas-tree groves with the Mexicans, who did all the irksome toil in the county these days, a chain saw in his right hand and the nozzle of a fertilizer spreader in his left, bent from the weight of the five-gallon tank of liquid fertilizer strapped on his back.
And he’d spend his nights rutting around after Regina and girls like her who would be working in the mail room at Robertson’s …
    â€œWe have learned that achievement cannot be measured in the cold calculations of income and purchasing power …”
    â€¦ Regina … she’s pathetic, and yet she’s part of the “cool” crowd, the “fast” crowd, which shuts Charlotte Simmons out because she’s such a grind, such a suck-up to the faculty, because she not only gets perfect grades but cares about it, because she won’t drink or smoke pot or go along for drag races at night on Route 21, because she doesn’t say fucking this and fucking that, because she won’t give it up … above all, because she won’t cross that sheerly dividing line and give it up …
    â€œWe have learned that cooperation, pulling together as one, achieves so much more than going it alone, and …”
    But why should that wound her? There’s no reason . It just does ! … If all those adults who were now looking up at her with such admiration only knew what her classmates thought of her—her fellow seniors, for whom she presumed to speak—if they only knew how much the sight of all those inert, uncaring faces in the green rectangle demoralized her … Why should she be an outcast for not doing stupid, aimless, self-destructive things?
    â€œ … than twenty acting strictly in their own self-interest …”
    â€¦ and now Channing is yawning —yawning right in her face! A wave of anger. Let them think whatever they want! The simple truth is that Charlotte Simmons exists on a plane far above them. She is not like them in any way other than that she, too, happened to grow up in Sparta. She will never see them again … At Dupont she will find people like herself, people who actually have a life of the mind, people whose concept of the future is actually something beyond Saturday night …
    â€œ … for as the great naturalist John Muir wrote in John of the Mountains , ‘The mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of glaciers, of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thoughts and deeds have moved the world, have come down from the mountains—mountain-dwellers who have grown strong there with the forest trees in Nature’s workshops.’ Thank you.”
    It was over. Great applause … and still greater applause. Charlotte remained at the podium for a moment. Her gaze swept over the audience and came to rest on her classmates. She pursed her lips and stared at them. And if any of them was bright enough to read her face—Channing, Regina,
Brian … Brian, from whom she had hoped for so much!—he would know that her expression said, “Only one of us is coming down from the mountain destined to do great things. The rest of you can, and will, stay up here and get trashed and watch the Christmas trees