Free Look at me: by Jennifer Egan Page A

sick, painful longing came loose in her. Each time Scott turned the wheel, Charlotte pressed harder against him as if by accident, and he groaned, nursing football injuries.
    As it happened, Charlotte lived nearest to Scott, so after he’d dropped everyone off it was just the two of them in the purple Jeep, making polite chat about the game and Scott’s bruised knee and dislocated shoulder, not to mention the black eye he’d sustained in a locker room fight two weeks ago. “And then there’s the stuff you don’t see,” he said. “My back’s shot—I’m on painkillers half the time, and what about this?” He brandished aloft his left thumb. “I can’t even straighten it all the way!” Charlotte only half-listened. She felt like an old radio issuing weird, splintering frequencies; she would perish if she couldn’t touch Scott Hess, or make him touch her.
    Two blocks from her house, she said, “Hey, stop the car a sec.” Quizzically, Scott pulled over and Charlotte shimmied close and kissed him on the lips, actually took his face in her hands (“Where did you get the guts?” her friends asked later, but it had taken no guts at all), and Scott, though initially startled, responded to her ministrations with rising enthusiasm. Soon he was driving again—toward an old orchard, it turned out, wizened trees contorted against the cloudy night.
    “What kind of trees are those?” Charlotte asked, making conversation as Scott fought with the knobs controlling her seat.
    “Pear I think.” He’d pushed her seat back to a horizontal position and was yanking open her jeans. “You know, from back in the day.” Then he climbed on top of her (supporting himself with his un-dislocated arm), and with one or two grunts of pain from his wounds dispensed with her virginity and collapsed on top of her in an apparent faint. It hurt. Charlotte pressed her eyes shut, amazed at how much it hurt, yet beneath the pain she felt the hunger still, completely unslaked. Scott’s head lay on her chest like a meteorite. Charlotte opened her eyes and watched pear trees drop their clenched leaves on the windshield. Finally, maneuvering her mouth close to Scott’s ear, she whispered, “Can you, like, do something else?”
    No response. Then, at last, some intimation of consciousness bestirred Scott’s bulk, and he lifted his head and muttered, “I look like Superman to you?” which Charlotte took to be a joke, an ironic commentary on his paltry efforts thus far, until Scott hauled himself from her, groaning like an old ship being lifted from the sea to have its barnacles scraped, looked down into her face with his small, blank eyes and said, “I don’t even know you.”
    An instant later, it seemed, he was driving toward Charlotte’s house while she yanked up her underwear, barely managing to zip her jeans before she found herself standing at the mouth of her driveway. “Thanks,” she said, not entirely managing to purge her voice of sarcasm. Scott Hess looked straight ahead and said nothing.
    Charlotte had assumed he would keep quiet about what had happened—what was there to brag about? But by Monday morning everyone in her small class had been alerted to the fact that Charlotte was a mad slut who’d thrown herself at Scott and begged him for it doggie style, that she’d given him five blow jobs and still wanted more—that she was a nympho animal who couldn’t get enough. Walking through school that Monday had been like finding herself abruptly radioactive, or the locus of a reverse magnetic force field; no one could seem to come near her. Boys sniggered uneasily at the sight of her; girls folded into groups from which her three best friends gazed at her helplessly, passengers through the windows of a train she had missed by one minute. No one else would look at her, but never had they been so aware, so keenly aware of her presence—it sent a tremor through their ranks that Charlotte could practically hear. But what had