Failed sexual encounter with Dana Collette

Charlie Decker's failed sexual encounter with Dana Collette, which occurred during a weekend trip to Bangor and a party near Schoodic Point in the summer before his junior year, stands as one of the most psychologically damaging events in his adolescence. The incident, narrated in detail during the hostage crisis, crystallizes his deep-seated fears of sexual inadequacy, reinforces his sense of being an outsider, and feeds the rage and self-loathing that culminate in his violent rampage. It is a moment where the private terror of the Creaking Thing—the childhood memory of his father's sexual aggression toward his mother—merges with the public shame of impotence, leaving Charlie feeling unmanned and irreparably broken.

The Party and the Promise

Charlie had traveled to Bangor with his friend Joe McKennedy to spend a weekend with Joe's older brother, Pete, a University of Maine student. On Friday night, Charlie got drunk for the first time, and the next day Pete took them to the campus. There they met Scragg Simpson, who told them about a party at a camp owned by Dana Collette's parents near Schoodic Point. The party was packed with college students, all drunk or stoned, and the atmosphere was chaotic and charged. Charlie, still high on marijuana he had smoked with Pete and a dealer named Jerry Mueller, felt self-conscious and young. Dana Collette, a short, almost pretty girl with bleached hair and a fluorescent orange dress so short it revealed the lace bottoms of her panties, immediately drew his attention. She pressed her hip against his, and Charlie became intensely aroused. She whispered in his ear, telling him to go out the back door, and he obeyed, his mind filled with the anticipation of losing his virginity.

The Failure on the Beach

Charlie went down a flight of weather-washed steps to a small, crescent-shaped beach, where the Atlantic stretched before him under a slip of a moon. The scene was beautiful but lonesome, and as he waited for Dana, unease crept in. By the time she joined him, his erection had vanished. Despite her efforts—kissing him, touching him, lying with him under the back steps—he could not become aroused. He tried to think of sexy images, but his mind was invaded by the memory of his father on the hunting trip, talking about the Cherokee Nose Job, a brutal punishment for adultery. That image killed any remaining desire. He lay there, unable to perform, while Dana grew irritated. She finally said, "It happens," and left him alone on the beach. Charlie was left with the cold certainty that he was queer, a fear that had never occurred to him before. He felt wrecked, depthless, and utterly humiliated.

The Dream and the Aftermath

The failure haunted Charlie. When he finally fell asleep that night, he dreamed of the Creaking Thing—the childhood nightmare of his father's sexual violence. In the dream, his father burst into the room holding his mother, her nose slit open and blood streaming down her face, and threw her dead body onto Charlie's bed. Charlie woke up screaming—and with an erection. This grotesque juxtaposition of sexual arousal and horror underscores the deep psychological damage inflicted by his father's violence and his own sexual shame. The failed encounter with Dana Collette became a defining wound, a secret proof of his inadequacy that he carried into the classroom and, ultimately, into the hostage crisis. It is a story he tells his classmates not as a confession but as a final piece of evidence in his own case against himself, a demonstration that he was broken long before he picked up the gun.