I Am Charlotte Simmons

11. Onstage, a Star

Well past ten o’clock the next morning, Charlotte was still in bed, lying flat on her back, eyes shut…eyes open…long enough to gaze idly at the brilliant lines of light where the shades didn’t quite meet the windowsill…eyes shut…listening for sounds of Beverly, who occasionally sighed or moaned faintly in her sleep…eyes open, eyes shut, running the night before through her mind over and over to determine just how much of a fool she had made of herself. She was at her most vulnerable, her most anxious, during this interlude between waking and getting up and facing the world…which she knew, but that didn’t make the feeling any less real…How could she have let him keep touching her that way? Right in front of everybody! Right in front of Bettina and Mimi! She had fled the Saint Ray house without even trying to look for them…walked back to Little Yard alone through monstrous shadows in the dead of the night. How could she ever look them in the eye? How could she have talked herself into believing that a predator the likes of Hoyt was just a friendly, hospitable protector who was rescuing her from social oblivion and validating her presence…at what?…a drunken fraternity wallow…when he was just a plain out and out…out and out…out and out…cad?…That was the word…even though she had never heard anyone say it out loud, including herself…She had even let him pressure her into drinking alcohol…and strutting around with the drink in her hand and his arm around her—in front of everybody…Momma would die! Barely a month, and already she had gone to a fraternity party and started drinking and letting herself be pawed, publicly, by some totally deceitful…cad…who only wanted to get her into a bedroom…

Well, she couldn’t lie here like this forever…but she dreaded waking Beverly up…Even on weekdays, when Charlotte got out of bed and got dressed, no matter how quiet she tried to be, Beverly would thrash about under her covers and huff great groans , as if she were still asleep but just barely, because Charlotte’s hayseed habit of getting up early was about to destroy all chance of rest and, for that matter, her entire day. One way or another, Beverly always made her feel like some rural throwback. When Beverly came in, much more noisily, in the middle of the night, Charlotte felt like giving her the thrash-and-groan treatment, but she didn’t have the nerve. Somehow, perhaps through sheer aloofness, Beverly had established the notion that she was the eminence in this room. She was a rich boarding school girl. Who would be so foolish as to deprive her of even thirty seconds of her heedless Saturday morning sleep?

Without a creak, without a rustle, holding her breath, Charlotte slipped out from under the covers, eyes pinned on the inert form of the eminence. In the same fashion, she slipped her slippers on and her bathrobe inch by inch, fetched her towel, soap, and toilet kit, and tiptoed toward the door…lost her grip on the bar of soap and it hit the floor with an impact that, under the circumstances, might as well have been an explosion. Paralyzed with dread, she stared at Beverly, the sleeping lion. Miracle of miracles! The lion didn’t so much as moan or move a muscle. Charlotte stooped down, retrieved the soap, and tiptoed out of the room, meticulously restraining the handle so that the door wouldn’t make even the slightest click as it closed.

Thank God there was hardly anybody in the bathroom. A pale girl with practically no waist, emerging—naked!—from a shower stall in a fog of steam…some guy in a cubicle making the usual rude bowel noises…So gross…She studied her face in the mirror to see what the night had done to it. Slightly ashen, wasn’t it, its vitality leached away by guilt and shame…Hurriedly she washed her face and brushed her teeth, returned to the room, and opened the door as carefully as could be…

Sunshine! The shades were up. Beverly was looking out of one of the windows, leaning forward, arms propped on the sill, wearing the panties and short T-shirt she slept in. From behind like this—the bones of her pelvis saddle stood out. She was a pale version of one of those starving Ethiopians you see on TV with bugs flying around their eyes. Beverly straightened up and turned about. With no makeup to help, her eyes seemed abnormally big and bulging, like an anorexic’s. She stared at Charlotte with a crooked little smile on her face. Charlotte braced for a reprimand, oozing with sarcasm, for waking her up “this early” on a Saturday morning.

“Well!” said Beverly. An arch and ironic Well. She paused and looked Charlotte up and down, still smiling with one corner of her mouth up higher than the other. “Did you have a good time last night?”

Startled, Charlotte paused, too, then managed to say timidly, “I guess so—it was all right.” Last night!

“I see you made a new friend.”

Charlotte’s heart palpitated for several seconds before snapping back into a normal—albeit speeding—rhythm. It had already spread everywhere! Ten-thirty in the morning, and everybody already knew! In a wavering voice:

“What do you mean?”

“Hoyt Thorpe,” said Beverly.

Her smile was the smug one that says, “I know more than you think I do.” Charlotte felt as if the lining of her skull were on fire. She was speechless. She wondered if her expression looked frightened or merely wary.

Beverly said, “So? What do you think? You think he’s hot?”

Charlotte was swept by an overwhelming need to dissociate herself utterly from Hoyt and everything that had happened.

“I don’t know what he was,” said Charlotte, “except drunk and…and…and…rude.” The word she had started to use was “deceitful,” but she didn’t want to give Beverly that strong a word to pry with. “How did you know I met him?”

“I saw you. I was there, too.”

“You were? At the Saint Ray house, at that party? You know, I thought I saw you”—she started to mention the BOOTING ROOM but thought better of it—“for a fraction of a second, but then you weren’t there.”

“Same with me. It was a mob scene, totally. Besides, you seemed like…otherwise occupied.”

A bit too emphatically: “I wasn’t occupied with him!”

“You weren’t?”

Unconvincingly: “No.”

“Maybe a little bit?”

“How did you know his name?” said Charlotte. “I never even heard his last name until you just said it, and now I can’t even remember what you said. Hoyt what?”

“Thorpe. You really had no idea who he was?”

“No.”

“Nobody said anything about how he caught some girl, some junior, giving head to this governor—from California?—what’s his name?—out in the Grove last spring?”

“No.”

Beverly proceeded to tell her the story, which had swollen in the five months since the incident. Hers had Hoyt knocking two of the governor’s bodyguards unconscious with his bare fists.

Charlotte got hung up on the phrase “giving head.” It took her a moment to figure out what it meant, and when she did, she found it trashy that Beverly had used such an expression. She didn’t absorb anything after that until Beverly said, “Do you want to see him again?”

“No.”

“Oh, come on, Charlotte. It didn’t look like that last night.”

It occurred to Charlotte that this was only the second time since the day they met that Beverly had addressed her by name.

Charlotte didn’t want to be at a campus crossroads like Mr. Rayon on this particular morning, but Abbotsford Hall (the Abbey), the great, gloomy Gothic dining hall she had to use in order to take advantage of the food allotment of her scholarship, stopped serving breakfast at nine a.m. That left Mr. Rayon, which was already a swarming, buzzing hive by the time Charlotte walked in carrying a text for her Introduction to Neuroscience course called Descartes, Darwin, and the Mind-Brain Problem, which she intended to read over breakfast. There were long lines at all six cafeteria counters. Elsewhere, students were weaving among one another in droves, raggedy to near perfection, wearing children’s clothes of every sort (so long as they weren’t wool or silk), especially ersatz sports and military gear: baseball caps on backward, hooded jerseys, Streptolon warm-up pants with bold stripes down the sides, tennis shorts, starter jackets, leather cockpit jackets, olive green wife-beaters, camouflage pants…The restless motion of such heroic, motley faux-warrior rags amid this smooth digital backdrop made Charlotte dizzy. She kept her head down. All she wanted was enough food to stave off hunger for a few hours and a cranny in a wall to consume it in.

By and by, she maneuvered her way through the crowds, head still down, carrying a tray on which rested her breakfast—four slices of health-nut bread (at the deli counter they scratched their heads and let her have them for 40 cents), a metallically wrapped little square of butter and a vacuum-sealed miniature jar of jelly (both free), and a 50-cent cup of orange juice (cheaper than the only water available, which came in bottles at 75 cents each). She found a small table against a wall. There were two chairs. She put Descartes, Darwin, and the Mind-Brain Problem across from her by way of discouraging anyone who might consider occupying the other seat. The health-nut bread, which seemed to be made of dried husks, was tough going, as were Descartes, Darwin, and the mind-brain problem. “Whereas the doctrine that cultural changes represent nothing more than the organism’s constant probing in the process of natural selection begs the question of whether or not the ‘mind’ is in any way autonomous, the argument that ‘minds’ are capable, through a process of organized ‘wills,’ of creating cultural changes wholly independent of that process revives, ultimately, the discredited notion of the ghost in the machine.” Charlotte understood the gist of it, but the effort of dealing with such stultifying rhetoric at breakfast made her…“mind”…“brain”…“will”—all those quotation marks were like dermatitis!—feel unbearably heavy. Besides, she had to use one hand to keep the book open, which created an annoying problem when she tried to put butter and jelly on the health-nut bread. So she closed it and looked up to give the room a quick survey—

Dear God. There were Bettina and Mimi, not thirty feet away, threading their way between tables. At Mr. Rayon, finding the right place to sit seemed to strike everybody as a vital, crucial, all-consuming matter. Charlotte ducked her head back down over the book, but it was already too late. Even though it was for only an instant, her eyes had locked with Bettina’s in a way that made it impossible to pretend she hadn’t seen her. So she lifted her head just as Bettina, in the heartiest Bettina fashion, sang out, “Charlotte!”

Charlotte put on a flat smile and waved, at the same time tilting her book up with the other hand, as if to say, “I’m acknowledging your presence in a friendly way, but you can see I’m busy reading, so you’ll just keep on walking, won’t you?”

If that got across to Bettina and Mimi, they didn’t show it for a second. They immediately changed direction and headed straight for Charlotte. Both had big smiles. She did her best to look enthusiastic as Bettina made herself at home at the little table’s other chair and Mimi pulled over a chair from a table nearby. Charlotte braced herself for…last night.

“Where’d you go last night?” said Bettina. “We looked all over for you before we left.” Bettina and Mimi were both leaning forward in their chairs.

“I walked back,” said Charlotte. “I couldn’t find you all, either, so I figured I’d get on back by myself. It was sort of scary walking all that way in the dark.”

“I thought maybe you didn’t have to get back,” said Mimi with a suggestive smile.

“Yeah,” said Bettina. “Who was that guy? He was hot.” Her smile and her gleaming eyes said she wanted to hear it all, every tasty detail of it.

“What guy?” said Charlotte.

“Oh—come—on!” said Mimi. “What guy. Were there ten guys or something?” But it wasn’t the irritated tone of last night. She was looking at her with the glittering eye of someone pumped up for an exciting story and waiting to be impressed.

“I guess you mean…”

“I guess I mean the guy who was all over Charlotte Simmons at the Saint Ray party, that guy. Who is he?” Big eyes, hungry smile.

Charlotte was overwhelmed by the urge to make it clear that whatever they had seen, the patting, the pawing, the squeezing, meant nothing. “His first name’s Hoyt. Or that’s what everybody called him. He never told me himself. He’s in that fraternity. That’s all I know about him, except that you can’t trust him.”

“What do you mean?” said Bettina. “What did he do?” Her eyes said, “Come on, every detail.”

“Oh, he pretended he was just being a good host. He was going to give me a tour of the house and this stupid secret room he was so proud of and everything. Then he kept touching me. All he really wanted to do was get me alone in a bedroom. It was so…so…He was really gross.”

“Hold on a second,” said Mimi. “How did you meet him in the first place?”

“I was just standing there, and he came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder and said—oh, it was so corny…I’m too embarrassed to tell you. I can’t believe I fell for it.”

“What’d he say?” Mimi and Bettina said, practically in unison.

“I’m too embarrassed,” said Charlotte. She hesitated, but then the pleasure of being at the center of a drama outweighed everything else. “He said, ‘I bet you get tired of being mistaken for Britney Spears.’ It was so corny!”

“And then he started touching you?” said Mimi.

“Yes.”

“But not really, not touching you…ummm—”

“Well, not like that!”

“And then he asked you if you wanted to dance, and you went out there and started grinding, right?” Mimi leaned back in the chair and rotated her hips.

“He tried to—how did you know?”

Mimi shrugged and cocked her head and rolled her eyes in an arch mime show of ignorance. “Just a wild guess. And then I guess he said, ‘Why don’t we go somewhere?’”

“I wouldn’t dance with him,” said Charlotte. “I saw the way they were all dancing out there. It was so gross. I just wouldn’t do it.”

“And how did he take that?” said Mimi.

“He kept on insisting that I had to dance with him. He begged, and then he practically got mad. He finally gave up and took me to see this stupid secret room they’ve got down in the basement.”

High on stardom, Charlotte gave a full account of the secret door in the wood paneling upstairs and getting past the bouncer sort of guy—she tucked her chin down into her clavicle to pantomime his bulked-up body—and the scene in “the stupid secret room”…it was all “so immature”…omitting, however, the big cup of wine she had accepted. She treated them to the trip upstairs and, indignantly, the incriminating lines We’ve got this room and Let me know when you’re through, and the way she stormed out. Mimi and Bettina were hanging on every word.

“You’re sure you left?” said Mimi.

Charlotte looked at her quizzically for a moment. “Of course I’m sure!”

“Okay, okay, just asking. You know, these frat guys like to brag to each other the next day about how fast they scored with some girl, some total stranger. They time it! They actually time it with a watch!”

Charlotte hated Mimi for that. She was trying to ridicule the very idea that Hoyt had found her genuinely attractive, that he actually felt something toward her, even if he did want to…score, as she put it.

But then the roly-poly guy Hoyt called Boo-man popped into Charlotte’s head—You got seven minutes, Hoyto, and the clock is running. That was the last thing she was going to reveal.

“They love to run that game on freshmen,” said Mimi. “You’ve probably heard the expression ‘fresh meat.’ I hope you didn’t do anything. You can count on them telling all their buddies about it—everything, from the size of your tits to—well…everything.”

Charlotte raised her head and looked past Mimi in an ostentatious pantomime of boredom. Mimi wanted her to feel small, didn’t she—yet another clueless victim of a heartless sexual prank, another piece of fresh meat, anything but a beautiful girl who had attracted a hot guy. Mimi…one of the tarantulas Miss Pennington had talked about, only this was not Alleghany High but Dupont—

—wait a second. Charlotte had to clinch her teeth to suppress a smile. When you thought about it, all three of them, Beverly, Mimi, and Bettina, had paid her an involuntary compliment, which was of course the only reliable kind among girls. In the six weeks she had roomed with Beverly, she had treated her as a person—as opposed to a rural alien who had somehow been billeted to her space—exactly twice. The first time was the night Beverly had come in drunk and had begged, cajoled, wheedled, pressured her into sexile with many utterly insincere cooings of “Charlotte” this and “Charlotte” that. From that night to this morning, Beverly hadn’t even so much as addressed her by name. But this morning she had become “Charlotte” again, and not because Beverly wanted anything—except personal information about this suddenly interesting roommate of hers, Charlotte Simmons. Mimi was no longer the California sophisticate rolling her eyes and sighing over the naïveté of this clueless mountain girl. Mimi was suddenly…jealous—jealous! It was so obvious now! As for Bettina, the most forthright and good-hearted of the three, she was openly impressed.

Charlotte turned back to Mimi. She found herself smiling with an unaccustomed aplomb. “Wow. How do you know all this, Mimi?”

Glumly: “Everybody knows it.”

“Oh, one thing I didn’t tell you,” said Charlotte, feeling a surge of confidence. “When I got back, there were all these girls sitting in the hall on our floor? Right on the floor they were sitting, backs against the wall and their legs sticking out, and you couldn’t get by unless they moved their legs? They did, but they all stared at me and wanted to know where I’d been. They were like…so weird.”

“Oh, they’re the Trolls,” said Bettina. “That’s what I call them. They sit there every weekend, and all they do is watch other people go out and come in and then gossip about them. Talk about losers…” She laughed to herself. “We’re far superior. We’re the Lounge Committee.”

The three of them, the whole Lounge Committee, laughed and laughed.

Charlotte gazed off again, grinning as if still amused by the “Trolls” and “the Lounge Committee.” What she was actually grinning about was the rankings. She wasn’t at the bottom like the Trolls. But neither was she stuck in the ever-hopeful middle class, the Lounge Committee.

And she had been mortified by the thought that she had disgraced herself in front of people she knew! Instead, she had become a new person in their eyes, an interesting person, a person to be reckoned with—and jealous of—a pretty girl very much on the scene…all because some hot guy had gone to the trouble of chasing her, no matter how perfidious his motives.

She rocked back in her chair and tilted her chin up and invited the whole world—all those boys and girls in their ludicrous Active Life outfits milling about in the big, slick supergraphic box that was Mr. Rayon—to get an eyeful of Charlotte Simmons. Idly she thought of the cleft chin, the ironic grin, the exotic hazel eyes, the preppy thatch of brown hair…which didn’t make him any less vile, of course.

“Hold it! Hold it! Jesus H. Christ, Socrates! You fucking—” He didn’t complete the impending insult.

The players froze in their tracks. They froze every time they heard one of Coach’s fucking s. Vernon Congers, who had just outdueled Treyshawn and Jojo for a rebound, stood frozen with the ball up near his right shoulder, his elbows sticking out at cockeyed angles, exactly the way they had been when Coach yelled Hold it! Fucking was Buster Roth’s all-purpose, universal term of disapproval. Charles once told Jojo, “After practice it’s two hours before I realize my name isn’t U. Fucking Bousquet.”

Here the man came, walking onto the court with a slow, menacing, rocking, straddling gait, as if his thighs were so dense with muscle he couldn’t get them any closer together if he tried, and his face was compressed into the full, furrowed Buster Roth scowl. Jojo hated it when Coach was like this. Jojo saw…Doom. He felt trapped on Doom’s domain, the court, its blond wood brilliantly lit by the LumeNex lights up above. The court was a little rectangle at the very bottom of Doom’s hellishly black bowl. Cliffs of seats rose up all around in the darkness like walls of an infinite height.

When Coach was ten feet away, he scowled at Vernon Congers as if he had just done something terribly wrong and said in a seething, low voice, “Give me the fucking ball.”

Zombielike, Congers tossed him the ball in a gentle arc. Buster Roth caught it and rested it on his right palm. Then he began tossing it up three or four inches and catching it, three or four inches and catching it, three or four inches and catching it, while he glowered at Jojo. Without another word he pivoted, reared back, and threw the ball about twelve rows up into the Buster Bowl’s seats, where it glanced off the top of a backrest and ricocheted crazily among the seats and the concrete tiers higher up.

He turned back toward Jojo, looking more furious than ever. “Well, well, old Socrates,” he said in a normal, if sarcastic, tone of voice. “You’re a famous thinker. So whyn’t you tell me what you think you’re doing here, Socrates…ONE A YOUR FUCKING PERIPATETIC DIALOGUES? YOU FUCKING GREEK PHILOSOPHERS TOO DIGNIFIED TO JUMP UP IN THE AIR FOR A BALL? WHY CAN’T YOU PRETEND YOU’RE STILL ALIVE INSTEAD OF A FUCKING GREEK STATUE? WHO THE FUCK YOU THINK’S YOUR COACH NOW, PROFESSOR NATHAN MARGOLIES? YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE COVERING THE FUCKING BOARDS, NOT STANDING THERE LIKE A SEVENTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD GEEZER CHUGALUGGING HEMLOCK! IF YOU WANNA ACT LIKE A FUCKING DEAD MAN, WHYN’TCHOO GET A PART IN A GREEK PLAY! I HEAR FUCKING SOPHOCLES IS AUDITIONING! FUCKING GUY’S NINETY YEARS OLD, AND HE DON’T LIKE JUMPING UP AND DOWN, EITHER! YOU TWO FUCKING GUYS’LL HIT IT OFF FAMOUSLY, YOU AND SOPHOCLES! HE’S FUCKING NINETY AND YOU’RE FUCKING SEVENTY-ONE AND O-DEEING ON HEMLOCK! WHYN’TCHOO—”

Jojo knew you had to just stand here and let him finish his rant. Everybody had been through it at one time or another, so there was no need to feel humiliated…Still—there was something about…this rant. It was like Coach had been planning it or something. He’d been reading up on a lot of stuff like peripatetic dialogues and Socrates dying at seventy-one and Sophocles writing plays when he was ninety. Reading up! Coach resented the fact that one of his players had ignored his instructions and gone ahead and enrolled in a 300-level course in philosophy. He truly resented it. There was something weird, something poisonous about this particular tirade.

Now Coach was turning toward the rest of the players. He was speaking in his “normal” voice, which in this case meant his most insidious and sarcastic voice. “Oh, I forgot. Maybe some a you ain’t been reintroduced yet to the hoopster formerly known as Jojo. So please give a big hello to a real philosopher’s philosopher, a real thinker, Professor Socrates Johanssen—”

Out of the corner of his eyes Jojo could see three student managers at courtside drinking this all in, feasting their eyes, gobbling it up. The student managers were students who willingly served as the team’s slaves, doing all the dirty work you couldn’t get a starving Mexican to do, cleaning up after the players, picking up their jockstraps and sweaty practice jerseys and putting them in the laundry, mopping up the vomit when they got drunk on the road. One of them was a fat-hipped, sullen little girl named Delores. She had long dark hair parted down the middle, which made her look like an Indian, and she wore heavy mealy-gray sweatpants, which made her look like an Indian in the shape of a bowling pin. She was the one who disturbed Jojo. Maybe he was being paranoid, but in practice, every time he did something wrong, he would catch her snickering into the ear of one of the other managers. She never smiled at him, only at his expense. One time after he passed by, he distinctly heard her say “the big stoop”; and another time, “not the sharpest knife in the drawer.” If she was such a genius, what was she doing working for free as a glorified men’s-room attendant?

Now Coach was looking straight at Jojo. “So okay,” Buster Roth was saying, “you bulked up over the summer. Fine. But if all it is, is fucking dead weight, then we might as well give the job to the fucking Safe. He can stand still bigger than you can.”

Jojo detected sniggers and stifled chuckles on the sidelines and among a couple of players on the court. The Safe was a 345-pound offensive tackle on the football team named Reuben Sayford. Jojo’s breathing accelerated. Coach was Coach, but this was pushing the outside of the envelope.

Buster Roth stopped talking but continued to stare at Jojo in a certain way. Then he crooked a forefinger and wiggled it and said, “Come here.”

Jojo was sweating terribly as he walked toward him. Sweat had soaked through the upper part of his sleeveless mauve basketball shirt to the point where it seemed to have a dark bib. Coach turned toward Vernon Congers, who had been in on the battle for the rebound and was no more than four feet from Jojo.

“Congers,” he said with another beckoning crook of the finger, “you come here, too.”

The two of them now stood before Coach. Congers was sweating also, and the sweat gave his brown skin a glossy sheen. His strength-coached muscles stood out in high relief, especially his deltoids, which popped out from his shoulders like two big apples.

In a perfectly ordinary voice Coach said, “You two trade shirts.”

All the ramifications of those four words hit Jojo at once. He was stunned, dumbstruck, paralyzed. Demoted to the second team. Six days before the opening game—which was here at Dupont! Against a pushover, Cincinnati—but the first game of the season! Students, alumni, the Charlies’ Club donors! The press!—scouts from the League!—they’ll all see Jojo Johanssen sitting on the bench! What team in the League was even going to consider a demoted has-been power forward! The very people who had looked at him as if they were looking at a god—the students, ordinary fans, sports junkies in front of the TV sets, all those hooples who wanted a little piece of Go go Jojo, an autograph, a smile, a wave, or just the chance of being in the same place he was, breathing the same air he breathed—even they would avert their eyes! Jojo Johanssen, object of pity!—assuming anybody bothered thinking of him at all…Congers was already taking off his yellow shirt, revealing his abdominals, which stood out like cobblestones, and his obliques, which surmounted his pelvic saddle like plates of armor.

Jojo just stood there staring at Coach, as if any second he was going to say, “Just kidding. Only wanted to get your attention.” But Coach was not the just-kidding type. His eyes were not dancing with merriment. The moment stretched out…stretched out…stretched out…stretched out…until finally Jojo had no choice but to start taking off his mauve shirt. A dishonored knight surrendering his sword and suit of mail. Every eye was pinned on him as the LumeNex lights beamed down on the blond wood stage…It might as well have been the whole world, because the whole world would soon know, anyway. Dead silence…not a sound…but what was there to say when you were watching a man being broken? The final indignity was putting on the yellow shirt and feeling the sweat left over from Congers’s magnificent, exhilarated, triumphant black body chill his own deflated pale white, bled-white, dead-white carcass.

The scrimmage resumed, and in a sheerly intellectual sense, Jojo knew that this was the time to show what he was made of, to dog Congers on defense in a way no power forward had ever been dogged before, to outrun him, outjump him, outmuscle him, fake him out, shoot him out of the water, crush the sonofabitch. Oh, yes; that he knew intellectually. But his spirit was in ruins, and that was all his body knew. It was Congers who did the out-dogging, outrunning, -jumping, -muscling, -faking, -shooting—and the crushing. Within fifteen minutes it couldn’t have been more obvious that once more, Buster Roth, lord and wizard of the Buster Bowl, had shown himself to be an unerring judge of horseflesh. Jojo left the floor feeling as humiliated as any athlete on earth had ever felt.

Sure enough, the rest of them were diligently not looking at him, not even Mike. Mike was making a big point of keeping himself wrapped up in conversation with Charles. On the edge of Jojo’s peripheral vision, however, one big pair of eyes was fixed right on him. He turned his head. It was Delores, the student manager with the Indian face and the big bottom. She was the only person still sitting on the bench.

“Hang in there, Jojo,” she said.

If she had said it out of sincere concern, it would have been bad enough. All he needed at this point was some pity poured on him by a “student manager.” As it was, a smile seemed to be playing at the corners of her mouth.

A red mist formed in front of Jojo’s eyes. He squared his stance toward her and said, “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

Abashed, she shrugged her shoulders and her eyebrows. She never took her eyes off him, however, and kept on giving him a what—ironic?—stare. “I was just trying—” She didn’t finish the sentence.

“You were just trying bullshit, is what you were just trying,” said Jojo.

“Well, you don’t have to take it out on me.” The calmness of her voice somehow made it worse.

“Take what out?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. He thrust his chin forward and gestured toward her. “Why do you do this? Tell me that.”

“Do what?”

“This ‘job’ you got, this student manager”—he started to say shit but thought better of it—“thing?”

“Well—”

“Nobody respects you for it. You know that, don’t you?”

The girl shrugged nonchalantly, which made Jojo furious.

He stepped closer. “Everybody laughs at you, if you wanna know the truth! Everybody wonders how you can get yourself down low enough to take this shit! Student manager…Student manager, my ass! Student slave is more like it! Student urinal puck supplier!” He stepped still closer. “The whole team spits on you people!”

Jojo was now the very picture of looking down at somebody. The six-foot-ten hulk of him towered over the little ball of Indian hair and nappy gray cotton rag down below him on the bench.

She looked frightened, but she didn’t budge. In a tiny voice she said, “That’s not true, and I’m sorry about what happened out there—but I didn’t do it.”

Of course she was right—which made it that much worse.

“You think it’s not true! How about a little experiment? If I spit on the floor, you’re the one who’s got to get down on all fours and wipe it up!”

She looked up at his huge white blond-tipped head, which was now florid with anger. She was afraid to attempt any reply at all. The giant was at the point of detonation.

Jojo swelled up his chest, lifted his head upward as high as it would go, and snuffled, scouring his sinuses, nasal pathways, and lungs so furiously it was as if he wanted to suck the bench, the girl, the entire Buster Bowl and half of southeastern Pennsylvania up into his nostrils. He grimaced until his neck widened, striated by muscles, tendons, and veins, swelled up his chest to the last milliliter of its capacity—and spat. The girl stared at the edge of the court where it landed: a prodigious, runny, yellowy pus-laced gob of phlegm.

“Clean it up,” said Jojo, halfway between a hiss and a snarl, whereupon he started walking away.

The girl, Delores, didn’t move or make a sound. At that moment, Buster Roth, heading off the court and back to his suite of offices, walked past, did a double take, stopped, and stared at the virulent mess on the floor.

He turned toward Delores. “Jesus Christ, what the hell is that? Clean it up!”

Delores pointed at the retreating Jojo and said, “Get him to do it.”

Roth was so astounded that anybody at Dupont, especially a creature so insignificant as this one, would dare talk back, he was speechless.

“He put it there,” said Delores.

The analog chemical computations within Buster Roth’s brain were almost visible. It was obvious that she was right. No doubt his flattop blond giant was the slob who had put it there. So he had a choice: order this little girl to do what he said—or make Jojo do it. But the girl was smart as a whip, a tireless worker who did most things before he had to ask her, the best student manager he had had working for him since God knew when. On the other hand, did he really want to make Jojo’s humiliation total and complete by ordering him to get his 250-pound hulk down on all fours in the Buster Bowl and clean up an oyster like that one? Jesus Christ…it was an insoluble dilemma. So without a word and without so much as looking at either of them, Buster Roth went behind the bench, picked a crumpled towel up off the floor, walked over and dropped it on top of the noxious mess, and began rubbing it around with his foot. It wouldn’t be a perfect job, but he was damned if he was going to get down on all fours, either. He figured he’d just smush it around like this until it was no longer identifiable.

When he finished, the floor at that spot had become a glaze of mucus about two feet in diameter. The mighty LumeNex lights of the Buster Bowl highlighted it in a viscous relief, or was he just seeing things? In any case, he’d get some other manager to clean up the remains later on.

Jojo, heading down the ramp to the dressing room, had heard the exchange. His humiliation took a further nosedive…into guilt. How could he have done what he just did? How could he have called the girl a slave and all that other stuff? And she had stood up to him, and to Buster Roth, too! He envisioned her twenty pounds lighter, slim in the hips, and naked.

The moment Hoyt got a glimpse of the guy coming toward them, he pegged him as a dork.

“Yo,” he said to Vance, who was seated across from him in the booth at Mr. Rayon, “who is that guy?” He made a slight motion with his head.

Vance turned his head in that direction as inconspicuously as he could. “No clue.”

Hoyt took another glance. The guy was wearing a red Windbreaker with BOSTON RED SOX on the front. It was unzipped, revealing a “lively” sport shirt, which was tucked into his pants, which were black flannel. And what was it about his hair? It was dark, curly, too long—and had a part in it. A part! By now long hair was very Goth. Now you wore your hair short with no part. The guy wore his hair parted! On top of that, he was skinny without looking in any way wiry, much less buff. He might as well have had a sign around his neck saying DORK.

The guy came right over to their table. He looked down at Hoyt with these big, wide-open, timorous eyes and said, “Hi! You’re Hoyt?” Then he managed a grin that was probably supposed to look affable. In fact, the small muscles in his lower lip were twitching.

“That’s right,” said Hoyt, looking him in the eye in a challenging manner.

The dork turned toward Vance and tried another smile and said, “And you’re…Vance?”

Vance didn’t say a word. He just nodded yes…in a cool fashion that as much as said, “And therefore…?”

The dork looked from Vance to Hoyt and from Hoyt to Vance and said, “I’m Adam. I don’t mean to…uh…” He couldn’t think up the word for what he didn’t mean to do, and he smiled, averting his eyes.

“Then why the fuck are you doing it?” Hoyt said under his breath.

“What?” said the dork.

Hoyt made a small dismissive motion with his hand.

The dork soldiered on. “You guys mind if I ask you something for just a second?”

Vance looked at Hoyt. Hoyt eyed the guy for a couple of beats and said, “Go ahead.”

“Thanks,” said the dork. Almost without looking, he leaned backward, grabbed a chair from the next table and pulled it up and sat down, hunching forward with his forearms resting on his thighs and his hands clasped between his knees. “I’m from the Daily Wave.” His eyes darted this way and that at Hoyt and Vance. “Several people have told my editor that you guys”—now he smiled as if he were about to bring up that merriest subject imaginable—“pulled a helluva prank on the governor of California last spring when he was here for commencement.”

His eyes darted even faster, and he held on to the smile for dear life. Evidently the smile was supposed to cover up a case of rapid ataxic eyeblink and the fact that his Adam’s apple went way up and then way down in an involuntary swallow.

Hoyt could see Vance staring at him in alarm. He said to the dork in a bored manner, “Who told you that?”

The dork said, “I guess—well, nobody told me exactly. They told my editor, was the way it happened. And he asked me to check it out. So I’m just here to—” He couldn’t find the word to complete that sentence, either, and resorted to a few shrugs. His shoulders shrugged, his eyebrows shrugged, and his lips smiled innocently.

Hoyt looked at Vance. “You know what he’s talking about, Vance?”

Vance shook his head no; too emphatically, if the truth be known.

Hoyt looked at the dork. “The governor of California…What’s supposed to have happened to the governor of California?”

The dork said, “Well, just before commencement—a day or two before—I’m trying to remember when the Swarm concert was—I need to check all this out—that’s why I’m asking you guys”—he lifted his eyebrows in a way that suggested a helpless plea—“to get it all straight. Anyway, what these people told my editor was—it wasn’t just one person—I mean, we probably wouldn’t even care if it was just one person—but this is one of those things that’s all over the place—”

“What is?” said Hoyt. He began rolling his forefinger toward himself in the semaphore that says, “Hurry up, get it out.”

“Well—this is what these people, these students I’m talking about—they’re all students—or at least I don’t know for a fact that they’re all students, but that’s what my editor told me—he didn’t go out looking for this story, nobody did—they came to us—” The dork broke off. He could no longer recall the syntax of what he was supposed to be saying. “Anyway, they told us that it was after the Swarm concert at the Opera House, and it’s after midnight or something, and you guys were walking back to campus through the Grove and you see the governor right out there in the Grove and this girl is giving him a blow job—” He stopped to look at Hoyt and Vance, as if to give them a chance to answer. “Am I right so far?”

“Wow,” said Hoyt in a bored, Sarc 1 fashion. “So what happens next?”

“Well…then—this is what we were told—I’m not saying it’s necessarily true one way or the other—I’m here to ask you guys”—a look filled with fathoms and fathoms of sincerity—“because the way we hear it is, the governor has these two bodyguards who are out there in the Grove, but they’re not, you know, right there watching or anything, but they spot you two guys and they come running up, and you guys jumped them and beat ’em up.”

“Two guys,” Vance blurted out, “and we jumped them…”

Vance, thought Hoyt, you are sooooo uncool.

“That’s why I wanted to ask you guys personally,” said the dork. “That’s not the way it happened? I’m just interested in…you know…how it did happen.”

The dork now knew he was onto something. He’d have to be retarded not to.

“Vance,” said Hoyt with another Sarc 1 smile, “you’re a vicious motherfucker, man.” To the dork: “And that’s the ‘prank’?”

“I guess ‘prank’ isn’t exactly the right word,” said the dork, “but you know, ‘prank’ in the sense of you guys didn’t go out there to jump anybody and you didn’t go out there to see the governor of California get some head—the people who were telling us about it, they called it the Night of the Skull Fuck. It was like it was a really unusual, funny thing that happened, that’s all. So is that the way it happened? Is it close to the way it happened?”

Hoyt could practically feel Vance’s eyes boring into his head, beseeching him…Hoyt said to the dork, “I tell you what. Whyn’t you call the governor of—what state was it?—California? See what he has to say.”

“I already have,” said the dork.

Vance couldn’t hold it back: “You did? What’d he say!”

“They never put me through to him personally,” said the dork. “I talked to some kind of…spokesperson. She said it was beneath comment. That was her expression, ‘beneath comment.’ But if you ask me, that’s not the same as saying it never happened.”

Vance, alarm still in his voice: “So now the guy knows you plan to write something about it?”

“Well…sure,” said the dork. “I told them.”

Vance, you are so-o-o-o-o-o-o-o uncool. To the dork: “Who’s the girl supposed to be in this story, the one giving the governor of California a blow job?”

“I don’t know her name,” said the dork, “but one of these people—we got the first name of her current boyfriend.”

“Which is what?” said Hoyt.

“Something like Crawford. You guys know who that might be?”

Crawdon McLeod, thought Hoyt. Now that was weird. Who the fuck could’ve or would’ve told these dorks about Crawdon and Syrie? “Crawford…Don’t know any Crawford,” he said.

“Wait a minute,” said Vance. “Back up a second. You came in here—how’d you know who we were? How’d you know where we were?”

Vance, Vance, Vance-man Vance…

“Well, I—I called the Saint Ray house and asked to speak to you,” said the dork. “They told me you were over here.”

“How’d you know what we looked like?”

“I asked some people.” He motioned vaguely in the direction of the entrance. “You guys are pretty well known!”

Big grin from the dork, big flattering grin. The flattery left Hoyt with conflicting impulses. On the one hand, it was time to let the dork know that dorks existed on a plane…way down there. On the other hand, was it really so bad…to be well known? Was it really such a frightening prospect…the possibility of becoming better known? “Looking at a fucking ape-faced dickhead is what we’re doing!” What would be so bad if that line, that great line, were recorded in print?

“I never read the Daily Wave,” he told the dork. “You read the Daily Wave, Vance?” He addressed Vance with a Sarc 3 inflection.

“No, I don’t,” said Vance. Hit the don’t just a little too hard. It made him sound petulant. “So you write for the school newspaper?” he said to the dork.

“Yeah…”

“What do you guys do if you want to run some story and it’s a great fucking story and you ain’t got one fucking fact to go on?”

The dork was jolted by the suddenly aggressive tone. His lips did some funny things, as if he could no longer control the little muscles that enabled them to go this way and that.

Timorous again, the dork said, “We just hope we can…get the facts. Look”—the big eyes again, pleading, pleading—“that’s why I wanted to talk to you guys directly! A story like this, we try to double-check the facts with the principals. We can always go with what other witnesses said, and I guess we will if we have to.”

“What other witnesses?” said Vance. Still in the alarm mode.

“Well, like you guys and the governor and the girl weren’t the only people there.”

“Like who else was?” said Vance.

“The bodyguards,” said the dork.

“The body guards?” said Vance.

“Well, they were there.”

“Body guards…plural?” said Vance.

“Are you denying there were bodyguards there?” Then to Hoyt: “Can you deny or confirm it?”

Hoyt could hardly believe it. The little fuck had ratcheted his courage up again. Vance was staring at him, dumbstruck.

“ ‘Do you deny it or can you confirm it,’” said Hoyt, contempt dripping from the legalistic phrases. “Deny and confirm my ass…‘Do you deny it or can you confirm it’…” He shook his head and twisted his lips in the way that says, “You…pussy.”

Pleading, pleading: “I have to ask you that! It’s not up to me, it’s up to you guys. My editor’s going with the story either way! We’d rather go with your version of the whole thing, but it’s like up to you guys.”

“What’s it?” said Vance. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.” Petulant again.

“See those two guys over there?” said Hoyt, pointing to two students, a couple of real porkers sitting about three tables away, laughing and carrying on. “Go ask them. Maybe they did it.”

The dork’s big eyes began bouncing from Hoyt to Vance to Hoyt again. Silence. Both were giving the dork okay-and-now-what stares.

The dork stood up and said, “Well, thanks for talking to me, guys…and here…” He twisted and slipped his backpack off his shoulders and fished around in it and came up with a Daily Wave calling card and a ballpoint pen. “If you want to get hold of me, here’s the number at the Wave, and I’m going to give you my cell number,” which he did, using the pen. He gave the card to Hoyt. “Thanks,” he said again.

Hoyt said nothing and didn’t stow the card anywhere. He just held it insouciantly between his first two fingers. He gave the dork a small Sarc 1 smile as the guy turned and headed off. The guy’s backpack was mauve with a yellow Dupont D on the flap. It was very dorky to go around with Dupont backpacks and jackets and things, as if you thought that the mere fact of being a student at Dupont was a big deal in and of itself. The fact that it was a big deal in and of itself was part of the inverse spin of the snobbery.

Vance sighed a high-blood-pressure sigh and fixed Hoyt with accusing eyes. “Goddamn it, Hoyt, how many times did I tell you to stop talking about it! Now we got this shit-bird at the Daily Wave—”

Hoyt said, “Relax. What’s the worst thing that can happen?”

“We get fucked, is what happens. This fucking tool has us assaulting two bodyguards, like we started it. Two bodyguards—I mean the fuck, the fucking guy’s talking about two bodyguards, and who the fuck needs to get caught in the middle of some goddamned story about the governor of California getting himself sucked off by Syrie Fucking Stieffbein?”

“Ea-ea-ea-ea-sy, Vance-man. Chill. Chill out! We didn’t make the guy’s gorilla go insane!”

“Yeah, but this guy’s gonna get it all fucked up. He’s already got it all fucked up. And now they’re gonna run the bodyguard’s version! You can imagine what that’s gonna be! Why didn’t you just deny the whole thing, the way I did? You strung it out. You strung it out so far, now the guy’s telling himself it’s obvious we were there.”

Hoyt broke into a grin. “Me? I don’t believe what I’m hearing! The little shit says ‘two bodyguards,’ and you say, ‘Whattaya mean, two? There weren’t two! I only saw one!’”

“I didn’t say that!”

“Well, you might as well have,” said Hoyt.

Vance eyed Hoyt for a few beats. “You know what I think? I think you’d like for somebody to write about it. That’s what I think.”

Hoyt turned his palms upward. “Who sent the guy packing? Who told him to kiss my ass?”

He stared Vance down, but hmmmm…the Vance-man had just painted him a little picture…

“Let me see the fucking guy’s card,” said Vance.

As he handed it to him, Hoyt flicked a glance at it himself. Adam Gellin.

“Never heard of him,” said Vance, handing it back.

Hoyt shrugged in as bored a fashion as he could. But he wasn’t bored. He jotted the name down in his mind. Adam Gellin was the little shit’s name.

Fuck! Why the fuck did that make him think of his fucking grades? He could be a legend in his own time—one of the very greatest. But what the fuck was he going to do next June?