I Am Charlotte Simmons

14. Millennial Mutants

Less than fifteen minutes left, and Charlotte was still leaning forward in her seat high up in the amphitheater, spellbound. The slender and surprisingly debonair figure down there on the stage, Mr. Starling, who must have been close to fifty, walked from one side to the other, not lecturing, but using the Socratic approach, asking his students questions and commenting on their answers, as if he were talking to twelve or thirteen souls gathered around a seminar table rather than the 110 who now sat before him in steep tiers, filling a small but grandiose amphitheater with a dome and a ceiling mural by Annigoni of Daedalus and the flight of Icarus from the labyrinth of Minos.

“All right,” Mr. Starling was saying, “so Darwin describes evolution in terms of a ‘tree of life,’ starting with a single point from which rise limbs, branches”—with his arms he pantomimed a tree rising and widening—“offshoots of infinite variety, but what is that point where it all starts? What does Darwin say this tree has ascended from? Where does he say evolution begins?”

He surveyed his audience, and a dozen hands shot up. “Yes,” he said, pointing to a plump blond girl in the topmost row, not all that far from one of the molten wings of Icarus.

“He said it began with a single cell, a single-cell organism,” said the girl. “Somebody asked him where the single cell was located, and he said, ‘Oh, I don’t know, probably in a warm pond somewhere.’”

An undercurrent of laughter ran through the amphitheater. Everybody looked to Mr. Starling to see how he would take it.

He smiled in a shrewd sort of way, paused, then said, “You happen to be exactly right. In fact, he suggested there might have been a whole school of single-cell organisms in that warm pond. But that leaves us with the question of where the single-cell organisms came from and, as far as that goes, the warm pond—but let’s forget about the pond for the time being. Where did Darwin say the single cell or cells came from?”

He crossed his arms and cocked his head to one side, a challenging pose he often struck. “Okay, my little geniuses,” the pose said, “what are you going to do with that one?”

One of the amphitheater’s downlighters happened to hit him dramatically, theatrically…just so…and he held the pose during the silence that ensued. In Charlotte’s estimation, the vision was…sublime. Victor Ransome Starling’s thick brown hair, which he combed straight back, was definitely still brown despite a rising tide of gray. The current fashion among male professors at Dupont was scrupulously improper: cheap-looking shirts, open at the throat, needless to say, and cotton pants with no creases—jeans, khakis, corduroys—to distinguish themselves from the mob, which is to say, the middle class; but Victor Ransome Starling always bucked the tide with the sort of outfit he was wearing right now, a brown-and-white houndstooth suit that looked great on his slender frame, a light blue shirt, a black knit tie, and a pair of ginger-brown suede shoes. To Charlotte he was elegance itself amid a motley crew.

Yes, Mr. Starling was sublime, to look at and to listen to, and he had posed a question. Swept away, Charlotte raised her hand and was immediately frightened by her own audacity—a freshman in an advanced class taught by a Nobel Prize winner in a daunting amphitheater overflowing with upperclassmen.

The vision below looked up at her, gestured, and said, “Yes?”

Charlotte’s heart began racing, and she became acutely conscious of the sound of her own voice. “Darwin said—he said he didn’t know where the original cells came from, and he wasn’t going to guess?” Even as the words left her lips, she was aware that she was reverting, in her nervousness, to the way she spoke before she arrived at Dupont. She had broken guess into two syllables and uttered it on a rising note, as if she were asking a question rather than making a statement. But she plowed on. “He said the origin of life itself was a hopeless in quiry?” Inquiry rose, too! And she had come down on the in like a farm boy driving in a stake with an ax head. “And it would be way, way in the future before somebody figured that out, if they ever did?”—which not only rose but also came out dee-ud. “And I think he said—in The Origin of Species?—I think he said that in the beginning it was the Creator?—with a capital C? It was the Creator, and he breathed life ‘into a few or into one’—a few single-cell organisms or one single-cell organism, I guess.” Geh-ess—in spite of herself.

“Right,” said Mr. Starling, looking up at her from the stage. Then he turned away to address the class as a whole. “Now you’ll notice—” He stopped abruptly and looked up again in Charlotte’s direction: “Very good. Thank you.” Then he turned away again and continued. “You’ll notice that Darwin, who probably did more than any other single person to extinguish religious faith among educated people, doesn’t present himself as an atheist. He bows to ‘the Creator.’ He always professed to be a religious person. There’s one school of thought that says he was only throwing a sop to the conventional beliefs of his day, since he knew The Origin of Species might be attacked as blasphemous. But I suspect it was something else. He probably couldn’t conceive of being an atheist. In his day, not even the most daring, most rationalistic and materialistic philosophers, not even David Hume, professed to be atheists. It’s not until the end of the nineteenth century that we come upon the first atheist of any prominence: Nietzsche. I suspect Darwin figured that since nobody had the foggiest idea as to what created life in the first place, and might never know, why not just say it was created by the Creator and let it go at that?”

He looked up in Charlotte’s direction again and gestured. “You’ve made a very fine and very important distinction.” Then his eyes panned over the entire class. “The origin of the species, which is to say, evolution, and the origin of life itself, of the impulse to live, are two different things.”

The student on Charlotte’s right, a cheery brunette with pale but striking features whom she knew only as a junior named Jill, whispered, “Hey! Charlotte!” and opened her eyes wide and pulled a face of mock astonishment. Then she mouthed the words “Not bad!” and smiled.

A flood of joy, so intense it seemed tangible in her nerve endings, ran through Charlotte’s entire body. She was giddy. She barely took in anything anybody said in the last few minutes of the class.

One thing she did remember was something Mr. Starling said about “the conscious little rock”:

“If anyone should ask me why we’re spending so much time on Darwin,” he was saying at one point, “I would consider that a perfectly logical question. Darwin was not a neuroscientist. His knowledge of the human brain, if any, was primitive. He knew nothing about genes, even though they were discovered by a contemporary of his, an Austrian monk named Gregor Johann Mendel—whose work strengthens the case for evolution tremendously. But Darwin did something more fundamental. He obliterated the cardinal distinction between man and the beasts of the fields and the wilds. It had always been a truism that man is a rational being and animals live by ‘instinct.’ But what is instinct? It’s what we now know to be the genetic code an animal is born with. In the second half of the last century, neuroscientists began to pursue the question, ‘If man is an animal, to what extent does his genetic code, unbeknownst to him, control his life?’ Enormously, according to Edward O. Wilson, a man some speak of as Darwin the Second. We will get to Wilson’s work soon. But there is a big difference between ‘enormously’ and ‘entirely.’ ‘Enormously’ leaves some wiggle room for your free will to steer your genetically coded ‘instincts’ in any direction you want—if…there is such a thing as ‘you.’ I say ‘if,’ because the new generation of neuroscientists—and I enjoy staying in communication with them—believe Wilson is a very cautious man. They laugh at the notion of free will. They yawn at your belief—my belief—that each of us has a capital-letter I, as in ‘I believe,’ a ‘self,’ inside our head that makes ‘you,’ makes ‘me,’ distinct from every other member of the species Homo sapiens, no matter how many ways we might be like them. The new generation are absolutists. They—I’ll just tell you what one very interesting young neuroscientist e-mailed me last week. She said, ‘Let’s say you pick up a rock and you throw it. And in midflight you give that rock consciousness and a rational mind. That little rock will think it has free will and will give you a highly rational account of why it has decided to take the route it’s taking.’ So later on we will get to ‘the conscious little rock,’ and you will be able to decide for yourself: ‘Am I really…merely…a conscious little rock?’ The answer, incidentally, has implications of incalculable importance for the Homo sapiens’ conception of itself and for the history of the twenty-first century. We may have to change the name of our species to Homo Lapis Deiciecta Conscia—Man, the Conscious Thrown Stone—or, to make it simpler, as my correspondent did, ‘Man, the Conscious Little Rock.’”

Once it ended, five or six students went up onstage and gathered about Mr. Starling. By the time Charlotte had made her way down from the upper rows of the amphitheater, he was just descending from the stage, and they came within two or three feet of each other. He excused himself from a tall young man who was hovering over him and turned toward her.

“Hello,” he said. “It was you—I’m afraid I have a hard time distinguishing faces in the upper rows—you’re the young…uh…the one who mentioned the Creator?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, you made a very nice summary of a very subtle point. Can I assume you actually read The Origin of Species?”

“Yes, sir.”

Professor Starling smiled. “I assign it every year, but I’m not sure how many actually go to the trouble, although it’s well worth it. What’s your background in biology?”

“I went as far as molecular biology. My high school didn’t have that, so they sent me over to Appalachian State twice a week.”

“Appalachian State University? You’re from North Carolina?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What year are you?”

“I’m a freshman.”

He nodded several times, as if pondering that. “You took the A.P.”

“Yes, sir.”

He did some more nodding. “I try to get to know every student before Christmas, but we’ve got a very large class this year. I’m afraid I don’t know your name.”

“Charlotte Simmons.”

Still more nodding. “Well, Ms. Simmons, keep going to the primary sources if you can, even when we get to neurobiology and some of the prose gets a little—a little steep.”

With that, he gave her a businesslike smile and turned back to the students who had been clustering about him.

Charlotte left the building and began walking aimlessly across the Great Yard. He had singled her out! The midmorning sun cast immense shadows of the buildings on this side upon the Yard’s lawn, which looked more lush and a richer green in shadow than in light. Beyond the shadows, the sun had transformed the Gothic buildings on the other side into gleaming monoliths. The bells of the Ridenour Carillon were tolling “The Processional,” and not knowing the lyrics Kipling had written for it, Charlotte found it stirring. The verdant foreground, the brilliant backdrop, the stirring music—all somehow arranged expressly for her! Sailing! Sailing! Gloriously drunk on cosmological theories and approbation.

On this sparkling, sunny morning, with its perfect, cloudless blue sky, amid the century-old majesty of the Dupont campus, it came to her in a rush…Yes! She had found the life of the mind and was…living it!

She gazed about at all the other students who were walking across the Great Yard. She was among the elite of the youth of America! Back home in Sparta, she was known as the Girl Who Went to Dupont. Here at Dupont she would be known, in the fullness of time, as…she didn’t know precisely what, but a radiant dawn had arisen…Before her, behind her, walking this way and that way across the Great Yard, enjoying the sun, enjoying the shade and the majesty of the ancient trees, chattering away into their cell phones, which their daddies could pay for as easily as drawing their next breath, suffused with the conspicuous lapidary consumption of all this royal Middle English Gothic architecture and the knowledge that they were among that elite minifraction of the youth of America—of the youth of the world!—who went to Dupont—all about her moved her 6,200 fellow students, or a great many of them, in midflight, blithely ignorant of the fact that they were merely conscious little rocks, every one of them, whereas…I am Charlotte Simmons.

The thought magnified the light of the sun itself. She was now beyond the Great Yard, but here, too, the lavish lawns, the way the sun lit up the tops of the leaves of the great trees and at the same time turned the undersides into vast filigrees of shadow—to Charlotte it became a magical tableau of green and gold. Just ahead, Briggs College…and even Briggs, generally regarded as a bit of an eyesore, had come alive as a pattern of brilliant stone surfaces incised by the shadows of arches and deep-set windows. Four or five guys and one girl were out on the steps of the main entrance. One of the guys, a string bean with a huge mass of dark curls, was on his feet. The others were sitting on the steps near him. Students hanging out on the front steps was a familiar sight at all the colleges, but Charlotte did a second take. If she wasn’t mistaken, one of them was the guy she had run into the other night at the gym: Adam.

On the steps, it so happened, Greg Fiore, the one standing, was saying to Adam, “Why do you keep pitching this Skull Fuck story? How many times do I have to tell you, this is something that may or may not have happened…last spring. People have been talking about this…this rumor…ever since school started. But there’s nothing concrete—and it’s not news anymore.”

Adam realized he was getting too worked up about it—this story required a smooth pitch—but he couldn’t hold back. “You’re not listening to me, Greg. I’ve got the whole thing on tape from a participant—two participants. This is strictly entre nous, okay? One is Hoyt Thorpe himself. He called me! He coudn’t tell me enough. He wants everybody to know about it, as long as we don’t say it came from him. That’s one. Now, the other—do you remember I finally found out the name of the governor’s bodyguard? They took him to a hospital in Philadelphia so his name wouldn’t be in the books in Chester? Well, I found out who he is! I’ve talked to him! He was a California state trooper. He just got canned, and he’s really pissed. He thinks it’s because some newspaper called about the story, and they want him long gone and out of the way. And guess who ‘some newspaper’ was?”

“You?” said Greg.

“Me. Me and the Wave. He’ll give us an affadavit if we want it.”

Greg sighed. “You’re a terrific reporter, Adam. I mean that. And you’ve done a lot of work. But I’m sorry—we can’t dredge up some random blow job from last May and run a story about it.”

Adam wanted to tell Greg the truth—namely, that he was one scared shitless fearless editor—but he knew that would only make him dig in for good. So he said, “Well…okay. I still think it’s a great story. So how about the other story, the basketball thing?”

Greg sighed again and said, “You don’t give up, do you? I don’t know why you’re taking the basketball thing so seriously. I don’t see how you can call it hypocrisy—”

Adam watched Greg’s lips move, and he tuned out…and fumed. Greg always positioned himself as the eminence of the Millennial Mutants, not merely in terms of authority but often physical stance. At the Wave office he sat in an outsize oak library armchair that overwhelmed any other stick of furniture in the dismal dump. And now out here on the steps, he ends up the only one standing, while the rest of the Mutants—Camille Deng, Roger Kuby, Edgar Tuttle, and himself—sit perched on the steps…at his feet, as it were.

All Adam could come up with was, “I don’t believe what I’m hearing.” That was so lame, he looked away in an instinctive bid to disengage from combat. He blinked. Coming toward them on the walkway in front of Briggs was that girl, the Southern girl, the pretty freshman with the innocent look, Charlotte.

He stood up and waved. “Hey, Charlotte!”

So it was him. He couldn’t have sought her attention at a more propitious moment. Charlotte didn’t know quite what to make of this Adam, whom she had met only in awkward circumstances, but she could say one thing for him. He was the only student she had met who shared—or openly shared—her vision of what the university should be like intellectually. Millennial Mutants…She couldn’t say she really got it, but all the same—and he really wasn’t bad-looking.

“Come here!”

So she walked on over to the front steps of Briggs, and Adam introduced her to Greg, Camille, Roger, and Edgar Tuttle. Greg was the skinny one with a pencil of a neck supporting his head and the huge mop of curly hair she had noticed. Camille’s Asian face was smooth and symmetrical, but she seemed irritable. Roger Kuby’s pudginess covered up what were probably some fundamentally handsome features, but he was prone to stupid jokes. “Charlotte O’Hara?” he said when Adam introduced her as Charlotte. Edgar Tuttle was tall and good-looking but terribly reserved.

“I told Charlotte I’d introduce her to some real Millennial Mutants,” Adam said to Greg, who appeared a bit put off by the remark.

“What makes you think we’re real?” said Roger. “That’s unreal.”

Charlotte smiled out of courtesy and from nervousness, but none of the others reacted in any fashion.

“Charlotte,” said Adam, “tell Greg what you told me about Jojo Johanssen in that French class. I think he doubts my assessment of our revered student-athletes. What was that course called?”

Charlotte hesitated before saying, “The Modern French Novel from Flaubert to Houellebecq?” She wasn’t sure she wanted to tell the story in front of five upperclassmen she didn’t even know.

“Well—who?” said Roger.

“Well-beck?” said Charlotte, to give him an approximation of the French pronunciation of Houellebecq.

“Oh—Well-beck,” said Roger, as if there were something funny about that.

“He’s a young novelist?” Charlotte said. “He’s sort of nihilistic?”

“Anyway,” said Adam, “Charlotte enrolls in this so-called advanced French course, and they’re reading the books in…English translation! Advanced French!” He looked toward her for confirmation. “Right?”

She nodded yes.

“And tell’m why,” said Adam.

The implication that she had some great exposé to relate made her uncomfortable. She wanted to say, “I’d rather not get into it,” but she didn’t have the nerve. She tried to get off by saying only, “The teacher said the course was for people having trouble completing their language requirement.”

“Who is this teacher?” the Asian girl, Camille, wanted to know.

“What was that term?” said Adam. “Linguafrankly challenged?”

Charlotte didn’t know what to say to either one of them. The girl hadn’t asked her question like someone who just wanted to hear some gossip. She sounded more like an inspector. Charlotte suddenly had the feeling that if she identified Mr. Lewin, who in fact had been nice to her, this irritable girl would see to it that there were consequences.

Fortunately, Adam just couldn’t wait to parade his new inside information. “Half of them were Greg’s beloved basketball players, whose combination of ignorance and pseudo-ignorant malingering he’s so eager to overlook.”

“Oh, give me a fucking break,” said Greg. “All I was saying was—”

Feeling that he now had Greg on the defensive, Adam seized the moment to ram his argument down Greg’s cynical gullet. “One of them was my tutee—I guess that’s who tutors tutor—tutees?”

Roger broke in: “SAT tutors tutor tutees for SAT twos. Try saying that fast—SATtutorstutortutees—”

Goddamned Roger! So he rammed Roger’s interruption aside. “One of them was my boy Jojo Johanssen. Jojo—”

Greg said, “You totally miss—”

Adam rammed Greg aside, too. “Charlotte, tell our basketball groupie here about Jojo and that question he started to answer in that class. He doesn’t even want to be mistaken for intelligent. Now, how did that go, that question he started to answer?”

“I don’t remember the details,” said Charlotte. “Besides, it was too complicated.” She was depressingly aware that she had just pronounced besides with a very long, flat i—besiiiiides—whereas everybody else at Dupont gave it three syllables: be-sy-ids.

“Beautiful!” Greg said to Adam. “Your own star witness—”

Camille Deng spared Adam the trouble of ramming his way back in. “Tell me this,” she asked Charlotte. “Did this guy hit on the women in the class?” What a grim set her lips had!

Charlotte could see Jojo’s enormous hulk approaching her—as vividly as if he were right here on the steps.

“I don’t know,” she lied. “I wasn’t in that class but one day. I transferred out of there as fast as I could.”

“You’re lucky,” said Camille. It was hard to tell whether her bitter tone came from personal experience or from some profound moral repugnance or ideological belief. “They think this campus is Testosterone Valley and they’ve got all-American dicks, and if a woman comes here, it’s only for one reason. They just assume…”

Edgar Tuttle spoke up for the first time. He had a sheepish voice. “That’s what cheerleaders are all about.”

“What is?” said Camille.

“Well, you know—they’re a chorus line,” said Edgar. “They kick their legs like cancan dancers, they show you the inside of their thighs, their breasts are hoisted up like—like—like missiles waiting for someone to push the button, they’re wiggling their hips, they wear these skimpy outfits…you know what I mean.”

Camille said, “I know what you mean, but I don’t get it.”

Edgar hesitated before saying, “They’re the sexual reward—or they represent the sexual reward.”

Running out of patience: “Whose sexual reward?”

“The athletes’,” said Edgar, “or that’s what they represent. Or maybe they actually are, too. I don’t know. Anyway, this is an old, old custom. It goes back a thousand years.”

“Cheerleaders?” said Roger. It was meant to be funny.

“No, what they represent,” said Edgar. “When knights were victorious in battle, one of their rewards was random sex. But sometimes there were no battles to be fought, and so about eight or nine hundred years ago they started having tournaments. Two armies would come out on the field of battle, and it was supposed to be like a game. They weren’t supposed to kill each other. They used blunt swords and lances and so on. The idea was to knock the other side’s knights off their horses, and if you did, you got to keep their armor, their weapons, their horses, their tack, and all this stuff was worth a fortune.”

Roger began twirling his forefinger in front of his chest, toward himself, as if to say Let’s speed it up. “Get to the part about the cheerleaders.”

“I am,” said Edgar. “After the tournaments, the knights would have like a bacchanal, and everybody would get hammered and boff all the girls they wanted.”

Edgar’s attempts at campus vernacular were inevitably embarrassing. Boff was totally out of date, and hammered and the conjunctive like just didn’t ring right coming out of his mouth.

“Sounds like an ordinary football weekend to me,” said Roger.

For the first time, Edgar became animated. “Thank you—that’s exactly the point! Nothing has changed in a thousand years! How do you think team sports like football originated? And ice hockey. With the medieval tournaments! What team sports did the original Olympic games have? None! It’s really funny if you—”

“Wait a minute,” said Greg. “How do you know all this stuff?”

“I read,” said Edgar. “Anyway, it’s really funny if you think about it. For a thousand years we’ve been having these watered-down versions of medieval tournaments, but with one big difference. The knights who fought in the tournaments also happened to be lord and master of everybody else. There was no such thing as a leader who wasn’t also a warrior. But these ‘sports heroes’ we’ve got at Dupont, they’re nothing but entertainers. What are they going to do when they leave here?”

“I never saw any figures for here,” said Adam, eager to stay in the discussion in hopes of impressing Charlotte, “but nationally there are thirty-five hundred Division One college basketball players, and they all think they’re gonna play in the NBA, and you know how many will actually make it? Less than one percent.”

“Right!” said Edgar. Nobody had ever seen Edgar riding higher. “And the rest of them, they’ve spent four years at Dupont University doing alley-oops or sacking quarterbacks or whatever it is they do, and they’ll leave here and they’ll be…oh…”

“Sacking my mother and hijacking her car in the parking lot at the mall, is what they’ll be doing,” said Roger.

“Very funny, Roger,” said Camille. “Why don’t we be a little racist while we’re at it?”

“Oh, racist my ass. Stop breaking my balls, Camille.”

“You’re telling me that remark wasn’t based on a racist assumption?”

“Okay, I’m a racist,” said Roger. “Let’s have closure and put that behind us and move on. I’ve got a question that’s so obvious nobody ever asks it. What is it with this sports mania in the first place? Why does anybody get excited because Dupont is gonna play Indiana in basketball? Either our hired mercenaries will beat their hired mercenaries, or vice versa. Why does anybody care? It’s a game between two groups of guys who have no connection with our lives whatsoever, and even if they did, it’s only a game! Why does a game get students so emotionally involved? Or anybody else for that matter. What does it mean to them? I don’t see how it could mean anything, but obviously it does. It’s a mystery. It’s completely irrational.”

Camille muttered, “I still say it was racist.”

Charlotte was fascinated by Roger’s transformation from just a few minutes ago. Up on this plane Roger Kuby was a different person, no longer the chronically off-key would-be wit, now an intellectual determined to get to the core of a psychological mystery. The serious Roger Kuby even looked better in her eyes. All at once she could see the handsome features hitherto hidden by his coat of fat.

“Irrational is right,” Adam was saying. “It’s a primitive ritual of masculinity, and girls just go along with it because that’s where the boys are.”

Oh, the Millennial Mutants were soaring now. Charlotte was enthralled. Maybe this was the group of students she had been looking for, the cénacle, students who, above all else, had a life of the mind, la vie intellectuelle she had envisioned back in Sparta as she looked out, at Miss Pennington’s urging, across the mountains toward the distant, shimmering Dupont…

She was so enthralled, in fact, that she, like the others, had scarcely noticed the four students who had emerged from Briggs and were settling in on the other side of the steps, slightly above them. Like the Mutants, they wore the usual, the T-shirts, the shorts, the sneakers, the flip-flops. But their…aura…was entirely different. All four were lean and on the tall side, and even though their loose T-shirts and shorts obscured everything but their extremities, they were obviously “diesels,” to use the Dupont word for boys who pumped up their muscles through weight lifting. The one in the foreground, about twelve feet from the Mutants, sat on one step with his feet on the step below. His legs were so long his knees came up practically to his shoulders, and his shoulders were this wide. His head, crowned by a baseball cap worn backward, and his angular face, beset here and there by acne scars, rested atop a preternaturally long, thick neck, with an Adam’s apple that stuck out like a rock formation. He kept pumping his heel up and down while his eyes roamed all over the place, as if he thought something or other was about to happen, God knew what. The other three were not quite so big, but they were big enough, and they had the same look of lounging on the steps while trying to figure out where the action was.

The contrast with the four male Mutants struck Charlotte immediately, although she couldn’t have put a name to it. She cast a glance at Adam. He was built in the proper proportions and had a nice symmetrical face with a fine nose and nice lips—sensual, in fact—but now he seemed…slight. Greg was so sketchily put together, not even his height did anything for him. His mop of dark brown curls made his head look enormous and misshapen, stuck as it was atop that little pencil neck of his.

The newcomers turned their heads from time to time to check out the Mutants, turned back to their cohorts and twisted their eyebrows. Pretty soon all four were pulling dubious, ironic faces for one another’s benefit, talking in low voices, chuckling, and then sizing up the Mutants again.

“…no mystery to it,” Adam was saying. “I can tell you why. Lacrosse is one of the only two sports where white boys are the ones with the machismo. The other one’s ice hockey. Basketball is totally a black sport, and football is mostly a black sport. It’s just not as obvious in football, because the uniforms cover up their bodies and they wear face masks. Lacrosse would be all black, too, like that”—he snapped his fingers—“if black teenagers ever started playing it. They’d make the white players they’ve got out there now look like…like…like I don’t know what…wusses, pussies…It wouldn’t even be close. Same thing with hockey. A few body checks by the sort of black athletes who play basketball and football, and the toughest Canadian in the NHL would be a basket case. He’d be mush.”

Oh yes, they were soaring, the Mutants were, soaring! And it was Adam who led the way. He was ramming home whatever he wanted to ram home. How could anyone even compete with him on this subject? He knew the athletes at Dupont, he tutored them, he had seen them up close. He could rip all mystery away because he had been inside their feeble heads. So absorbed was he in revealing all, he was the last to notice that trouble was nearby and staring at him.

The guy with the pumping flip-flop had risen to his feet. Sure enough, hewas…tall…in fact, gigantic, as if from another species—rangy, lean, perhaps six-five or -six…and big. He rolled his immense shoulders and then started coming down the steps, his flip-flops slapping, toward Adam. The first thing Adam detected was Edgar, Roger, Camille, and Charlotte looking up. So Adam looked up. Leaning over him was a giant, or so he seemed from down here on the steps where Adam was sitting, a giant with immense forearms, a huge chin, an enormous Adam’s apple, and acne on a face that now bore a look of such exaggerated seriousness—accompanied by such contortions of the forehead and eyebrows—that it oozed with irony and mockery of the hambone variety. And in that instant Adam knew, as surely as he knew anything in this world, that whatever happened next, it would not be pleasant. Then he caught a glimpse of the giant’s three cohorts in the background, smirking, each an only slightly smaller edition of the giant himself. One had a brawler’s grizzle stretching from the dome of his head, down his jaws, above his upper lip, over his chin, and under his chin to the itchy skin below, and Adam now knew that this was going to be unpleasant in a particular way.

“Don’t mean to interrupt,” said the giant with a ham actor’s solicitude. “You guys having a seminar out here?”

Adam ransacked his brain for something…cool…to say, something to show that he got it, the big hambone’s game, and that he, too, was into irony and could parry any such thrust. But all he came up with was, “No.”

As soon as he said it, he realized he should just leave it at that, a curt, flat no. But what if the hulking guy took that as disrespectful? That way lay disaster—in an as yet unknown form, but inevitably, disaster! He heard himself adding, “We’re just chilling, just hanging out.”

The big interloper put on a hambone long face and began nodding over Adam with his eyes cast to one side and into an unfocused distance, as if he were pondering…pondering…pondering…Then he looked straight down at Adam and nodded some more before looking back over his shoulder and saying to his three comrades, “Says it’s not a seminar. Says they’re just chilling, just hanging out.”

In a tone of mock contemplation, the one with the grizzle all over his head said, “Just chilling,” and did some nodding of his own.

The Millennial Mutants grew silent. The high spirits of their intellectual romp through history, psychology, philosophy, and anthropology had—poof!—evaporated.

Adam knew he should stand up and not have the guy standing over him and looking down like this, but he was afraid that if he stood up, it would be perceived as a challenge…one that could only end badly.

“We thought it was a seminar,” the big hambone said, “because you guys know so much about sports.” His eyes suddenly seized upon Greg.

Greg tried a smile, then a shrug, then a sigh before attempting another smile and saying, “Well, not really,” which came out rilly.

“No, you rilly do, rilly,” said the guy, making it sound like the most effete locution he had ever heard. “We’re rilly interested in sports, too.” He motioned toward his sidekicks. “We play lacrosse.”

Adam tried not to swallow or blink, but failed.

“—and you guys rilly know your lacrosse.”

Silence. Implicit in all the rillies was: you faggots. The silence swelled up malignantly until Greg, the maximum Mutant, editor of the Wave, a supposed campus leader, realized he had to put up a defense. But how?

Finally, in only slightly more than a mumble, he managed to say, “Thanks. Nice talking to you. We have some things to go over.”

“Hey, no problem,” said the giant, lifting his hands up, palms forward. The hands were huge. “Go right ahead. You don’t mind if we listen in, do you?”

In a faint voice Greg said, “Well…” Then he stopped. Something was happening to his lips. They were scrunching together into a little pink wad, as if gathered by a drawstring. Even more faintly he managed to say, “Well, no…” The muscles around his lips seemed to have an epileptic life of their own. He barely managed to croak out, “Wouldn’t you rather”—his voice broke—“go play with your sticks?”

The lout broke into a wild, leering grin and just looked Greg in the eye until Greg broke. The giveaway was a big swallow and a frightened compression of the lips.

The giant turned toward his boys. “Says we oughta fuck off and go play with our sticks.”

The boys went, “Woooooooooo!” The one with the grizzled head said, “Play with our what? Did he say dicks or pricks?”

Greg said, “I didn’t say—”

But the giant, leering at him once more, broke in. “We’re not letting ourselves get”—he raised his right hand and let the wrist go limp in a hambone fashion—“rilly pissy here, are we?”

Greg opened his mouth, but the little muscles were playing such spastic tricks with his lips that he couldn’t utter a word.

Inexplicably, the big lacrosse player turned toward Charlotte. He looked her up and down, smiled, winked, and said, “Hey, babe.”

Then he turned back to Greg and began to leer in the most humiliating way, and the leer was the eternal leer of the playground, the one that says, “Come on, fag, think you can fuck with me?”

Greg had begun hyperventilating.

Suddenly Camille Deng sprang up, eyes snapping, lips pursed grimly. She looked about a third the size of their tormentor. She spoke in a low, rasping snarl:

“Let me put it another way. Take your lacrosse stick—bitch—and stick it up your ass net-first—bitch—and keep shoving until you shovel all the shit out of your mouth—bitch.”

The giant’s face turned bloodred. He took a step toward Camille.

Adam knew he should do something, but he remained rooted to the step he was sitting on.

Camille didn’t retreat an inch. She thrust her chin forward and said, “Go ahead. Just touch me once. You’ll be brought up on assault and sexual harassment charges so fast you’ll be out of Dupont like a shot. You can go home and play with your all-American dick—bitch. And eat your buddies’ ice cream”—she motioned with her head toward his comrades—“and drool their spooch from your filthy mouth, bitch.”

The big athlete stopped in his tracks. The radioactive words assault and sexual harassment had jolted him. He knew them for what they were—career killers. He despised this woman—she was too grim and mean to be called a girl—as much as he had ever despised anyone, male or female, in his life.

“Oh, you little slit-eyed skank—”

“Slit-eyed!” cried Camille. “Slit-eyed!” It was a cry of triumph. “You heard that!” She was all but hopping up and down as her eyes panned over Edgar, Greg, Roger, Adam, and Charlotte. “Slit-eyed! You heard him!” Then she looked the bewildered giant right in the face. “You just had to go and do it, didn’t you! You couldn’t hold back! You just had to—” Whereupon she drew the edge of her hand across her throat like a knife and flashed him a vicious smile.

The guy looked as if he had been poleaxed at the base of his skull. He got the picture right away: racial insult. The poisonous skank had him. At Dupont that was worse than homicide. With homicide on your record, you had a fighting chance of staying in school.

“Let’s go,” he said in a barely audible voice, and they all got up and headed along the walkway toward the Great Yard. They looked back malevolently, but they kept walking.

Adam knew he should get up and congratulate Camille and whoop in triumph or something. And maybe say something to Greg. At least Greg had tried. But Adam still didn’t move. He was paralyzed with shame and lingering fear. I didn’t do a thing…nothing…I just sat here. (And what if they come back?)

At first none of them said a word. Then Camille, looking down as if at the steps, said, “Student…athletes…” As in herpes pustules. Then she looked up and said with great animation, “Hey, we gotta find out what that guy’s name is! You can find out, can’t you, Adam?”

Dispiritedly, “I think so.”

Camille gave a humorless chuckle. “That moron is fucking outta here! He’s history! He’s a dried-up piece a shit! He’s lucky if he’s a student at Dupont—student”—another mordant chuckle—“forty-eight hours from now.”

“Dja see the way they went skulking off with their tails between their legs?” said Greg. He had a grin of victory stretched across his face. “We crrr ushed those motherfuckers! They won’t fuck with the Millennial Mutants again!”

We, thought Adam. You’d have caved completely if Camille hadn’t stepped in. Yeah, well, Greg had put up some resistance, hadn’t he. Couldn’t very well deny him that.

“He won’t fuck with anybody anymore!” crowed Camille. “Not at Dupont! That cretin is roadkill! And you’re all my witnesses, right?”

She looked at each of them, including Charlotte, until all nodded yes. In fact, testifying in some kind of procedure against that lacrosse player was the last thing in the world Charlotte wanted to do. He had been sarcastic and mildly insulting, but Camille was a total…bitch. She was ready to bring the whole world up on “charges.” Why? For what? The guy wasn’t all that bad. He was virile. He was good-looking in a rugged way, acne scars and all…Beverly, on all fours: Where are the lacrosse players? Should he be expelled from Dupont, maybe have his life ruined, for calling a bitch like Camille a slit-eyed skank after what she said to him? Shoving a lacrosse stick net-first—

Camille’s vulgarity made Charlotte queasy. No, it was more than that. It had shocked her in some fundamental way. In order to attack, Camille had abandoned all pretense of being feminine. Charlotte could still see the guy’s stunned expression…It had shocked him, too…How anguished he looked as compared to a few moments before—

She glanced at Adam. He was looking straight at her, and she found herself in an eye lock. Adam was still sitting there on the step. He hadn’t budged.

What was it he saw in her face? Adam wondered. It wasn’t an accusation, in any case. Such a tender beauty she had…the purity of it…the innocence…the lithe legs, the sweet, delicate, lubricious curve of her lips…all in one. And she was as inexperienced as himself…forgiving yet intensely desirable…This was no mere observation. It was a feeling as real as any of his five senses. It suffused his body even unto the most remote nerve endings, suffused his body, his mind, everything within him—

Charlotte wanted to put an arm around him. He looked so forlorn and hopeless, sitting on that same spot where he had been sitting all along. He hadn’t moved a muscle.

Reduce the world to a cocoon in which there were just the two of them. Just that, thought Adam, and he wouldn’t ask for anything else.

I’m only eighteen, Charlotte thought, but I guess he needs someone to tell him everything is going to be okay. She broke the eye lock and departed that sad moment.

She thought the guy hadn’t even noticed her, but all at once he had turned toward her, smiled, winked, and said, “Hey, babe.”