I Am Charlotte Simmons

22. Shaking Hands with Fortune

Such excitement! The Lounge Committee had never before convened in Charlotte’s room, where the boarding-school-cool and aloof Beverly ruled. But these were special circumstances. A senior, a member of the coolest fraternity of all, Saint Ray, had invited Charlotte, a freshman, to be his date for a Saint Ray overnight “formal” in Washington, D.C. The questions before the committee were two: should she or shouldn’t she go—and what was a “formal,” anyway?

Bettina and Mimi gawked at this side…and the other side…and this side again, where Beverly’s galaxy of electronic wonders rose up from a jungle of cords plugged into big cream-colored junction knuckles…a plasma TV that turned on a stainless-steel base, a recharger stand on the desk, a refrigerator, a fax machine, a makeup mirror framed in LED lights—there was no end to it all—compared to what the other side of the room looked like…well, abandoned…plain wooden Dupont dorm-issue desk, straight-backed chair, the bureau, and a single electrical device, an old, rusting gooseneck lamp on the desk.

“Which side is yours?” said Mimi.

“Take a wild guess,” said Charlotte.

Beverly’s clothes and towels were strewn across her unmade bed and its twists and tangles of sheets and covers, and down on the floor in a field of dust balls were vast numbers of shoes, not always matched up, littered this way and that.

“Where’s Beverly?” said Mimi.

“I don’t know where she goes,” said Charlotte, pulling the straight-backed chair over a few feet, facing the beds. “She never comes back until two or three in the morning, if she comes back at all.”

Thus assured, Mimi sat in the techie-looking swivel chair at Beverly’s desk, gave it a spin, and came rolling over beside Charlotte, who was sitting on her wooden chair. Bettina sat on Charlotte’s bed.

Charlotte was beginning to regret that she had told Bettina or Mimi about the formal. But how could she not? They were her closest friends; and the unspoken, taboo function of the Lounge Committee was to boost one another’s morale until they figured out a way to ascend from loser status. Besides, one thing she really wanted to hear them all say was that there was nothing wrong with going off on a fraternity party like this…and if it showed everybody that she was already on the ascent…that was all right, too.

“I’ve heard of formals,” said Bettina, who was sitting on the foot of Beverly’s bed, “but I don’t really know what they are. What are they?”

Charlotte said, “I don’t really—”

“Wait a minute. Back up. Rewind,” said Bettina. “I want to know how this all happened. The last thing I remember was that brawl at the tailgate. And so now he invites you to his fraternity’s formal? You must have seen him since then—or something.”

“Oh, sure,” said Charlotte, as if it were both obvious and insignificant. She kept looking at Mimi—to avoid looking at Bettina, who was her very closest friend. She hadn’t told them…anything about seeing Hoyt after that. “Afterward, I went over to the Saint Ray house to thank him. I mean, he could’ve like…gotten himself killed.”

“You went over there that night?” said Bettina.

Now Charlotte was forced to look at her. Oh God, the consternation on her face! Charlotte read it as not merely a look of surprise, but rather, the surprise of one who has been betrayed. “We brought you back here and stayed with you for two hours while you lay down on that bed and cried.”

“I don’t mean that night,” said Charlotte. “It was a couple of days later.”

“So that was before he hit on that blond girl at the I.M.?” said Bettina.

“I guess—I don’t know.”

“Funny, you didn’t get around to telling us that.”

Charlotte felt so guilty, she knew her face was crimson. “I was just being polite. I felt like I just owed him—I mean, if it hadn’t been for him…” She didn’t try to complete the sentence. The more words she uttered, the more guilt oozed out.

“Wow,” said Bettina, “that was a nice thing to do. You neglected to tell us what good manners you have.”

That made Charlotte feel so small she couldn’t even muster the strength to combat the sarcasm. “It didn’t seem like a big thing at the time.” Her voice sounded worse than defensive. It sounded fugitive.

“And so then he invited you to the formal,” said Mimi. Her face wore an expressionless mouth below a pair of big, guileless eyes, the classic attitude of Sarc 3.

“Noooooo,” said Charlotte, just as fugitively as before. All the while her brain was crunching prevarication equations. “I’ve like…hung out with him a few times since then.”

Bettina and Mimi must have said it at once: “What does that mean!”

“We sort of—you know—hung out.”

“Oh, you hung out,” said Mimi. A pause. “Where?”

“Mostly at the Saint Ray house, I guess. But nothing happened. I swear! There were always a lot of people around. Everybody was just hanging out. I never went upstairs in that building. I pledge you my word.”

“I don’t care if you went upstairs,” said Mimi.

Oh God, thought Charlotte. I’ve betrayed them. Why didn’t I tell them anything, any little thing, about seeing Hoyt? Aloud: “Well, anyway, I didn’t. All these girls—they’re fools, the way they just go hook up with guys. It’s so…so demeaning. I’ve straightened Hoyt out on that point.”

“Are you saying you’ve never hooked up with him?” said Mimi.

“Noooooo…” As soon as she said it, she realized it was about as indefinite a no as anybody ever came up with. “I was never alone with him in the Saint Ray house.” She emphasized the alone to draw attention from the rhetorical flexibility of the rest of the sentence. Already her amygdala—or was it the caudate nucleus?—was aflame with the memory of the explorations of the hand in the Little Yard parking lot.

“And he never tried?” said Mimi.

“I guess he sort of tried,” said Charlotte. “I guess they all do. But I was very clear about that?” She could see Bettina flicking a Sarc 3 glance at Mimi. “I don’t think you believe me, but he’s been a gentleman ever since that first night at the Saint Ray house?” Why was she reverting to statements accented like questions? Part of her knew she was beseeching them to accept all this at face value and say that going off on this fraternity formal sounded like fun. “He already knows how I feel. But does it look terrible to go off to Washington with him like that?”

“Hah,” said Bettina without mirth. “What does look terrible around this place anymore?”

That wasn’t the answer Charlotte wanted.

“But what exactly’s involved in a formal?” said Bettina.

“Oh, the fraternities and sororities have them,” said Mimi, who prided herself on being knowledgeable in such areas. “The idea is, the guys wear tuxedos, and the girls wear party dresses, and they have a party away from the campus at some place like the Inn at Chester. Or they go out of town overnight, and that’s supposed to like make it really special.”

“Yeah,” said Bettina, “but what do they do at a formal?”

“I don’t know,” said Mimi. “I’ve never been to one. But I bet they do what they do at every party. The guys get drunk and yell a lot, and the girls get drunk and throw up a lot, and the guys try to get a little somethin’ somethin’, and the next day the girls claim they can’t remember what happened and the guys remember all kinds of shit, regardless of whether it happened or not—except that the clothes and the food are better.”

All three of them laughed, but even amid the trilling merriment, Charlotte knew she heard a voice—talking on a cell phone—outside in the hall, which could only be—

The door opened, and in came Beverly, her head leaning into the cell phone she held up to her ear, and right behind her was Erica. Beverly stopped in her tracks, the cell phone still at her ear, glowering, especially at Mimi—in her room—in her chair. Mimi sat up very straight on the edge of the chair—Beverly’s chair—as if ready at any moment to depart the nest, like a barn swallow.

Beverly now stared at Charlotte. Into the cell phone she said, “Jan…Jan…I know…Gotta go. Call you back.”

She took a few more steps into the room, staring at Charlotte but saying nothing. Erica came in behind her, and Charlotte seized the moment to stand up and sing out, “Hi, Erica!” Mainly she didn’t want Beverly to advance into the room looking down at her—and she didn’t want to stand up as if out of respect.

Erica gave Charlotte a stone-cold smile. Charlotte thought of it as the Groton smile. Before Beverly could say anything, Charlotte said, “Sorry, Beverly. I just didn’t think you’d be here. We…we’re having a sort of meeting.” She didn’t dare get into what for.

Charlotte said, “This is Erica?—Mimi? Bettina?”

Erica at least looked at everybody long enough to freeze their bones with a withering, bone-dry preppy smile. Beverly glanced at Mimi and Bettina, just those two, and that was it.

“Well—” said Beverly, looking at Charlotte with a neutral expression. Charlotte decided it must be Sarc 2. “So what’s going on?”

Charlotte had no idea what to say, but Bettina piped up, “It’s major, Beverly.”

Charlotte could tell immediately, from Bettina’s loud tone and the ultra-familiar way she used Beverly’s name, that she was tired of everybody giving way before this supposed paragon of the boarding-school elite—and that her anger actually came from her realization that despite all the ways the Lounge Committee had of dismantling the status, the worth, of this elite, down deep she still regarded them as…the elite.

“Wow,” said Beverly in a completely careless, Sarc 3 tone of voice. She was not looking at Bettina, either, but straight at Charlotte. She flipped her palms upward in an idle fashion and said in the same tone, “Must be big news. So what is it?”

Rather than appear to Mimi and Bettina that she was ducking from Beverly, Charlotte just blurted it straight out. “I’ve been invited to a formal, and I’m trying to decide whether to go or not.”

“Really? Who with?”

“Hoyt Thorpe.”

It was Erica who chimed in, “Hoyt—Thorpe?” She had a big, incredulous smile on her face and popped-open eyes. “Are you serious?” It was the first time she had ever responded directly to anything Charlotte said or did.

“Yeah…”

“Where is this going to be?” The same popped eyes and an expression on a crest between laughter and astonishment.

Charlotte’s voice cracked slightly as she said, “Washington…” This stuck-up…bitch…rattled her.

“D.C.?”

“Yeah…”

“How on earth did this happen to you?” said Erica, whereupon she broke into a chilling boarding-school laugh.

Beverly said, “Oh, Charlotte knows Hoyt Thorpe.” Not even Sarc 3; straight-up-front Sarc 1.

Erica put on a Sarc 3 look of seriousness and concern. “You know who they invite to formals, don’t you—especially the Saint Rays and…Hoyt Thorpe.”

“Hope you get along with all the Saint Ray frat whores.”

“I’m not the least bit worried about Hoyt,” said Charlotte. “Not for one second. Hoyt knows beter than to try—to—whatever you’re talking about—with me. And I don’t know anything about any…‘frat whores.’”

Erica said, “Okay, just make sure you don’t become one of them.”

Beverly said, “Ha! Charlotte! A frat whore? She’ll probably bring her pajamas and bathrobe with her and insist on sleeping on the couch!”

“You know I’m still in the room,” Charlotte said. “Plus, it’s none of your business where I sleep.”

“Ooh, getting a little testy, aren’t we?” said Beverly.

“Well, sorry if I don’t broadcast where I sleep like you do,” said Charlotte.

“Oh, please!” said Beverly. “Not that I’d tell you anything, but at least I do get some play every now and then. Be careful at the formal, Charlotte. No one likes a goody two-shoes.”

So anxious was he to be on time, Hoyt got to the lobby of the Inn at Chester, where he was to meet Rachel—Rachel—Rachel—he couldn’t remember what she said her last name was—nobody had last names anymore anyway—Rachel—she of the lips—he could close his eyes and see those teasing, serpentine lips—so eager was he to make this stroke of luck pay off, he got to the lobby fifteen minutes early and sat down in a commercial knock-off Sheraton armchair in a lobby cluster, as hotel franchise decorators called them—clusters of couches, armchairs, side tables, and polyurethaned coffee tables, all calculated to domesticate the lobbies, which these days were usually like this one, cavernous spaces caked with marble and plasticized-shiny showy-grain wood.

The lobby vista at eye level, to anyone sunk down in a chair, seriously subverted whatever glamour the place might have conjured in the mind of a twenty-two-year-old who lived in the give-a-shit squalor of a fraternity house. Everywhere he looked…potbellies, sagging paunches—an entire field of them, as far as the eye could see—an entire tableau of men whose abdominal walls had given way. Disgusting…certainly to any male who had attended Dupont for going on four years—Dupont, where buff and dense bodies had become a part of fashionable male dress, and flat, cut, ripped, cobblestone body-armor abs were Buff at its best. These innumerable disgusting guts befouling his line of sight hung from middle-aged and even mid-thirties men, scores of them, perhaps hundreds, apparently attending some sort of business conference, by the looks of the name cards pinned to their shirts. Their shirts were no small part of the problem. Obviously the invitations, or instructions, had gone out marked “Dress: Weekend Casual.” They were wearing short-sleeved sport shirts, polo shirts, V-neck cashmere sweaters with T-shirts showing in the V, the occasional huntin’-n’-fishin’ khaki twill shirt—without jackets—all guaranteed to reveal not only their ponderous guts but also their stooped shoulders, double chins, wattles, and etiolate arms. Did it bother them? Not for a moment, judging from the roaring surf of conversation, the cackles—such hearty old-folks cackling as you never heard!

Hoyt was floating in this pool of blissful superiority, a hard frat guy in a world full of blubber, when he felt a hand on his shoulder. Startled, he swung his head about—

Looking at him with a bemused expression from behind the chair was the hottie from Pierce & Pierce, Rachel. “Ohmygod—I frightened you.”

Her smile! Her smooth white flesh glowed. She looked even more lubricious than she did the other night—the same businesslike black suit and the black V-neck sweater—but it wasn’t a sweater, it was black silk—reached even deeper, revealing an expanse of bare white flesh—with the tiniest of gold chains circling her lovely neck, bearing only a single small pearl that whispered in its small pearly way, This tiny strand is all that stands between you and all my fair white flesh—if—if!—and it was no mere happenstance that her eyes were made up to suggest the mysteries of the night and that her hair was now so silken, shiny, and blown full—

Pop. Before he could say another word, she had come around the chair and extended her hand in a perfectly businesslike way. They shook hands.

Chester was not noted for its restaurants. In fact, the Inn’s main dining room, officially the Wyeth Room, was about as good as it got in Chester cuisine. The place was packed, and the maître d’ said there was no table for two available. Rachel of Pierce & Pierce produced a scalding hiss and said, “Then we’ll take a table for four or six…or eight…or twelve. I made this reservation…right here…in this very spot…twenty-three hours ago, and I want…our table.”

Her imperiousness worked magic. In no time the perfect table for two materialized…by a window looking out on the Inn’s terrace and garden, with swaths of flowers lit up even this late in the fall in exuberant blues, yellows, mauves, and magentas beneath the midday sun. Rachel was no more than twenty-four or twenty-five years old…and a woman…but she had exerted her will to power in a restaurant stuffy and stiff enough to intimidate any girl Hoyt knew at Dupont.

In the center of the restaurant the buildup of ricocheting voices was deafening, but here by the window they could hear each other and at the same time be sure that no one nearby could hear them.

“I wish I could show you the reports we have about you,” said Rachel, “but I can’t.” Big smile.

“Reports? How could—what reports?”

“Perhaps I shouldn’t tell you this in so many words, but you come very highly recommended.”

It was against his better judgment, but Hoyt couldn’t resist pulling his chin down into his neck and opening his eyes very wide and saying, “I do?”

“Unh—hunh.” The smile—the maroon lips—the eyes that said so much more than her voice! She looked away in order to fish two or three or four sheets of paper, stapled together, out of a leather portfolio. She put them on the table and scanned the first sheet.

“Let’s see…‘unusually mature for a student his age’…‘refuses to be intimidated’…‘decisive and quick-acting in critical moments’…‘character traits should more than compensate for lagging academic performance’…”

Not even trying to conceal his astonishment, Hoyt touched the middle of his chest with the fingertips of his right hand. “That’s me?”

“Yes, and the source carries a lot of weight with Pierce and Pierce.” She gave him a profound if indefinable look, waited a few beats, and said, “The governor of California.”

Alarm seemed to spread throughout the lining of Hoyt’s skull with a feverish heat. He desperately ransacked his meager knowledge of the wiles of politicians to figure out the origin of what he had just heard. A prank? A warning? A threat? The maroon-lipped woman before him didn’t actually work for Pierce & Pierce? She was some whore doing the bidding of the damnable governor? Many things churned in his brain far faster than it would take to catalog them, and none of them was good.

It seemed an eternity before he was able to summon the presence of mind even to say the limp and the predictable: “You’re joking. Like hell that’s the governor of California.”

“I assure you it is,” said Rachel. “Or it’s from someone on his staff speaking specifically for him.”

She held the top sheet close enough to Hoyt for him to read the letterhead. “The State of California.” And beneath that “Office of the Governor” and “Sacramento” and so on.

“He’s quite a fan of yours, the governor is.” Seeing Hoyt’s consternation, she said, “Hoyt! Don’t be so skeptical! This didn’t just come from out of the blue, you know. The state of California has 224 billion bonds outstanding—forgive the Wall Street–speak—I mean 224 billion dollars’ worth of bonds. They’re one of our most important clients. They’d be one of any body’s most important clients. So when we get a recommendation like this from the governor of California, we take it very seriously.” She gave Hoyt her warmest smile yet. “I wish you could see the look on your face. I don’t know how you could be that surprised. Obviously you know each other, or he’s seen you at work firsthand. I mean, this is a very detailed report.” She looked down at it again. “I mean…like here: ‘He also shows his maturity in the way he handles sensitive information. He doesn’t divulge the nature of complex or delicate situations simply to call favorable attention to himself.’”

She looked up again. “I mean, nobody in my office has ever heard of a student recommended this highly before, or not by anybody in a position like the governor’s. Not to be blunt about it, but coming from him—I probably shouldn’t tell you this, either—it’s more like an instruction than a recommendation.”

Hoyt studied her face again, this time as much perplexed as aroused. “Be straight with me, Rachel—is this some kind of a joke?”

Rachel gave him another of her sophisticated smiles, and practically convulsed with suppressed chuckles. “One of the original Pierce brothers—Pierce and Pierce?—Ellis Pierce—used the word ‘loser’ in a sentence, and somebody asked him what he meant by loser, and he said, ‘A loser’s just like everybody else, except that he won’t shake hands with good luck.’ Or so it says in their biography, the one by Martin Myers? You know the book?”

Hoyt shook his head no.

“It’s called Fierce and Fierce,” said Rachel. “Cute…Stop staring at me like that! We’re talking about a job that pays ninety-five thousand to start. I don’t think that’s bad, to start.”

“Doing what?” said Hoyt as disinterestedly as he could manage, seeking to regain his much-vaunted cool.

She explained that there was an eight-week training program, after which one was assigned to sales, analysis, a trading desk, or whatever.

“All right,” said Hoyt. “Let me ask you something else I’d like a straight answer on. Aside from the fact that he considers me an awesome guy, why is the governor of California going to all this trouble for me? Or is this just some generous streak he’s got?” He searched her face for any hint of knowledge she wasn’t owning up to.

Completely deadpan: “I don’t know. It seems self-evident to me. I assumed you’d know the context and everything.”

Hoyt gave her a slanted, ironic smile, calculated to make her smile in complicity if she, too, was aware that this had to be a bribe. But she didn’t smile. She seemed genuinely puzzled by his expression. Then he surveyed her lips, the little ever-so-fragile gold chain with the tiny pearl, the only thing standing between him and…and…and this time such things didn’t resonate with his loins at all. It was the rational poker player in him that was inflamed now. No more irony…He sat there staring at her and nodding ever so slightly, but over and over and ever so sagaciously…Pierce & Pierce and $95,000 a year to start…He kept on nodding, ever so significantly, expressionless, in a gambler’s way.

Wait’ll he tells Vance about this! Unfuckingbelievable.

Rachel set her glistening dark lips in their most concupiscent smile yet. “I’m waiting, Hoyt. Are you going to shake hands with Fortune or not? She’s a much-maligned lady. That’s from Evelyn Waugh.”

Hoyt extended his hand, and Rachel took it. They looked into each other’s eyes, and Hoyt gave her hand a certain squeeze, but the hand he held was all business. The hand didn’t give him its room number, much less its key. All it said was, “It’s a deal, big boy.”

On the way up in the elevator, Adam said to himself—out loud, “Whoa-oh-oh…pull yourself together”…Not even Buster Roth was so brutish, he’d dare have somebody do something physical…but there were other ways of eliminating him, weren’t there? Somehow—they’d blame the whole thing on him. He wrote the paper for Jojo and pressured him into handing it in…Maybe they were going to tape what he said to Buster Roth…Why hadn’t he brought someone along…like Camille…She’d happily tell Buster Roth to stick his head up his descending colon until his shoulders disappeared. Camille! The very thought gave him a few volts of courage.

Before he knew it, the elevator door had opened and he was in Buster Roth’s lair…He was conscious of four or five men sitting on the leather and stainless-steel furniture…not students. Who were they?

He approached a fence made of panels of glass…seemed like a reception area…Four lean, sleek veal-gray workstations in a row and, at each, a lean, sleek young woman perched on a lean, ergonomic word processor’s chair. Adam could hardly believe it. They were gorgeous. As opposed to all the plastic veal in the place, they were definitely flesh and blood. Two of them, one with long dark hair parted down the middle, the other with long light brown hair parted down the middle, happened to swivel about, to get up. Adam felt inadequate to even approach these girls. They weren’t much older than he was, if at all, but they seemed to be from another order of human, in which everyone was glamorous and sex-savvy.

He caught the eye of the one with dark hair. Adam could barely croak out his appointment with “Coach Roth.” The girl turned to another young woman, whom she called Celeste, seated at a workstation, and Celeste turned to her computer and then to Adam, gave him a polite smile, assured him that Coach Roth would see him shortly, and gestured toward all the postmodern leather and stainless steel. Polite smiles they gave him, that and nothing more. They had written him off after the first glance. Each had sized him up as someone incapable of flirting…precisely because he had never even…gotten laid. They could tell! It showed! And the older he got, the harder it was going to be to do it, to admit he’d never done it before or demonstrate the same thing through his ignorance of technique and clumsy attempts at learning.

So he sank into a couch, and the rich tannery smell of the leather rose and befuddled him. He knew he should be concentrating on what he was going to say to Buster Roth, but the same vision kept dissolving his powers of logic: Charlotte, running on the treadmill, her face free of makeup or even thoughts of artifice—innocence in the flesh—and the dark line, the juice of her own body, down the cleft in her buttocks.

This strange state, with lust wafting through logic, lasted a long time, for Coach Roth did not see him shortly.

At last, “Mr. Gellin?” It was the same girl. She led him down a narrow arched passageway. He emerged into a room as bright as day. A big, middle-aged man wearing a polo shirt rocked back in a swivel chair behind an enormous postmodern desk—rich wood—walnut?—pointlessly curvy as on Philadelphia channel news shows. Buster Roth.

As Adam entered, Roth didn’t get up. In fact, he rocked back still farther in his chair. He eyed Adam for a moment with a slightly sly smile before he said, “Adam?”

Adam heard himself saying, “Yes, sir.”

Roth gestured toward an armchair near the desk. As Adam approached, Roth squinted his eyes at him and turned one side of his lips up in a smile that wasn’t so much a greeting, as Adam saw it, as a conclusion: I know your kind.

Adam sat down, and Roth, still rocked way back in his desk chair, said, “How long you been with us, Adam?”

“You mean tutoring?” said Adam.

Roth nodded yes.

“Two years, sir.” Why was he adding all these sirs? But he knew why. It was fear. He also knew viscerally that Roth was one of that breed of men who was totally unlike himself, the kind who welcomes a fight over anything whatsoever, the better to demonstrate his dominant nature, the kind who, in fact, couldn’t wait to show you how much he liked to tangle, the kind who, as a boy, dared you to take him on and then made sure you caved in immediately, perhaps by bullying but more often subtly, through “good-natured” roughhousing in which you always wound up as the “mock” victim and through a condescending obliviousness when you went out of your way to flatter him or curry favor. Adam, like so many others, had grown up knowing that the male sex was divided into these two types, those who seek to impress by their willingness to fight and who abide no insinuations that they might not have it—and those who, like himself, know from age six on that they don’t have it and who seek to avoid all situations where the distinction might be made. He would live out his life knowing which breed he was. He would be aware of it every day until the day he died. His shame would be profound, so profound that he would never mention it to a living soul, not even the intimate soul to whom he had divulged…everything…

“Two years…” Buster Roth was saying. He began nodding, as if ruminating over this interesting piece of information. “Well, I’m sure in two years you’ve gotten to know a lot more about sports and athletes than most students.”

Adam couldn’t figure out what the right answer to that might be. One answer might indicate that he knew more about it than was good for him. Another answer might indicate that he had a negative attitude.

Finally Adam said, “I can’t really tell, sir. I don’t know how much other students know. Other students certainly talk about the sports program a lot. I know that.”

“Well, you’re talking about fans now, Adam. I’m talking about—but by the way, since we’re on the subject, would you call yourself a fan?”

Adam didn’t know the right answer to that, either. “Yes” seemed like the better part of wisdom, but his pride wouldn’t let him say that, not even in front of an audience of one—one who had committed his entire life to sports. So he said, “Sort of, I guess, but I guess not in the way”—he wanted to say not in the way you mean, but that didn’t sound tactful enough—“not in the way most fans are fans.”

“Sort of but not in the way most fans are fans…” said Buster Roth with an unnatural drawl. Irony? “What would you say yours is?”

“Well, I’m like interested in sports…as sports, I guess you’d say. I mean I think it’s really interesting that millions of people become completely absorbed in sports, emotionally involved.”

The tactician in Adam—which is to say, his powers of logic—told him to drop the subject and act dumb or ask Coach Roth some humble question that would flatter the man’s sense of mastery of the world of sports. Neutralize yourself! Make him the subject! Why didn’t you just say, “Oh, yes, I’m a fan…” But the intellectual exhibitionist in him brushed the tactician aside, and he said, “Well, I guess I mean I’m interested in what makes fans fans.”

He wanted to say, “Why on earth do Dupont University students with average SATs of fourteen-ninety get excited, scream their hearts out over ‘their’ basketball team—which is made up of a bunch of hired mercenaries who probably wouldn’t average nine hundred without the swimmies—who live a life completely apart from the real students, who feel infinitely superior to them, who eat better food in a better dining room, who have tutors to do their schoolwork for them, who say you ain’t, he don’t, and nome saying?, who look upon friendly student fans as either sluts or suck-ups—why are they fans of such people?” But not even the egoist in Adam could push him that far, so he settled for, “I keep wondering why people in Boston, where I’m from, get so excited over the Red Sox. I mean, there’s not anybody on the team who’s from anywhere near Boston. They don’t set foot in Boston, most of them, except to go to Fenway Park. But that doesn’t matter. Red Sox fans are the most loyal fans in the world.”

He sensed that he was already getting too wound up. This was not the time, if ever, to try out the theory of championism on Buster Roth. “I mean, that’s the sort of thing that interests—that I’d like to figure out, I guess.”

“I see,” said Buster Roth with a tuned-out expression on his face. “What about the athletes themselves? You’ve gotten to know some of the athletes pretty well by now, I’d imagine.”

Adam hesitated. “I don’t know. I guess there are all kinds.”

Buster Roth smiled, which Adam took to be a good sign.

“Well, let’s talk about our mutual friend, Jojo. Jojo’s got a serious issue on his hands here. Whattaya think he ought to do?”

Adam had never thought of it from that point of view. It confused him. “Well…I don’t know…”

“If I were you, Adam, I’d give it some thought. If Jojo is penalized over…whatever has happened…you could run the risk of the same penalty.”

The idea stunned Adam. His brain churned, finally settling on a single consideration. If that was true, if any such thing happened, he could say good-bye to the Rhodes scholarship, to any and all scholarships, to any and all consulting jobs, and to the pretension of being a Millennial Mutant.

He croaked out, “I don’t understand.”

“Let’s suppose,” said Buster Roth, “that you wrote the entire paper for Jojo, and all he did was hand it in. I’m just saying what if.” He paused and squinted at Adam. “I’m not saying that’s what happened. Jojo doesn’t say that’s what happened. But if the panel decided that’s what happened, then Jojo would be suspended for the next semester, which happens to be the basketball season. And so would you.”

Adam felt an adrenal flash flood. “The panel?”

“Oh yes. If things got pushed far enough, there would be a panel of four students and two faculty members, and there would be what amounts to a trial, and if the panel found Jojo guilty of any such thing, then anybody who knowingly aided and abetted him would be considered just as guilty.”

Adam didn’t know what to say. He had the terrifying feeling that the brute behind the desk—with his arms as big as Adam’s thigh, with his look of domination over…the other breed—was ready to swat him like a fly. “I—” He didn’t know how to word what he wanted to say. “But—the Athletic Department hires the tutors and makes it clear that we’re supposed to give the athletes all the help they need. That’s what we’re told—all the help they need.”

“Oh? Did anyone in the athletic department ever tell you to write an entire paper for an athlete and all he had to do was hand it in? If so, I want to know that individual’s name. Not that I’m saying that’s what happened. All I’m saying is that’s what Jojo’s teacher thinks. The actual truth could be something else entirely. Only you and Jojo know.”

Adam could feel his pulse galloping in the carotid artery in his neck. The next question would be, “So what did happen?” and he hadn’t a clue as to how to answer it. He waffled as best he could: “It’s hard to give like a…yes-no—”

Buster Roth held up his right palm in the halt mode. “I’m not asking you to go through the whole thing right now. What I want you to do is take a day or two and try to remember everything you can about what happened…or didn’t happen. You understand what I’m saying? Make sure you haven’t forgotten anything.”

Adam’s mind was spinning. He immediately feared the worst. He was being set up—although exactly how, he couldn’t imagine. He was being tested—but for what? Loyalty? Coolness at conniving? He was being made to look as if he were lying—by accepting the suggestion that he take a few days to “remember.” He was being toyed with—because the warrior breed, eating spareribs, bones and all, loved to torment the other breed. On the other hand, suppose he just blurted it all out, as he could right now, without forgetting one speck of detail—could it be that Buster Roth was offering him a way out by “remembering” what happened…in a certain way…

And then he couldn’t resist: “What does Jojo say happened?”

As soon as he asked, his heart fell. A question like that—he was as much as admitting his willingness to cook up some kind of story in order to wriggle out of the jam he was in.

Buster Roth looked him in the eye and said in a level, almost monotonous voice, “Jojo says he wrote it himself. At the last minute he realized there was some important material he needed, so he called you up and you showed him the books where he might be able to find it. So he used those books, and by now it was the last minute and he’d run out of time, and he didn’t know exactly what all the terms meant, but he used them anyway. That’s what Jojo says happened.”

Buster Roth stopped talking but continued to look Adam right in the eye. The atmosphere was now humid with the matter of whether Adam remembered it that way or not. But Roth never asked.

Adam wouldn’t have known what to say if he had.

As soon as Vance came into the library, Hoyt jumped up and steered him into the billiard room. “You wanna hear something incredible, Vance-man?” With great gusto, he told him about Rachel and Pierce & Pierce.

“Shit, Hoyt,” said Vance, “that’s fucking awesome!” He looked toward the doorway. There was I.P., saying, “Anybody got—”

“Nobody got,” said Hoyt. “Saint Rays only fuck around for real.”