I Am Charlotte Simmons

5. You the Man

The next night, before dinner, Vance, an ultra-solemn look on his face, beckoned Hoyt into the otherwise empty billiard room, crossed his arms over his chest, and said, “Hoyt, we’ve got to have a serious talk about this shit.”

“What shit is that, Vance?”

“You know ‘what shit.’ This governor of California shit. You think the fucking thing’s funny. I don’t. And you want to know why?”

I already know why, Vancerman, thought Hoyt. You’re scared shitless, that’s all. As he stood there waiting for Vance’s lips to stop moving, his mind wandered…

…those who cower and those who command…Europe in the Early Middle Ages, taught by a wizened old Jew named Crone, as Hoyt thought of him, whose droning voice would put you right under but who was a notoriously, or gloriously, easy grader. To Hoyt’s own surprise, the course had captured his imagination. He had experienced the sort of moment that real scholars, as opposed to Saint Rays, lived for: the Aha! phenomenon. In the early Middle Ages, according to old Crone, there were only three classes of men in the world: warriors, clergy, and slaves. That was it—China, Arabia, Morocco, England, everywhere. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a leader of the people was, or had been, a warrior, baptized in battle. In the hundredth case, the man was the high priest of the local religion. Mohammed had been both warrior and high priest. Likewise Joan of Arc. Everybody else on earth was some sort of slave: serf, indentured servant, or outright chattel, including artists, poets, and musicians, who were merely entertainers existing at the sufferance of warrior-leaders. In the Bible, according to Crone, King David had started out as a boy of the slave class who had volunteered to fight the Philistines’ champion of “single combat”—Goliath. When, against all odds, David defeated the giant, he became Israel’s warrior of all warriors. He ascended to King Saul’s royal household and became king when Saul died, leapfrogging over Saul’s own son, Jonathan.

Hoyt loved that story, the Nobody who was King. His own ambitions were analogous. His father, George Thorpe, was—

“—hire a bunch of goombahs to intimidate witnesses—”

Goombahs. Every now and then some phrase from Vance’s earnest, frightened lips would snag in Hoyt’s mind.

“What’s a goombah?” he said, not because he wanted to know, but just to make Vance think he was paying attention.

“An Italian thug,” said Vance. “And these guys…”

Goombahs. Oh, give me one fucking break, Vancerman, thought Hoyt. My dad would have eaten your goombahs for breakfast. As Hoyt remembered him, his dad, George Thorpe, was handsome and a half, with a thick stand of dark hair, a strong, square jaw, and a cleft chin. His old man loved it when people said he looked “just like Cary Grant.” He spoke through his nose with a New York Honk accent that intimated a boarding school background. He made oblique references, stuck inside relative clauses, to his days at Princeton, and his dad’s before him, too, not to mention his stint with the Special Forces in Vietnam, where he had seen, literally seen, swarms of AK-47 bullets coming straight at him at five times the speed of sound. They looked like green bees. But since he had been a member of the elite of the elite, Delta Force, he couldn’t really go into details. Strictly speaking, he shouldn’t even have told his family he was in Delta Force. It was that elite. On the strength of these New York Honked-out credentials, he managed to gain membership in the Brook Club. There was no more socially solid club in New York. With the Brook escutcheon on his shield, he gained entry to four more swell clubs of the Old New York sort. Thus established, he recruited club brethren into three esoteric hedge funds he had set up based on a strategy of selling corporate bonds short. This was during the Wall Street bond boom of the 1980s. In the late eighties, he changed his legal name from George B. Thorpe to Armistead G. Thorpe. Even at age eight Hoyt found that strange, but both his dad and his mother explained that Armistead was his dad’s mother’s—his grandmother’s—maiden name and he had loved her profoundly, and Hoyt swallowed it.

Hoyt’s mother, the former Peggy Springs, a pretty, brunette, washed-out, submissive lab rabbit of a woman, was a certified public accountant with a master’s degree in economics from her alma mater, the University of Southern Illinois. She cooked George B. Thorpe’s books for him and Armistead G. Thorpe’s, too, backed up his stories even when they became so tall they collapsed of their own lack of foundation, and was willing to keep her timid Peggy Rabbit self at home, at his suggestion, when he went trolling for investors over lunches and dinners at his clubs.

Hoyt always hung on to the assumption that his father’s intentions had been on the up and up. But not even a son could fail to see that toward the end his father had been setting up the new hedge funds for no purpose other than to get cash with which to assuage the investors in the old ones who were getting cranky and threatening to sue. He had even convinced a bank teller—a twenty-four-year-old Estonian girl who had grown up on an island in Maine called Vinalhaven, a lissome little blonde he liked to flirt with when he was at the bank—to invest all her savings, a $20,000 Treasury bond her parents, a night watchman and a nurse’s aide, had given her on her twenty-first birthday, in a hedge fund based on selling futures on bond sales short. It was complicated stuff but absolute dynamite…She should think of it as a “hedge against a hedge with a multiplier or ‘whip’ effect”…Bango! He told Peggy to print up the necessary letterhead stationery, contract, and prospectus using computer fonts, tout de suite, and open a commercial bank account to receive her check. This was one of but many last desperate contortions before all of his funds crashed in a pile.

Hoyt and his parents were living at the time in a house built originally by the old cowboy movie star Bill Hart in the Belle Haven section of Greenwich, Connecticut, close to Long Island Sound. George Thorpe now found it advisable to disappear for “a while,” until things smoothed over. Ever mindful of the potential wrath of his creditors and investors, he had long since put the house in passive Peggy’s name. Now he wanted the title back—fast. For the first time Hoyt’s mother allowed her brain to take over from her faint heart. She stalled and stalled and stalled. She knew her husband’s “things” inside out, and there was no way they were going to smooth over this time. One Thursday morning, he mentioned, in the Oh-I-didn’t-tell-you? mode, a weekend real estate conference he was going to on Sea Island, Georgia. That afternoon he packed two garment bags and headed off to La Guardia Airport. They never saw him again. The bankers, insurance companies, and investors descended on Peggy. She gave them nothing but an innocent, clueless face and managed to hang on to the house. She got a job in the accounting department at Stanley Tool in nearby Stamford and was able to bring home just enough honest dollars to pay the mortgage installments. But Hoyt’s days at the pricey Greenwich Country Day School were over.

In the course of settling George’s affairs, Peggy called the Princeton alumni office for some amplification of his record there, but they couldn’t find his name, or that of his father, Linus Thorpe. Similarly, the army drew a blank on Captain George Thorpe. Peggy found a cache of aging, intimate letters from women—addressed to George Thornton, George Thurlow, and George Thorsten.

In short, she never found a single documented record of her husband’s background—or of his existence on this earth, come to think of it. Hoyt, being only sixteen, explained all doubts away. To him the old man remained—he had to remain—a tough, aggressive military hero. It all had to do with Delta Force being a secret unit of the Special Forces. They probably had to destroy records.

When Hoyt had moved from the lower school to the middle school at Greenwich Country Day, he was a short, slight boy, and two outsize bullies in the class above him picked him out for special torment. Their favorite torture was to lock him up in a janitor’s broom closet in a seldom-used hallway and leave it up to him to shout and bang on the door until he got somebody’s attention. He had missed entire classes that way, to the detriment of his academic standing. Naturally, there was no way he could explain to the teachers what had happened, because there was nothing—nothing—worse than a boy being a snitch. After three weeks of the ordeal, he finally told his mother about it, first making her swear not to tell his father, which of course was the first thing Peggy did. His father gave Hoyt his grimmest Vietnam search-and-destroy look and said he was going to the school tomorrow and lift the headmaster up by his shirtfront, if necessary, and tell him that this bullshit will cease. “Bullshit” was the word, since George regarded sharing vulgarities, father and son, as a part of helping the son grow up as a man’s man.

Oh God, no! Tell the headmaster? There was something worse than being a snitch; it was having Mommy or Daddy being a snitch for you.

In that case, said the old man, you’ve got to make a choice. Hoyt could either give one or both of the bullies a good pop on the nose—Dad demonstrated by administering an imaginary clout, not with his fist but his forearm (which Hoyt assumed must be the Delta commando way)—or he, the old man, would head straight for the headmaster. But such a pop on the nose was impossible! They were bigger than he was! They’d destroy him! Not so, said his father. One good pop on the nose, especially if it drew blood, and they would never bother him again; and neither would anybody else at that school. Not only that, but from then on, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, you’ll be able to dominate every confrontation with nothing more than an intimidating stare and a couple of give-a-shit words. “Give-a-shit” he shared, too.

But—but—there was no way it could work out like that!

His father shrugged and said okay then, you’ve got a big problem. You’re gonna have one totally pissed-off—“pissed-off”—parent storming into that school and raising holy hell.

That did it. The next morning, one of the bullies approached Hoyt and began taunting him. Hoyt croaked out his usual nervous response—and then, with no preamble whatsoever, lunged at the astonished kid and gave him a good whack on the beak with his forearm. Blood gushed out all over the place. Everything his father predicted had ensued. This was one sixth-grader nobody was going to mess with. Furthermore, never again did he run into a situation he couldn’t handle with an unblinking stare and a few superior give-a-shit comments.

But that was sweet little Greenwich Country Day. Now he had to go to a public school, Greenwich High. Greenwich High had a not-bad academic reputation, as public schools went, but it drew a certain element…The third day Hoyt was there, a group of four Hispanic-looking guys blocked his way in the hall between classes. The group’s spokesman had a week’s worth of stubble on his face and a tight T-shirt with sleeves so negligible you could see the tubelike pumping-iron veins on his biceps as well as his forearms. He wanted to know Hoyt’s name.

“Hoyt, hunh? That suppose a be a name—or wot? A fart?”

The thought of going through all the preliminaries, all the stupid words, all the moronic sneers, all the ritual challenges, depressed Hoyt tremendously. So without a word or the slightest change in expression, he smashed the guy in the nose with his forearm. Something cracked, and blood poured out of his nose like Niagara Falls. The bigmouth, the group wit, fell back with half a whimper and half a cry and brought both hands tenderly to his hemorrhaging nose as if it were his child. Blood poured through the crevices between his fingers and down his arms. The other three piled on Hoyt and would have probably given him a pretty good drubbing except that a couple of teachers happened along and broke up the melee. The four tough guys vowed several types of crippling foggin’ revenge upon the white mottafogga, but in fact that was the end of it, and Hoyt spent four years at Greenwich High as one white mottafogga you didn’t mess with.

After that, he was regarded as cool by all factions. As he began to fill out and his cleft chin took on manly contours, he was regarded as hot by all the girls. He was fourteen when he first scored, as the expression went. It was one night on the couch in the den in the girl’s own house, while her parents were directly overhead in their bedroom. The girl didn’t go to Greenwich High, however, but to Greenwich Country Day. Without consciously planning it, Hoyt kept himself insinuated into the student social circles of Greenwich Country Day. He dressed in the marginally preppier, neater Greenwich Country Day boys’ clothes, and he wore his thatchy hair in their longish, but not truly rebellious, style. That only made him hotter in the eyes of girls at Greenwich High—“hot” being the comparative degree of “cool” in teenage grammar. Hoyt didn’t altogether neglect the Greenwich High girls by any means. In fact, it was they who, in short order, got him through the usual teenage male sexual trials, such as premature ejaculation and “how to do it.”

Thanks to his comparatively rigorous preparation at Greenwich Country Day, Hoyt was a good year ahead of most of his classmates at Greenwich High. He was diligent about maintaining that advantage, not because of any true interest in academic excellence, but rather because good grades were a sign that you were part of the better element. At the beginning of his junior year at Greenwich High, his Greenwich Country Day friends began to talk about how good grades alone weren’t enough to get you into the top colleges. You needed a “hook,” sometimes called a “spike,” some area of remarkable achievement outside the academic curriculum, whether it be athletics, the oboe, summer internships at a biotech lab—something. Hoyt had nothing. He thought and thought. One night on television he saw a brief segment about a charity in New York City called City Harvest, which sent trucks with refrigeration units around to restaurant kitchens at night and collected unused food that would have otherwise been discarded and brought it to soup kitchens for the homeless. A lightbulb went on over Hoyt’s head. He talked a nerdy classmate who had access to his parents’ Chrysler Pacifica minivan into joining him in a venture called the Greenwich Protein Patrol. Thus read the professional-looking posters taped to the front doors of the minivan. Hoyt had prevailed upon the new blond twenty-three-year-old art teacher, who was a real number—she obviously had a thing for Hoyt but restrained herself—to do the graphics, which included two white sweatshirts with THE GREENWICH PROTEIN PATROL appliquéd in dark green. In fact, the Protein Patrol gathered no protein—only carbohydrates in the form of leftover bread at two bakeries—since they had no refrigeration for meat, leafy greens, or other protein-heavy food. This the two eleemosynary youths dropped off at the First Presbyterian Church, which had a soup line for the homeless. Hoyt laid eyes on the ultimate recipients of his generosity only once. That was when an idea-starved feature writer for the Greenwich Times named Clara Klein heard about the Patrol from the church’s Reverend Mr. Burrus and wrote a story about it, accompanied by a three-column photo of Hoyt in his white sweatshirt with his arm around a little old soup-line regular who provided a striking contrast. There was Hoyt, the knight in white; and there was the poor little man, all in dark tones of brown and gray: dirty gray hair, sickly grayish brown skin, the turd-brown thirty-nine-gallon vinyl garbage bag he had converted into a poncho, the blue jeans that by now had turned soot gray, as had his Lugz sneakers, lurid stripes and all.

Attached to Hoyt’s Dupont application, the photo was dynamite as far as the admissions office was concerned. Here was a good-looking young man who was not only sympathetic to the downtrodden but also imaginative and enterprising. He had created and organized a mobile food-collecting service, complete with uniforms, to provide the needy with nutritious food from the best restaurants in a wealthy town, an implication that Hoyt let stand. It didn’t hurt that he himself was from a broken home and his mother had been reduced to drudgery at a place called Stanley Tool. These days such things were a definite plus at college admissions offices.

Hoyt had to emphasize his “deserving poor” credentials in order to get a partial scholarship, which was essential. Putting himself in this light galled him, however, and he had never revealed it to a soul at Dupont. If anybody asked, he said he had gone to a “day school” in Greenwich. Anybody who knew anything about Greenwich took this to be an unpretentious way of referring to Greenwich Country Day—even people who didn’t assumed that “day school” referred to a private school. He said that his parents were divorced and his dad was an investment banker who operated internationally (the fleeced little Estonian morsel at the bank). Stanley Tool and its accounting department he took care not to mention.

It never occurred to Hoyt that here was another tendency he shared with his father: blithely covering up his past and manufacturing a pedigree. In short, he was a second-generation snob. He looked so great, had such confidence, projected such an aura, had cultivated such a New York Honk, it never occurred to anyone to question his autobiography. He had no trouble getting into what everybody knew was the most socially upscale fraternity at Dupont, Saint Ray—far from it. Four fraternities had vied for him. None was quite what Saint Ray was, however. Saint Ray was the natural home of the ideal-typical socially superior student, who would be someone like Vance, whose father, Sterling Phipps, a golf nut, had retired at fifty after running a wildly successful hedge fund called Short Iron and had villas in Cap Ferrat and Carmel, California (on the beach), Southampton, New York (with memberships at both the Shinnecock and National Links golf clubs), as well as a twenty-room apartment at 820 Fifth Avenue in New York, which Vance called home. One of Vance’s uncles had put up most of the money for the Phipps Opera House. That the Vance Phippses of Dupont looked up to him and were in awe of his aristocratic daring meant the world to Hoyt. As he looked at Vance’s anxious face here in the billiard room, Hoyt’s blood alcohol level was not far from perfection. He became more convinced than ever that his role in life was to be a knight riding through throngs of students trapped by their own slave mentality—but that made him think of next June. The Knight was going to need a job at an i-bank…It was the only way…but his fucking grades! Stop thinking about it! Don’t get a long face in front of Vance—

“—here looking for us!” Vance was saying, his voice rising an uncool octave or so.

“Vance,” said Hoyt, “we’re not gonna wait and see if the governor comes here looking for us. We’re gonna invite him here.”

“Gonna what?” said Vance. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Hoyt loved the fear on Vance’s face. He, Hoyt, didn’t really know what he was talking about, either. But the general idea felt right.

He couldn’t resist shaking Vance up a little more. “If we can get him here, we can make that fucker fucking sit up on his hindquarters and beg.”

For a moment Vance said nothing. Then he said, “Hoyt, if you—has anybody ever been honest with you and told you you’re insane?”

Hoyt couldn’t hold back a laugh and a big grin. He loved it…an even bigger legend in his own time…It only remained to figure out how to get the governor of California to the campus on Chevalier Hoyt’s terms…He knew of one thing that turned the governor of California to a quivering gob of jelly…

Vance was saying, “You think that’s cool, don’t you, somebody saying you’re crazy. You think it’s a compliment.” He couldn’t believe the dreamy look that had stolen across Hoyt’s face. “Well, it’s not. You’re not crazy cool, Hoyt, you’re just crazy.”

Hoyt couldn’t suppress another laugh. “Hey, this is your chance, dude! Stick with me and you’ll be a real legend in your own time.”

“Me? I don’t think so. I’ve had enough legend. Legend gives me mud-butt, if you want to know the truth.”

“Aw, come on. You’re money, baby, and you don’t even know it. Let me grab a beer, and I’ll tell you how we do it.”

As Jojo entered the study hall, Charles Bousquet and Vernon Congers were just in front of him, and he could hear Charles dogging the big freshman, as he often did, because Congers was (a) a rookie and (b) such an easy mark.

“Aw, mannn,” Charles was saying, “I can’t believe you just said that, Vernon. What’s the matter witchoo? You want people going around thinking you got room to rent upstairs?”

Congers just stared darkly. He always had trouble processing Charles’s gibes and was apparently puzzling over “room to rent upstairs.”

“Okay, here’s an easy one,” said Charles. “What state are we in?”

“What state?”

“Yeah, what state. The United States of America is made up of fifty states, and we’re in one of them right now. Which one, Vernon?”

Congers paused, perhaps wondering if this might be a trick question. Frowning: “Pennsylvania.”

“Right,” said his tormentor. “Okay, what’s the capital of Pennsylvania?”

Now Congers was obviously stumped, and at the same time, he didn’t have the wit to deflect this entire demeaning quiz. Testy hesitation. Then: “Philadelphia.”

“Godalmighty, Vernon! Phil a del phia? The capital of Pennsylvania’s a town called Harrisburg. H, a, r, r, i, s, b, u, r, g. It’s about 150 miles west of here. Harris-burg.”

By now Curtis, Alan, and Treyshawn had started listening in, and Curtis let out a low chuckle.

Congers said, “Who gives a good fuck.”

“Come on, Vernon,” said the inquisitor, “you gotta know these things. You’re a high-profile guy now. Think about the fucking press. What if the press starts asking you questions? This ain’t no And 1 camp, baby, this is the big-time hoops!”

Muffled, reined in, but clearly audible laughs this time. Congers’s eyes were narrowing with anger.

Charles wouldn’t let up. “You gotta know some geography, man! Go get a map or look at a globe or watch the History Channel or something. Whatta you tell yo’ mama when she ax you where you at?”

Open laughter. Congers was now plainly furious. He glowered at Charles and then at the whole bunch of them.

“Fuck you,” he said, and stormed off into the room, a small classroom in Fiske used for the basketball team’s compulsory two hours of study every night after dinner.

Unrestrained eruptions of laughter. Jojo drew in his breath. He was glad he had been behind Congers’s line of vision. The schadenfreude side of him enjoyed seeing his young rival ridiculed, but Charles had gone too far. He had started dogging the kid in a ghetto accent, which even Congers could tell was sheer mockery. Worst of all, Charles had brought in the subject of Congers’s mother. It was only a joke, and he hadn’t said anything bad about her, although come to think of it, he had sort of insinuated that she couldn’t figure out where her own son was. Jojo was close enough to the black players to know that the subject of their mothers was touchy stuff, especially in the case of somebody like Congers. He didn’t know a whole lot about Congers, but he did know that he was a fairly typical case of a boy whose mother had raised him entirely on her own, ghetto-style, in a town outside of New York City called Hempstead, if he remembered correctly. Charles, on the other hand, had grown up in a reasonably affluent suburb of Washington, D.C., and had a father who was chief of some sort of security operation at the State Department and a mother who taught English in the local school system.

Congers took a seat in a desk chair near the back, and—whap—slapped a loose-leaf binder on the surface of the chair’s desk arm, as if terminating a fly. Boyish face and all, he was a lot bigger and stronger than Charles. He was six-nine, maybe 240 pounds, jacked, ripped, and thick. Charles was six-six and well built, thanks to Mad Dog the strength coach, but he was slender, with a fine-boned face, and was close to forty pounds lighter than Congers. Jojo took note of the dimensions because Congers was so furious, he wondered if it just might come to that…

The study hall started off as usual—which is to say, unless you were deaf or had the concentration powers of a Charles Bousquet, you might as well forget about studying. The usual suspects were making fart noises, cracking jokes in stage whispers, frogging each other, launching sneak attacks using Blue Shark candy drops as missiles, or otherwise horsing around. An assistant coach, Brian Glaziano, sat in a chair near the podium, facing these student athletes, supposedly to make sure they kept their noses in the books, but he was young, white, and a hoops nonentity compared to the elite players he was assigned to preside over.

Jojo had a loose-leaf binder and a couple of textbooks with him. He sat at his desk riffling through an auto accessories catalog, daydreaming about cool ways in which he might tart up his Chrysler Annihilator. He happened to be sitting one row behind Congers and ten or twelve feet off to the side. Hearing Congers unsnap the rings on his loose-leaf binder, Jojo glanced over idly. He found himself witnessing a strange thing. Congers took a sheet of paper out of the binder—ordinary lined school paper—and stuffed it into his mouth. Then he started chewing. Must have tasted like hell, all that acid or whatever it was they put in cheap paper. Then he took out another one and started chewing that one, too…and then a third one…chewing and chewing but not swallowing. By now his cheeks were ballooned out like one of those frogs or whatever they were on those learning videos they used to make you watch in elementary school. His eyes were angry slits. The next thing Jojo knew, Congers was forcing a prodigious wad of gray mush out of his mouth and into his cupped hands. He began shaping it into a sphere, the way you’d make a snowball. Saliva and a mushy gook began oozing out between his fingers and dripping onto his lap. Then he stood up, all six feet nine of him, holding the huge mushball aloft, and he hurled it with all his might—splat—against the back of a shaved brown head three rows ahead of him. Charles, of course. Until that moment, since the back of one shaved brown head looked much like another, Jojo hadn’t even noticed that Charles was sitting there.

Charles did nothing at first except raise his nose from his books and look straight ahead. Then, deliberately, coolly, in the Charles Bousquet fashion, still without turning around, he reached back and scraped the mush off the base of his skull with his hand and inspected it. Then he felt the neck of his T-shirt where the slimy pulp had soaked it. Only then did he twist about and look back.

The first person he saw was Jojo, who, transfixed, was looking him right in the face. Charles eyed him for an instant and then, apparently concluding that Jojo was a highly unlikely suspect, lasered in on Congers, who now had his head way down, practically buried in his loose-leaf binder, scribbling away with a ballpoint as if he were taking notes.

In a deep voice Charles yelled out, “Yo!”

Naturally, everybody in the room craned about to see what was going on, everybody except Congers, who still had his head down and his ballpoint squiggling like mad.

“Yo!” Charles yelled again. “Yeah, I mean you, ni—you moronic motherfuckin’ shitfa brains!”

Charles had started to say “nigger,” but he checked himself because Jojo and Mike were right there. The black players never uttered the n-word, not even in jest, if he, Mike, Coach, a swimmie, or any other white person was within earshot.

Congers had no choice now. There was no way he could pretend he hadn’t noticed. He stood up, shoving his chair over backward with a thwack, and took a deep breath. His tight T-shirt was more like a film than a fabric, and his mighty pecs, delts, traps, lats seemed to pump up before your very eyes. Seething, he stared at Charles and said in a strained, constricted, strangely high-pitched voice, “Who the fuck you think—” He broke off the sentence and then said, “Motherfucker.”

Whereupon he stepped out into the aisle and began walking slowly toward Charles. No professional wrestler ever looked bigger or meaner. Charles stood up and stepped out into the aisle, too. He faced Congers, took a spread-legged stance, folded his arms across his chest, cocked his head, and put his tongue in his cheek. Congers was now barely four feet from Charles. For a moment that seemed interminable to Jojo, the two of them confronted each other stock-still in a stare-down.

Then Congers pointed his forefinger at Charles, one, two, three times, not uttering a sound, before saying in the same strained, constricted voice, “Open your mouth one more time, motherfucker, and—” Once more, he didn’t finish the sentence.

“And what, Shitfa Brains?” said Charles. He sounded gloriously bored. He didn’t move a muscle. He just stood there with his arms folded across his chest and his head cocked skeptically to one side.

Congers glowered for a moment and said portentously, “You heard me.” With which, he turned, muttering, “Motherfucker,” and returned to his desk.

Not a sound in the room, not a laugh, not a chuckle, not even an unhh unhh unhh under the breath. Everybody, even Jojo, was too embarrassed for the big freshman, pitied him too much, to call any more attention whatsoever to the way he had tried to start something with Charles the Coolest and then backed down like a pussy.

Jojo and Mike remained aroused by the incident after they returned to their suite. The suite’s common-room casement windows were open, but it was so dark outside, you couldn’t even make out the library tower or the smokestacks of the power plant. Jojo sat down in an easy chair and got comfortable, but Mike began pacing back and forth. A lungful of the mere atmosphere of male physical combat can start a young man’s adrenaline pumping that hard.

Mike was saying, “It was the ‘moronic’ and ‘shitfa brains’ that got him. He couldna gotten any madder over ‘nigga’ than he did over that. When he got up from that desk and started heading for Charles, I thought he was gonna—”

Jojo interrupted. “You know something, Mike? That fucking study hall is a farce. Studying in there is a fucking impossibility. Somebody’s always horsing around or cracking jokes or making fart noises…and we sit there for two fucking hours doing nothing.”

“Seriously,” said Mike.

“And what the fuck’s Charles doing in there in the first place? Coach dud’n make the swimmies go to study hall, and everybody knows Charles’s grades are as good as theirs. Why make him sit there for two hours while a buncha guys throw mushballs and do fuck-all?”

“Oh ho ho.” Mike chuckled ironically. “Don’t you get it, Jojo? Coach don’t care what the swimmies do at night, because they’re not gonna be playing. They’re not really part of the program. But us? Us—he wants to fill up the day so we’re totally into the program and nothing else. He dud’n want Charles or anybody else just rattling around the campus at night…thinking…or anything counterproductive like that.”

Jojo nodded pensively. Maybe Mike had a point. They got up in the dark, had breakfast in their own dining room, went over to the weight room and pumped some iron, or else went running. The only time they saw anybody else was when they went to class, and even then, who did they actually talk to? Maybe some hoochie groupie who would come over later and provide you some ass.

Into his head blipped the girl with the long brown hair, the one in the French class…But she was no hoochie, not that girl, and certainly no groupie. She had frozen him out from word one. Pure! The purity—that was what made her beauty unique, that and the fact that she was unobtainable. His loins stirred so, he could feel the tumescence against the fly of his jeans. Oh God…he wanted some of that…He had never laid eyes on her since then. True to her word, she had never turned up in Whatsisname’s French class again.

“…practice for three and a half fucking hours, and then where do we go? Back to the dining room where we see the same fucking faces—”

Jojo had become so absorbed in his sublime vision he had lost track of what Mike was talking about.

“—or maybe spending time in the fucking library writing his own papers, getting all interested in something besides basketball—”

“Oh shit!” said Jojo, thrusting his hands up, fingers spread, as if he were holding a big physioball over his head. “I totally fucking forgot. I got a paper due tomorrow.”

“What in?”

“American history, that fucking guy Quat. I don’t know where they ever got the idea he’s an athlete-friendly professor. If he’s athlete friendly, then I’m…I’m…I don’t know what. What time is it?”

“About twelve.”

“Shit…he’s really gonna be pissed if I beep him now.”

“Who is?”

“My history tutor, kid named Adam. But I don’t see that I got any choice. Shit, I hate to do this to him. He’s a nice kid…Thank God he’s a nerdy little guy. He’ll take it without breaking my fucking balls.”

So he got on the telephone and beeped the nerdy little guy, and in due course the guy called back, and Jojo said he needed to see him right away.

Meantime, Mike had turned on the TV set, some sitcom, but he was already bored with it, so he prevailed upon Jojo to play a video game while he was waiting for the tutor. Jojo didn’t take much persuading. Mike had a new PlayStation 3 set, and it was awesome. The images had depth and fluid motion; the sounds rose and fell just the way they should, and they had a wraparound effect, and you felt like you really were competing—football, baseball, basketball, boxing, judo, whatever—before cheering fans in some huge stadium. It was all eerily realistic. How the hell did they come up with these things? So Jojo and Mike sat down and picked up the handsets for their current favorite, which was called Stunt Biker. You were on a bicycle on a huge half-pipe, doing double, triple flips in the air and full gainers and everything else, while thousands cheered. What they both liked best about Stunt Biker were the wipeouts. If you miscalculated on your flips and crashed, you usually landed on your neck. In real life, although not on PlayStation 3, you’d be dead. Gales of laughter when your opponent broke his neck on the concrete surface of the half-pipe…

They became so absorbed in Stunt Biker and the cheering multitudes that God knows how much time had gone by before they realized that somebody, no doubt the tutor, was repeatedly knocking on the common-room door. Jojo got up and opened it.

“Hey, Adam!” said Jojo. He opened his arms in a gesture of welcome. The tone of his voice and the smile on his face were the sort one would ordinarily save for some dear but long-absent friend. “Come on in!”

By the looks of him, Adam the history tutor wasn’t feeling nearly so cheerful about this house call.

“Adam,” said Jojo, “you know my roommate, don’t you, the old Microwave here?”

“Hey, how’s it going?” said Mike, smiling broadly and putting out his hand.

The tutor took it with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm, said nothing, and put a look on his face that said, “Okay…I’m waiting.”

Stunt Biker was still on the TV screen, and you could hear the yammer of the crowd waiting for more action.

The tutor seemed half as tall as Jojo and about a third as heavy, although if he stood next to ordinary students at Dupont, he would have looked neither very tall nor very short. His face had fine, almost pretty features, and he wore a pair of glasses with pin-thin titanium rims, but it was his hair that people were likely to notice. His hair was longish, with a profusion of soft dark brown curls that came down in bangs in front and a bohemian ruff in back. And he parted his hair—unbelievable! His baggy khakis and his black sweater, with just a T-shirt beneath it, seemed to hang rather than lie upon his frame. He seemed as delicate as Jojo was massive, and even though they were both seniors, he appeared to be much younger.

An awkward pause. Jojo realized that he had to plunge into the void. “Adam…you’re gonna kill me.” He averted his eyes, lowered his head, and shook it, all the while smiling as if to say, “Wouldn’t you just know it?” Finally he removed the smile, looked at his tutor, and blurted out his problem.

“All right,” the boy said in a measured voice, “what’s this paper supposed to be about?”

“It’s about…ummm…something about the Revolutionary War.”

“Something about the Revolutionary War?”

“Yeah. Wait a second. I got it printed out.” Jojo hurried into his bedroom.

By now Mike had returned to PlayStation 3 and was playing Stunt Biker solo. From time to time he said, “Oh fuck!” as he broke his neck. The crowd cheered and groaned.

Jojo returned with a printout of an e-mail, which he now scrutinized. “It says here…it says here…it says it’s supposed to be about…Here it is: ‘The personal psychology of George the Third as a catalyst of the American Revolution.’ Eight to ten pages the guy wants. What’s a catalyst, anyway? I’ve heard of the damned things but I don’t really know what they are.”

“Oh fuck!” said Mike, intent on the TV screen, which flared with stadium lights and hot colors.

The boy, Adam, said, “When is this due, Jojo?”

“Uhh…tomorrow. The class is at ten.” Ingratiating smile. “I told you you’d kill me.”

“Ten o’clock tomorrow?…Jojo!”

The way he said it allowed Jojo to relax. What did Adam the tutor amount to? He amounted to a male low in the masculine pecking order who is angry, deserves to be angry, is dying to show anger, but doesn’t dare do so in the face of two alpha males, both of them physically intimidating as well as famous on the Dupont campus. Jojo had enjoyed this form of unspoken domination ever since he was twelve. It was a source of inexpressible satisfaction. Literally inexpressible. Only a complete fool would ever own up to such a feeling out loud—to anybody.

Out loud: “Yeah, I know.” He feigned the sort of grimace that indicates you’re disappointed in yourself. “I just like totally forgot, man. I been in study hall for two hours studying for a French test I got coming up, and I just like, you know, drew a blank on the fucking history paper.”

Adam said, “Well…have you got any notes? Any texts?”

“Nawww…I think the guy said he wanted this to be a research paper or something.”

“Oh—fuck—all!” said Mike. The crowd groaned louder than ever, and the screen flared with a change of background color.

A rising whine from Adam: “Jojo, do you have any idea what this is gonna involve? Researching the life of George the Third and the history of the Stamp Act and all that stuff and putting them together and writing eight or ten pages”—he looked at his wristwatch—“in the next ten hours?”

Shrugging: “I’m really sorry, man, but I got to get that paper in. The fucking guy’s already on my case. Mr. Quat. He’s just waiting for some excuse to flunk my ass.”

The atmosphere was heavy with the realization that failing a course could make an athlete ineligible to play during the following semester.

The roar of the crowd swelled, and then—“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”—turned into a bottomless groan.

Adam stood there looking glum, and whipped. “Okay…give me the sheet of paper.”

Jojo threw a big arm around the boy’s back and shoulders and squeezed so hard he practically lifted him off his feet. “You the man, Adam, you the man! I knew you wouldn’t let me down!”

The little tutor squirmed helplessly in Jojo’s powerful grip. When Jojo relented and released him, the boy stood there for a moment with a desolate look on his face. He shook his head slowly and headed for the door. Just before he went out, he turned around and said, “By the way, a catalyst is something that precipitates—something that helps set off something else that’s not directly related to it, like the way the assassination of a Serbian archduke nobody ever heard of was the catalyst for World War One. You might want to know what the word means, just in case you ever have to make somebody think you know what you’ve written.”

Jojo didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, but he did know it was supposed to be some kind of sarcastic reprimand, as close as a nerd could get to saying how totally pissed off he actually was. The alpha male smiled and said, “Hey listen, man, I’m really sorry. I appreciate the hell outta this. I owe you one.”

The boy was not even all the way out the door when Jojo turned toward Mike and said, “What are all these oh fucks, man? You may be the microwave of treys, but you can’t stunt-bike for shit.”

No sooner had Adam closed the door and taken a few steps down the hall than he heard the muffled sound of Jojo and his roommate at the controls of PlayStation 3, crying out in triumph or pain and laughing…laughing at him, no doubt. The two morons would sit there playing their stupid video game, like they were twelve-year-olds, and yelling Oh fuck and laughing at Adam Gellin…while he had to hustle to the library and ransack some source material, cobble together some notes, and stay up all night turning out 2,500 or 3,000 words that would read like something a cretin such as Jojo Johanssen might conceivably have written. Actually, Jojo wasn’t all that stupid. He just refused to use his head, as a matter of principle. It was sad. It was worse than sad. It was pathetic. Jojo was a brute, but he was also a weakling who didn’t dare violate the student-athlete code, which decreed that it was uncool to act in any way like a student. For that reason, he, Adam, was doomed to an all-nighter, while Jojo put in a few more vacuous hours in front of the TV screen and slept the sleep of the child who knows everything he needs will be there when he wakes up in the morning.

Adam’s face began to burn with anger and humiliation. Goddamn it! The smug, heavy-handed way the big lout had acted happy to see him…the utterly transparent simulation of contrition, when he had undoubtedly known for a long time that this paper would be due tomorrow…the way he had put his arm around him in a sickeningly fake show of camaraderie…You the man!…Goddamn that muscle-bound sonofabitch! He had grabbed him and lifted him off the floor as if he owned his very hide! “You the man”—and what he was really saying was, “You’re not a man at all! You’re my servant! You’re my little slavey boy! I own your ass!”

A great muffled yawp of manly laughter from behind. Jojo and his roommate were laughing at him! Couldn’t contain themselves! Adam scurried back on tiptoe and stood outside the door to their suite. They were laughing again!—but it turned out they were laughing about Vernon Congers and how Charles kept teasing him, and Congers hadn’t a clue about how to deal with it. All right, so they weren’t laughing at slavey boy…at that moment…Nevertheless, Adam trudged along the hallway, head down, thinking of all the devastating remarks he should have obliterated the giant with. He had long ago come to terms, at least on a rational level, with the master-servant aspect of the job. For that matter, not every athlete he tutored acted superior. A few were grateful the way any needy child might be or should be, in which case a traditional teacher-pupil relationship existed, and the psychic rewards were his. In any event, the three hundred dollars a month he was paid for this service was crucial to his existence at Dupont, as was the approximately one hundred a month—all of it in tips, none in wages—he made delivering pizza, mainly to students’ rooms, for a franchise operation called PowerPizza. Of course, delivering pizza for tips created a master-servant relationship, too, but these days, students and young people generally shrank from being anything but egalitarian in their dealings with the working poor.

No matter which job he was working at, he had to make a trade-off. The downside of delivering pizza was that it was mindlessly repetitive, and your time wasn’t flexible. Whenever you worked the job, you were committed to a six-hour stretch. In tutoring athletes, you had to submit to the egos of large, stupid people who could summon you by beeper anytime they felt like it, and you had to accept the fact that you were abetting an institutional farce known as “the student-athlete.” On the other hand, the work was varied and occasionally interesting, you could do much of it on your own time…and your dim-witted charges were in some way dependent upon you, regardless of how they behaved.

A little farther down the hall, he could hear, coming from behind the door he was just passing, an old Tupac Shakur CD going full blast—the classic track, the song about his mother…That would be the freshman hotshot Vernon Congers, whose room looked like a Tupac Shakur shrine—two entire walls papered with photographs of that legendary martyr of the rap music wars. Adam had substituted for one of Congers’s regular tutors once. He passed another door, which was open a few inches…Fireball movie sounds and a male voice saying, “Treyshawn, just between you and me, I don’t play ’at shit. You know what I’m saying?” Ah, yes, Treyshawn “the Tower” Diggs…Inside the suite opposite it, two males were laughing, and a female was squealing in mock denigration, “Curtis, you a girl’s what you are!” Louder squeal: “Keep yo’ hands offa me, you old nancy!”…Curtis Jones. Adam kept on walking…From behind that door, this door, this door, that door, came the unmistakable cracking sound of opposing forces colliding in video games. Ah, the hallway symphony of the basketball greats, the living legends at their midnight ease. Adam smiled. But fuck! “The personal psychology of George the Third as a catalyst of the American Revolution”…for a brick skull that didn’t contain a clue as to what “catalyst” meant…

Far from being quiet at midnight, the historic Charles Dupont Memorial Library was humming. The rustle of many people in motion—plus the occasional sharp, piping chirp of sneakers on the great stone floor—echoed off the vaulted arches of the main hall. So grand and so gloomy, the cavernous space swallowed up the light from the chandeliers and rendered it feeble. Nevertheless, the hall and the huge computer cluster off to this side and the vast reading room off to that side and the circulation and reference desks up there were alive with students. Many undergraduates never began doing homework until midnight, and there were always plenty of them still at it when the sun rose. Dupont Memorial never closed. Staying up until two, three, or four a.m., weekdays included, was part of the conventional, if eccentric, cycle of student life at Dupont.

Two girls, chattering away in hushed voices while glancing this way and that, walked right across Adam’s path. Whatever they were looking for, it wasn’t him. Both had on eye makeup, lip gloss, and earrings. One wore a low-cut, lacy peignoir-sort-of top, the other wore a tight T-shirt, and both were deeply cloven behind by tight jeans. None of this was remarkable except that these girls were totally slutted up. Many girls got dressed up to go over to the library at midnight for the simple reason that boys would be there.

The sight roused within Adam a familiar, smug feeling of superiority. So many students treated Dupont as an elite playground where they played for four years with bright and, for the most part, wellborn people like themselves…while he and a small Gideon’s army, most of whom he knew personally, were here at Dupont as “Millennial Mutants”—his friend Greg Fiore’s term—who would…

Another surge of anger. Long after Jojo Johanssen and his ilk had been reduced to pissing away the remainder of their lives sitting on the curb somewhere drinking malt liquor out of brown paper bags, Adam Gellin and his confreres would—

—would what? Poof. All his superiority vanished in an instant, just like that, as if it had never been anything but air in the first place. Jojo could get laid anytime he felt like it. He had only to step outside onto the campus and point. Jojo had expressed it to him just that way once—“and point”—and Adam believed him. Whatever else he was, Jojo wasn’t boastful. He had described actual examples. He thought it was funny. One had stuck in Adam’s mind. Jojo had finished a class and was walking across the Yard, not even thinking about any such thing, when he saw an athletic-looking blonde in a tennis outfit, a tall, slender girl with “these long legs and buff shoulders and tits like this”—he had cupped his hands to indicate the size and where on the torso they were placed—hustling toward the tennis courts where she and a friend had booked a court, and he just stepped in her way and came on to her, and ten minutes later they were in his room slogging away at it. It was simple as that if you were a basketball star. And that girl’s voice in Curtis’s room—she wasn’t in there to ask him for a basketball ticket. Adam wheeled about and took a second look at the girls in the tight jeans. Both these little midnight scholars would get themselves laid within the hour. He could be sure about that. Sex! Sex! It was in the air along with the nitrogen and the oxygen! The whole campus was humid with it! tumid with it! lubricated with it! gorged with it! tingling with it! in a state of around-the-clock arousal with it! Rutrutrutrutrutrutrutrut—

He tried to visualize how many of Dupont’s 6,200 students were rutting away at it at this very moment, visualize in the sense of being able to see through walls and spot the two-backed beasts herkyjerky humping bang-bangbang…up there, in that bedroom in Lapham—there, in that room in Carruthers—up there, on the floor of that empty seminar room in Giles—over there, in the euonymus shrubbery because, bursting with lust, they couldn’t make it all the way back to a bedroom—and there, up against a locked rear door on the other side of the tower, because doing it where they might get caught gave it a fetishistic kick they couldn’t resist—and here was himself, Adam Gellin, so superior in so many excellent ways…and a virgin. A senior at Dupont and still a virgin. Even in his own thoughts he said it softly. It was a failing he was desperate that the world not know of. The whole campus was rutting away like dogs in the park, and he remained a virgin. As soon as he could, at the end of his sophomore year, he had moved out of Carruthers College, away from roommates for good, and into a squalid little apartment off campus—nothing more than a slot for humans created when two ordinary bedrooms in a rotting nineteenth-century town house were converted to four “apartments,” all using one bathroom out in the hall—rather than have others gradually come to realize…there was something wrong with him—namely, a bad case of virginity—and now it was getting terribly late, because he knew nothing about it…and he would be perfectly inept—he felt it—and whatever he could do wrong, he would do wrong—nervous impotence, premature ejaculation—and how did they manage to stop just before…and put on the condom in some suave way—did it require a joke?—would just unsheathing the damned thing and touching the tip of his dong with it cause him to ejaculate?—

Damn. The library catalog computer cluster was mobbed. There were some twenty computers arranged in a horseshoe behind a low retaining wall of oak carved with High Gothic tracery, and he had to locate some volumes of British and American history, and all those computer screens glowing with twenty-first-century electronic jaundice behind grand fourteenth-century flourishes of conspicuous wood-sculptural waste were occupied. But wait a minute—in the very back corner, hard to spot, a screen with nobody sitting in front of it. He began speed-walking toward the cluster. If it wouldn’t have looked so totally dorky, he would have made a run for it. Barely fifteen feet away when—Shit!—a girl with long brown hair, looked like a kid, came in from the side and went straight to that one last screen.

His mind spun. He couldn’t afford to be his passive, play-by-the-rules self, not this time. Besides, the girl looked so young. Unless his judgment was seriously off, she would be the sweet, pliant type who gives way to avoid friction. He entered the bull pen. It was packed with the hunched-over backs of students clattering away on the keyboards. The glow of the screens gave their faces a sickly dry-ice pallor. Resolute, he marched up to the girl, who was already seated, and said:

“Excuse me, but I was getting ready to use that one”—he gestured toward the screen—“when you cut in front of me, and I mean, I’ve got to use it.” He spoke as sternly as he could. “I’ve got a paper due in the morning. How about letting me use it for just a minute? Okay? Do you mind? How about it?”

He stood right over the girl. Stern insistence; no smile. She looked up at him warily, a touch of fear in her eyes, studied his face, deliberated, and finally managed to say in a frightened little voice, “Yes.”

“Grrrrreat! Thanks! Hey, I really appreciate it.” He let his face soften for the first time.

The girl hesitated again and then said in the same small voice, “I meant yes I do mind.”

She didn’t move, she didn’t change her expression, and he couldn’t stare her down. Her big blue eyes were fixed on his face. She wouldn’t budge.

It was he who wilted, as a flood of impressions swept over him all at once. The way she pronounced the i in I and mind—Iiii meant yes Iiii do miiind—a flat, drawn-out way that made him think of one of those Southern racial-conflict-turned-racial-amity movies where everybody sings “Amazing Grace” at the end. She wasn’t pliant, wouldn’t yield in the slightest, and she was beautiful in a way he wasn’t used to seeing, not in the slutty atmosphere of Turning Boys On at Dupont. She had an absolutely clear, open, guileless beauty. A graceful neck, big wondering eyes, no earrings, no eye makeup, no lip gloss—and such perfectly formed, untouched lips they were! Virginal…that was the only word for this sort of face. And she wouldn’t give an inch.

It was he who became pliant. “Well…” He lapsed into a weak, ingratiating smile. “Okay if I just stand here and wait till you’re through?”

The girl said, “All right.” Came out allriot.

“Thanks. I promise I won’t hover or anything.” Bigger ingratiating smile. “By the way, I’m Adam.”