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 Dayâeven 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 Rayâfar 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 mentalityâbut 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 Vanceâ
“âhere 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 youâhas 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 mudbutt, 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.”
Â
Â
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!
Philadel
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 I 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, andâ
whapâ
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
â¦
The study hall started off as usualâwhich 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 binderâordinary lined school paperâand 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 mightâ
splatâ
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
, niâyou 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 thinkâ” 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, andâ” Once more, he didn't finish the sentence.