“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.
Â
Â
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 âmoronic' and âshitfa brains' that got him. He couldna gotten any madder over ânigga' than he did over that. When he got up from that desk and started heading for Charles, I thought he was gonnaâ”
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? Usâhe 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 â¦
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
purityâ
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 facesâ”
Jojo had become so absorbed in his sublime vision he had lost track of what Mike was talking about.
“âor maybe spending time in the fucking library writing his own papers, getting all interested in something besides basketballâ”
“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 competingâfootball, baseball,
basketball, boxing, judo, whateverâbefore 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 â¦
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 hairâunbelievable! 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: âThe 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 loudâto 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.”
“Ohâfuckâall!” 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”âhe looked at his wristwatchâ“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 thenâ“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”âturned 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 precipitatesâsomething 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.