Camille muttered, “I still say it was racist.”
Charlotte was fascinated by Roger's transformation from just a few minutes ago. Up on this plane Roger Kuby was a different person, no longer the chronically off-key would-be wit, now an intellectual determined to get to the core of a psychological mystery. The serious Roger Kuby even
looked
better in her eyes. All at once she could
see
the handsome features hitherto hidden by his coat of fat.
“Irrational is right,” Adam was saying. “It's a primitive ritual of masculinity, and girls just go along with it because that's where the boys are.”
Oh, the Millennial Mutants were soaring now. Charlotte was enthralled. Maybe this was the group of students she had been looking for, the cénacle, students who, above all else, had a life of the mind,
la vie intellectuelle
she had envisioned back in Sparta as she looked out, at Miss Pennington's urging, across the mountains toward the distant, shimmering Dupont â¦
She was so enthralled, in fact, that she, like the others, had scarcely noticed the four students who had emerged from Briggs and were settling in on the other side of the steps, slightly above them. Like the Mutants, they wore the usual, the T-shirts, the shorts, the sneakers, the flip-flops. But their ⦠aura ⦠was entirely different. All four were lean and on the tall side, and even though their loose T-shirts and shorts obscured everything but their extremities, they were obviously “diesels,” to use the Dupont word for boys who pumped up their muscles through weight lifting. The one in the foreground, about twelve feet from the Mutants, sat on one step with his feet on the step below. His legs were so long his knees came up practically to his shoulders, and his shoulders were
this
wide. His head, crowned by a baseball cap worn backward, and his angular face, beset here and there by acne scars, rested atop a preternaturally long, thick neck, with an Adam's apple that
stuck out like a rock formation. He kept pumping his heel up and down while his eyes roamed all over the place, as if he thought something or other was about to happen, God knew what. The other three were not quite so big, but they were big enough, and they had the same look of lounging on the steps while trying to figure out where the action was.
The contrast with the four male Mutants struck Charlotte immediately, although she couldn't have put a name to it. She cast a glance at Adam. He was built in the proper proportions and had a nice symmetrical face with a fine nose and nice lipsâsensual, in factâbut now he seemed ⦠slight. Greg was so sketchily put together, not even his height did anything for him. His mop of dark brown curls made his head look enormous and misshapen, stuck as it was atop that little pencil neck of his.
The newcomers turned their heads from time to time to check out the Mutants, turned back to their cohorts and twisted their eyebrows. Pretty soon all four were pulling dubious, ironic faces for one another's benefit, talking in low voices, chuckling, and then sizing up the Mutants again.
“ ⦠no mystery to it,” Adam was saying. “I can
tell
you why. Lacrosse is one of the only two sports where white boys are the ones with the machismo. The other one's ice hockey. Basketball is totally a black sport, and football is mostly a black sport. It's just not as obvious in football, because the uniforms cover up their bodies and they wear face masks. Lacrosse would be all black, too, like
that”
âhe snapped his fingersâ“if black teenagers ever started playing it. They'd make the white players they've got out there now look like ⦠like ⦠like I don't know what ⦠wusses, pussies ⦠It wouldn't even be close. Same thing with hockey. A few body checks by the sort of black athletes who play basketball and football, and the toughest Canadian in the NHL would be a basket case. He'd be mush.”
Oh yes, they were soaring, the Mutants were,
soaring
! And it was Adam who led the way. He was ramming home whatever he wanted to ram home. How could anyone even compete with him on this subject? He knew the athletes at Dupont, he tutored them, he had seen them up close. He could rip all mystery away because he had been inside their feeble heads. So absorbed was he in revealing all, he was the last to notice that trouble was nearby and staring at him.
The guy with the pumping flip-flop had risen to his feet. Sure enough, he was â¦
tall â¦
in fact, gigantic, as if from another speciesârangy, lean, perhaps six-five or -six ⦠and
big
. He rolled his immense shoulders and then
started coming down the steps, his flip-flops slapping, toward Adam. The first thing Adam detected was Edgar, Roger, Camille, and Charlotte looking up. So Adam looked up. Leaning over him was a giant, or so he seemed from down here on the steps where Adam was sitting, a giant with immense forearms, a huge chin, an enormous Adam's apple, and acne on a face that now bore a look of such exaggerated seriousnessâaccompanied by such contortions of the forehead and eyebrowsâthat it oozed with irony and mockery of the hambone variety. And in that instant Adam knew, as surely as he knew anything in this world, that whatever happened next, it would not be pleasant. Then he caught a glimpse of the giant's three cohorts in the background, smirking, each an only slightly smaller edition of the giant himself. One had a brawler's grizzle stretching from the dome of his head, down his jaws, above his upper lip, over his chin, and under his chin to the itchy skin below, and Adam now knew that this was going to be unpleasant in a particular way.
“Don't mean to interrupt,” said the giant with a ham actor's solicitude. “You guys having a seminar out here?”
Adam ransacked his brain for something ⦠cool ⦠to say, something to show that he got it, the big hambone's game, and that he, too, was into irony and could parry any such thrust. But all he came up with was, “No.”
As soon as he said it, he realized he should just leave it at that, a curt, flat no. But what if the hulking guy took that as disrespectful?
That way lay disasterâ
in an as yet unknown form, but inevitably,
disaster
! He heard himself adding, “We're just chilling, just hanging out.”
The big interloper put on a hambone long face and began nodding over Adam with his eyes cast to one side and into an unfocused distance, as if he were pondering ⦠pondering ⦠pondering ⦠Then he looked straight down at Adam and nodded some more before looking back over his shoulder and saying to his three comrades, “Says it's not a seminar. Says they're just chilling, just hanging out.”
In a tone of mock contemplation, the one with the grizzle all over his head said, “Just chilling,” and did some nodding of his own.
The Millennial Mutants grew silent. The high spirits of their intellectual romp through history, psychology, philosophy, and anthropology hadâ
poof
!âevaporated.
Adam knew he should stand up and not have the guy standing over him and looking down like this, but he was afraid that if he stood up, it would be perceived as a challenge ⦠one that could only end badly.
“We thought it was a seminar,” the big hambone said, “because you guys know so much about sports.” His eyes suddenly seized upon Greg.
Greg tried a smile, then a shrug, then a sigh before attempting another smile and saying, “Well, not really,” which came out
rilly
.
“No, you
rilly
do, rilly,” said the guy, making it sound like the most effete locution he had ever heard. “We're
rilly
interested in sports, too.” He motioned toward his sidekicks. “We play lacrosse.”
Adam tried not to swallow or blink, but failed.
“âand you guys
rilly
know your lacrosse.”
Silence. Implicit in all the
rillies
was:
you faggots.
The silence swelled up malignantly until Greg, the maximum Mutant, editor of the Wave, a supposed campus leader, realized he had to put up a defense. But how?
Finally, in only slightly more than a mumble, he managed to say, “Thanks. Nice talking to you. We have some things to go over.”
“Hey, no problem,” said the giant, lifting his hands up, palms forward. The hands were huge. “Go right ahead. You don't mind if we listen in, do you?”
In a faint voice Greg said, “Well ⦔ Then he stopped. Something was happening to his lips. They were scrunching together into a little pink wad, as if gathered by a drawstring. Even more faintly he managed to say, “Well, no ⦔ The muscles around his lips seemed to have an epileptic life of their own. He barely managed to croak out, “Wouldn't you rather”âhis voice brokeâ“go play with your sticks?”
The lout broke into a wild, leering grin and just looked Greg in the eye until Greg broke. The giveaway was a big swallow and a frightened compression of the lips.
The giant turned toward his boys. “Says we oughta fuck off and go play with our sticks.”
The boys went, “Woooooooooo!” The one with the grizzled head said, “Play with our
what
? Did he say dicks or pricks?”
Greg said, “I didn't sayâ”
But the giant, leering at him once more, broke in. “We're not letting ourselves get”âhe raised his right hand and let the wrist go limp in a hambone fashionâ“rilly
pissy
here, are we?”
Greg opened his mouth, but the little muscles were playing such spastic tricks with his lips that he couldn't utter a word.
Inexplicably, the big lacrosse player turned toward Charlotte. He looked her up and down, smiled, winked, and said, “Hey, babe.”
Then he turned back to Greg and began to leer in the most humiliating way, and the leer was the eternal leer of the playground, the one that says, “Come on, fag, think you can fuck with
me
?”
Greg had begun hyperventilating.
Suddenly Camille Deng sprang up, eyes snapping, lips pursed grimly. She looked about a third the size of their tormentor. She spoke in a low, rasping snarl:
“Let me put it another way. Take your lacrosse stickâbitchâand stick it up your ass net-firstâbitchâand keep shoving until you shovel all the shit out of your mouthâbitch.”
The giant's face turned bloodred. He took a step toward Camille.
Adam knew he should do something, but he remained rooted to the step he was sitting on.
Camille didn't retreat an inch. She thrust her chin forward and said, “Go ahead. Just touch me once. You'll be brought up on assault and sexual harassment charges so fast you'll be out of Dupont like a shot. You can go home and play with your all-American dickâbitch. And eat your buddies' ice cream”âshe motioned with her head toward his comradesâ“and drool their spooch from your filthy mouth, bitch.”
The big athlete stopped in his tracks. The radioactive words
assault
and
sexual harassment
had jolted him. He knew them for what they wereâcareer killers. He despised this womanâshe was too grim and mean to be called a girlâas much as he had ever despised anyone, male or female, in his life.
“Oh, you little slit-eyed skankâ”
“Slit-eyed!” cried Camille. “Slit-eyed!” It was a cry of triumph. “You heard that!” She was all but hopping up and down as her eyes panned over Edgar, Greg, Roger, Adam, and Charlotte. “Slit-eyed! You heard him!” Then she looked the bewildered giant right in the face. “You just had to go and do it, didn't you! You couldn't hold back! You just had toâ” Whereupon she drew the edge of her hand across her throat like a knife and flashed him a vicious smile.
The guy looked as if he had been poleaxed at the base of his skull. He got the picture right away:
racial insult
. The poisonous skank had him. At Dupont that was worse than homicide. With homicide on your record, you had a fighting chance of staying in school.
“Let's go,” he said in a barely audible voice, and they all got up and headed along the walkway toward the Great Yard. They looked back malevolently, but they kept walking.
Adam knew he should get up and congratulate Camille and whoop in triumph or something. And maybe say something to Greg. At least Greg had
tried
. But Adam still didn't move. He was paralyzed with shame and lingering fear.
I didn't do a thing ⦠nothing ⦠I just sat here
. (And what if they come back?)
At first none of them said a word. Then Camille, looking down as if at the steps, said, “Student â¦
athletes ⦔
As in herpes pustules. Then she looked up and said with great animation, “Hey, we gotta find out what that guy's name is! You can find out, can't you, Adam?”
Dispiritedly, “I think so.”
Camille gave a humorless chuckle. “That moron is fucking
outta here
! He's history! He's a dried-up piece a shit! He's lucky if he's a student at Dupontâ
Student”
âanother mordant chuckleâ“forty-eight hours from now.”
“Dja see the way they went skulking off with their tails between their legs?” said Greg. He had a grin of victory stretched across his face. “We
crrr
ushed those motherfuckers! They won't fuck with the Millennial Mutants again!”