“Noâ
what
?”
A bit shortly: “
You
know what.”
“I know
what
what?” The voice was combative but the face was a dog's, the dog that has been caught in a forbidden act and reprimanded and lowers its head and looks up at its owner with sad eyes, distrustful lest it be reprimanded again or else swatted.
But he quickly recovered his Cool King Hoyt of Saint Ray authority and said in a calm voice, oozing with the accusation of contemptible violence against cool code: “What are you doing?”
“I'm going to my room, Hoyt.”
Her voice was faltering. Only the would-be confident tacking on of the
Hoyt
at the end gave it any semblance of confidence whatsoever. So she reached out and stroked his uninjured left cheek.
“I'm sorry, Hoyt, but I have to go.”
She tried to plant a light kiss on his lips, but he turned his head petulantly to put his lips out of range.
Now afraid she'd gone too farâby not going far enoughâand ruined everything: “I'm really sorry, Hoyt.”
“Roger that,” said Hoyt with a devastatingly kind smile that as much as said, “This is the last good-bye.”
“It's just thatâ”
“You have to go.” He shrugged and then smiled the devastating smile again and shrugged again.
Charlotte got out and stepped over a railroad tie marking the perimeter of the parking lot and walked up a small grassy slope toward Mercer Gate. A flash of recallâher father with his mermaid tattoo beaming like a red alert from his forearm, shooing off the student porter because he thought he was going to demand a tip ⦠the ratty camper shell on the ratty pickup truck ⦠the Amorys at the Sizzlin' Skilletâwhich is to say, the defeats, all the defeats ⦠and how they began ⦠She was all at once overcome by the possibility that what had just happened was the worst defeat of allâgiving up a cool coupâa boyfriend, a
senior
, gorgeous-looking, a victory in and of himselfâhow she would stand out!âand she had let him go
that
far ⦠before her little Sparta girl panic set inâbut she just couldn't let him do what he was about to do ⦠It hadn't been a
decision
at all, had it. It had been a reflex, as natural as drawing your hand away when the griddle plate on top of the woodstove is red-hotâshe'd seen it when it was truly red-hot. A group of boys and girls was just entering the tunnel of Mercer Gate, girls screaming the scream of excitement from being with boys and one boy shouting in
a mock-serious deep voice, which you'd think was the funniest voice in the history of the world from the way the girls were screaming. The old-fashioned lights up on stanchions near the tunnel made them all a sickly jaundice yellow until they disappeared into the shadows in the tunnel. She could hear the throaty roar of Hoyt's Suburban starting up, the roar of a rusted-out muffler, if she knew anything about itâDaddy would have repaired it himself in no timeâand she was dying to look back,
dying
to, even though she wouldn't be able to tell whether Hoyt was looking at her or not, given the darkness and the sick, jaundiced, moribund light from the useless, fussy old-fashioned light fixture reflecting on the windshieldâshe wanted desperately to look at him, as if to say, “I didn't mean that to be final, Hoyt!âplease, you mustn't take it that way!”
“Charlotte.”
She looked about. Bettina was just coming in, too.
Bettina, in a concerned voice: “Hey, what's up?”
“It shows, hunh?”
“Well ⦠yeah,” said Bettina. “You're not too hard to read, you know.”
Now they were in the gloom of the tunnel, where a couple of lamps gave off a sickly, feverish glow that was worse than no light at all.
“I just did something so-o-o-o stupid,” said Charlotte. She said it louder than she had meant to, and the words echoed slightly in the tunnel. For a moment the
so-o-o-o-o-o
lengthened like a moan and a whimper and a stifled wail of grief.
“You did
what
so stupid?” said Bettina.
But Charlotte wasn't listening. An impulse had begun wriggling inside her central nervous system, a tiny impulse, which, if it could have spoken, would have asked: was there some pretext, any pretext, on which she could call him without seeming to be begging?
Â
Â
When Hoyt returned, only Vance and Julian were left in the library. Vance said to Hoyt, “You're not back as soon this time, playa. Getting any sump'm sump'm?”
Hoyt sank into the Hoyt easy chair and said, “Welllll ⦠I wouldn't call it genuine
pink
sump'm sump'm, but we work at it. You know? We persevere. We'll get there. In factâyou know what? I'm going to invite her to the formal.”
“That
little girl?” said Julian. “What about Whatshername? I call her
Whatshername because it took you about two months of cum dumping”âhe motioned upstairs with his thumbâ“before you learned her name. If the
Guinness Book of Records
had a category for anonymous cum dumping, you'd be in the fucking book, playa.”
Hoyt stared off toward nowhere and said, “She was good sump'm sump'm, man. She really fucking was. But she's given me the big fuck-you. She won't even fucking talk to me on the phone anymore. Ungratefulâshe claims I'm nothing but another
frat playa
âher words.”
Vance and Julian howled. “A
playa
!” said Julian. “Fuck! You shouldn't even
associate
with a girl who's no better judge of character than that!”
“Julian's right!” said Vance. “You don't go bringing an imbecile like that to a
Saint Ray formal
! I mean, shit!”
They had a good time with that for a while, but they finally ran out of wit, and Hoyt said, “The fact remains, how the fuck can I even go to the formal with no date? I can't just call up some girl right on the verge of the thing and say, âHey, gorgeous, how about coming with me to the Saint Ray formal, so I can have some sump'm sump'm like everybody else?'”
“You can always hijack I.P.'s date once you get there,” said Julian.
“What are you talking about?” said Hoyt.
“You know this girl Gloriaâshe's a Psi Phi? She's bangin'! She's awesome. I'd give my left nut for some a that. How fucking I.P. ever talked her into being his date, I don't fucking know.”
“Well ⦠shit,” said Hoyt. Pause. “Nawwww ⦠I'm gonna take a chance and invite Charlotte.”
“Hey, dude!” said Vance. “You know her, fucking name! This must be love!”
“Y
ou keep saying âcool,'” said Edgar, “but what does that mean, somebody's cool?”
“If you have to ask,” said Roger Kuby, “you're clearly not cool.”
“I wouldn't have it any other way,” said Edgar, “but what does it
mean
? If somebody came up to you and said, âWhat's the definition of cool?' what would you say? I've never heard anybody even try.”
Edgar only took charge like this when the Mutants met in his apartment. They loved to meet here. For all of his mild manner, Edgar lived a good eight blocks deep into the City of God in a small 1950s apartment building. Most of the other tenants were Hispanic or Chinese. The elevator was loud, rickety, and mysteriously dented. Edgar's hallway was drab to the verge of decrepit. It had eight identical metal-clad flush doors, all with more than one lock. But when Edgar's door openedâmagic!âinside was a wonderworld of taste ⦠and expense, at least by Dupont undergraduate standards. None of the rest of the Mutants' living quarters rated any classification more exalted than “bohemian.” Edgar, by contrast, was more like “cutting edge.” He had modern leather and stainless-steel furniture, brass lamps from some place in Nebraska, and a rugâa huge, real woven rug in a rich camel's-hair color, woven God knows how many tufts to the square inch so
that it looked as smooth and luxurious as cashmere. Edgar himself was holding courtâin an authentic Ruhlmann “elephant chair” from the 1920. His father, a distinguished biologist, was CEO of Clovis Genetics, an heir to the Remington munitions fortune, and an art collector and patron.
Camille said, “Well, I can tell you one thing. âCool's' got nothing to do with women. Nobody ever calls a woman cool.”
“That's'cause guys like you'n'me, Camille, we like 'em hot,” said Roger. That got a laugh. Thus encouraged, Roger looked at Randy, he who had come out of the closet, and said, “Right, Randy?”âand gave him a mock grin and two fast-pumping thumbs-ups.
Randy's face turned red. He was speechless. Adam felt terribly embarrassed for him. He glanced at Charlotte. She was engrossed, smiling slightly.
Camille shot Roger a scorching look, but not, Adam realized, because of what Roger had said to Randy. It was because he was interrupting her point, her insight. Any Mutant would feel the same way.
Adam jumped in so that Charlotte wouldn't think he was out of it. “That's not really true, Camille. I've heard girls called cool. Think ofâ”
“Yeah, if they're the frat-hag, buddy-girl type,” said Camille, breaking back in, fire in her eyes. “It's a male thing. Not that I give a good fuck. The guys they call cool are all a bunch of fratty dickheads, if you really think about it. They're guys who demonstrate their ignorance in some approved way.”
Greg jumped in. “Actually, I think Camille's right.”
“Oh, wow, thank you,” said Camille.
“Actually â¦
you
think
.”
Adam could tell by the way Edgar was leaning forward over the table, swollen with a lungful of air, that he was primed to begin the discourse he no doubt had in mind when he first introduced the subject. But no-oh-oh, old Greg wasn't about to let that happen, was he. He was also leaning forward. He had his torso twisted until it was vertical to the table, as if he were a knife primed to thrust.
Edgar began, “When you thinkâ”
Sure enough, Greg cut him off. “I
like
Camille's idea.” His eyes swiftly panned the tableâno doubt, thought Adam, to indicate that he himself the leader was running the show and that his remarks were for the illumination of one and all. “I wouldn't go so far as to say cool equals stupid, but being a dim bulb doesn't disqualify you, either. Treyshawn Diggs is cool, right? Nobody's gonna say the Tower ain't cool, and he's got like the mental faculties of that ⦠that ⦔âhis eyes darted about, trying to find something brainless enough.
Randy Grossman and Camille gasped simultaneously. “Why don't we be a little racist about it!” said Camille.
“Racist?” said Greg. “What's racist about somebody being a fucking moron?” Smart comeback, Adam thought with gloomy envy. They weren't about to contradict him on that. “All you're saying is, you were never in a class with Treyshawn Diggs. I was. I was in his seminar section of Economics 106, and we're learning about how you measure the GNP. The T.A.'s talking about how you arrive at a gross sum for wholesale transactions and how you divide that into two sums and subtract each sum from the sum of gross manufacturing output on the one hand, the sum of gross service costs on the other, and you take the resulting sums and divide them by this and that, and I mean it's a
beast
, and hands are going up all over the place, and one of them's Treyshawn Diggs's. The T.A. can't believe it. I mean, Treyshawn hasn't raised his hand for
any
thing the entire semester, and so the T.A. calls on Treyshawn, and you know what the Tower says? He says, âWhat's a sum?'”
Greg himself was already laughing by the time he got to
What's a sum?
And then some vivid memory of the actual scene must have bubbled up into his brain, because the laugh turned into a manic cackle, an uncontrollable yawp, and Greg began beating his fists on the arms of his chair with his head down and his eyes shut, and he tried to repeat the words What's
a sum
? but tidal waves of mirth came rolling up from his innards and slammed the words against the roof of his mouth. Adam glanced at Charlotte. She was smiling, shaking with chuckles, practically laughing out loud, Greg's hysterical seizure was so infectious. She was
absorbed
with Greg.
Head still down, eyes still squeezed shut, Greg brought his hands up in front of his face, palms toward Camille, in a defensive gestureâ“I know ⦠I know”âbefore giving way to new paroxysms of laughter. Adam's envy turned to resentment, and resentment reached the threshold of anger. The basketball team was
his
terrain! Treyshawn Diggs and company were
his
exclusive conversational nuggets. The sonofabitch was
poaching
on
his
preserve! One of the few compensations for the hours and hours he had to waste on these imbeciles was his status among the Mutants as
the
reigning expert on big-time collegiate sports, and here was Greg, right in front of Charlotte, using
his
material and captivating her with some shamelessly purloined spiel about Treyshawn Diggs!
Nowâbefore Greg could get hold of himselfâwhile he was still in the thrall of his self-amusement, now was the time to take back the subject and
ram it down his throat.
“You're absolutely right, Greg ⦠up to a point.” Suavely masking his anger ⦠“But there's a more fundamental principle here. Being a basketball star doesn't guarantee you're cool. I'll give you a good example. You know this freshman, Vernon Congers? He's taken Jojo Johanssen's place on the starting five away from him. You'll see why when we play Maryland next week.”
The Mutants never admitted to being sports fans â¦
themselves â¦
but this bit of news had their attention.
Edgar said, “But I saw himâ”
Adam quickly pulled a Greg and cut Edgar off once more. “I know, you saw him start the last game. That's only because Buster”âfirst name familiarityâ“still starts him in the Buster Bowl because he doesn't want to start an all-black team at home. But Congers plays twice as many minutes as Jojo even at home, and Buster's already starting Congers on the road.” Peripheral glance: good; now Charlotte was absorbed in
him
.
He proceeded to regale them with an account of how Charles Bousquet made life miserable for Congers and how pathetic Congers's attempted comebacks were. “But you wanna know the reason they don't think Congers is cool? This gets down to the underlying principle I'm talking about. It's not because he's stupid, it's becauseâ”
Camille broke in: “Is this Congers by any chance black?”
Warily: “Unh-hunh ⦔
Camille said, “So here we go again, right?”
“Whattaya
talking
about, Camille? Bousquet's black, too!” said Adam.
“Oh, that really does make a huge difference, doesn't it.”
Not about to let this degenerate into a squabble with Camille, Adam raised his voice and bellowed right on over her: “IT'S NOT BECAUSE HE'S STUPID! It's because he's
defensive
! CharlesӉ
I'm on a first-name basis with him, too, of course
â“asks him what's the capital of Pennsylvania, and the poor bastard freezes up. He knows he's doomed. He starts to say Philadelphia, but he knows Charles would've never asked him if it was that easy. You can see the humiliation in his face. He knows he's been reduced to a 250-pound loser. He wants a trapdoor so he can fall right through it and disappear. So the main thing is confidence ⦠confidence and insouciance.” He hoped the big word impressed Charlotte. “All he had to do was act like he didn't give a shit about what Charles”âfirst-name basisâ“or anybody else thought of his intelligence. Confidence plus a little roughhousing isn't bad, either. Next time he ought to grab Charles in a headlock and say, âThis is an
IQ test, Chuck, and the question is, how you gon' get your head back.'” Without meaning to, Adam had put so much emotion into saying “This is an IQ test, Chuck” and the rest of it that he half realized he was actually acting out a revenge fantasy. He had involuntarily made a fist and lowered his shoulder and cocked his arm into a choke-hold clamp as if it were
he
who wanted to crush somebody's windpipe. Actually, Bousquet would be about the last member of the basketball team he would want to finish off. The anabolic bastard he
really
had in the grip was Jojoâno, Curtis Jones, who had gone out of his way to be rude and humiliatingâno, it was
every
big-time athlete he held in that lethal lock, every lacrosse playerâ
those
cretinous bastardsâevery jock, every bully who had ever walked over him as if it were in the natural order of things that little Adam Gellin was a weakling.
Already, with peripheral vision, he could see Charlotte looking at him in a funny wayâ
âand so he quickly tried to cover up his hatred of the Curtis Joneses and Jojo Johanssens of the world by amping up his insight's brilliant light. “Of course, a guy like Congers, he got into Dupont with three-figure SATs. We're talking low seven hundreds, maybeâ”
“Aw, that can't be true,” said Greg. “They couldn't
afford
to take a chance like that.”
“Wanna bet?” said Adam. “What's the average SAT at Dupont now? Fourteen-ninety? They'll knock off five hundred points for a basketball or football playerâ”
Greg broke in. “Yeah, and that's not even close to low seven hunâ”
Gamely, Adam overrode Greg. “But the point I'm making is confidence or putting on the appearance of confidence. That's at the core of being cool, and I don't care who you're talking about.”
“Confident about what?” said Randy.
“Everything,” said Adam. “Taste, status, appearance, opinions, confrontationsâyou know, like dealing with other students who are trying to fuck you over or professors who are reprimanding youâ”
“Shit, the professors don't reprimand anybody at Dupont,” said Randy. “I wish they did. What they actually do is, they tell the T.A. to give the guy a bad grade, and they hide in their office.”
Camille sighed, as if about to fire another Deng rocket, probably because of the word “guy,” but she said nothing.
“Did you ever have Ms. Gomdin in psychâ” Randy began.
But Adam wasn't about to allow the subject to change to the eccentricities
of Dupont pedagogy, so he walked right over Randy: “THE OTHER SIDE OF BEING CONFIDENT”âRandy looked startledâ“IS NEVER TO PLEASE PEOPLE”âRandy was vanquished, so Adam lowered his voiceâ“or not obviously. The cool guy doesn't flatter anybody or act obsequious or even impressed by somebodyâunless it's some athlete, maybe, maybeâand you don't act enthusiastic unless it's about sports, sex, or getting high. It's okay to be enthusiastic about something, like Dickensâalthough if you want my honest opinion, I don't know how anybody could be
enthusiastic
about Dickensâ”
Randy smiled and raised the first two fingers of his right hand and said, “Peace,” which Adam took to be approval, and so he couldn't resist dilating upon this extraneous obiter dictum: “I mean, you can be a lot of things about Dickens, but I don't see âenthusiastic' being one of themâ”
“You really can't see being enthusiastic about
Great Expectations
or
Dombey and Son
?” said Greg.
Fucking Greg again. Nothing to do but walk right over him again: “OKAY, I CAN SEE IT, but the point I'm making is, sure, you can be enthusiastic about Dickens or Foucaultâor Derrida, for that matterâbut if you want to be cool, you don't show it, you don't say it, you don't even let on. A cool guyâand I've seen this happenâcan secretly work his ass off fiveâno, fourânights a week at the library, but he has to make light of it if anybody catches on. You know what the favorite major of the cool guy is? Econ. Econ is fireproof, if you know what I mean. It's practical. You can't possibly be taking it because you really
love
economics.”