“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…themselves…but this bit of news had their attention.

Edgar said, “But I saw him—”

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”—first name familiarity—“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 because—”

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! Charles”—I’m on a first-name basis with him, too, of course—“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”—first-name basis—“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, ‘This 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 Jojo—no, Curtis Jones, who had gone out of his way to be rude and humiliating—no, it was every big-time athlete he held in that lethal lock, every lacrosse player—those cretinous bastards—every 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 way—

—and 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, maybe—”

“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 player—”

Greg broke in. “Yeah, and that’s not even close to low seven hun—”

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, confrontations—you know, like dealing with other students who are trying to fuck you over or professors who are reprimanding you—”

“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 psych—” 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”—Randy looked startled—“IS NEVER TO PLEASE PEOPLE”—Randy was vanquished, so Adam lowered his voice—“or not obviously. The cool guy doesn’t flatter anybody or act obsequious or even impressed by somebody—unless it’s some athlete, maybe, maybe—and you don’t act enthusiastic unless it’s about sports, sex, or getting high. It’s okay to be enthusiastic about something, like Dickens—although if you want my honest opinion, I don’t know how anybody could be enthusiastic about Dickens—”

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 ‘enthusiastic’ being one of them—”

“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 Foucault—or Derrida, for that matter—but if you want to be cool, you don’t show it, you don’t say it, you don’t even let on. A cool guy—and I’ve seen this happen—can secretly work his ass off five—no, four—nights 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.”

Greg had to be heard from, of course. “You’re leaving out the most obvious thing, Adam.”

“Which is what?”

“Size and build. It’s a hell of a lot easier to be cool if you’re tall and you spend half the week pumping yourself up on the Cybex machines. That’s what makes me laugh, all these guys—”

Goddamn Greg. “ANOTHER THING IS IF YOU START SOME CLUB—” said Adam, but Greg was not one to let himself get walked over.

“—who go around campus walking like this.” He stood up and started—

“—THE ADMINISTRATION APPROVES OF—”

The others were laughing—and ignoring him. Greg was walking across the floor with his thighs straddled and his chin pulled down and his trapezius muscles flexed up, to make his neck look bigger—“as if they’re, you know, like so…hung…they can’t get their legs any closer together—”

“—LIKE SOME ENVIRONMENTAL—” It was no use. Fucking Greg had the floor, and the others found him so amusing…laughter laughter laughter. Well, he, Adam, had held the floor for a good stretch, and he, Adam, had established the basic concept of cool, the theory of confidence. Although he hadn’t dared look at Charlotte for more than an instant at a time, she had been…engrossed…so he chanced a glance now. She was engrossed, all right, but with Greg’s stupid act, smiling and chuckling—

—and then she spoke up! To Greg! “You know Jojo Johanssen? He’s on the basketball team? He walks just like that except he also sneaks looks at himself in reflections in the windows? And he straightens his arm…like this?—and all these things pop out back here.” She put her hand on the triceps of her straight arm.