Hawhawhaw. Greg was delighted, of course, and Randy, Roger, and Edgar joined in the merriment, and Charlotte was mighty pleased with herself. Her implied approval of Greg’s puerile form of humor bothered Adam, but there was something else as well. He had never seen Charlotte make fun of anybody before. Somehow this was an opening breach in her purity, her innocence. He didn’t want her to be like other people, mocking, cutting, cynical, even though he didn’t hesitate to be that way himself. But Charlotte was different. She had a different order of intelligence and charm.

“I thought you liked Jojo,” he said. It was actually a reprimand.

“I do like him,” said Charlotte. “I can comment on the way he walks and still like him, can’t I?”

“Yeah, what’s the matter with you, Adam?” said Randy. “You know Jojo. You’re not saying Charlotte’s wrong, are you? I’ve noticed that you have the occasional comment about Jojo, and I wouldn’t exactly characterize them as flattering, and you’re his tutor.”

Adam shook his head with exasperation. Somehow he couldn’t stand Randy’s referring to her as “Charlotte” that way, as if she was theirs, too, now.

“Adam Gellin and the mouths of babes,” said Camille.

So she knew exactly what he was thinking…He wondered if everything he felt about Charlotte was obvious.

He had no way of knowing it, but he was filled—suffused—with a love for a woman that only a virgin could feel. In his eyes she was more than flesh and blood and more than spirit. She was…an essence…an essence of life that remained tactile and alive—his loins certainly remained alive at this moment, welling up beneath his tighty-whiteys—and yet a…a…a universal solvent that penetrated his very hide and commandeered his entire nervous system from his brain to the tiniest nerve endings. If he could only embrace her—and find that she had been dying for him to do just that—she, her tactile essence, would come flooding into every cell, into all the billion miles of spooled DNA—he couldn’t imagine a unit of his body so minute that she would not suffuse it—and they would…explode their virginities in a single sublime ineffable yet neurological, all too neurological, moment! They would—

“—the flip side of it, Adam? Does that mean it’s cool for athletes to do that?”

Pop. It was Edgar. Edgar had just asked him a question—about what? His mind spun.

“Except for athletes!” said Greg. Dependable old Greggo—immediately taking advantage of his lapse in attention in order to leap back into the ring.

“What do you mean, except for athletes?” said Edgar.

“Treyshawn Diggs does good works,” said Greg. “Or they show pictures of him in the newspaper, and he’s down in ‘the ghetto’ helping ‘the youth’—and as long as it’s him, that’s cool.”

“What’s wrong with that?” said Camille.

“There’s nothing wrong with it—”

“Then why are you saying”—she mugged a prissy expression and minced out the words—“the ghetto and the youth?”

“Stop breaking my…scones, Camille. All I’m saying is that if you’re a sports star, you can act enthusiastic about some charity and still be cool, because you’re precertified macho, and in that case you can show your tender side—like feminine side. Somebody like Tower, it even makes him look more macho by contrast.”

“Okay, I’ll grant you that,” said Edgar, “but first you’ve got to be a big athlete.”

“Yeah,” said Greg. “Or else you’ve got to have—”

Adam glanced at Charlotte. She was looking from Edgar to Greg and from Greg to Edgar. She was absorbed in what they were saying. The urge overcame him. Got to break back in—

But Greg beat him to the punch: “I’d describe cool in an entirely different way. I’d say cool is…”

At this point Greg made the mistake of rolling his eyes up and hesitating as he searched for le mot juste—

—and Adam slipped in a counterpunch: “Includes nobody at this table”—as if he were finishing Greg’s sentence for him. He sped up and raised his voice before Greg could recover: “I MEAN, FACE IT. BY OUR OWN DEFINITION—MILLENNIAL MUTANTS—we’re flaunting our enthusiasm for academics. We’re all out to get Rhodes scholarships—”

“Oh ho—the boy bleeds ego!” said Greg.

“DON’T GIVE ME THAT SHIT, GREG! Are you really gonna sit there and pretend—I mean, this is me you’re talking to and a table full of self-professed Millennial Mutants!”

“There’s goals, and there’s bleeding fucking egos, and yours—”

“Oh, shut the fuck up,” said Camille. “You guys are giving me a pain in the crank.”

“The crank?” said Randy Grossman with a whoop of delight. “Please, Madame Deng, be so kind as to show us your crank!”

“You wouldn’t know what it was if you saw it,” said Camille. It was a snarl.

Randy’s face, which he had lifted in majestic hauteur when he came out of the closet six months ago, fell and turned red. His eyelids were brimming with tears. In a low, hoarse, beaten voice he said, “I never expected that—from you, Camille.”

So womanish! thought Adam. He immediately hated himself for the thought. After all, coming out wasn’t like switching a light, probably. There must be a painful period during which someone like Randy remains terribly sensitive. But he looked like a woman, all the same. He looked like Adam’s mother, like Frankie, on the brink of one of her crying jags after his father informed her that she hadn’t “grown.” Adam felt guilty all over again.

But not Camille. “The fuck, Randy? Suck it up, Randy. I didn’t say cunt, I said crank.”

Randy averted his eyes, turned his anguished face away, covered his eyes with his hand, and started pouting.

“Come on, Randy,” said Edgar solicitously, “Camille said crank. She was joking. Who would know what a crank was, even if they saw one? I wouldn’t.”

After that, the weekly meeting of the Millennial Mutants deteriorated rapidly. Adam kept glancing at Charlotte. She was obviously fascinated by the whole thing. Her eyes jumped from one combatant to the other. Adam was not fascinated. He was no longer even thinking about Randy and Camille—or not in the sense of Randy versus Camille. He, if not they, had put it behind him and moved on to another question entirely. How had he performed in her eyes—Charlotte’s? Was she saying to herself, He’s weak. He let Greg break in and ram his own point about the Rhodes scholarship competition right down his throat…and then just sat there like a dummy and let Camille and Randy take the conversation off on a whole other tangent about pariahism. Or would that be more than offset by the fact that it was he who had actually defined cool. It was he who had developed the concepts of confidence, defensiveness, the suppression of enthusiasm for anything or masking of enthusiasm for anything adults might want to pat you on the head for—

He kept torturing himself with Doubt, swinging back and forth from the positive to the negative. Had she shown any signs at all of becoming comfortable with the Mutants? She was fascinated by the whole Mutant mission in an intellectually barren era, wasn’t she—but what was she to make of Randy or Camille? The evening died a whimpering death, and Edgar drove them back through the City of God and to the campus in his Armor My Baby tank, the Denali.

Adam insisted on walking Charlotte back to Little Yard, and she was glad. She felt euphoric. She had just been witness to the sort of conversation she had just known Dupont would be thriving with—back when Dupont was an…El Dorado, a glow, a vague but glorious destination on the other side of the mountains. The Millennial Mutants didn’t just use this word cool like everybody else at Dupont, they analyzed it and broke it down into…to…to intellectual components that would never even occur to indisputably cool guys such as the Saint Ray house was full of, such as Hoyt himself first and foremost…while the Mutants were openly, brazenly, proudly uncool…