He went away smiling, but Jojo kept his straight face on tight. He didn’t dare gloat. Inside, he was elated. Approval and perhaps admiration by a black player who was as cool as they come!

Play resumed, and Jojo breathed easier. The Shirts had switched Cantrell over to guard him, and Charles was sent over to guard the Skins’ other forward, Curtis Jones, who liked to slash through the big guys inside and go to the hole. They let the swimmie guard André Walker. Cantrell gave Jojo a battle, but he was respectful about it, and so Jojo was content to stick to Coach’s game plan, which was for him to set up picks, block shots, rebound, and feed the ball to Treyshawn and the other scoring machines.

As the game wore on, Jojo began to hear more bursts of cheering and applause. It was as if his TKO of Congers had turned the crowd on. He’d hear people singing out names: “Treyshawn!”…“André!”…“You the man, Curtis!”…Somebody yelled, “Go go, Jojo!”—a familiar cry here at the Buster Bowl when the season was on. During a break in the game, Jojo checked out the stands. Thousands! Part of the charade of the “pickup game” was to leave the doors to the arena open and let anybody wander in. But who were these people? University employees? People from town? Where did they come from? How did they know? They were like those gawkers who seem to—bango!—rise up from out of the concrete and asphalt wherever there’s a car wreck or a street brawl. Now they had materialized by the thousands in the Buster Bowl to watch a game of Shirts and Skins in the middle of the afternoon. The young gods of basketball. Ranked first in the country last season, the fifth Buster Roth Dupont team to reach the Title Two in his fourteen years here…three national championships…nine teams in the Final Four. What an extraordinary elevation Jojo Johanssen dwelled upon! How far above the great mass of humanity his talent and fighting spirit had already taken him! Oh, he knew who some of the people in the stands were, the usual, inevitable, freelance groupies, for example. But sometimes scouts from…the League…would materialize, scouts and agents…looking for a piece of those who might reach the League and make millions…tens of millions…But then Vernon Congers popped into his head, and he lost heart. Congers hadn’t vanished from his life, he was merely off the court…

During the breaks, Mike kept drifting over to the stands and chatting up this girl with a storm of blond hair sitting in the first row. You couldn’t miss her. Her hair was very curly but very long. It gave her a wild look.

Jojo said, “Like what you see over there, Mike?”

“You know me. I’m always friendly with the fans.”

“Who is she?”

“She’s a senior. She’s doing something with freshman orientation. All the freshmen come in tomorrow for orientation.”

“You know her?”

“No.”

“You know her name?”

“No. I know what she looks like.”

Freshman orientation. Jojo had never gone through freshman orientation, because basketball recruits were exempt from things like that. They barely saw nonathlete students except in the form of groupies, fawning admirers or students who happened to be in the same classes they were. If you played basketball for Buster Roth, you got your freshman orientation on the court. Well…one freshman got his orientation just now. That was the last time Vernon Congers was going to Yo! Tree! Jojo Johanssen…He lost heart again. Maybe it was only going to get the kid more fired up.

Finally Coach signaled from way up there in the stands that practice was over, and the Shirts and Skins left the court. The fans descended from the stands in a pell-mell rush and thronged the players. So easy! No security guards to impede their worship! They could touch them! Jojo was surrounded. He was mainly aware of the crop of ballpoint pens and notebooks, notepads, cards, pieces of paper—one hoople held up the ripped-off corner of a cardboard NO SMOKING sign—thrust up toward him…by the little people way down there. Nearby, a fan kept yelling, “Great give-and-go, Cantrell! Great give-and-go, Cantrell!” As if Cantrell Gwathmey had the faintest interest in some hoople’s learned analysis of his play. Jojo kept walking slowly toward the locker room as he signed autographs, carrying a great buzzing hive of fans with him. There were a couple of obvious groupies, their bosoms jacked up by trick bras, who kept smiling and saying “Jojo! Jojo!” and searching his eyes for a look deeper than the ones he gave to ordinary fans. Over there was Mike. Being a second-stringer, he didn’t attract a real hive, but he sure had attracted the blonde with all the wild curly hair. She was giving him that same groupie grin, searching his eyes for a look loaded with meaning profound. As usual Treyshawn had the biggest hive of all. Jojo could hear him saying, “No problem, Sugar,” his slacker-cool way of saying “You’re welcome” to girls who thanked him for his autograph. To Treyshawn, all females, any age, any color, were named Sugar. Consciously, the players regarded this hiving as a tedious fate that befell them as part of their duty as public eminences. Unconsciously, however, it had become an addiction. If the day should come when the hives disappeared and they were just a group of boys walking off a basketball court, they would feel empty, deflated, thirsty, and threatened. By the same token, bored and irked by it all as they were, somehow they never failed to notice which player attracted the biggest hive. In fact, any of them could have ranked hive sizes, player by player, with startling accuracy.

“Vernon!”

“Yo! Vernon!”

“Vernon—over here!”

With a chilling realization Jojo looked…over there. They—fans—groupies—university groundskeepers—were all over Vernon Congers, and he had yet to play in a single game for Dupont or anyone else at the Division I level! Congers probably struck them as a good-looking guy, assuming they could stomach the cornrows and dreads. That was it, nothing more than looks. Of course, he had gotten a lot of pub due to speculation last spring that, as one of the hottest high school prospects in the country, he might skip college and go straight to the pros. That was it, nothing more than pub. That was it…and yet there it was. The young shit-talking hot dog already had one hell of a hive.

Finally the young gods reached the locker room.

“Know’m saying?

Fucking gray boy say, ‘Yo, you a beast.’

I take my piece, yo, stick it up yo’ face.

Yo li’l dickie shaking, it won’t cease

Faking you got heart. You ain’t got shit, yo.

Know’m saying?”

Rap music by Doctor Dis was kicking and screaming from one end of the room to the other. Rap of some sort was always kicking and screaming from one end of the room to the other. Thanks to a nonaphonic wraparound sound system, there was no getting away from it, not in this locker room, where black giants ruled. The team captain always got to choose the CDs on the loop. Charles, who was a senior, was the captain this year, even though he was no longer a starter. Nobody was cooler than Charles. No one commanded more respect. In Jojo’s opinion, Charles was totally cynical about the music. If most of the boys wanted rap, he’d give them rap…the most rebellious, offensive, vile, obnoxious rap available on CDs. Curtis swore he had seen Charles coming out of Phipps one night after a Duke Ellington and George Gershwin concert by some white symphony orchestra from Cleveland. He said he knew for a fact that was the kind of shit Charles really liked. Nevertheless, Doctor Dis was who Charles had chosen for the locker room. Doctor Dis was so sociopathic and generally disgusting, Jojo had the suspicion that Doctor Dis himself was a cynic who created this stuff as a parody of the genre. He’d stick in words like “beast” and “cease,” words more than half the Dupont national basketball champions had never uttered in their lives. At this very moment, in fact, the Doctor was singing?—saying?—