Camille was elbowing her way to the great man with typical Deng doggedness. Adam stayed on her heels, even elbowed his way past an odd body or two the way she did. He put his hand on her shoulder. She spun about angrily but then saw who it was.

“He’s awesome!” he said to Camille. “He’s the Man! I never heard him speak before! I gotta meet him!”

“I’ll introduce you!” said Camille. “He’s the only one with any fucking guts!”

When she reached Quat, she raised her hand to give him a high five, and he slapped her palm with gusto. “Mr. Quat, you’re the only straight professor on the whole fucking faculty with any fucking guts!”

Far from being taken aback, Quat threw an arm around her, squeezed her to him and said, “It’s Jerry, Camille…Jerry. You’re the one with guts! The way you sent that bunch of frat boys packing—that was golden!”

They proceeded to do quite a duet in that fashion before Camille was aware Adam was planted right in front of them, barely thirty inches away.

“Mr. Quat—”

“Jerry.”

“—this is my friend Adam Gellin.”

“Adam Gellin…,” said Quat, as if ruminating…

“I told you about the Millennial Mutants?” said Camille. “Adam’s one of us. There’s supposed to be all these liberal straight guys who are going to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Fist? A lot of them are going to—but they’re dicks—”

“ ‘Dicks’? Camille, I love you, kid!” said Quat with a great chortle.

“—and they don’t show, but Adam did. He was right down there in front of the podium with a placard.”

Quat shook hands with Adam and began ruminating again. “Adam Gellin…Why do I know your name? Just the other day…”

“Adam writes for the Wave,” said Camille. “He wrote the story about the trustees and their Buddy Club. You see that?”

“Everybody saw that! Congratulations,” he said to Adam. “The way you made those pompous—but that isn’t what I was thinking about…It was something else…It was just the other day, too…”

Adam took a deep breath—and held it. Odds…evens. Acey-deucey…He thought of Charlotte…waiting for him. Damn it! This time he wasn’t going to let himself be frozen with timidity.

“Mr. Quat,” he said, “I think I can tell you why. Until recently I was a tutor for the Athletic Department. I was the tutor for Jojo Johanssen.”

He pursed his lips and stared straight into Quat’s eyes. He tried to resist swallowing, but he couldn’t. He’d said it—and now he was in play.

Quat didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he began nodding his head. “Ahhh,” he said. “I see.” More nodding.

He seemed as unsure of what was happening as Adam did.

Later that afternoon Adam opened his cell phone with such a feeling of elation that it even dispelled—for the moment—his fear of the Quat situation. He immediately called Greg at the Wave.

After keeping him hanging—for about five minutes, it felt like—Greg came on the phone and said, testily, “What is it, Adam? We’re on deadline here.”

“This’ll take two seconds,” said Adam. “You know the Skull Fuck story?”

“Holy shit, Adam!” said Greg. “How many times—”

“Just one thing, Greg, just one thing. I’ve got the angle! This makes it news! I just got off the phone with a source deep…deep…within the Saint Ray house. Hoyt Thorpe just took a bribe from the governor of California to keep quiet about the Skull Fuck story. And just thirty minutes before this call I got a call from Thorpe saying he’s changed his mind, and we can’t run the story. A bribe, Greg! A Dupont student gets fucking bribed by the likely Republican nominee for president!…Greg…Are you there?”

Finally, wearily, Greg said, “Yeah. I’m here.”

“Greg, this source is ironclad. We’re talking iron-fucking-clad.”

Adam assumed a role completely foreign to him. He became Charlotte’s “bad” camp counselor, the one who couldn’t care less about being known as “a good guy,” the one who insists that the campers not only obey the rules but also realize that the rules have the force of righteousness, which is to say God, behind them.

Charlotte was like many another depressed girl before her. Come the dawn she would still be wide-awake, all too alert, all too alarmed by the thought of having to get out of bed. There was the drag of inertia and the fatigue of insomnia and, worse than either, fear. The insomniac’s period of sleep, whether she falls asleep or not, is like Charlotte’s eight-hour, nine-hour, ten-hour interstate bus ride. In that period she has no duties, no obligations, no responsibilities, no one to confront, because there is no one to confront. She has official permission from God to take care of nothing for the duration.

The morning of Charlotte’s modern drama exam was the worst. Adam had set the alarm for eight, because the exam was at nine-thirty and he intended to make sure she took a shower, yes, in the hall bathroom, and did her hair, and dressed neatly. The alarm went off, and Charlotte didn’t budge, even though she was clearly not asleep. She responded to Adam’s exhortations with indecipherable grunts. He climbed over her and got up and turned off the alarm. She lay there the next thing to comatose; her eyes were open, but the lights were not on.

“Damn it, Charlotte!” said Adam. He stood before her in T-shirt and boxer shorts, elbows akimbo. “I’ve gone to a lot of trouble for you! I didn’t want to get up at eight, either, but I did. And you’re going to, too. You’ve got an exam ninety minutes from now, and you’re going to take that exam, and you’re going to arrive at that classroom looking like a person who cares about herself, and you’re going to eat enough to provide enough blood sugar to be able to concentrate on that exam. So let’s…hop—to it!”

Charlotte didn’t move a muscle, but her lights turned on dimly. In a tiny, groggy voice she said, “What difference does it make? I stay here, I go there…either way I get an F.” With that, she moved a muscle, two muscles, in fact, the frontalis muscles, which enable a girl to lift her eyebrows in a shrugging manner.

“Oh, really?” said Adam. “Now, why is that? And please provide some pity for yourself in your answer.”

The little voice said, “It has nothing to do with self-pity. Mr. Gilman is absolutely—I don’t think the way he does. I can’t think the way he does. He thinks this poor all-messed-up little woman, this ‘performance artist,’ Melanie Nethers, is the most important thing there is in modern drama. Shaw, Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, they’re all passé? They’re not cool? He thinks ‘cool’ is a concept? What am I supposed to—”

Adam wouldn’t let her finish. Gesturing at her inert, horizontal form with both hands, he said, “Charlotte—this is not right!”

“It’s not a matter of—”

“It’s simply not right! Do you hear me?”

“Whether it’s right—”

“You can’t just blow off a final exam! Who do you think you are? How dare you be so thoughtless?”

“Well, the plain truth is—”

“You have no idea what the plain truth is!” This time Adam clenched his teeth and gestured at her with both hands, fingers curled as if they had claws on the tips. “WHAT YOU’RE DOING IS PLAIN WRONG! YOU’RE THROWING AWAY A GREAT MIND AND A GREAT OPPORTUNITY! WHO GAVE YOU THE RIGHT TO DO SUCH A THING! WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?”

“I think—”

“THIS IS NOT RIGHT!”

“I—”

“GET UP! GET UP! THIS IS NOT RIGHT, YOU JUST LYING HERE LIKE THIS!”

“Will you—”

“NO! I WON’T! THIS IS NOT RIGHT! IT’S WRONG!”

“Will you let—”

“NO! I WON’T! WE’RE ON THE EDGE OF A KNIFE HERE AND WE’VE GOTTA JUMP ONE WAY OR THE OTHER, THE RIGHT SIDE OR THE WRONG SIDE! THERE’S NO MEDIAN STRIP!”

Something about Adam’s avalanche of implacably moral stuff got to her, resonated with some of Christ’s Evangelic creed she had brought to Dupont without meaning to, sewn, as it were, into the very lining of her clothes. There was also, unbeknownst to either of them consciously, a woman’s thrill!—that’s the word for it!—her delicious thrill!—when, as before, a man expands his chest and drapes it with the sash of righteousness and…takes command!…upon the Heights of Abraham.