“Victor Hugo? I didn’t even know he wrote poetry.”

“See? Now I know something you don’t!” He stared straight into Charlotte’s eyes. “But you gotta help me! If you don’t, I’m fuh—I’m screwed.”

“Help you how, Jojo?”

“I passed the Age of Socrates, and nobody thought I could do it,” said Jojo. “Now, if I can do okay in real French and this other philosophy course I’m taking this semester—I didn’t tell you about that—Religion and the Decline of Magic in the Seventeenth Century—yeah!—if I do okay in that too, the bastards’ll have to have microprocessors instead a hearts not to give me a break on this other thing. You know?”

Monotonously: “Help you how, Jojo?”

Jojo said, “Well, the way I figure it is, you know French. The way you were reading that book in Mr. Lewin’s class that time—I can’t remember the name of the book—I mean, people were looking around at each other—”

“Madame Bovary,” said Charlotte.

“Yeah! That’s the one. If you hadn’t said what you said that time, I’d still be—what did you call it?—‘playing the fool.’ That’s what you said, playing the fool. You know that stuff. So I figured the only way I can save my—save myself is if I take a tape recorder to class, and then I come back and you tell me what she said. Maybe you could help me with some of the poetry? I mean, I can do it…but you know metaphors and all that stuff? Sometimes it’s…you know…hard.”

Charlotte said, “You know what they call people who will do that for you?”

Jojo, tonelessly distrustful: “No. What.”

“Tutors.”

“No!” said Jojo. “I told you! I’m finished with all that stuff! I’m going—” And Jojo was off on an explanation of why if Charlotte helped him, it would be different…

Out of the corner of her eye she spotted Lucy Page Tucker and Gloria coming into Mr. Rayon. They were bound to come close to the table if they headed for the cafeteria rails, and the positioning was perfect. First they would see Jojo, who was more or less facing them. Then their curiosity would get the better of them. They’d be dying to know who the girl was. Charlotte wasn’t really following what Jojo was saying, but she figured she knew the gist of it. As soon as his lips stopped moving, she lifted her chin and put on a smile of abnormal animation and coquettishness and said, “Oh, Jojo, Jojo, what makes you think I”—she lowered her head, brought the fingers of one hand up to the middle of her chest, opened her eyes wide, and looked up at Jojo—“know enough French to be a tutor?”

“That’s what I just got through telling you!” said Jojo, also with great animation. “You’re a lot more than a tutor…to me…You’re the girl who turned me around! You were the only person who had the guts to stand up to me and tell me the truth! I thought I was cool…and all the time I was playing the fool. You’re the one who…inspired me.” Now he was leaning way toward her…giving her a look of…significance. Before she knew it, he had taken her hand in both of his. Charlotte instinctively cut a glance to the left and to the right. Lucy Page Tucker and Gloria—they had both taken trays at the Italian section and were looking back at her. Charlotte, fixing her gaze upon Jojo, manufactured the merriest of laughs and withdrew her hand from his. And the two witches—they couldn’t have helped but get an eyeful of it.

“What’s so funny?” Jojo wanted to know.

“Nothing,” said Charlotte. “I was just thinking of the look on a lot of people’s faces when they find out you’ve really become a student.”

Jojo smiled for a moment, then became very serious and once more gave her the look that said he wanted to pour his whole soul into her through her optic chiasma. “Charlotte, I think you know—I hope you know—there’s no way you could just be a tutor to me.”

Charlotte. Interesting. It was the first time he had said her name in the entire conversation. And that look…soulful was the word…

In reply, Charlotte gave him a smile of sympathetic understanding, which was quite different—and she meant it to be—from a smile of excitement, joy, or tenderness, much less love. In that same moment she cut another glance toward the Italian section rails to see if perhaps…they…Still there! They had only moved a few feet along the cafeteria rails. She didn’t have time to study their faces to see if they were still looking at her, because Jojo was off on another speech and pouring more soul into her eyes.

“It ain’t—id’n just the academic stuff, Charlotte.” Charlotte; check, check. “I don’t know if you know it or not, but you’ve showed me like a…I don’t wanna get all—you know…but you’ve showed me a new way to like…” He threw his enormous body into it, the struggle to deliver this speech fluently, twisting this way and that, as if to give his brain momentum, and shaping a large lump of invisible clay with his hands. “…like…you know…think about things…being at Dupont and everything…and it’s not enough to just do things with a round orange ball…and what a…relationship is, or oughta be…I’m not very good at saying all this—but you know what I’m saying…”

Charlotte maintained her benign smile. She sure hoped Lucy Page and Gloria got a load of Jojo’s anxious body language.

Greg and Adam were the only ones left in the office at the Wave.

“I’m telling you,” said Adam, “you’ll be the biggest fucking editor in the country, Greg! You’ll be publishing the dynamite of all dynamite! This thing is fireproof! It’s locked down! We’ve got two lawyers from Dunning Sponget and Leach, Greg—Dunning Sponget and Leach!—who’ve vetted it and given the thumbs-up!—it’s fireproof!—it’s libel-proof!—you’ll be the hottest editor who ever worked on a college newspaper and went straight to The New York Times! Now that’s Millennial Mutant stuff, Greg! We’re always talking about public intellectuals and shit—public intellectual is fucking looking at you in the mirror! Carpe diem, dude!”

Pause…Pause…“Now, who was the last guy we talked to at Dunning Sponget—the old guy, Button, or—”

I think the Fearless Editor’s getting over the shakes, Adam said to himself. At least something’s going right.

31. To Be a Man

Come on in, Mr. Gellin,” said Mr. Quat, a ball of fat in a sweater and T-shirt, tilting himself way back in a glorious sprawl in the swivel chair behind his desk. He swept one fat arm up in the air in a beckoning gesture grand enough for a…a…Adam didn’t know what it reminded him of—a pasha?—but he didn’t have the capacity to pursue the comparison, not the way his heart was pounding pounding pounding pounding him on on on on into doing…whatever he was doing here in Mr. Quat’s office.

Was he kidding himself? He knew what he was doing. Otherwise, this was the last place he would be likely to show up. It was just that he wanted to leave himself room…to change his mind and bail out at the last minute.

Like most professors’ offices at Dupont, this one was small, old-fashioned—dark wooden furniture, dark wooden cornices, a pair of tall double-hung windows side by side—but Mr. Quat’s walls were lurid with posters…from the 1960s, if Adam knew anything about it…a poster of Bob Dylan, rendered so that his hair looked like a conglomeration of hair extensions dyed different hot pastels…a poster full of swirly lines and swirly lettering advertising the Grateful Dead…a poster with a cobra, proclaiming the martial might of something called the Symbionese Liberation Army—

“So?” said Mr. Quat. “You like my posters?”

“Yes, sir,” said Adam. Nerves popped the words out an octave too high. He cleared his throat.

“You know what they are?”

“No, sir. From the 1960s?”

“Ah! So you do know your ancient history, Mr. Gellin,” Mr. Quat said. He smiled the smile of a man who has known the score for a long time.

The pasha. Maybe the word was pasha because pasha made Adam think of a smug fat man. The same old ratty gray V-neck sweater with a T-shirt visible in the V—or it looked like the same one he wore to Stand Up Straight for Gay Day—hugged Mr. Quat’s rolls of fat, which sagged and otherwise changed shape every time he moved. They were bobbing like gelatin at this moment, in fact, as he made another grand, sweeping gesture toward a chair on the other side of the desk, a library chair, the wooden kind with stout arms and a low, curved back. “Go ahead, Mr. Gellin, have a seat.”