—he didn’t complete the line. What he saw in front of the entrance to Mr. Rayon was too strange. It was cold as hell out here, but there was a regular hive of students, twenty of them at least. Their heads were lowered, and they were silent…save for the random chortle by some guy or screamlet of laughter by some girl. What the fuck were they doing? Then he saw the newspapers. They had newspapers in their hands, poring over them…outside in the cold. A few others were rooting like maggots to get to one of those metal newspaper boxes with windows that were out front of Mr. Rayon. It was a taxicab-yellow box…That would be the Wave…A bunch of students standing out here riveted by the school newspaper? That was mega-weird.
Hoyt joined the throng. A girl piped up with one of those high-pitched shrieks you usually hear at parties. Guys were beginning to make comments. They were so excited, they were taking the Fuck Patois over the top.
“This fucking stuff is…too—fucking—much!”
“—fucking student! The fuck you talking about?”
“Where’s Jeff? Where’d he fucking go? I think he fucking knows this guy—”
“—didn’t know they could print ‘fuck’ in the fucking paper!”
“—opera house. Same fucking family!”
“—fucking name? I don’t know—Horatio Fucking Fellatio.”
“—same fucking one! I was fucking here!”
“—blow job! I don’t fucking believe this!”
Blow job? Hoyt felt like his brain was flushing. He began doing some accidentally-on-purpose body checks in a bid to get to the yellow box before the newspapers were all gone. “Sorry! Coming through! Gotta restock!” he said as he swung his left leg in front of the right leg of a guy slightly ahead of him, a guy in some kind of old military jacket with ghost shapes where chevrons and other insignia had been removed. Hoyt figured the cool authority of his seriously awesome topcoat would intimidate half of them. But the guy with the ghost jacket was stubborn. He gave Hoyt an accidentally-on-purpose shove with his hip. Hoyt battled back by accidentally extending the range of his left calf across the stubborn guy’s right shin on purpose. That made Hoyt turn slightly—and he saw a girl, a pretty girl, with that Norwegian look—straight, shiny blond hair a mile long and parted right down the middle—staring at him with big eyes. She nudged another girl, a dog, and they both stared at him. Then the mouth of the hot one—gorgeous!—he loved that Norwegian look, the blond hair, the bright blue eyes, the fine bones of the face, the rolls in the snow, naked, and then into the sauna, naked—her mouth fell open, her eyes widened. She gave him a stare that all but ate him up for two seconds, three seconds—and then she said, “Ohmygod…Ohmygod…aren’t you—you’re him! You’re Hoyt Thorpe!”
Unable right off the bat to think of any other cool response, Hoyt gave her his most charming get-something-going smile and said, “That is true. Had lunch yet?”
All at once, innumerable eyes were pinned on him. A general buzz swept the crowd. Bango! The students were in a circle around him, as if beamed there by intergalactic voyagers. A guy standing right in front of Hoyt, near the concupiscent Scandinavian blonde, a tall Chem-geeky-looking guy, with a long neck and an Adam’s apple the size of a gourd, said, “Awesome, dude! Did you really say to the guy, ‘You’re an ape-faced dick—’” He broke it off and turned to a guy with a newspaper standing right beside him. “Wait a minute, How’s it go? It’s better than that.”
Hoyt closed one eye and opened his mouth on that side, as if to say, “I don’t know what he’s talking about.”
The blonde, the fjewel of the fjords, had a newspaper folded over once, twice, in her hand. “Come on. You haven’t seen this?”
Hoyt shook his head no—but slowly, which is to say, coolly.
The girl unfurled the newspaper and held the front page up right in front of him. There was the biggest headline he had ever seen on a newspaper. Eleven fat white letters on a black band four inches deep stretched across the entire width of the page beneath the logo: WHAT ORAL SEX? Underneath that on the right-hand side:
POL BRIBES CHARLIE WHO
SAW HIS GROVE SEX CAPER
Underneath that, a smaller headline:
FRAT BOY WILL GET
$95K WALL ST. JOB
FOR “MEMORY LOSS”
Underneath that: “By Adam Gellin.”
Underneath that, a swath of paragraphs printed two columns wide ran to the bottom of the page, where a notation said, “See BRIBE, pages 4, 5, 6, 7.”
“Governor of California”…“Republican nomination”…“paid off Dupont senior”…“coed”…“of oral sex”…Hoyt’s eyes were in too much of a rush to do anything more than scan the first paragraph of the story. The left side of the page was pulling them like an imaging magnet. Other than the headlines, the byline, and the few inches of type, the entire front page consisted of a photograph of a guy. He was in the foreground, coming out of the I.M. with, slightly behind him, a little blond cutie-pie who, even though it was fiercely cold and she was wearing a bomber jacket and jeans, still managed to show a swath of bare belly. The guy, the guy front and center—he was one…awesome…dude…the boots, the Abercrombie & Fitch creaseless khakis, what you could see of them…the shirt open at the throat…and the coolest, longest single-breasted navy melton-cloth topcoat that ever turned up in a photograph…It made the guy look eight feet tall, slender, cool, and Serious Business. Out of the rakishly turned-up collar of the awesome overcoat rose a white, thick, dense neck—well, wide enough, thick enough, and dense enough, in any event—and a face—Hoyt couldn’t keep his eyes off that face—a face with wide square jaws, a chin cleft perfectly—guy looked like a combination of Cary Grant and Hugh Grant with a lighter, thatchier, thicker, cooler head of hair than either one of them—cooler because it had no part. There was a slight sneer on the lips, the sneer that says, “I’m money, baby, and you’re all fucked up”—a sneer, and maybe people don’t like to see a guy sneering, but this was one…cool…awesome…sneer, cool as sneers will ever get. Before the heavy-duty machinery of his brain could even gear up to figure out what this whole goddamn thing might mean, Hoyt thought of three people: himself, Rachel, the Pierce & Pierce succuba of the dream i-bank job; himself; that little nerdy, devious, cowardly, backstabbing, rat-faced weasel, Adam Whateverthefuckhisnameis; himself, himself, and himself. Even the subrational himself sensed trouble on the right-hand side of the page somewhere in all that big type. But that picture—that picture! Could any college boy ever look better than that?
It was now one o’clock in the afternoon, and Charlotte was going to some lengths to keep from admitting to herself that after fourteen hours, next to no sleep, one slice of stale whole wheat bread with jelly, a couple of sips of orange juice turning bad, and a patient with insatiable psychological demands, she was good and tired of being Millennial Mutant Adam Gellin’s nurse. She was also growing resentful, which she didn’t try to keep herself from knowing. For him, out of a sense of obligation, she had blown off two classes this morning, one of them being her history course for the new semester, The Renaissance and the Rise of Nationalism. That was sure a great start, wasn’t it—after the debacle of her academic collapse last semester. What was worse, in a way, was the fact that blowing it off no longer created in her the same sense of guilt and despair she had felt back in October when she first overslept a class after playing shepherd for a blitzed Beverly half the night. That she was aware of very clearly. Then there was the horrible Monday morning following the formal, when she as good as overslept—“as good as,” hah!—“worse than overslept” was more like it—and wound up sitting through the last half of her modern drama class a clumsy, sweating, panting, disheveled little fool, an object of ridicule for her classmates and an object of scorn for the T.A., who all but buried her final grade.