“I know, Momma.”

“Do you?…’Deed I do hope so.”

“I’m sorry, Momma.”

“Sorry don’t change a thing, darling. Never did, never will.”

Long pause. “I love you, Momma.” The last and lowest resort of the sinner.

“I love you, Charlotte, and so does your daddy and Buddy and Sam. And Aunt Betty…and Miss Pennington. You got a lot of folks you don’t want to be letting down.”

After they hung up, Charlotte sat stricken in her wooden chair, too empty to cry. She had thought it would be a relief to “get it over with.” It wasn’t a relief, and she had gotten nothing over with. She was an ungrateful coward and a liar. What she had accomplished was to egest a putrid, obvious lie.

She had even sunk so low as to pass off Adam Gellin, perhaps soon to be on television, as her boyfriend. Such a lie, such a lie, and to what earthly end? Momma wasn’t stupid. She hadn’t believed a word of it. All she found out for sure was that her little prodigy was, for some no doubt vile reason, a little liar.

“I probably shouldn’t be calling you, but I just had to tell you: you’re awesom, dude, awesome.” As the words came through the receiver of his cell phone, Adam purred. He had been purring a lot this morning. Calls! E-mails!—like a thousand e-mails! Letters slipped under the door! Even a couple of FedExes! He was high, high in the best way a human being could be high, high with the triumph…and high with vengeance satisfied, paid in full. Even this shithole he lived in…glowed as he looked about it, glowed like some…well, holy place…

Nevertheless, this particular call was special. He owed this guy…a lot.

“Thanks, Ivy,” he said into the cell phone. “That means a lot to me, coming from you. I couldn’t have—”

“What’s better than ‘awesome’?” said the exuberant voice. “ ‘Dynamite’ maybe? It was fucking dynamite, dude! Mission Ayyyy-complished. I wish you could come over and see the sonofabitch dragging his rotten fucking ass around this place. He hasn’t said a word about it, as far as I know, but body language says it all. That fucker’s gotten some baaaaaaad news.”

“You’re the one who’s dynamite, Ivy,” said Adam. “I gotta run off to this fucking press conference pretty soon, but I gotta ask you again, because I’ve racked my fucking brain, and I just—cannot—figure—out—how you got those documents from Pierce and Pierce and those tapes from your house there. How did you?”

The voice laughed heartily. “Some things it’s better you—especially you—don’t know. You know what I mean? Let’s just say there’s certain…friends of the family…who used to work at Gordon Hanley and have moved along to…let us say, other investment banks and who’ve—well, let’s just leave it at that. As for the tapes…let’s just say that most Saint Rays are above working with their hands and fooling around with wiring and shit, but every now and then, I guess, somebody comes along who—who—and I think I’ll leave that…at that. Do yourself a favor. Forget I even told you that much.”

“Look, Ivy,” said Adam, “I really do have to run, but we’ve got to get together sometime and let each other in on the complete war stories.”

“Great idea,” said Ivy. “Once all this shit blows over. I tell you what. I’ll take you to dinner some night at Il Babuino in Philadelphia. Maybe you’ve heard of it. It’s as good as any restaurant in New York, and it’s a place where you can hear each other talk. Also, I know there’s not a fucking soul in this house who feels rich enough to go there. Not even our Mr. Phipps.”

“Sounds great!”

“I’ll tell you about all the shit that the shitheads, the major shithead and the minor shithead—well, Phipps isn’t so bad—what the number-one shithead and his pals have dumped on me. I’ll tell you what they fucking did at this formal we had in Washington.”

“I know a little bit about that particular formal, Ivy.”

“You do?”

“Yeah, and I know a little bit about a girl named Gloria.”

“You’re shitting me! Well, obviously you aren’t. You’re too fucking much, Adam! You know everything!”

“Not everything, believe me…not everything, by a long shot. But hey! We can talk about that, too! Right now I really do have to get to this fucking press conference.”

As he lugged his bicycle down the narrow stairway, Adam repeated the words to himself. Not everything…not everything…He hadn’t known enough to hold on to Charlotte and make her love him the way he loved her. He could see her from yesterday as if she were still here today. Not even the greatest triumph of his life, not even an accomplishment of this magnitude, was enough to win Charlotte. There was not a more beautiful girl on this earth…

But he mustn’t let himself be so down right now. There was the press conference, and right after that, a whole segment on the Mike Flowers show on PBS. He just couldn’t believe this was all really happening! He couldn’t let himself wilt now.

Hoyt was drinking alone at the bar of the I.M. with the shell-backed bar stool slump of…the loser who comes to a bar and drinks alone.

Not that by the strictest of definitions one could have described Hoyt as alone. His peripheral vision detected yet another student he never saw before in his life approaching him…and now leaning over the empty seat beside him and saying, “You’re Hoyt Thorpe, right?”

Hoyt turned his head just far enough to get a glimpse of the guy, and he responded, “Yeah,” wearily, as if he had been asked the same question a thousand times already, which he had, or at least it seemed like that many. This guy was very tall and very bony and very pale and acne-scarred, and he had an ingratiating smile. He had grown one of those little stubbly patches of beard not on but underneath his chin. He was a tool, obviously.

“Aw-right!” the tool said. “You’re awesome, dude! I just wanted to tell you that!” So saying, he made a fist and put it practically in front of Hoyt’s nose. So Hoyt made a fist and touched the tool’s fist without even looking.

“Keep on truckin’!” the tool said with comradely warmth as he walked away. “Good stuff!”

Keep on truckin’…Good stuff…That was from Old School…Couldn’t you cram in any more cornball Cool into it?…you toolshed…

It was only nine-thirty, and the evening was just beginning to buzz at the I.M. Fortunately, it was too early for the band and the customary balls-to-the-wall excitement of being “out” at a bar. The sound system was playing CDs…Right now lonesome James Matthews and his lonesome guitar were singing and sighing that lonesome…ballad?—is that the word?—called “But It’s All Right.” It was a relief from the usual, in any case.

Anybody looking on probably thought the phlegmatic give-a-shit way he, Hoyt, was responding to all this was intended to show people he was still cool and not being swept away by all the gushing idolatry coming his way. The funny thing—except that it wasn’t funny—was that the whole campus took this “exposé” by that little shit Adam Gellin as practically a King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table about him and Vance. The little shit thought he had nailed him with the “bribe” shit. But the Night of the Skull Fuck story was so awesome, people seemed to barely notice the rest. With his own ears Hoyt had heard students quoting that one line—“Doing? Looking at a fucking ape-faced dickhead, is what we’re doing!”—and going into convulsions. What was this so-called bribe compared to that? A nice fat Wall Street job with an incredible starting salary floats his way and he takes it? What’s the big deal?

“Hey, dude, sorry to be late.” It was Vance, arriving finally.

“Where the fuck’ve you been?” said Hoyt. “I’ve been sitting here and having to act like a real asshole to save this fucking seat for you.”

Vance slid onto the seat. “I couldn’t help it, man. I got hung up at the library with—”

He couldn’t even finish the sentence, because a guy came up from behind and said, “Wait a sec—aren’t you Vance Phipps?”