Vance pulled back behind the tree and whispered, “Holy shit, Hoyt, you know who that is? That’s Governor Whatsisname, from California, the guy who’s supposed to speak at commencement!” Commencement was Saturday. Tonight was Thursday.

“Then wuz he doing here now?” said Hoyt a little too loudly, causing Vance to put his forefinger to his lips again.

Vance chuckled deep in his throat and whispered, “That’s pretty fucking obvious, if you ask me.”

They peeked out from behind the tree again. The man and the girl must have heard them, because they were both looking their way.

“I know her,” said Hoyt. “She was in my—”

“Fuck, Hoyt! Shhhhh!”

Bango! Something grabbed Hoyt’s right shoulder from behind in a terrific grip, and a tough-guy voice said, “What the fuck you punks think you’re doing?”

Hoyt spun around and found himself confronting a short but massively muscled man in a dark suit and a collar and tie that could barely contain his neck, which was wider than his head. A little translucent coiled cord protruded from his left ear.

Adrenaline and alcohol surged up Hoyt’s brain stem. He was a Dupont man staring at an impudent simian from the lower orders. “Doing?” he barked, inadvertently showering the man with spit. “Looking at a fucking ape-faced dickhead is what we’re doing!”

The man seized him by both shoulders and slammed him back against the tree, knocking the breath out of him. Just as the little gorilla drew his fist back, Vance got down on all fours behind his legs. Hoyt ducked the punch, which smashed into the tree trunk, and drove his forearm into his assailant—who had just begun to yell “Shiiiiiit” from the pain—with all his might. The man toppled backward over Vance and hit the ground with a sickening thud. He started to get up but then sank back to the ground. He lay there on his side next to a big exposed maple root, his face contorted, holding one shoulder with a hand whose bloody knuckles were gashed clear down to the bone. The arm that should have been socketed into the stricken shoulder was extended at a grotesque angle.

Hoyt and Vance, who was still on all fours, stared speechless at this picture of agony. The man opened his eyes, saw that his adversaries were no longer on the attack, and groaned, “Fugguz…fugguz…” Then, overcome by God knows what, he folded his face into another blind grimace and lay there moaning, “Muhfugguh…muhfugguh…”

The two boys looked at each other and, possessed by a single thought, turned toward the man and the girl—who were gone.

Vance whispered, “Whatta we do?”

“Run like a bastard,” said Hoyt.

Which they did. As they ran through the arboretum, the tree trunks and shrubs and flowers and foliage kept whipping by in the dark and Vance kept saying things like “Self-defense, self-defense…just…self-defense,” until he was too winded to run and speak at the same time.

They neared the edge of the Grove, where it bordered the open campus, and Vance said, “Slow…down…” He was so out of breath he could utter no more than a syllable or two after each gulp of air. “Just…walk…Got’act…natch’rul…”

So they emerged from the Grove walking and acting natural, except that their breathing sounded like a pair of handsaws and they were soaked with sweat.

Vance said, “We don’t”—gulp of air—“talk about this”—gulp of air—“to anybody”—gulp of air—“Right?”—gulp of air—“Right, Hoyt?”—gulp of air—“Right, Hoyt?”—gulp of air—“Fuck!”—gulp of air—“Listen to me, Hoyt!”

But Hoyt wasn’t even looking at him, much less listening. His heart was pumping just as much adrenaline as Vance’s. But in Hoyt’s case the hormone merely fed the merry gale, which now blew stronger than ever. He had deleted that sonofabitch! The way he had flipped that muscle-bound motherfucker over Vance’s back—ohmygod! He could hardly wait to get back to the Saint Ray house and tell everybody. Him! A legend in the making! He looked up and gazed at what lay just ahead of them, and he was swept by the male exhilaration—ecstasy!—of victory in battle.

“Look at it, Vance,” he said. “There it is.”

“There’s what, for Chrissake?” said Vance, who obviously wanted to move on, and fast.

Hoyt just gestured at it all.

The Dupont campus…The moon had turned the university’s buildings into a vast chiaroscuro of dark shapes brought out in all their sumptuousness by a wash of pale white gold. The towers, the turrets, the spires, the heavy slate roofs—all of it ineffably beautiful and ineffably grand. Walls thick as a castle’s! It was a stronghold. He, Hoyt, was one of a charmed circle, that happy few who could enter the stronghold at will…and feel its invincibility in their bones. Not only that, he was in the innermost ring of that charmed circle, namely, Saint Ray, the fraternity of those who have been chosen to hold dominion over…well, over everybody.

He wanted to impart this profound truth to Vance…but shit, it was such a mouthful. So all he said was, “Vance, you know what Saint Ray is?”

The total irrelevancy of the question made Vance stare back at him with his mouth open. Finally, in hopes of getting his accomplice moving again, he said, “No, what?”

“It’s a MasterCard…for doing whatever you want…whatever you want.” There wasn’t a single note of irony in his voice. Only awe. He couldn’t have been more sincere.

“Don’t say that, Hoyt! Don’t even think it! Whatever happened in the Grove, we don’t know what anybody’s talking about! Okay?”

“Stop worrying,” said Hoyt, sweeping his hand grandly from here to there, as if to take in the entire tableau before him. “Innermost ring…charmed circle.”

He was once more vaguely aware that he wasn’t altogether coherent. He only idly noticed the look of panic that stole across Vance’s moonlit face. What was Vance so squirrelly about? He was a Dupont man himself. Hoyt once more gazed lovingly upon the moon-washed kingdom before them. The great library tower…the famous gargoyles, plainly visible in silhouette on the corner of Lapham College…way over there, the dome of the basketball arena…the new glass-and-steel neuroscience center, or whatever it was—even that weird building looked great at this moment…Dupont! Science—Nobel winners! whole stacks of them!…although he couldn’t exactly remember any names…Athletes—giants! national basketball champions! top five in football and lacrosse!…although he found it a bit dorky to go to games and cheer a lot…Scholars—legendary!…even though they were sort of spectral geeks who floated around the edges of collegiate life…Traditions—the greatest!—mischievous oddities passed from generation to generation of…the best people! A small cloud formed—the rising number of academic geeks, book humpers, homosexuals, flute prodigies, and other diversoids who were now being admitted…Nevertheless! There’s their Dupont, which is just a diploma with “Dupont” written on it…and there’s the real Dupont—which is ours!

His heart was so full he wanted to pour it out to Vance. But the coherence problem reasserted itself, and all he could utter was, “It’s ours, Vance, ours.”

Vance put a hand over his face and moaned almost as pitifully as the little thug on the ground in the Grove. “Hoyt, you are so fucked up.”