Hoyt couldn’t suppress another laugh. “Hey, this is your chance, dude! Stick with me and you’ll be a real legend in your own time.”

“Me? I don’t think so. I’ve had enough legend. Legend gives me mud-butt, if you want to know the truth.”

“Aw, come on. You’re money, baby, and you don’t even know it. Let me grab a beer, and I’ll tell you how we do it.”

As Jojo entered the study hall, Charles Bousquet and Vernon Congers were just in front of him, and he could hear Charles dogging the big freshman, as he often did, because Congers was (a) a rookie and (b) such an easy mark.

“Aw, mannn,” Charles was saying, “I can’t believe you just said that, Vernon. What’s the matter witchoo? You want people going around thinking you got room to rent upstairs?”

Congers just stared darkly. He always had trouble processing Charles’s gibes and was apparently puzzling over “room to rent upstairs.”

“Okay, here’s an easy one,” said Charles. “What state are we in?”

“What state?”

“Yeah, what state. The United States of America is made up of fifty states, and we’re in one of them right now. Which one, Vernon?”

Congers paused, perhaps wondering if this might be a trick question. Frowning: “Pennsylvania.”

“Right,” said his tormentor. “Okay, what’s the capital of Pennsylvania?”

Now Congers was obviously stumped, and at the same time, he didn’t have the wit to deflect this entire demeaning quiz. Testy hesitation. Then: “Philadelphia.”

“Godalmighty, Vernon! Phil a del phia? The capital of Pennsylvania’s a town called Harrisburg. H, a, r, r, i, s, b, u, r, g. It’s about 150 miles west of here. Harris-burg.”

By now Curtis, Alan, and Treyshawn had started listening in, and Curtis let out a low chuckle.

Congers said, “Who gives a good fuck.”

“Come on, Vernon,” said the inquisitor, “you gotta know these things. You’re a high-profile guy now. Think about the fucking press. What if the press starts asking you questions? This ain’t no And 1 camp, baby, this is the big-time hoops!”

Muffled, reined in, but clearly audible laughs this time. Congers’s eyes were narrowing with anger.

Charles wouldn’t let up. “You gotta know some geography, man! Go get a map or look at a globe or watch the History Channel or something. Whatta you tell yo’ mama when she ax you where you at?”

Open laughter. Congers was now plainly furious. He glowered at Charles and then at the whole bunch of them.

“Fuck you,” he said, and stormed off into the room, a small classroom in Fiske used for the basketball team’s compulsory two hours of study every night after dinner.

Unrestrained eruptions of laughter. Jojo drew in his breath. He was glad he had been behind Congers’s line of vision. The schadenfreude side of him enjoyed seeing his young rival ridiculed, but Charles had gone too far. He had started dogging the kid in a ghetto accent, which even Congers could tell was sheer mockery. Worst of all, Charles had brought in the subject of Congers’s mother. It was only a joke, and he hadn’t said anything bad about her, although come to think of it, he had sort of insinuated that she couldn’t figure out where her own son was. Jojo was close enough to the black players to know that the subject of their mothers was touchy stuff, especially in the case of somebody like Congers. He didn’t know a whole lot about Congers, but he did know that he was a fairly typical case of a boy whose mother had raised him entirely on her own, ghetto-style, in a town outside of New York City called Hempstead, if he remembered correctly. Charles, on the other hand, had grown up in a reasonably affluent suburb of Washington, D.C., and had a father who was chief of some sort of security operation at the State Department and a mother who taught English in the local school system.

Congers took a seat in a desk chair near the back, and—whap—slapped a loose-leaf binder on the surface of the chair’s desk arm, as if terminating a fly. Boyish face and all, he was a lot bigger and stronger than Charles. He was six-nine, maybe 240 pounds, jacked, ripped, and thick. Charles was six-six and well built, thanks to Mad Dog the strength coach, but he was slender, with a fine-boned face, and was close to forty pounds lighter than Congers. Jojo took note of the dimensions because Congers was so furious, he wondered if it just might come to that…

The study hall started off as usual—which is to say, unless you were deaf or had the concentration powers of a Charles Bousquet, you might as well forget about studying. The usual suspects were making fart noises, cracking jokes in stage whispers, frogging each other, launching sneak attacks using Blue Shark candy drops as missiles, or otherwise horsing around. An assistant coach, Brian Glaziano, sat in a chair near the podium, facing these student athletes, supposedly to make sure they kept their noses in the books, but he was young, white, and a hoops nonentity compared to the elite players he was assigned to preside over.

Jojo had a loose-leaf binder and a couple of textbooks with him. He sat at his desk riffling through an auto accessories catalog, daydreaming about cool ways in which he might tart up his Chrysler Annihilator. He happened to be sitting one row behind Congers and ten or twelve feet off to the side. Hearing Congers unsnap the rings on his loose-leaf binder, Jojo glanced over idly. He found himself witnessing a strange thing. Congers took a sheet of paper out of the binder—ordinary lined school paper—and stuffed it into his mouth. Then he started chewing. Must have tasted like hell, all that acid or whatever it was they put in cheap paper. Then he took out another one and started chewing that one, too…and then a third one…chewing and chewing but not swallowing. By now his cheeks were ballooned out like one of those frogs or whatever they were on those learning videos they used to make you watch in elementary school. His eyes were angry slits. The next thing Jojo knew, Congers was forcing a prodigious wad of gray mush out of his mouth and into his cupped hands. He began shaping it into a sphere, the way you’d make a snowball. Saliva and a mushy gook began oozing out between his fingers and dripping onto his lap. Then he stood up, all six feet nine of him, holding the huge mushball aloft, and he hurled it with all his might—splat—against the back of a shaved brown head three rows ahead of him. Charles, of course. Until that moment, since the back of one shaved brown head looked much like another, Jojo hadn’t even noticed that Charles was sitting there.

Charles did nothing at first except raise his nose from his books and look straight ahead. Then, deliberately, coolly, in the Charles Bousquet fashion, still without turning around, he reached back and scraped the mush off the base of his skull with his hand and inspected it. Then he felt the neck of his T-shirt where the slimy pulp had soaked it. Only then did he twist about and look back.

The first person he saw was Jojo, who, transfixed, was looking him right in the face. Charles eyed him for an instant and then, apparently concluding that Jojo was a highly unlikely suspect, lasered in on Congers, who now had his head way down, practically buried in his loose-leaf binder, scribbling away with a ballpoint as if he were taking notes.

In a deep voice Charles yelled out, “Yo!”

Naturally, everybody in the room craned about to see what was going on, everybody except Congers, who still had his head down and his ballpoint squiggling like mad.

“Yo!” Charles yelled again. “Yeah, I mean you, ni—you moronic motherfuckin’ shitfa brains!”

Charles had started to say “nigger,” but he checked himself because Jojo and Mike were right there. The black players never uttered the n-word, not even in jest, if he, Mike, Coach, a swimmie, or any other white person was within earshot.

Congers had no choice now. There was no way he could pretend he hadn’t noticed. He stood up, shoving his chair over backward with a thwack, and took a deep breath. His tight T-shirt was more like a film than a fabric, and his mighty pecs, delts, traps, lats seemed to pump up before your very eyes. Seething, he stared at Charles and said in a strained, constricted, strangely high-pitched voice, “Who the fuck you think—” He broke off the sentence and then said, “Motherfucker.”