A little farther down the hall, he could hear, coming from behind the door he was just passing, an old Tupac Shakur CD going full blast—the classic track, the song about his mother…That would be the freshman hotshot Vernon Congers, whose room looked like a Tupac Shakur shrine—two entire walls papered with photographs of that legendary martyr of the rap music wars. Adam had substituted for one of Congers’s regular tutors once. He passed another door, which was open a few inches…Fireball movie sounds and a male voice saying, “Treyshawn, just between you and me, I don’t play ’at shit. You know what I’m saying?” Ah, yes, Treyshawn “the Tower” Diggs…Inside the suite opposite it, two males were laughing, and a female was squealing in mock denigration, “Curtis, you a girl’s what you are!” Louder squeal: “Keep yo’ hands offa me, you old nancy!”…Curtis Jones. Adam kept on walking…From behind that door, this door, this door, that door, came the unmistakable cracking sound of opposing forces colliding in video games. Ah, the hallway symphony of the basketball greats, the living legends at their midnight ease. Adam smiled. But fuck! “The personal psychology of George the Third as a catalyst of the American Revolution”…for a brick skull that didn’t contain a clue as to what “catalyst” meant…

Far from being quiet at midnight, the historic Charles Dupont Memorial Library was humming. The rustle of many people in motion—plus the occasional sharp, piping chirp of sneakers on the great stone floor—echoed off the vaulted arches of the main hall. So grand and so gloomy, the cavernous space swallowed up the light from the chandeliers and rendered it feeble. Nevertheless, the hall and the huge computer cluster off to this side and the vast reading room off to that side and the circulation and reference desks up there were alive with students. Many undergraduates never began doing homework until midnight, and there were always plenty of them still at it when the sun rose. Dupont Memorial never closed. Staying up until two, three, or four a.m., weekdays included, was part of the conventional, if eccentric, cycle of student life at Dupont.

Two girls, chattering away in hushed voices while glancing this way and that, walked right across Adam’s path. Whatever they were looking for, it wasn’t him. Both had on eye makeup, lip gloss, and earrings. One wore a low-cut, lacy peignoir-sort-of top, the other wore a tight T-shirt, and both were deeply cloven behind by tight jeans. None of this was remarkable except that these girls were totally slutted up. Many girls got dressed up to go over to the library at midnight for the simple reason that boys would be there.

The sight roused within Adam a familiar, smug feeling of superiority. So many students treated Dupont as an elite playground where they played for four years with bright and, for the most part, wellborn people like themselves…while he and a small Gideon’s army, most of whom he knew personally, were here at Dupont as “Millennial Mutants”—his friend Greg Fiore’s term—who would…

Another surge of anger. Long after Jojo Johanssen and his ilk had been reduced to pissing away the remainder of their lives sitting on the curb somewhere drinking malt liquor out of brown paper bags, Adam Gellin and his confreres would—

—would what? Poof. All his superiority vanished in an instant, just like that, as if it had never been anything but air in the first place. Jojo could get laid anytime he felt like it. He had only to step outside onto the campus and point. Jojo had expressed it to him just that way once—“and point”—and Adam believed him. Whatever else he was, Jojo wasn’t boastful. He had described actual examples. He thought it was funny. One had stuck in Adam’s mind. Jojo had finished a class and was walking across the Yard, not even thinking about any such thing, when he saw an athletic-looking blonde in a tennis outfit, a tall, slender girl with “these long legs and buff shoulders and tits like this”—he had cupped his hands to indicate the size and where on the torso they were placed—hustling toward the tennis courts where she and a friend had booked a court, and he just stepped in her way and came on to her, and ten minutes later they were in his room slogging away at it. It was simple as that if you were a basketball star. And that girl’s voice in Curtis’s room—she wasn’t in there to ask him for a basketball ticket. Adam wheeled about and took a second look at the girls in the tight jeans. Both these little midnight scholars would get themselves laid within the hour. He could be sure about that. Sex! Sex! It was in the air along with the nitrogen and the oxygen! The whole campus was humid with it! tumid with it! lubricated with it! gorged with it! tingling with it! in a state of around-the-clock arousal with it! Rutrutrutrutrutrutrutrut—

He tried to visualize how many of Dupont’s 6,200 students were rutting away at it at this very moment, visualize in the sense of being able to see through walls and spot the two-backed beasts herkyjerky humping bang-bangbang…up there, in that bedroom in Lapham—there, in that room in Carruthers—up there, on the floor of that empty seminar room in Giles—over there, in the euonymus shrubbery because, bursting with lust, they couldn’t make it all the way back to a bedroom—and there, up against a locked rear door on the other side of the tower, because doing it where they might get caught gave it a fetishistic kick they couldn’t resist—and here was himself, Adam Gellin, so superior in so many excellent ways…and a virgin. A senior at Dupont and still a virgin. Even in his own thoughts he said it softly. It was a failing he was desperate that the world not know of. The whole campus was rutting away like dogs in the park, and he remained a virgin. As soon as he could, at the end of his sophomore year, he had moved out of Carruthers College, away from roommates for good, and into a squalid little apartment off campus—nothing more than a slot for humans created when two ordinary bedrooms in a rotting nineteenth-century town house were converted to four “apartments,” all using one bathroom out in the hall—rather than have others gradually come to realize…there was something wrong with him—namely, a bad case of virginity—and now it was getting terribly late, because he knew nothing about it…and he would be perfectly inept—he felt it—and whatever he could do wrong, he would do wrong—nervous impotence, premature ejaculation—and how did they manage to stop just before…and put on the condom in some suave way—did it require a joke?—would just unsheathing the damned thing and touching the tip of his dong with it cause him to ejaculate?—

Damn. The library catalog computer cluster was mobbed. There were some twenty computers arranged in a horseshoe behind a low retaining wall of oak carved with High Gothic tracery, and he had to locate some volumes of British and American history, and all those computer screens glowing with twenty-first-century electronic jaundice behind grand fourteenth-century flourishes of conspicuous wood-sculptural waste were occupied. But wait a minute—in the very back corner, hard to spot, a screen with nobody sitting in front of it. He began speed-walking toward the cluster. If it wouldn’t have looked so totally dorky, he would have made a run for it. Barely fifteen feet away when—Shit!—a girl with long brown hair, looked like a kid, came in from the side and went straight to that one last screen.

His mind spun. He couldn’t afford to be his passive, play-by-the-rules self, not this time. Besides, the girl looked so young. Unless his judgment was seriously off, she would be the sweet, pliant type who gives way to avoid friction. He entered the bull pen. It was packed with the hunched-over backs of students clattering away on the keyboards. The glow of the screens gave their faces a sickly dry-ice pallor. Resolute, he marched up to the girl, who was already seated, and said: