The giant, Jojo, got a hamburger in the BurgAmerican sector and a can of Sprite. Charlotte refused to get anything, partly because she couldn’t afford it and partly so that the giant wouldn’t think she was deigning to “dine” with him or in any other fashion allowing this to be turned into some sort of “social” situation.

As they headed for one of the slick black tables, one of a group of four guys a couple of tables away halfway rose up from his seat, waved, and yelled, “Go go, Jojo!” The giant gave him a somewhat begrudging smile and nod and kept on going. A terrible thought crossed Charlotte’s mind: If he was a basketball player, he might be very well known on campus, and suppose she were seen with him?…She wished she could put up a sign saying, THIS IS NOT A DATE. I DON’T KNOW HIM. I DON’T LIKE HIM. I’M NOT IMPRESSED BY HIM. I’M UNIMPRESSED. On the other hand, seen by whom? There was no one at Dupont University who could possibly care, except maybe Bettina. And what would she care?

They sat down, and this Jojo leaned forward over his plastic plate with the hamburger on it, as if to make sure nobody else heard him. “Remember what you said to me that day? After Mr. Lewin’s French class?”

Charlotte shook her head no. She remembered very well.

“You asked me why I ‘decided to say something foolish’—to Lewin when we were discussing Madame Bovary.”

Charlotte couldn’t hold back any longer. “Well, why did you?”

“That’s the question I’ve been asking myself ever since!” His voice was barely above a whisper. “I liked that book. It really made me think. And you remember what else you said?”

This time Charlotte didn’t shake her head no. She looked at him for a moment and then ever so slowly nodded yes.

“You said, ‘You knew the answer to that question, didn’t you?’ And I did. And you wanna know why I acted as if I didn’t?”

He paused, obviously eager for a response. So Charlotte obliged: “Why?”

“Three other players, my teammates, are in the class. It’s okay to do the work, because you have to pass the courses, and you might even get away with good grades—although there’s this one really bright guy on the team, and he always tries to keep anybody from knowing his grades. But you can’t let anybody know you’re actually interested in a course—you know, like you actually enjoyed the book?—then you’re really fucked.”

“Don’t talk that way,” snapped Charlotte, genuinely offended.

Jojo stared at her, motionless, as if he had been stunned. “Hey, I’m sorry! It just slipped out!” Awkward pause…Finally he said, “Where are you from?”

Charlotte fired back rat-tat-tat: “Sparta, North Carolina—it’s up in the mountains—you never heard of it—nobody ever heard of it. Far’s that goes, you don’t even know my name, do you?”

Jojo was speechless.

Afraid she had gone too far, Charlotte said with a small, forgiving smile, “It’s Charlotte. All right, you were saying how you’re terrified of peer pressure.”

Jojo compressed his lips into a slit. “It’s not like—it’s not peer pressure exactly—” He broke it off. Charlotte had him pinned with a cold and dubious stare. “I mean, this thing starts in high school. In junior high school. Coaches, everybody, start telling you you’ve got it. You know what I’m saying? You’re very big for your age, you’re something special, you’re on the way to being a great athlete. Three different high schools, I’m talking about public high schools, three of’m tried to recruit me out of junior high school! My dad told me to go to the one that had the best record for getting players into the Division One basketball programs, and I ended up going to the one the furthest from where I lived, Trenton Central.”

“Where’d you live?” Whirred, she realized.

“Trenton, New Jersey. But everybody on the team, Treyshawn Diggs, André Walker, went through the same thing. You’re a freshman in high school, and everybody’s treating you like you’re way up here, and down there’s all the other students. The other students, they’re worrying about books and tests and homework, but you’re ‘special.’ I mean like I’d sit in the last row of the class and kinda, you know, sprawl back in the chair and hold the book upside down. All the kids thought that was really cool. Then in high school I started getting all this ink in the local newspapers—for playing basketball—and that was a great feeling.”

Still timidly: “Well…isn’t that what you wanted?”

“I guess. But now I’m getting interested in some things, like literature, even if it’s only Frère Jocko.”

“Frère Jocko?”

“That’s what everybody calls that course. That’s French for Jocks. There’s a German class they call Jock Sprache. There’s a geology class they call Rocks for Jocks. There’s a course in the Communications Department they call Vox for Jocks. I never got the Vox part.”

“Vox is voice in Latin,” said Charlotte. “You know, ‘vox populi’?”

Jojo drew a blank.

“The voice of the people?” said Charlotte.

Jojo nodded yes in a distracted fashion that as much as declared he didn’t get that, either. “Oh yeah, and I take a course in econ they call Stocks for Jocks,” he said. “At first you think, wow, this is cool. But one day somebody says something to you, the way you did, and it sort of like…zaps you.”

“Why would you care what I think? I’m just a freshman.”

Jojo cast his eyes down and massaged his huge forehead with his thumb and two fingers. Then he looked up at Charlotte with wide-open eyes. “I don’t have anybody to talk to about things like this. I don’t fucking dare! ’Scuse me. I just get—”

Without finishing his sentence, he leaned farther over the table. “You’re not just a freshman. What you said to me—it was like…like you had just arrived from Mars. You know what I mean? You didn’t come here already affected by a lot of—a lot of the usual sh—stuff. It’s like you came here with clear eyes, and you see things exactly like they are.”

“Sparta, North Carolina, is a long way away from here, but it isn’t on Mars.” She was conscious of smiling at him for the very first time.

Charlotte immediately detected that something other than his concern for academic achievement was now seeping into that sincere expression of his. She knew this was the moment to put a stop to it. The thought of his starting to “hit on” her again was unpleasant and even frightening…and yet she didn’t want to put a stop to it. The present moment was much too early in her experience for her to have expressed it in a sentence, but she was enjoying the first stirrings, the first in her entire life, of the power that woman can hold over that creature who is as monomaniacally hormono-centric as the beasts of the field, Man.

“Charlotte…I love that name,” said Jojo.

Charlotte rheostatted her expression down to a completely blank look.

Jojo apparently took that as the rebuke Charlotte meant it to be. He mopped up the hormonal seepage of his expression and said, “My problem is, I don’t know any a this…cultural stuff. You know what I mean?”

“No.”

“I mean like where did this idea come from and where did that idea come from. People mention these names, like everybody knows who that is, but I never know. I never paid attention before! It’s embarrassing. I mean like I got this teacher in American history, Mr. Quat, and he’s saying the first settlers in America were Puritans—” He stopped short. “That’s not right. What he said was not Puritans but Protestants, although there was something about Puritans, okay? Then he’s saying in England, the Protestant revolution—wait a minute, or did he say reformation?—yeah, that was it, reformation—he’s saying the Protestant Reformation—this is what he said almost exactly: ‘The Protestant Reformation fed on rationalism, but rationalism didn’t cause it.’ Okay? So I’m looking around, waiting for somebody to raise their hand and say, ‘What’s rationalism?’ But nobody does! All these kids have like ridiculous GPAs, and they know what he’s talking about. And here’s me, and I’m afraid to raise my hand, because they’ll all look at me and say, ‘You dumb jock.’ ”