“Honest, I know all these words, Mr. Quat! I know them! The only problem I have is saying the meaning the way you want me to!”

“Which means you know the words but you have just one little problem: you don’t know what they mean.”

“Honest—”

“Stop displaying your ignorance, sir! Here’s your paper.”

Still holding it up before Jojo, he flipped it to the first page once more. Jojo thought he was giving it back, and he reached for it. But Mr. Quat withdrew it and held it close to his chest. Then he reached inside his jacket and produced a big mechanical china marker. He set the paper down on the table and with a furious flourish printed a huge red F on the first page beneath the title. Then he handed it to Jojo, who, shocked, accepted it robotically.

“When this is averaged in with your other grades, Mr. Johanssen, you are in deep trouble in this course. But that’s a secondary problem. I have the grounds here for filing a serious honors violation…and I intend to file it immediately. I have no idea how much you’ve enjoyed making a mockery of the academic life of this university, but your fun is over. Do I make myself clear? Over…And if you try to get anybody to intervene on your behalf—any body—can you possibly imagine who I mean by any body?—that will only make it worse. Do I make myself clear?”

Jojo was speechless.

The fat man gathered up his papers and, without so much as another glance at Jojo, walked out of the room. Jojo stood there, bewildered, holding the tainted paper as if his fingers were frozen to it.

Mr. Quat reappeared in the doorway. “By the way,” he snapped, “in case you’re wondering, that’s a xeroxed copy.” Then he was gone.

Jojo’s mind whirled and whirled…Fuck! So he got help from a tutor. That’s what they were there for! Besides, he knew those words! All right, he didn’t know maladroit and metro-whateveritwas, but damn it, he knew catalyst, or he knew it last week. He just couldn’t remember what his twerpy goddamn tutor had told him. He knew meddling and subtle, too, and he knew the gist of exhortation, more or less. He could use them in a sentence! No problem at all! Okay, he might have an issue with exhortation, but meddling and subtle—Goddamn it! It was just that he couldn’t rattle off formal definitions. What was he supposed to be, a CD-ROM? And what the hell was that scrawny little fuck Adam doing, throwing in maladroit and metro-whuzzywhuzzy and all that stuff. That kid was as bad as Mr. Quat! Had he sabotaged him intentionally? Why else would he stick in words nobody ever heard of? Except for those two words, hell, he knew the whole thing cold! And all these insults…Don’t display your ignorance, sir…and threats! Nobody but nobody can help you…If worse came to worse, he’d just have Coach come over and twist the guy’s head off for him and shit down his windpipe. Then he remembered: Jojo Johanssen was on Buster Roth’s shitlist, too. He felt bolted to the floor of this, the scene of his second devastating…uh…uh…experience.

He was not the first man to throw the h word down the memory hole when it applied to himself.

13. The Walk of Shame

In the lichen twilight, dusky, rusky as could be, around the corner of the house he swaggers, stops, puts his fists on his hips, paralyzes Charlotte with a stare. It’s already too dark to see his face, but she knows it’s him, and she knows he’s staring straight into her eyes, and she can’t move her legs at all, much less run. Desperately she looks toward the house, for Daddy, Momma, Cousin Doogie, the Sheriff, but there’s no one, not even a light, and Channing swaggers straight up to her, smirking and saying, “Party time,” even though she can’t actually hear the words. He reaches around to the back side of his jeans and produces a chaw bag of Red Man, digs in with his fingers, and shoves a plug of it into his mouth until his left cheek lumps out the size of a walnut. Smirks—sneers?—at her, does Channing, with a tilted smile, vile brown juice dribbling out of the lower corner of his mouth. He twists his body halfway around so she can see him slide the chaw bag into the jeans’ rear pocket, leaving two inches of it sticking out in the accepted fashion. He starts patting it, the chaw bag in his pocket, and leering at her and doing some heavy breathing, Unggh hunh, unggh hunh, unggh—

—hunh, unggh hunh—Charlotte woke up in the dark, and she could still hear it, Unggh hunh, unggh hunh, and her heart started pounding. It’s in here, in this room! Utter darkness! Lunged for the lamp on the little bedside table—crash—knocked it off onto the floor beside the bed. With another lunge jackknifed herself over the side of the bed, and even before she could find the stem switch on the lamp’s neck, it had started crying and whimpering, “Charlotte…Charlotte…” Charlotte turned the lamp on—

Not two feet away, on the floor, on all fours—Beverly. The crashed lamp cast a huge shadow of her onto the wall opposite. She was on—all fours!—slowly crawling forward on her hands and knees. The way her high heels stuck up in the air behind her made them seem ludicrously superfluous. Her black pants were stretched across her scrawny rear end. A mess of flattened streaked-blond hair hung this way and that.

Charlotte, still in the hypnoidal state: “What’s the matter , Beverly…”

Beverly looked at her blearily, trying to stanch her tears, her gasps, her whimpers, her bleats of “Charlotte” long enough to say—

Before she uttered a word, even the hypnoidal mind knew that the big high-heeled creature on all fours was drunk, and not just a little bit.

“Charlotte…Charlotte…Where are the lacrosse players? Where are the lacrosse players?”

“What lacrosse players?”

“This guy—I’ve got to go back and talk to him…Charlotte, Charlotte!”

“How can you go anywhere? You’re like—I think you’ve had too much to drink.”

Beverly looked up into her face with the eyes of a bewildered patient. “Him, too, Charlotte! That’s the only time they talk—when they’re drunk! Charlotte!…This is my only chance…He was talking to me, Charlotte!…He says he doesn’t want to get involved…But I don’t care! I have to hook up with him tonight.” More tears, whimpers, gasps. “Where are the lacrosse players!”

Charlotte said, “He says he doesn’t want to get involved? Isn’t that a kind of a hint?”

“But he was talking to me! I gotta go find him while he’s still interested…”

“Then why did you leave him?”

“He said he had to talk to some guy and he’d call me on my cell in ten minutes. That was five minutes ago—my cell in ten minutes five minutes ago…” Beverly lowered her head and began sobbing…on all fours. “I’m gonna drive back. I gotta drive back! I have to hook up with him! Charlotte!”

“Back where?”

“The I.M.!” Exasperation, as if she were repeating something for about the tenth time: “The I.M.!”

The I.M….

Charlotte said, “You can’t drive a car to the I.M., Beverly. You can’t drive a car, period.”

“Then you gotta drive me. Here are the keys.” Without getting up off her hands and knees, she tried to fish her keys out of her pants pocket. But the pants were so tight she had to twist her body and straighten one leg and dig into the pocket while supporting herself on one arm and canting her neck to one side, grimacing, eyes shut, all the while. She finally retrieved the keys and held them up toward Charlotte.

“I can’t drive you anywhere,” said Charlotte, “least of all the I.M. You’ve had enough to drink. Here, why don’t I help you go to bed.”

Charlotte was just about to swing her legs over the side of the bed when Beverly grabbed one sleeve of her pajama top and tried to drag her toward the door. She was strong, too.

“Hey, let go! You’re going to rip my pajamas!”

“You gotta drive me!—drive me!—drive me!”

“Stop it, Beverly!”