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He had almost reached the elevator when the belly laughs began in earnest. They came rolling out from behind the door of Jones 3A. The bastards had given him a few moments’ grace, and now they were letting it all out. Hegghhh heggghhh heggggghhhhh!…His public unma
Adam left the building and looked this way and that in the morbid darkness without actually taking in anything he saw. He got back into the Bitsosushi and just sat there, even though he had seven more orders to deliver, seven more orders that would soon grow cold.
All at once something stirred within him. It was Frankie Horowitz’s His Majesty the Child coming out of his coma.
The Child blinked, stretched, and gulped some fresh air. As Adam sat there in an exhausted eight-year-old small-size hatchback, Frankie’s prince’s crown popped up magically on his curly head.
Destiny’s Adam Gellin. In that very moment, he made himself a promise, the sweetest promise the human beast can make to himself: vengeance is mine, and I shall be repaid.
8. The View up Mount Parnassus
The next morning, shortly after ten o’clock, Charlotte had just come down from Mr. Crone’s classroom on the third floor of Fiske, where she had spent the past hour in the blessed company of about ninety others taking the medieval history test. Two students she recognized from the class, a guy and a girl, juniors or seniors it looked like to her, were standing by the magnificent spiral finial of a brass balustrade that ornamented the wide swath of steps that swept from the Great Yard up to the Fiske entryway.
The girl was saying to the guy, “How’d you feel about the test?”
“How’d I feel?” He put his head back, rolled his eyes up until the irises almost disappeared, and expelled a noisy jet of air between his teeth. “I felt like I was getting ass-raped by a very large animal.”
The girl laughed and laughed, as if that were the wittiest thing she had ever heard in her life. Then she said, “What was that second essay question all about? ‘Compare the Dublin and Baghdad slave markets of the eleventh century and’—what was it?—‘the differing nature of the chattel trade in northern Europe and the Middle East’?”
“I had to wing it with that fucker,” said the guy. “Do you think he’ll give me a few points for truly inspired bullshit?”
The girl laughed and laughed, as before. Nevertheless—blessed company!
Charlotte only wished she were still in the middle of the test! At least for that hour she was part of a group of human beings all doing the same thing. At least she had been completely engrossed in a task that made it impossible to think of…how lonesome she was.
Loneliness wasn’t just a state of mind, was it? It was tactile. She could feel it. It was a sixth sense, not in some fanciful play of words, but physically. It hurt…it hurt like phagocytes devouring the white matter of her brain. It wasn’t merely that she had no friends. She didn’t even have a sanctuary in which she could be simply alone. She had a roommate who froze her out in order to remind her daily what an invisible nonentity Charlotte Simmons, the erstwhile mountain prodigy, really was—and to underscore it by throwing her out when she felt like it in the dead of the night. Out to where? To a public lounge…which also burned with lust and sexual fear…in the dead of the night.
Charlotte sca
In this mood, she knew there would be no Bettina to be found upon the su
She was halfway there, walking through a stretch of deep, ancient leafy shadows, when she became aware of the scritching sound of someone in sneakers ru
She looked back over her shoulder—and was so startled she stopped, paralyzed with dread. It was the huge guy from the French class, the wantonly stupid one who had tried to pick her up. How about lunch? She wheeled about and stiffened. He was almost upon her—the same hulk, the same tight T-shirt displaying the same grotesque muscles, the same odd little plateau of buzz-cut blond hair. He came to a stop barely two feet from her. The urge to run clashed with her desire not to look childish. The yearning for mature status prevailed. Motionless, paralyzed, aghast, she managed, but barely managed, to say in a strangled voice, “What do you want?”
His mouth fell open, and he slowly raised his hands, palms upward, as if lifting a huge plastic exercise ball. He was the very picture of a good soul misunderstood.
“I just wanted to apologize, that’s all. Honest.”
Still afraid: “For what?”
“For the other day,” said the giant, “for the way I acted, the way I just walked up…” He blushed, which to Charlotte was an indication he just might be sincere and hadn’t simply devised a new way to “hit on” her, as the terminology here at Dupont seemed to be. But it was no more than that, an indication, and she said nothing.
He rushed in to fill the conversational vacuum. “I was sort of hoping I would run into you again. I was thinking about what it must have looked like to you, and I’m really sorry.”
Charlotte didn’t say a word. She just glowered. He was so big, he was abnormal. His neck was so wide, his arms were so long, so packed with slabs of muscle…
“Come on, let me make it up to you. Let’s go have lunch at Mr. Rayon—only this time, lunch. That’s all. I swear.”
Charlotte continued to grill him with a malevolent stare. On the other hand, there was a certain…supplication in his voice.
“You don’t know who I am, do you,” he said. Somehow the way he said it didn’t reek of self-importance.
Charlotte oscillated her head as slowly as an electric fan, as if to say, “I don’t know, and you’re not even capable of conceiving how little I care about finding out,” even though she did know he was some sort of basketball player, and now a little flame had lit up her curiosity.
“My name is Joseph Johanssen, and I’m on the basketball team. Everybody calls me Jojo.”
Charlotte debated with herself.
“Come on,” said Jojo. “We’ll just go in and grab a little something.”
All she had to do was say she was late for class or…In fact, she didn’t owe him any explanation at all. All she had to do was say no and leave.
But she couldn’t budge. It was as if her autonomic nervous system had taken over. The other her, the autonomic her, the one aching so with loneliness, ruled.
So, without knowing why—the other her kept mum—she found herself saying, “All right.” She said it in a faintly disgusted way, as if she were doing him a reluctant and essentially pointless favor.
Charlotte had never set foot in Mr. Rayon before. It was on the ground floor of a huge and rather overbearing Gothic classroom building, Halsey Hall, whose exterior offered not the vaguest hint of the visual explosion that hit Charlotte as she and Jojo entered the restaurant. Slick white walls seemed to scream from all the winking electrographics and industrial lighting they reflected. Medievalish ba