And someone was watching! As she moved ahead in the line, she felt a tap on her shoulder and turned about to see Bettina.

“Hey! Where’ve you been?” An upbeat, sunny Bettina.

“Around,” said Charlotte, moving forward and picking up a tray.

“Hey, what’s wrong? You pissed at me?”

“No,” said Charlotte in a noncommittal tone, and she kept moving forward.

“Well, Mimi and I are sitting over there if you want to sit with us.”

“I’m already sitting with someone, thanks.”

“Who?”

“Adam is his name.”

“Who’s he?”

“He’s right back there—plaid shirt.”

Bettina glanced back and took her time about it and then said to Charlotte, “What is he, a T.A. or something?”

“No, he’s my friend.” The way she said it cut off any further discussion.

“Ohhh,” said Bettina. Her nostrils flared slightly and curled, as if Adam gave off an odor from afar. “Okay, then, whatever. See ya later.” Bettina left, miffed, presumably to rejoin the other snake, Mimi.

Charlotte was offended by Bettina’s tacit verdict on Adam—and worried by it. Was he that obviously dorky? She tried to work it out in her mind. Even if he was, it wouldn’t take much to change that. Some contacts or laser corrections…and get rid of those glasses. That would be the first thing. Cut back on all that curly hair and shape it and get rid of that part. That would focus attention on his face. He had fine features. In fact, he would be handsome, if only he would let himself be handsome and un-dork—such a word?—un-dork his clothes. What are those dark blue wool pants with the pleats and cuffs…wool?…no guys wore wool pants…and that old man’s belt with that sort of fake-silver sleeve instead of a normal belt buckle, and the plaid shirt with green and tan and rust-red stripes going this way and that on an oatmeal-gray background? She had the sneaking feeling that he had decided to get dressed up for breakfast with her, and this was the result. Those plaid shirts gave off whiffs of Engineering Geek or Chem Major. And those brown moccasins with soles like rock ledges—what was this unerring eye for just the wrong thing? Some simple, plain button-down shirts, some khakis, some jeans, some flip-flops, some loafers, although she would have to choose the loafers—nothing to it, and he’d be a different person!

Charlotte’s breakfast came to $3.25 for orange juice, cereal, berries, and toast. Much too much—did she really need toast? Could she conceivably return it and get her money back? Not she. She knew she wasn’t the sort of person who could pull something like that off…Her rehabilitated spirits were sinking. Tray in hand, she led Adam over to the same out-of-the-way table behind the Thai food wall divider where she had her first talk with Jojo; only this time she sat with her back to the room. As to why she had done so, chosen this table, chosen this chair—she knew but fought its rising to the level of conscious knowledge.

They sat down, and Adam looked very happy. She had never seen him look so happy. She had seen him in a good mood before—but only after an odd and in its way exhausting form of combat. He loved to compete with Greg and the other Mutants in conversation—but it was a struggle, because they were good at it. He had a passion, obviously, for her, but he didn’t know what to do with his glasses if he was going to try to kiss her—another struggle. He got all balled up trying to figure out some way to sound passionate without sounding dorky—yet one more struggle. No one on earth would call Adam laid-back, but that was what he seemed to be at this moment.

“I don’t know if I ever told you,” he said, rocking back on two legs of his chair and smiling like a man who just shot the moon, “but I went to Japan the first semester of my junior year, and I spent a week with a family in a little fishing village two hours from Tokyo by train, way out by the ocean. For breakfast they didn’t have an entirely different menu the way we do. For breakfast, you know how we—or most people—have things we never think about the whole rest of the day? Juice, cereal, sliced bananas, eggs, pancakes, French toast, English muffins, cheese Danish.” He chuckled, quite delighted with himself. “Hmmm! Never noticed all that pan-European breakfast terminology before! That’s completely American, using all those foreign names for simple food. Greek coffee? Nahhh. I don’t know anybody who has Greek coffee for breakfast. Anyway, we have our special breakfast foods, and we never think about them again until the next morning. But you know what they have for breakfast out in a little village like the one I was in? They have leftovers from dinner the night before. Fish soup, warmed-over rice, stir-fried dumplings if there are any left; they’re really good. Now in that one thing, breakfast, you can read the story of the difference between two peoples, two cultures. For a start—”

And off he goes, thought Charlotte. It was endearing, this tendency of his…for the most part…after all, he did have the most wonderful intellectual curiosity.

“…things we’re trying to deny ourselves”—she realized she had lost track of what exactly had led to things we’re trying to deny ourselves.

“…the calories, the carbs, the bread, the butter, the cheese Danishes I mentioned, the eggs, whereas in Japan there’s nothing ‘scientific’ about it—”

A delicious aroma was wafting over from the other side of the salmon-colored LithoPlast divider. With the extraordinary power the olfactory sense has—Mr. Starling had talked about this—it went straight to a receptor in her memory, bypassing her “logical mind”—the very way Mr. Starling pronounced the words “logical mind” put them in quotation marks—the aroma summoned up a vision, in detail, from the time she and Jojo had sat at this very table and the same aroma had come wafting over from the Thai food counter on the other side of the LithoPlast divider. It was absolutely “ambrosial,” the adjective Momma used for food that was out of this world—in fact, Momma used to serve a dessert she called ambrosia, slices of orange with white coconut shavings and a little bit, no more than a sort of glaze, of molasses covering the bottom of the bowl—Momma used cereal bowls—but why was she putting ambrosia…and Momma…in the past tense? Did this—

“…and the yang of life, the passive and the aggressive, broadly speaking. As a result, the Japanese have the lowest incidence of—what’s the matter?”

He was looking at her quizzically.

Oh God, she must have let her eyes wander. Had she really been staring at a blank wall of LithoPlast?

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, already centrifuging her brain to try to force some little white explanation to the surface…Got it: “What you said about different cultures and different foods? It made me think of—in neuroscience, you’d be surprised—or maybe you wouldn’t—by what a hard time the neurophysiologists have trying to figure out exactly what neural pathways like…you know…what’s the word?—convey!—it’s convey—convey the sensation of hunger from the stomach to the brain.”

Adam just stared at her with his upper teeth overbiting his lower lip in puzzlement. The wonderfully happy look he had a moment ago was gone. That made her feel guilty all over again. He was sweet, and he really was smart—and why was she glad nobody else was here listening to all this? She consciously wanted to be Adam’s friend, his close friend—no, it was more than that…she wanted to love him! That would solve so many problems! She could live the life of the mind and the life of romance in one and the same person! All things that really counted would come together! She would once again be on the high road. She could return to Sparta and report to Miss Pennington without fear, without guilt, without…lies…but she didn’t love him, and she couldn’t force herself to love him…She didn’t feel butterflies in her stomach at the very thought of him…If she did, she was convinced, love would drive all the cheap, smug standards of Cool out of her mind. But Adam did have his blind spots, after all, such as trying to turn ordinary things into his beloved “matrical ideas,” and he didn’t even realize it was a form of showing off.