If the big man recognized him, if he was at all happy that his five flats had arrived, or if he was in any other way pleased by Adam’s presence, he successfully contained his enthusiasm. He motioned toward a table just inside the door and said, “Over there.” Over there—not even put it over there, much less please.

Adam did as he was told and glanced about the room, which was big but practically unfurnished except for an outsize DVD television screen tuned to ESPN SportsCenter, which nobody seemed to be watching, and a set of quadraphonic speakers currently devoted to the drones and percussions of “Elliptical Rider.” Jones was not the only tall, powerfully built young man in the room with a shaved head. Treyshawn Diggs over there—hard to miss him. André Walker, Dashorn Tippet…but also some young black men who didn’t look like athletes or students, either. Smoky in here. The sweet odor—marijuana. The black athletes, Adam had noticed, liked weed—that was invariably the term—while the white athletes preferred alcohol, and nobody even paid lip service any longer to the rule that athletes shouldn’t get high during the season. The TV screen flared and lit up a huge white head. Jojo! That was him, Jojo. He was in the back of the room talking to Charles Bousquet. That huge white head happened to turn his way.

“Hey, Jojo.” Somehow it seemed very important that the morose and intimidating Curtis Jones realized that he, Adam, knew someone here. Jojo gave him nothing but a blank stare. Couldn’t he see who it was? Adam raised his voice this time—“Hey, Jojo!”—and waved.

Jojo nodded once, without a smile, then turned and resumed his conversation with Charles Bousquet. Adam couldn’t believe it—but then he knew it was true. Jojo was avoiding him. He didn’t want to acknowledge his tutor’s existence in the same room as his cohort of fellow giants. Just two days ago he had stayed up all night researching and writing a paper for him on a complicated subject—saved him from a catastrophic F—and now the big, ungrateful dummy cuts him half dead with a single stone-faced nod!

Curtis Jones was glowering. “Okay. How much I owe you?”

Adam fished the PowerPizza check out of the pocket of his Windbreaker, looked at it, and said, “Fifty dollars and seventy-four cents.”

Jones snatched the check from between his thumb and forefinger. “Lemme see that.” He stared at it until his eyebrows came together. “Shit.” He looked at Adam as if he were trying to perpetrate some outrageous scam. Belligerently he jammed his hand down into a pocket of his jeans, withdrew a thick fold of money clamped with a broad gold clip, riffled through it with his thumb, extracted two bills, handed them to Adam, and turned away without so much as another word.

The man’s wide back was toward him before Adam comprehended what was in his hand. A fifty and a one. A fifty and a one? Twenty-six cents? Surely Curtis Jones was going to turn back and give him his real tip.

But he didn’t. Adam was stunned. This was a fifty-dollar order! It didn’t matter who the man was. He couldn’t let himself get stiffed like this. He screwed up his courage. “Hey, wait a minute.” He’d started to say, “Wait a minute, Curtis,” but he wasn’t brave enough to act that familiar, and he was too angry to grovel and say Mr. Jones. Not that it would have made any difference; Jones hadn’t even heard him above the noise of the conversations and C. C. Good Jookin’s Sample Rap.

Adam stared at the two bills again. Twenty-six cents. Anger wrestled with fear. Fear was winning. Okay, he’d—he’d—he knew what he’d do. He’d take twenty-six cents in change out of his pocket and say Hey, you forgot your change and then throw it at him. Well, not exactly throw—more like toss. He searched his pockets. He didn’t have any change, not even a single coin. He ransacked his mind.

“Hey! Curtis!” It just came blurting out.

Jones, who had begun walking toward Treyshawn Diggs, stopped, turned his shoulders slightly, and looked back.

“What about my tip!” The trigger had been pulled now, and there was no holding back.

The big black man merely tilted his head, raised one eyebrow, narrowed his eyes, and gave Adam a certain look of male challenge that as much as said, “Okay, what about it?” Adam was speechless. Jones turned his back and started toward the center of the room.

“THEY DON’T PAY ME TO DELIVER THIS STUFF! ALL I GET IS THE TIPS!”

The room grew quiet except for C. C. Good Jookin’s synthesizer beat, which in the sudden silence seemed swollen with amplification. The odor of weed seemed somehow stronger. The lurid flashes of ESPN SportsCenter hurt Adam’s eyes. He knew his face was a burning red.

Without even looking at him, Curtis Jones said, “Hey, the man says he wants a tip.” He sounded gloriously bored. Sniggers, chuckles, and the deep rumble—hegghhh hegghhh heggghhhh—of somebody’s belly laugh. “One a you guys wanna give the man a tip?”

A few more low, restrained hegghhh hegghhh heggghhhhs, but nobody said a word, and nobody reached into his pocket, either. Adam was acutely conscious of a roomful of black faces, all turned toward him.

And one white face: Jojo’s. Adam opened his eyes wide, imploringly, and fixed them upon Jojo. Jojo! You know these guys—don’t let them do this to me!

Jojo stood there like a building. Finally he screwed his lips up to one side, shrugged his shoulders, and rolled his head in the direction of Curtis Jones, as if to say, “Hey, it’s his party.”

The others were already tired of the spectacle of the whining delivery boy. Conversation resumed, and C. C. Good Jookin’s “Elliptical Rider” sank into the general hubbub. Jojo turned back to Charles Bousquet as if his tutor had never existed. Out in the middle of the room, silhouetted against the garish rectangle of the big television screen, some black guy was nudging the great hulk of Treyshawn Diggs. Adam couldn’t see their faces very well, but he was sure they were having themselves a good laugh at his expense: the little white boy, his face contorted into a wretched plea, standing there atremble, begging a room full of black males for his tip…

Aghast at his own abasement, Adam slunk out through the door. Why even bother slamming it? It would only make his humiliation complete, if by any remote chance it wasn’t already. They—and Jojo—had treated him like the lowest form of servant and, worse, as the lowest form of male, a bitch who didn’t dare do anything more than bleat for his tip.

As he shitkicked his way along the hallway’s steel-wool–colored carpet toward the elevator, his chin hooked down over his clavicle, Adam tried to console himself. After all, what could he have possibly done about it? He had been on alien terrain in a room full of young males of a different race, half of them giant pumped-up trained athletes. Was he supposed to loathe himself for not confronting the alpha-male challenge in Curtis Jones’s eyes and fighting him? But that hadn’t been his only choice, had it. He could have told him off. He could have told them all off. He could have informed them of what vulgar, illiterate, childish, ego-inflated, brain-stunted, reverse-racist bastards they actually were. Except for Jojo, of course—and you’re worse, you towering buzz-cut blockhead! You’re so terrified of looking uncool in front of the other players, you’re afraid to show even the most minimal common courtesy to someone who just rescued you from disaster, you nine-hundred-SAT, ninety-IQ, PlayStation 3 cretin! You didn’t even want to be caught knowing me, you craven snob!

But he hadn’t uttered a word of all that, had he. He had been the craven one. He had just stood there pleading for a tip, too much of a coward to do anything else. He could rationalize it all he wanted, but there was no getting around the simple fact of the matter. He had caved in at the first sign of male challenge.