When he finished, the floor at that spot had become a glaze of mucus about two feet in diameter. The mighty LumeNex lights of the Buster Bowl highlighted it in a viscous relief, or was he just seeing things? In any case, he’d get some other manager to clean up the remains later on.

Jojo, heading down the ramp to the dressing room, had heard the exchange. His humiliation took a further nosedive…into guilt. How could he have done what he just did? How could he have called the girl a slave and all that other stuff? And she had stood up to him, and to Buster Roth, too! He envisioned her twenty pounds lighter, slim in the hips, and naked.

The moment Hoyt got a glimpse of the guy coming toward them, he pegged him as a dork.

“Yo,” he said to Vance, who was seated across from him in the booth at Mr. Rayon, “who is that guy?” He made a slight motion with his head.

Vance turned his head in that direction as inconspicuously as he could. “No clue.”

Hoyt took another glance. The guy was wearing a red Windbreaker with BOSTON RED SOX on the front. It was unzipped, revealing a “lively” sport shirt, which was tucked into his pants, which were black flannel. And what was it about his hair? It was dark, curly, too long—and had a part in it. A part! By now long hair was very Goth. Now you wore your hair short with no part. The guy wore his hair parted! On top of that, he was skinny without looking in any way wiry, much less buff. He might as well have had a sign around his neck saying DORK.

The guy came right over to their table. He looked down at Hoyt with these big, wide-open, timorous eyes and said, “Hi! You’re Hoyt?” Then he managed a grin that was probably supposed to look affable. In fact, the small muscles in his lower lip were twitching.

“That’s right,” said Hoyt, looking him in the eye in a challenging manner.

The dork turned toward Vance and tried another smile and said, “And you’re…Vance?”

Vance didn’t say a word. He just nodded yes…in a cool fashion that as much as said, “And therefore…?”

The dork looked from Vance to Hoyt and from Hoyt to Vance and said, “I’m Adam. I don’t mean to…uh…” He couldn’t think up the word for what he didn’t mean to do, and he smiled, averting his eyes.

“Then why the fuck are you doing it?” Hoyt said under his breath.

“What?” said the dork.

Hoyt made a small dismissive motion with his hand.

The dork soldiered on. “You guys mind if I ask you something for just a second?”

Vance looked at Hoyt. Hoyt eyed the guy for a couple of beats and said, “Go ahead.”

“Thanks,” said the dork. Almost without looking, he leaned backward, grabbed a chair from the next table and pulled it up and sat down, hunching forward with his forearms resting on his thighs and his hands clasped between his knees. “I’m from the Daily Wave.” His eyes darted this way and that at Hoyt and Vance. “Several people have told my editor that you guys”—now he smiled as if he were about to bring up that merriest subject imaginable—“pulled a helluva prank on the governor of California last spring when he was here for commencement.”

His eyes darted even faster, and he held on to the smile for dear life. Evidently the smile was supposed to cover up a case of rapid ataxic eyeblink and the fact that his Adam’s apple went way up and then way down in an involuntary swallow.

Hoyt could see Vance staring at him in alarm. He said to the dork in a bored manner, “Who told you that?”

The dork said, “I guess—well, nobody told me exactly. They told my editor, was the way it happened. And he asked me to check it out. So I’m just here to—” He couldn’t find the word to complete that sentence, either, and resorted to a few shrugs. His shoulders shrugged, his eyebrows shrugged, and his lips smiled innocently.

Hoyt looked at Vance. “You know what he’s talking about, Vance?”

Vance shook his head no; too emphatically, if the truth be known.

Hoyt looked at the dork. “The governor of California…What’s supposed to have happened to the governor of California?”

The dork said, “Well, just before commencement—a day or two before—I’m trying to remember when the Swarm concert was—I need to check all this out—that’s why I’m asking you guys”—he lifted his eyebrows in a way that suggested a helpless plea—“to get it all straight. Anyway, what these people told my editor was—it wasn’t just one person—I mean, we probably wouldn’t even care if it was just one person—but this is one of those things that’s all over the place—”

“What is?” said Hoyt. He began rolling his forefinger toward himself in the semaphore that says, “Hurry up, get it out.”

“Well—this is what these people, these students I’m talking about—they’re all students—or at least I don’t know for a fact that they’re all students, but that’s what my editor told me—he didn’t go out looking for this story, nobody did—they came to us—” The dork broke off. He could no longer recall the syntax of what he was supposed to be saying. “Anyway, they told us that it was after the Swarm concert at the Opera House, and it’s after midnight or something, and you guys were walking back to campus through the Grove and you see the governor right out there in the Grove and this girl is giving him a blow job—” He stopped to look at Hoyt and Vance, as if to give them a chance to answer. “Am I right so far?”

“Wow,” said Hoyt in a bored, Sarc 1 fashion. “So what happens next?”

“Well…then—this is what we were told—I’m not saying it’s necessarily true one way or the other—I’m here to ask you guys”—a look filled with fathoms and fathoms of sincerity—“because the way we hear it is, the governor has these two bodyguards who are out there in the Grove, but they’re not, you know, right there watching or anything, but they spot you two guys and they come running up, and you guys jumped them and beat ’em up.”

“Two guys,” Vance blurted out, “and we jumped them…”

Vance, thought Hoyt, you are sooooo uncool.

“That’s why I wanted to ask you guys personally,” said the dork. “That’s not the way it happened? I’m just interested in…you know…how it did happen.”

The dork now knew he was onto something. He’d have to be retarded not to.

“Vance,” said Hoyt with another Sarc 1 smile, “you’re a vicious motherfucker, man.” To the dork: “And that’s the ‘prank’?”

“I guess ‘prank’ isn’t exactly the right word,” said the dork, “but you know, ‘prank’ in the sense of you guys didn’t go out there to jump anybody and you didn’t go out there to see the governor of California get some head—the people who were telling us about it, they called it the Night of the Skull Fuck. It was like it was a really unusual, funny thing that happened, that’s all. So is that the way it happened? Is it close to the way it happened?”

Hoyt could practically feel Vance’s eyes boring into his head, beseeching him…Hoyt said to the dork, “I tell you what. Whyn’t you call the governor of—what state was it?—California? See what he has to say.”

“I already have,” said the dork.

Vance couldn’t hold it back: “You did? What’d he say!”

“They never put me through to him personally,” said the dork. “I talked to some kind of…spokesperson. She said it was beneath comment. That was her expression, ‘beneath comment.’ But if you ask me, that’s not the same as saying it never happened.”

Vance, alarm still in his voice: “So now the guy knows you plan to write something about it?”

“Well…sure,” said the dork. “I told them.”

Vance, you are so-o-o-o-o-o-o-o uncool. To the dork: “Who’s the girl supposed to be in this story, the one giving the governor of California a blow job?”

“I don’t know her name,” said the dork, “but one of these people—we got the first name of her current boyfriend.”

“Which is what?” said Hoyt.

“Something like Crawford. You guys know who that might be?”

Crawdon McLeod, thought Hoyt. Now that was weird. Who the fuck could’ve or would’ve told these dorks about Crawdon and Syrie? “Crawford…Don’t know any Crawford,” he said.