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“Karen Brown,” Temple said, readily. “We grew up together.”

The cops traded looks. “Can you give us a description of Miss Brown?”

“Black, short, built, long blond hair, light blue eyes, ivory skin.”

The cop was confused. “Did you say black? What’s black?”

“Karen.”

“She’s a black girl.”

“Yes. She’s my girlfriend.”

“And she’s light-skinned.”

“Yes.”

“But black.”

“She’s on a minority scholarship.”

“And she has what you call a passing complexion.”

“Anybody can tell looking at her that she’s black. She has full lips and a little flat nose, kind of like Barbie.”

“Barbie is Swedish.”

Temple was silent, thinking maybe they weren’t believing him.

When Temple called home to say the police had questioned him in connection with drugs, Dee uttered a scream she was sure could be heard in Charlottesville. She sat down hard, pounding the table with her fists. Meg was far away, incommunicado, at a squirrel sanctuary without a phone, and for several minutes Dee hoped somehow to conceal the revelation from Ike forever. She felt very alone.

“Take it easy, Mom,” Temple said. “It was a coincidence. We went to this party where there was a bust going on. How were we to know?” He described the conversation, adding that Barbie could be black and Swedish, the way Pushkin was black and Russian. Dee told him to keep his mouth shut and not to talk to anybody until she conferred with Ike. Understandably, she kept putting it off.

They didn’t ask him anything else, and they never questioned him again. There had been a request from the university administration to keep the scandal within limits. They were not about to sacrifice a black Jefferson scholar. And of course he was exempt from the prosecutor’s project of railroading white students. There was even a danger that if the public became aware of his presence at the party, all the white boys would be off the hook. Temple was not a welcome addition to the case.

The news that Karen was also black greatly disappointed the prosecutor. He wouldn’t be able to charge her with anything, or even throw around his new catchphrase “acid whore.” It would alienate the very constituency he was trying to reach. With a sigh of resignation, he set his sights on Byrdie alone.

The authorities didn’t catch up with Karen until the next day. She had been so busy with meals and classes and buying new sneakers. Most of her classes were well-attended lectures, and Temple’s description applied to half the women at UVA. You couldn’t tell by looking who was a natural blonde, and certainly not which blondes were black. Any short girl might wear heels. They were waiting outside her dorm room when she got back from breakfast.

They asked whether she had been given blotter acid at the party, and what she had done with it. She said she had thrown the acid away, because drugs are bad. She gave them the first note from Byrdie, explaining that she had found it in her pocket with the unwanted blotter, and the unsigned postcard.

“Did he do anything to you? Any evidence of a sexual encounter?” She shook her head, looking offended. “Would you be willing to submit to examination by a physician?”

“There’s nothing to examine!” Karen said. “I’m not that kind of girl!”

She led them to where she and Temple had disposed of the acid. And there it was — in tatters, laden with sand, but extant. Two nights underground including an episode of light rain had boosted its weight to a respectable five grams. They put the acid and Byrdie’s correspondence in Baggies and thanked her for her cooperation.

Not twenty minutes later, the prosecutor finally had his case. The poor, innocent black coed, the substantial amount of acid miraculously saved from the college dump, the note in Byrdie’s hand written with Byrdie’s Cartier fountain pen (it had been in the prosecutor’s possession since the search of Byrdie’s room), the revelatory postcard from the safe house, a.k.a. Holiday Inn.

The prosecutor put it all together, imagining himself a newspaper reporter, and experienced a moment of unexpected heavenly bliss.

Karen ran to Temple’s room and threw herself in his arms, wide-eyed with fear. Drugs. Sex. The police. This was not how she had imagined college.

She was scared straight. Instead of sitting still on his lap as she was used to doing, she squirmed. Temple leaned down and kissed the top of her head. Then he kissed her mouth. But instead of enveloping her in a bear hug as usual, he put one hand on the nape of her neck and the other on her breast. Then he got up and locked his roommate out. “Shit, why didn’t we think of this before?” he asked.

“Because we’re retarded,” Karen said.

Hours went by before a loud knock and a stern, stage-whispered “Temple!” alerted them that Dee had arrived. He let her in almost immediately, and her dismay over his metamorphosis reached a peak. The bedspread was smooth, their clothes were on, but their underwear was in a corner of the floor, and their hair. . Dee trembled. The shape of Temple’s coiffure, which wanted cutting, was that of a topographic model of West Virginia, and Karen’s hair was ratted all up the back like dog hair in a brush. Her lips had that bitten red look, and she was reading The Myth of Sisyphus as if she didn’t have a care in the world.

Dee slid past the bed and opened the window. Looking at Karen, she said, “Don’t be afraid to say hi. I’m not going to hit you.”

“Don’t rag on her, Mama,” Temple said. “She’s my best friend in the world.” He hugged and kissed his mother on the cheek.

“You smell like a bear,” Dee said. “And let me set something straight. I’m your best friend. But right now I feel like sending you out to cut a switch.”

“The situation is not good. We went to the wrong party.”

“You went to a party on Halloween? You’re not nine years old!”

“This is a party school. Everybody says, ‘Work hard, play hard.’ It’s not entirely clear to me how you can learn physics chronically hungover. But they all do it. I’m serious, Mama.” He took her hands. “They don’t work eight hours and go down to the pond with a fishing pole. I could go to community college and have better odds of working at the State Department than here. The way it’s going, I’ll be lucky to have a C average.”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“What subject?”

Dee turned. “Miss Karen, would you please explain yourself? How long has this been going on?”

Karen put the book down and stood up to borrow Temple’s comb. “You think I’m the reason he’s getting bad grades? You know when’s the first time we had sex? About twelve thirty. Today!”

Dee looked at her son and back at Karen, who was busy struggling with her hair, leaning forward with her head upside down.

“Was she experienced?”

“Drawing on the vast sophistication about women I’ve amassed in my long life, I would say no,” Temple said.

Dee reached down and threw back the bedspread. A conspicuous spot of blood appeared. She covered it up again quickly and said, “You know, I’m starting to think I might be angry at the wrong person.”

“You could say that.”

“Now I feel mad at myself, but that’s still the wrong person.”

“Keep on, Mama. You’re getting there.”

Dee sat down on a chair. “Why don’t you go and bathe yourself, and let me fix your hair, and we’ll go out and get some pie and you can tell me the whole story from the beginning.”

The hair project lasted fifteen pages of Camus. Pick pick pick, pat pat pat, coaxing it to maximum fluffiness and then trying to get it more or less spherical with the scarf from around her neck. As she worked she pondered how brilliantly she had raised a tall, handsome, noble boy who was the smartest child in the state of Virginia. She kept sneaking looks at the puny Shadow on the bed. Black my ass, she thought. You could tell by the food. White people were always eating things you couldn’t identify. Chicken nuggets, fish sticks, hamburgers from some in-between place beyond meat. Her food, you could tell what it was. If you left white people alone, they would put crawfish in a blender. It was no wonder Karen was undersized. Eventually she gave up. “After pie, the barbershop,” she said.