As Charlotte encounters Dupont's elite- her roommate, Beverly, a fleshy, privileged Brahmin in lusty pursuit of lacrosse players ; Jojo Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont's godlike basketball team ; the Young Turk of Saint Ray fraternity, Hoyt Thorpe, whose heady sense of entitlement and social domination is clinched by his accidental brawl with a bodyguard for the governor of California ; and Adam Gellin, one of the Millennium Mutants who run the university's 'independent' newspaper and who consider themselves the last bastion of intellectual endeavour on campus - she gains a new, revelatory sense of her own power, that of her difference and of her very innocence. But little does she realise that she will act as a catalyst in all of their lives.