He was a most incongruous ball boy, dark-skinned with a shag of black hair falling over his soft dark eyes. His nose, his cheekbones, the mild thrust of his jaw—all of them were prominent, none of them dominated. His was the face of an unintrusive factotum—a good flight attendant perhaps, or an assistant sommelier. But that face was joined to a hard body that somehow conveyed, at least to me, a guarded turbulence, a suppressed defiance. Ferment seemed to seep through the filter of his skin and unsettle the very air around him. Or maybe it was my imagination.

The girl tossed a ball into the air. Her racquet circled and slammed it across the net. She darted forward, on her toes, and Abby and I were delighted, entranced as she performed her caprioles. She swerved to the center of the court, her tight little ass all but bursting the snug cutoffs, her ponytail flying, those plangent breasts in the man’s shirt uncontaminated by a bra, alive alive-o like two playful puppies under a thin blanket.

I watched, Abby watched, but Derek, poor bastard, had to watch the ball, and he wasn’t even good at that. He took a few stagey, self-important steps, swerving heroically, and hit a clinker. The ball thunked against the rim of his racquet and fell like a dead bird at his feet.

Derek stared at his racquet, holding it in front of his face as if it had committed some unforgivable breach and he were admonishing it silently. He tugged at his immaculate shorts the way pros do on TV. He looked like a tennis player, but his game had more form than content and his racquet categorically refused to do his bidding.

“Thirty-love,” the girl said solemnly, and I laughed to myself. I was having a great time, after all those months in the stacks. Out there in the open, sportsmanlike reticence I suppose precluded any wild demonstration (crying for joy, foaming at the mouth, cartwheels, rape). Abby’s eyes held a look of mute blind rapture like the eyes of a lap dog clotted with adoration.

Someone was breathing heavily down my neck. I turned; it was Phillips Chatterton lurching toward me in his hair shirt of a bathrobe, like a fat penitent on the road to Canossa. His burden was a thick bundle of newspapers, yellowed and foxed with age. He dumped them on the rickety table and it staggered. What a windfall, I thought, what a veritable windfall. With trembling hands I picked up the top sheet. The logo read THE COCKEYSVILLE WEEKLY CLARION, and under it the date: Thursday, May 12, 1923. To the left was the weather forecast (cloudy, with possible thundershowers) and to the right a box enclosed a rather formidable statement: “The World’s Greatest Weekly,” it said forthrightly.

“What is this?” I asked.

“Tom Chatterton’s newspaper. I thought…”

“Who’s Tom Chatterton?”