“Hey,” I said.

Our fourth day of following Jason Warren and it was beginning to feel like tailing a young Valentino. Diandra had stressed that we not let Jason know we were tailing him, citing a male’s reluctance to let anyone else control or alter his destiny and Jason’s own “formidable” sense of privacy, as she called it.

I’d be private too, I guess, if I averaged three women in three days.

“A hat trick,” I said.

“What?” Angie said.

“The kid scored a hat trick on Wednesday. That officially puts him in the hound hall of fame.”

“Men,” she said, “are pigs.”

“This is true.”

“Wipe that smirk off your face.”

If Jason were being stalked, the most likely suspect was a jilted lover, some young woman who didn’t much appreciate being a notch on a belt, the number two of three. But we’d been watching him almost nonstop for over eighty hours and we’d seen no one following him but us. He wasn’t hard to find either. Jason spent his days in class, usually arranged a nooner in his dorm room (an arrangement he seemed to have worked out with his roommate, a stoner from Oregon who held bong parties every night at seven when Jason was out of the room), studied on the lawn until sunset, ate in the cafeteria with a tableful of women and no men, then hit the bars around Bryce at night.

The women he slept with—at least the three we’d seen—all seemed to know of one another without jealousy. All were somewhat of a type, too. They wore fashionable clothing, usually black, with even more fashionable rips in them somewhere. They wore tacky costume jewelry which—given the cars they drove and the soft imported leather of their boots, jackets, and knapsacks—they presumably knew was tacky. So un-hip as to be hip, I guess—their ironic postmodern wink at a hopelessly out of touch world. Or something. None of them had boyfriends.

They were all enrolled in the School of Arts and Sciences. Gabrielle majored in literature. Lauren majored in art history, but spent most of her time playing lead guitar in an all-female ska/punk/speed metal band which seemed to have spent far too much time taking Courtney Love and Kim Deal seriously. And Jade—small and lean and self-consciously foul-mouthed—was a painter.

None of them appeared to bathe much. This would have been a problem for me, but it didn’t seem to bother Jason. He didn’t bathe much, either. I’ve never been particularly conservative when it comes to my taste in women, but I do have one rule about bathing and one rule about clitoral rings and I’m pretty unyielding about both of them. Makes me a killjoy with the grunge set, I guess.

Jason made up for the slack, though. Jason, from what we’d seen, was the male campus pump. Wednesday, he climbed out of Jade’s bed and they both went to a bar called Harper’s Ferry, where they met Gabrielle. Jade stayed in the bar, but Jason and Gabrielle retired to Gabrielle’s BMW. There they had oral-genital contact, which I had the misfortune to observe. When they returned, Gabrielle and Jade went into the ladies’ room where, according to Angie, they gleefully compared notes.