Of course, Tim had anticipated this too. “All you have to do is get there, Fitz—the rest, room and board, three meals a day—is only fourteen-forty per diem. It’s Mexico, Fitz, cheap as dirt. And if you can’t afford that”—a wink for the room—“there’s always the IFIF scholarship.”

“The what?”

“The International Federation for Internal Freedom. Dick and I are founding it—for obvious reasons. The science game is falling short and we’re not going to be held back by it any longer. But the point is, Peggy’s rich—she and her twin brothers are heirs to the Mellon fortune—and if you didn’t know, Dick’s from a well-to-do family too. We’ll underwrite you, Fitz—you’ll be the first scholarship recipient, what do you say to that?”

“Come on, Fitz,” Fanchon purred, canting her head to look up at him. “It will not be the same without you.”

“But Joanie—her job?”

“Fitz, Fitz, Fitz,” Tim said, shaking his head in a whirl of little blue balls, “you are just too rigid—”

“Uptight,” Charlie put in.

“Which is all right, I’m not criticizing,” Tim said, “but a library job? Joanie’s worth ten times more than that and I’ll bet you anything she’ll get whatever she wants in the fall, I mean whatever, so you really have no grounds to stand on here, amigo. None at all.”

Tim lifted his cup and Charlie, Ken, Fanchon and Rick followed suit. “To Mexico!” he cried, and Fitz, riding a sudden swell of joy that sank the library, his cramped apartment and the psych building from sight as if the pellucid waves had already closed over them, raised his too.

He was a bit foggy the next morning—and he had a headache, the first tequila headache of his life, which, he noted dully, was a novelty in itself—but he woke to a vision of frothing surf, white beaches and a sun parked overhead. Joanie was already up—he could hear her in the kitchen, rattling the pot she soft-boiled her morning eggs in, then padding across the floor to slip into Corey’s room and whisper him awake. Some mornings, depending on her mood, she rattled out, “You gotta get up, you gotta get up, you gotta get up in the morning!” as her waking anthem, but today she just whispered, as if to spare them all.