Joe College: A Novel by Tom Perrotta

you prep school bitch!”
    Even before she finished, Kristin realized that her audience had expanded beyond Djembe. Blushing sweetly, she reached up to adjust the paper cap she kept pinned to her hair at a charmingly impossible angle.
    “My obscene caller,” she explained. “I changed my number twice but he still keeps tracking me down.”
    “Gross,” said Sarah. “My roommate gets those all the time.”
    “Outrageous,” Djembe declared in his elegant Nigerian accent. “This should not be tolerated.”
    Nick gave a soft, derisive chuckle, just loud enough for Brad and me to hear. Djembe had long gotten on Nick’s nerves, originally for his regal bearing and exotic good looks, but more recently for his close and sexually charged friendship with Kristin.
    “Hey, Jimbo,” Nick called out. “You know why they don’t have any obscene phone callers in Africa?”
    Djembe turned wearily toward our end of the table. He had long ago given up correcting Nick’s deliberate mispronunciation of his name.
    “Please explain,” he said.
    “I’ll tell you why.” A slow grin of triumph spread across Nick’s face. “’Cause they don’t have any fucking phones.”
    For some reason, he addressed this punch line to me instead of Djembe. Even after the joke met with a deafening lack of response from the rest of the table, he kept his eyes glued to mine, as if daring me to laugh, to join him in an alliance against the humorless stiffs and African princes of the world. The best I could manage for him was a tight little smile, a cowardly smirk of approval.
     
     
    The dish line had its own eccentric rhythm, out of synch with the rest of the operation. It was quiet when the dining hall was packed and noisy, and increasingly hectic as the place began clearing out. You got to lounge when your co-workers were hustling,
and then had to pick up the pace just as everyone else began slacking off.
    At its best, the dirty end of the line was simply unsavory. At its worst, the work was filthy and relentless. Tray after tray—some of them stacked into precarious double- and triple-deckers—came streaming down the conveyor belt at a pace that seemed reasonable enough right up to the moment when it suddenly became demonic. In the space of a couple seconds, you had to grab the silverware, rinse the plates, and empty the glasses, sorting each item into separate racks. When a rack got full, you had to shove it into the dishwasher, which resembled an automatic car wash, and then grab a fresh rack from underneath the conveyor belt, all without missing a beat on the next tray. It was just possible to accomplish these tasks without shutting down the line if the diners did as they were told before bussing their trays—i.e., dispose of their paper trash and uneaten food, and place their silverware on the right—but not everyone found it in their hearts to cooperate. You would get coffee cups half-filled with peanut butter, a mound of mashed potatoes studded with cigarette butts, someone’s eyeglasses tucked inside a taco shell. You’d grab for a plate, only to discover that it had been painstakingly coated with mayonnaise, or find yourself staring in confused revulsion at a bowl full of melted chocolate ice cream and green peas. All over the dining hall, it seemed, people were ripping their napkins into confetti, and dropping the confetti piece by piece into nearly empty glasses of water, just to give us the pleasure of reaching in with our bare hands and scooping out clots of saturated paper. By the end of the shift, you were soaking wet and smelled exactly like the webbed rubber floor mat you had to hose down before calling it quits—ripe and meaty and hazardous to the public health.
     
     
    Eddie Zimmer was late that night, but I didn’t mind covering for him. Eddie and I had handled the Thursday-night dish line all year, and had developed a model working relationship. Outside of the
dining hall we barely exchanged two words, but inside