For many college students, spring break means fun and sun in Florida. For Danny, a Yale junior, it means two weeks behind the wheel of the Roach Coach, his father's lunch truck, which plies the parking lots of office parks in central New Jersey. But Danny can use the time behind the coffee urn to try and make sense of a love life that's gotten a little complicated. There's loyal and patient hometown honey Cindy and her recently dropped bombshell to contend with. And there's also lissome Polly back in New Haven-with her shifting moods, perfect thrift store dresses, and inconvenient liaison with a dashing professor. If girl problems aren't enough, there's the constant menace of the Lunch Monsters, a group of thungs who think Danny has planted the Roach Coach in their territory. Joe College is Tom Perrotta's warmest and funniest fiction yet, a comic journey into the dark side of love, higher education, and food service. "Tom Perrotta...is like an American Nick Hornby: companionable and humane, lighthearted and surprisingly touching." -- Newsweek "An absorbing, fleshed-out portrait of an American male edging toward adulthood by crossing seemingly rigid social boundaries." -- The New York Times Book Review Tom Perrotta is also the author of Election (made into the acclaimed 1999 movie starring Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon), The Wishbones, and Bad Haircut. He lives in Belmont, Massachusetts, and is a 1983 graduate of Yale. Joe College part onepencil dicksAll through that winter and into the spring, when our Tuesday- and Thursday-night dinner shifts were done, Matt and I would sit at the long table near the salad bar and plan his end-of-the-year party, our voices echoing importantly in the cavernous wood-panelled dining hall."What do you think?" he asked. "We gonna need more than two kegs?""Depends, I guess. How many people are coming?""A lot." Matt fixed me with those weirdly translucent blue eyes of his, eyes that sometimes made me think I was looking straight into his head. "I'm just gonna plaster the campus with signs that say, 'Party at Matt's.' As far as I'm concerned, the whole school's invited, plus all of Jessica's friends from Columbia. I wouldn't be surprised if a couple hundred people show up.""A couple hundred? Your landlord's gonna freak.""I talked to him. He's cool about it.""Cool about a couple hundred people?" I hadn't had much experience with landlords, having lived only at home and in dorms for the first twenty years of my life, but even I had enough sense to be skeptical of this claim."Lance is a party guy. Two glasses of grain alcohol and he'll be sliding naked down the banister to answer the door.""Grain alcohol? Who said anything about grain alcohol?""You can't have a really good party without it. Not the kind of party I'm talking about.""That stuff'll fuck you up," I said, trying to sound as though Iwere speaking from experience. It was a tone I'd pretty much mastered in my first two and a half years of college.Matt looked away, a private, dreamy smile softening the intensity of his face. I followed his gaze down the long center aisle of the dining hall, taking quiet satisfaction in the order I'd imposed on what only an hour before had been total chaos. While Matt had been working the dish line, feverishly sorting the dirty plates, glasses, and silverware from trays that came streaming toward him on the conveyor belt, I'd been clearing tables, straightening chairs, emptying ashtrays, laying down fresh paper doilies and clean water glasses, propping up table tents, and wiping the floor with a big hairy dust mop. All the dead guys on the wall, the former masters and rich donors and esteemed scholars, looked down upon my handiwork with solemn approval. They appreciated a clean dining hall and were glad I had made myself useful."What I really want," Matt mused, "is a party where everyone gets laid who wants to.""There's a name for that.""I'm not talking about an orgy," he said, apparently disappointed in me for thinking that he was. "I'm talking about a situation where everyone gets lucky in their own way.""Sounds like an orgy to me."Nick, the Tuesday-night chef, emerged from the kitchen and trudged over to the table to join us for a final cigarette before heading home or out to a bar, wherever it was he went after work. I always did a double take when I saw him in street clothes. Out of uniform he struck me as a plausible human being, an average guy in a belted leather jacket, rather than the sweaty buffoon he impersonated during working hours, a malcontent in a puffy hat muttering an incessant profane monologue as he tossed sprigs of garnish onto trays of scrod in white sauce and meatless baked ziti."What's up, pencil dicks?" he inquired, pulling up a chair at the far end of the table as if to illustrate the gulf between us. Theredidn't seem to be anything hostile in the gesture, just an acknowledgment of fact. We were college boys; he had to work for a living."Mat