Orin, B.U. punting, and Joelle (p. 289)
he showed up to watch the sprinklers come on and turn the lemon-wedge of risen sun into plumed rainbows of refraction. The refracting-sprinklers part was actually true, and that he liked it; the rest had been fiction. […] Orin had developed a horrible schoolboy-grade crush, complete with dilated pupils and weak knees, for a certain big-haired sophomore baton-twirler he watched twirl and strut from a distance through the diffracted spectrum of the plumed sprinklers, all the way across the field’s dewy turf, a twirler who’d attended a few of the All-Athletic-Team mixers […] and who danced the same way she twirled and invoked mass Pep, which is to say in a way that seemed to turn everything solid in Orin’s body watery and distant and oddly refracted.
Context
The scene's master image, at the origin of the whole Orin-Joelle-Jim triangle: Orin first sees the P.G.O.A.T. through the diffracted spectrum of Nickerson Field's sprinklers, bent light being the one true thing in his cover story, and the sight refracts him — "everything solid in Orin's body watery and distant and oddly refracted." The future star of the lethal cartridge enters the novel as an optical phenomenon, never seen straight on.