Christmas in Shiny Prize; New Year's cocaine; Orin abstains

timeline_event

texture · B.S. 2001, Dec–31 Dec

When: B.S. 2001, Christmas and New Year's Eve ("the last P.M. Before Subsidization"), Shiny Prize KY
What: Orin flew to Kentucky for Christmas with Joelle's chemist Daddy Joe Lon van Dyne (the Pyrex litmus collection). On New Year's Eve he watched Joelle do "very small amounts of cocaine" for the first time and declined it himself — not judgmentally, and partly because "the N./O.N.A.N.C.A.A.-urine considerations" of football testing forbade it — finding a "vicariously on-the-edge feeling" in being straight while she got high. He wired Bain, Reat, and the Nickerson heir "that he was by all indications in love with somebody." (Cf. scene 062: "his urine was an open book because of football.")