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SUPERFAN

ALSO BY JENNY TINGHUI ZHANG

Four Treasures of the Sky

SUPERFAN JENNY TINGHUI ZHANG

A Novel

PENGUIN MICHAEL JOSEPH

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First published in the United States of America by Flatiron Books 2026

First published in Great Britain by Penguin Michael Joseph 2026 001

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For those who live with love

I’ll follow you until you love me

—“Paparazzi,”

Lady Gaga

I love

my fans

. . . and

my what

—“Idol,” BTS

How foolish men are! To see nothing but beauty in what is clearly evil! And how benighted to dismiss as absurd what is clearly well intended!

—Pu Songling

(translated by John Minford)

MINNIE

The boys are there, waiting for her. They have always been waiting for her.

She is browsing the front page of a video sharing site when she sees them: draped in white, frozen, yet exploding. ASIAN BOY BAND STUNS AT LOCAL MUSIC FESTIVAL, the title of the video says. Normally, she would ignore a declaration like this, preferring to decide for herself the things that stun her, but their faces—which are undeniably lovely—give her pause. Two million views. Uploaded ten days ago. She cannot fathom the numbers and she cannot fathom the boys. Between Josh Tries to Eat Everything at Whataburger and this, she chooses this.

The music begins. The four of them leap forward, stage lights rolling oﬀ their bodies as if unable to latch on. The video was recorded on a cell phone, the picture peppered with grain, but the boys remain clean. Their hair is the color of acorn, honey, liquid silver, and midnight; their bodies are sheathed in white fabric. She can feel them through the laptop screen, count all the pixels that come together to form their sublime faces. She imagines, too, the pulsing tangle of pixels beneath their clothes, the ones that make up their blood, their muscles, their precious bones. The boys are tall and lanky, the kind of model bodies that are 90 percent legs and the rest pure charisma. Glossy boys, unstoppable boys.

It starts like this, then. With a video of boys.

The boys are singing and dancing, gliding and spinning, and glowing, really glowing, and she is glowing with them, because between her and them, there is no longer a laptop screen. There is no audience, no band, no crew in the wings. Not the concept of distance, not even air. There

is only them and all the things she wants, which is to be with them, to love them and for them to love her.

The performance ends. The crowd screams their approval, the sound a white-hot current that shoots back and forth between her ears. The boys bow for the final time, each face softened with a smile. They press their palms to their lips and wave.

The screen fades to black and she is left staring at her own stunned face.

She replays the video four times more, watching one boy at a time. She tracks his dance, his song, the shimmer of his face as he struts up and down the stage. She follows these faultless boys, these irresistible boys, these boys with voices pitched to an octave of angels, and she feels herself falling and rising at the same time.

I have no idea who these boys are, one comment below the video says, but I’m in love with them.

HALO’S POWER!!! reads another. MURDER ME KING!

I’m drowning in so much bliss.

Why are their bodies built like that? Are they telling me to die?

And on and on, for one thousand more.

A new hunger blooms, the desire to know every single thing about these boys until she brims with them. She opens a tab and types the band’s name into the search bar. A column of results greets her: fanmade websites; web-encyclopedia entries; message boards; blog rings; video compilations. All created in the past few days by fans like her (can she call herself a fan already? It feels that way). She skims through the results, and then, knowing that she may very well never come back from whatever lies ahead, clicks the first one.

She consumes. Until the light drains from her dorm room and the only source left is the glare of the laptop, illuminating her slack face. Until a whine in her stomach reminds her that she has not eaten in hours. The dining hall is surely closed, but it no longer matters, because the boys are here now and she can eat her fill with them. Every interview she reads brings them closer. Every video she watches makes them more hers. When she goes to sleep that night, she is surrounded

by the boys, their faces warm and handsome, their hands all holding her, rubbing her, passing oﬀ some of their magic onto her so that she, too, might shine the way they do.

In class the next day, she cannot concentrate. The professor asks her to read a poem out loud, Borges, and she does so, but the words fatten and blur into spongy macaroni. You are invulnerable, she recites. Didn’t they deliver (those forces that control your destiny) the certainty of dust? Beyond the words, she imagines a screen on which play images of the boys, their necks taut and pearled with sweat. Lovely, the professor intones. She is inclined to agree.

The sound of the carillon bells releases her back to them. She shoots through campus to her dorm and climbs into bed with her laptop on her thighs, searching for more information. What she knows so far: There is Minwoo, the responsible leader; Denim, the aﬀable allAmerican; Jelly, the ethereal dancer; and Halo, the aloof and mysterious bad boy. The four of them, together, make HOURglass.

Those are my boys, she thinks as she listens to them sing to her. She has never done drugs before—she has not had the chance—but she has known what it is to love: a detective book series, a gorgeous actor, the soft spot behind her first dog’s ears. Those had been her obsessions, brieﬂy, but they wither next to the imperative of the boys. She imagines this must be what they mean when they call it taking a “hit.” But there is nothing dangerous about it, nothing nefarious. The boys stand on every side of her, radiating love, and she feels it course through her own body, plumping her up, making her skin smooth, her lashes long, her lips pink, until she is the most beautiful version of herself, one everyone can love, one even she, herself, can love.

WE ARE YOURS, AND YOU ARE? the boys ask in one video. OURS, the crowd shouts back. A call and response that is almost holy. It is not clear to her who belongs to whom, but this is the way it is supposed to be: They belong to each other.

When the day is over, she knows what Minwoo’s favorite fruit is (pineapple), where Denim went to high school (a private performing arts academy in California), the qualities Jelly looks for in his soulmate

(someone who can cook), and what scares Halo the most (ghosts). The boys feel like a place where she can live a while, perhaps forever. They could be her friends, her brothers, her lovers. In fact, she thinks, they are all those things combined.

In the hallway, a door opens and she hears the laughter of two girls who occupy the room next to hers. One of them has just returned from a study date and recounts the titillating details to the other. Their conversation forces her to reenter the atmosphere. She remembers just how far away she is from the boys—they in Los Angeles, she in Austin. They up so high in the sky, she tangled in her comforter. It is a heavy realization, an unwelcome disruption of the happiness she has cultivated for the past forty-eight hours. She rises to lock her door, even though no one ever comes to her room, and returns to bed, where she watches videos of the boys until she falls asleep.

EASON

They are on in five when the tremors come. His left hand succumbs first, then his right, until both hands vibrate a violent magic. To anyone watching, it would seem that he is casting a spell, but they would be wrong. The spell has been cast by something outside himself.

He clenches his hands into fists, but nausea is not far behind. The nearest trash can is back in the green room, which feels worlds away from where he is now, so he dives behind a handcart full of stage lights and retches there, wincing as milky bile splashes on the ﬂoor. The smell of it rises, hot and sour.

“Dude, come on,” a stagehand groans, but there is no time for him to clean the mess or apologize. His makeup is ruined and there is residue on his shirt cuﬀ. As if on cue, a stylist appears beside him, swiping gloss on his lips and patting down his cheeks. She presses something hard into his left hand. Looking down, he finds a breath mint.

2 MINS, the display monitor signals.

The curtain is lifting, ﬂoating upward like a ghoul, as the announcer takes the stage once more. “You’re in for a treat,” he hears her tell the crowd. He pops the mint.

Nearby, his bandmates run through their last-minute rituals—for Minwoo, it is a prayer, and for Colt, three knocks on wood. Julian cranks his head left and right, then jumps in place. For Eason, there is no pre-show ritual, because this is the first performance of his life. Instead, he remembers a trick his sister once taught him as a remedy for nerves: Take a deep breath in, form an infinitesimal hole with your lips, then push the exhale through. It’s called an embouchure, she told him. That’s how brass players get their sound. He does this now, closing

his eyes and feeding the air in his body through the opening between his lips.

It works. He opens his eyes and sees the four of them anew: Minwoo is Minwoo and Colt is Denim and Julian is Jelly and he—he is Halo. The tremors are gone, as is the nausea. The four of them stand in the dark, beacons newly lit to burn into the night.

Out they go, to a pavilion with a sweeping, domed roof and stone steps leading out onto a dew-struck lawn. The audience is there, waiting for him. Perhaps they have always been waiting for him. He looks out at the bodies spilling over the grassy field. When he was young, he always wondered what celebrities felt in front of a crowd such as this. Now, gazing into a mirror of two thousand reﬂecting his own wild hope, he finally has some idea: the need for them to love him. This is all he can think when the music begins and the beeps inside his in-ears cue him to his starting position. In this moment, nothing matters more.

The first song ends. Time is precious—they only have eight minutes to capture the audience’s hearts and make enough of an impression that they might become lifelong superfans. As the second song cues in, he feels himself relaxing, his body settling into the playful movements of the choreography. Eight eight-counts of footwork, then a body roll before unleashing the bubblegum charm of the chorus. A few women in the front row go nuts for it, reaching for him with outstretched hands. “I LOVE YOU!” they shriek. But they do not know him enough to love him, not yet. There is still so much he has to earn. He sends them a wink, a reﬂex from his training, and they scream even louder, their voices verging on a shatter.

Then it is all over. Eight minutes goes by too quickly, he thinks, dazed. The display monitor facing them ﬂashes GOODBYE in warning. The four of them scatter around the stage, waving at the audience until their wrists go soft. Thank you, he mouths to a group of girls bobbing up and down against the barricade. Their faces are a cross-pollination of stage lights, lit in purple, lemon, baby blue, and gold. They look beautiful, he thinks. Like ﬂowers opening in the face of a splendid sun. Everything will change. He knows this with unshakable certainty as

they run oﬀ the stage. Minwoo is beaming, Colt is whooping, and Julian returns the high fives that every stagehand throws at them. HOURGLASS! HOURGLASS! the audience chants behind them. A name they did not know eight minutes ago, but will now remember forever. The backstage area, which once felt suﬀocating, now expands with possibility. As he stands there with his bandmates, the four of them panting and spent, he realizes why. They are the splendid sun.

POST #28

I discovered the most wonderful thing today.

I was looking for something to watch during my lunch break. I like to watch shows when I eat, because it makes me feel like I’m with friends and not alone. I usually stick with sitcoms, but I just ﬁnished the one I was watching and felt burned out from fake laughter.

That’s when they found me. I don’t know how, but I came across a video of four boys. They were singing and dancing like any other boy band, but they were not like any other boy band. They were the most beautiful things I have ever seen. I couldn’t look away. And all of a sudden, I felt the joy of just living life. Like life was worthwhile, because these boys existed in that same life.

Where did they come from? How did they get here? I look around at everything I have ever loved and it all pales in comparison to them. I only wish they had been in my life longer, so that I might have had a longer time to be happy.

MINNIE

Her name is Minnie, short for nothing. Like most Chinese kids who immigrated to the States in their single-digit years, Minnie had no say in what her English name would be. She did not know any English back then, so why would she have a preference? Besides, she already had a name, 亮心, one that she was proud of because she thought it described her well: someone who had a bright and clear heart, where that brightness was not a marker of her intellect, but evidence of the way she went about the world, with hope and earnest curiosity.

It was with this same bright heart that she answered Disney World when her parents asked what she most wanted to do when she arrived in America. Because every kid knew what Disney World was, even if they did not speak English.

That had been a mistake. From then on, she was Minnie. Her parents had bestowed the name upon her as if it were an invaluable gift. But as the plane descended into the Denver International Airport, she knew that this new English name was inferior to the one she already had—that it was trying to diminish and replace her, and even without knowing all the things it meant, she knew that she did not like it.

By the end of her first week of school, Minnie was aware of all the connotations of her new name, too. None of them felt right. She was not miniature, as her name suggested, but taller than most kids her age, her legs shooting out like bamboo from the jeans in the children’s, then juniors, and eventually women’s clothing sections. Nor was she a cartoon mouse. But in their new home of Colorado Springs, she had suddenly become conditioned to be quiet like a mouse. Her white classmates, initially curious about the newcomer from China (a word they never said normally, instead elongating the syllables so that it sounded

like hyena), were certain she possessed some otherworldly power that she would eventually reveal to them, a mystical mixture of martial arts that involved karate, ﬂying, and dragons. They were disappointed. Instead, this girl from Hyena was simply a weirdo with halting English and slatted eyes. They made fun of her, and once they got tired of that, they did something worse: They ignored her. She took these abuses, and each time, she felt her voice getting smaller even as she continued to grow taller, the distance between her and everyone else increasing not just in height, but in those delicate ways so felt by young girls.

How is our big poet? her Lao Lao and Lao Ye would ask when they called. Tell us again the story of the dog who wanted to grow up. Her grandparents remembered her as she had left them in China: a storyteller. While the other kids played chase during breaktime, she had held court by the monkey bars, regaling the smaller ones with made-up tales of wolves in the woods, cats that could ﬂy, a dog traveling the world in a quest to be great. She learned something powerful during those early years: Respect and redemption could be achieved with something as simple as a story, as having the space to be able to speak.

But this was no longer the case in America. In America, her mouth was full from all the things she wanted to say, but they were dammed in by a language she could not grasp. Was the wolf in or on or at the woods? Did the cat ﬂy through or with the sky? The dog who wanted to be great—there was no English idiom to describe the vastness of his desire.

By the time Minnie got to high school, she was at the top of her class in English. But she had stopped trying to speak and her stories did not return. In class discussions, where participation was mandatory, her classmates filled the quiet with meaningless phrases like, “to piggyback off of . . .” or “going off of that . . . ,” and Minnie could only nod. Her classmates parroted each other, whereas she prided herself on her deep and intricate interpretations of the texts they read—but it was all lost on her peers. Once, during a discussion of Pride and Prejudice, she wondered out loud if there was a difference between being alone and being lonely. The discussion faltered—no one seemed to want to piggyback

or go oﬀ of what she had to say. That was okay, though. Minnie was oﬀ to college with a major in English Literature at the University of Texas in Austin, and she could not wait for all the things she could say then.

“I keep thinking,” her mother mused when they moved Minnie into the dorm. “When you move out next year, you won’t be the same as you are now.”

“And all for the better,” her father said. He did not like the sheet of dust on the window blinds, nor the mealy texture of the walls. “This time next year, she’ll be a scholar.”

She watched them drive away, realizing that this was the first time she would truly be alone. When the U-Haul finally disappeared, she turned to face her dorm, clutching her laundry bag and meal card to her chest.

This was what she had been waiting for her whole life. In all the movies she had seen, in all the books she read, college was where it was supposed to happen. Here was where she would find lifelong friends. Here was where she would blossom into the winning personality she was sure she possessed. Here was where she would meet the love of her life. Here, most importantly, was where she could reclaim her bright heart. It was all beginning now, and the promise of her new life filled her up with such joy that she hardly registered the tinge of sadness at the thought of her parents returning to their home in Colorado Springs, the house now quieter and emptier. But that was fine. It was even necessary. Some things have to die in order for others to ﬂourish. And that was what this was—in place of her childhood, an invitation to ﬂourish.

The Honors Quad is a cluster of four buildings— Littlefi eld, Andrews, Blanton, and Carothers— located on the north side of campus. These are the nicer dorms for cheap, its residents like to gloat as they point to the sun- soaked courtyard, which the four buildings share. Unlike the rich kids whose parents paid for posher dorms like San Jac and Duren, everyone in the Quad was there because they were in an honors program, thus earning their residence through talent and intellect.

Minnie lives in the Honors Quad, although this, much like her name, is a mistake; due to a confusion of first initials and last names, she found herself placed on the second ﬂoor of Carothers dormitory despite the fact that she is not an honors student. An additional administrative error made her the only resident on the ﬂoor without a roommate. It was a blessing, she decided in the beginning; the room was small, and with a roommate, there would barely be enough acreage to stretch out her arms without imposing on space that did not belong to her. But as the days went on and she heard laughter pealing out from beneath the doors surrounding hers, she began to suspect that she was missing out on something crucial.

It’s impossible to live here and be bored, the resident assistant told them on their first day. There’s always something going on. This was true: There were so many clubs to join and meetups to meet up, and all of it was displayed in kaleidoscopic color on the bulletin board located on the first ﬂoor of each dorm.

And yet she was bored. The postings were always the same: athletic club tryouts, study groups for courses she would never take, meetups for a religion called the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Nothing that ever said: me.

What did: Books. Writing. Sunsets. The esoteric quotes about life, love, and sensibility that she collected on Tumblr. Cozy bookstores on a gloomy day. The word “petrichor.” Wisteria, or the color of it.

And now, the boys.

Tonight, after she returns from class, she glances at the bulletin board as she does every night. No new colors, which means no new postings. She will try again tomorrow.

On the second ﬂoor, she finds ten girls in pajamas sitting outside her door. Some she recognizes from rooms along the hall, but a few must have come from other dorms in the Quad. She wonders when the girls in her hall had time to make friends in other buildings, it being only the second week of classes.

The girls’ heads snap up when they hear her approach. For a delirious moment, she lets herself believe that they are here for her. But

then, one by one, their heads fall and return to each other and she remembers: She is a stranger to them.

“So no cover?”

“Obviously.”

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that freshmen get in to everything for free because we’re young and hot.”

“My sister used to live at the Co-op. She says their parties are insane.”

“Okay, we’re in.”

“Group trip?”

“Group trip!”

The girls collapse against each other and stay that way, giggling. It is not weird or awkward; they already know each other well enough to welcome the pressure of each body. She finds herself staring at them with a dumb grin on her face, as if she were a part of their laughter, too. But then one of the girls looks back up at her, and she catches herself.

“Um, sorry. This is my door.”

What she wants to say instead: Hi. I’d like to go to this party with you all, too.

The girls exchange raised eyebrows and a few of them snicker. Others pull faces of exaggerated embarrassment. One by one, they rise, their pajamas levitating with them.

“Oh my god, we’re the worst.”

“We must be so annoying.”

“I feel like we’re already drunk.”

Before she has a chance to tell them that actually, it’s fine, they can stay outside her door for as long as they want and can she join, they saunter down the hallway and repark themselves at the very end, in front of a new door, their laughter bouncing back to her and disappearing before she can grab hold.

EASON

Overnight sensation. That was what the news pundits, latenight hosts, and internet journalists called them. The day after the festival, someone had uploaded a recording of their eight-minute set to a video sharing site. By the end of the week, Eason had seen his face so much that he no longer recognized himself, as if he were a word that had been spoken too much and now sounded wrong. Who are the boys of HOURglass? Everyone wanted to know. They watched as their social media followers ballooned from 2,000 to 400,000 and their publicists went into overdrive fielding requests for interviews. An up-and-coming actress mentioned them on the red carpet. A singing competition on primetime asked if they might like to perform for boy band week. The record label said yes. So, ten days after the music festival, they found themselves back in the practice room.

“Your shoulders are wrong,” the choreographer, a small coil of a man, tells him during today’s practice. “Relax, please. It’s ta-TA-ta, not ta-ta-TA.” He shows Eason the diﬀerence, stabbing the air with each shoulder like a pike.

Eason adjusts. The others are wet clay, their bodies primed for shaping and reshaping, but he has always been the outlier. He started with nothing. To make up for it, the record label paid for over one thousand hours of private dance lessons before he was deemed somewhat decent. Dancing, he came to realize, was nothing more than following counts and memorizing movements, a simple game of mimicry, and with that knowledge, he was able to keep up. It was diﬃcult, but not impossible. His instructor had seen something in him that could be manipulated into talent: His hardness, which he had been cultivating since he left home, could translate into power. That was how he made up for his weaknesses, by always pushing himself to mirror an

explosion. If he couldn’t be perfect, then at least he would be earthshattering.

Today, his reliance on power is falling apart. The song in question is a lament to an ex-lover, a slow drip of R&B and electronica. Rather than energy and excess, this choreography asks that they isolate one body part at a time while pulling back the rest, as if resisting the dance but for one wrist, one hip, one toe. The song is about waiting so long for something, only to realize you had it the whole time. The song is about love. In that way, they must express an endless yearning—the kind of desire that could run a city dry—all in the rise and fall of a shoulder, the turn on a heel, the step ball change.

“It should look easy,” the choreographer tells Eason. “But you’re making it look like work.”

“Maybe I’m not the problem,” he snaps back.

“You’re too tense,” Julian says. He takes the bottom of Eason’s shirt between his fingers and shakes it back and forth. In the mirror, Eason’s torso ripples as if made of snakes. “Relax the parts of your body that you don’t need.” There was that word again: relax. From the choreographer’s mouth, it was a taunt, but from Julian’s, it was an answer.

By the time practice ends, their bodies, each its own furnace, have fogged up the windows, blurring Sunset Boulevard into a slide of gray watercolor. Colt jogs to the mirrors, pulling out a Ziploc baggie of sea salt from his duﬀel. He sprinkles a few grains into his water bottle and gulps it all down, the shiny bulb of his throat bouncing gratefully with each swallow. Minwoo limps over to join him, each step accompanied by a wince. A motorcycle accident as a teenager left him with short stamina and aches meant for someone triple his age. But this, their manager Brooks was always reminding him, was no excuse. “You’re the leader,” Brooks would say. “You have to lead.”

Eason remains in front of the mirror, practicing the shoulder isolation from before. He knows the choreographer is right: He had indeed been doing the movement wrong. It was the lingering pain in his shoulder that prevented him from getting a full rotation, but he had never told anyone about the pain, just as he never told anyone where

his tremors came from. He would not be seen as weak, or worse— defective.

Julian stays, too, practicing the move with him. “Try bringing your chest forward. Then you can cheat the rotation.”

Julian moves the way the sun does in the early hours of morning, so easy in its ascent that you would not notice the world has ﬂipped from darkness to light until you are surrounded by it, part of that light, too. Some people are born with bodies meant for work, Eason’s mother used to say, and some are meant for comfort. Some are meant to suﬀer. If he were to believe her, then Julian’s body was meant to be on a stage, twisting and spinning and propelling, his body the greatest proof that perhaps they were all built for a purpose, and that when it was right, it was perfect.

Eason tries again, leaning his chest forward as Julian instructed. His shoulder comes around obediently, the familiar pinch more bearable than before.

“You’ve got it. Let’s drill it in.”

Square up. Core tight. They do it ten times more. Julian puts the music back on and they run it from the top, then another five. Eason does as Julian says, following the baton of his voice, a strange vernacular that only dancers seem to know: di- no- saur, ba- ba- ba, zhuzh- zhuzh- zha, and- wash- your- hair- out . This is the way it has always been. In their nine months of training together, it was Julian who stayed behind after practice, leading him through the movements again and again, a teacher he never asked for, but needed all the same. Stop thinking so hard. Your body already knows the words, now speak in full sentences.

“See,” Julian says, finally stilling. “Easy.”

Eason squares his hips and wrings his shoulders once more for insurance. This time, his reﬂection follows without protest. Julian claps out the tempo and the studio fills with his voice, then the voices of Minwoo and Colt, chiming in: ta-TA-ta, plant-a-tree, ba-ba-ba, and-cryyour-heart-out. That’s it, Eason, they tell him when he is finished. You killed it.

¤¤¤

The singing competition tapes at eight in the morning, so they are in hair and makeup by four. The makeup artist tells him to close his eyes and he obeys, letting her swipe black shadow across his lids. When he opens them again, the hollows of his cheeks are more pronounced and his eyes are ringed in smoke. He wonders why they have made him look like a dead thing. In the chair next to him, an assistant holds Colt, who has fallen asleep, up by the temples, so that his makeup artist can finish applying contour. The room is hot with hairspray and rollers and the sweat of the stylists, who ﬂit between the four of them like moths. Their hushed frenzy only adds to the twist inside his belly—the music festival had been nerve-racking, but this will be their first appearance on national TV. There is the performance to think of, but there is another consideration: that he will finally be seen, not just by everybody but by her, and is he ready for that?

At least, he thinks, eyes passing over Minwoo, Colt, and Julian, I will not be alone.

Out on the soundstage, the four of them click into formation: Minwoo at the front, Colt behind, Julian following, and Eason at the rear. When Minwoo finishes the first verse, he turns and saunters to the back of the line, letting Colt take the front for the pre-chorus. The cameramen circle him, filling their lenses with his baby blues. Then the chorus hits and Colt moves away. Julian slides into place. Two giant cameras attached to cranes lurch forward. Julian finishes, spins out and glides past, leaving Eason exposed.

The giant cameras on cranes see him now. They pick up his scent, a tangle of mania and acidic nerves, and they descend. The studio lights burn his face as he dances for his life, the shoulder movement finally perfected. The audience goes crazy for him, but he stays locked on the cameras. One of them comes up to his left side, a black hole in his periphery, and he wills himself not to notice it, to keep going, keep pushing, but when he cannot stand it anymore, he dares to peer at it, through it, shooting past the lens to the other side, where he can see himself as everyone else will, as she will, and god does he look skinny,

god does he look raw, god does he look mad. His lips are mouthing the lyrics and his body is on stage, but inside he is all tremor and he knows, he knows that when she sees him later on her ﬂickering screen, she will also see the truth: that he is still that scared little boy, same as he ever was.