Adam

Adam is Niru Ikemadu’s track-team captain, high jumper, and one of the most socially confident figures in the school world. He is practical, physically assured, and apparently protected by family wealth, yet his ease repeatedly becomes pressure on others. Through Adam, the novel places Niru’s private uncertainty inside a culture of athletic camaraderie, heterosexual expectation, racial mockery, drinking, and inherited privilege.

Identity and Introduction

Adam first appears as someone who treats life as a problem to be solved efficiently. He advises Niru to kiss Meredith by moving her to one corner of the dance floor and putting his mouth on hers, insisting that this is how kissing works because it worked for him. His confidence is not based on emotional attentiveness: when Niru says Meredith should kiss him if she likes him, Adam responds that it definitely does not work that way. The exchange establishes Adam’s blunt practicality while also revealing his assumption that intimacy can be managed through technique and initiative.

His practical habits extend to ordinary details. He parks his car facing toward home so that he will not waste time when leaving. This small routine makes him recognizable as a person who values convenience, control, and forward movement, even in situations that require mutual interpretation rather than efficiency. His confidence also has a material basis: he wears a Princeton hat because he has always known he will attend Princeton, and the narrative connects his freedom from anxiety to a family that can afford not to worry.

Athletic Leadership and Performance

Adam’s authority is most visible in the track environment. He is a high jumper and the team captain, and the team playlist associates him with the song “I’m on a New Level.” In the locker room, he calls Niru “Harvard,” a nickname derived from Niru’s early admission, turning Niru’s academic achievement into a familiar public label. Adam is tall and muscular, wears only spandex in the locker room, and knows that he has worked to build his abs. His body, like his social position, appears comfortable occupying space.

At the championship meet, Adam leads the team’s ritual before the race. The runners extend their hands toward the center of a circle, and he hops from foot to foot while beginning the chant “We’re on a new level.” The team repeats him until the chant gathers speed and physical energy, then breaks toward the track for its warm-up laps. Because seniors traditionally link arms and lead the final laps at the championship meet, Adam’s leadership is both personal and institutional. He rubs Niru’s head and tells him they are almost there, folding Niru into a collective performance of belonging.

Adam’s leadership is encouraging but also competitive and demanding. After Niru’s race, he praises Niru’s late surge and says he has never seen anyone come from behind like that, while also noting that Niru should have won. At the party, he urges Niru to celebrate and repeatedly pressures him to drink, using the same “new level” language that energizes the team to draw Niru into a different kind of performance. Adam’s influence therefore crosses from athletics into social life: he makes participation look like proof of courage and treats refusal as a failure to join the group.

Social Power and Racialized Conduct

Adam’s party behavior exposes the darker side of the camaraderie he represents. He cheers when Niru accepts a red cup of vodka mixed with Coke, rubs Niru’s back, hands him another cup, and joins the surrounding students in urging him to swallow. The group’s embraces, fist bumps, and high fives make Niru feel absorbed into something larger, but alcohol and collective pressure also make him feel that he is no longer himself. Adam’s welcome is thus conditional: Niru is accepted by imitating the group’s behavior.

The party’s racial atmosphere is especially important. The track team dances to “I’m on a New Level” as though imitating Black people, while white students laugh at Black movement. Later, drunk white students imitate Black speech for amusement, and the music includes “Fuck Up Some Commas,” which they find funny because it presents Black people rapping about grammar. Adam does not interrupt this environment. Instead, his encouragement helps sustain the scene in which Niru is simultaneously included, displayed, and reduced to a racialized performance.

Adam’s ease with heterosexual masculinity also structures the party. He kisses the girl in the sweater after handing Niru another drink, and she receives him eagerly while holding herself tightly around his body. Earlier, he presents kissing as an uncomplicated act of masculine initiative. In both settings, Adam treats heterosexual pursuit as ordinary and available, while Niru’s desire and fear remain marked by uncertainty. Adam’s conduct does not amount to a single explicit doctrine, but it gives social force to the norms that Niru struggles to inhabit.

Relationship with Niru

Adam is both a friend and a source of pressure for Niru. He offers practical advice, gives Niru a place within the team, and publicly recognizes his athletic ability. Yet his nickname, his insistence that Niru drink, and his reliance on group chanting make Niru’s identity dependent on Adam’s terms. Niru can belong as “Harvard,” as a runner, or as a participant in the party, but Adam’s world leaves little room for hesitation, vulnerability, or difference.

The contrast becomes sharp at the championship meet. Adam tells Niru that they are almost there and helps lead the senior warm-up, while Niru privately recognizes that he does not want to run at Harvard and does not want the life that the team’s progress seems to promise. Adam’s ritual points toward continuity, achievement, and institutional belonging; Niru experiences the same moment as an approaching end. Adam can make the team feel unified, but he cannot resolve the conflict between athletic success and Niru’s need to choose another life.

Narrative Role and Significance

Adam is not presented only as an antagonist. His practical advice, athletic leadership, and capacity to encourage Niru make him socially compelling, while his privilege and group behavior reveal how ordinary confidence can participate in exclusion. He belongs to the novel’s world of people for whom rules and norms appear optional because the consequences are distributed unevenly. His family’s economic security helps explain his composure, while Niru’s racial and religious vulnerability makes the same social environment dangerous rather than liberating.

Adam’s role also helps frame Niru’s later collapse. The locker room, the chant, the drinking, and the party all turn the body into a public object: athletic bodies are evaluated, masculine bodies are displayed, and Blackness is imitated by white students as entertainment. Adam moves easily through this performance economy. Niru cannot do so without splitting from himself. By placing Adam at the center of the team’s rituals and the party’s coercive celebration, the novel makes him a vivid representative of belonging that depends on conformity—and of a privilege that mistakes its own freedom for a universal condition.