He puffed his cheeks and blew out, blinked again rapidly, and stared at the tunnel. 'Oxygen, kid,' he told himself as he stumbled to his feet.
'You need a little of the old O2, if you know what I mean.'
His jacket was gone.
He looked down on the spot at the fifty-yard line where he had dropped it, stared with a perplexed frown, and finally looked up to scan the field. Then he turned and scanned the stands. It was gone. He knew he had left it right here; he could feel it leaving his hands and could hear it striking the ground. And now it was gone. He waited a moment for someone to start laughing, waited until he was sure it was not a joke.
And when he was sure, when he knew he wasn't even safe on his track anymore, he put his hands into his pockets and started for home.
This, Tracey thought, is the pits.
She sat alone on a crumbling stoop in front of a crumbling brownstone, one of a whole block that could just as easily have been in any of the city's boroughs. The curbs were lined with cars, the pavement packed with children, and there wasn't a single face she recognized, not a single voice she <new.
The pits.
This was supposed to be Long Island-trees and beaches and elegant houses and developments, a place you visited to get away from it all. But even Ashford was better than this, for god's sake. At least it had the football game she was supposed to be playing the flute for right now; it had her books and her stuffed animals and the seclusion of her room; Ashford had Don Boyd.
She squirmed, thinking of the way she had kissed him before she'd known what she was doing. He'd looked as if she'd punched him in the stomach; she felt as if she'd been punched herself, and had run straight to her room without giving her mother the usual minute-by-minute account of her time out of the house. She must have been blushing, though, because her sisters began a teasing that hadn't let up, not even on the trip over, until her father had finally laid down the law-no talking, he was driving, he needed to concentrate on the idiots who were on the road with him.
She clasped her hands between her knees, watching a game of stick ball grow dangerously close to a brawl, suddenly thinking of the Howler and what he could do to these kids. A shudder. A swallow. A look over her shoulder to the windows above, to the window where she saw her father's face looking down. She smiled at him, waved, and sighed when he gestured her off the steps and into the building.
Damn, she thought. If he's such a macho cop, why the hell can't he get the old lady to move? At least to a place that had trees instead of garbage cans.
Long Island was the pits.
At the doorway she stopped and turned, and a sour smile parted her lips.
Good-bye, twentieth century, she said to the noisy street. I'm going in my time machine now. Fasten your chastity belts, please, it's going to be a rough, boring ride.
The house's original porch had been torn down long before Don and his family had moved in, the previous owner claiming the wood had been rotted, and he didn't want anyone hurt in case a board or the steps gave way. It had been replaced by one that barely reached to either side of the door, and its roof was peaked, the railing up the steps twisted black wrought iron. It was the only house on the block with a porch like that, and Norman had once insisted he was going to restore the old one; that was before Sam had died. Now he said nothing beyond a grumbling that what was there did little to protect him from the rain or the snow.
Don sat on the top step. He had been inside only long enough to towel himself off and fetch a sweater, had intended on going back to his room, when he saw that his parents hadn't yet returned. They would never know he was gone. They would assume they had been obeyed. He had actually sat down on the bed and stared at the blank wall where the stallion had been; then he felt the weight of the empty shelves, and the hollow sound his breathing made, and the chill that seemed to drift from the white-painted walls. He looked into his parents' room, into Sam's room, then opened the attic door and went up.
They were there. Piled on cartons, helter-skelter on the dusty floor, dropped on a trunk that belonged to his grandfather. He had swallowed, stood, and finally picked up the poster and brought him back down. Taped him up over the desk and stared at him, wondering.
He saw little save the withdrawing of the light.
He heard only the leaves, and the shadows, and the silence of the house rising behind him.
An automobile or two had sped past, but he paid them no heed; a flock of kids shrieked through the twilight, but he didn't smile at their greetings; a red convertible crawled down the street, radio on full, and it wasn't until he realized it had pulled into a driveway a few houses down that he turned his head slowly, as if it were too heavy to move.
The driver's door slammed.
Chris. He blinked. It was Chris Snowden, and she wasn't with Tar. She was still in her dark cheerleader's sweater, still had on her saddle shoes, but her pleated skirt had been replaced by a pair of faded-to-white jeans.
And she wasn't going into her house; she was walking across the intervening yards directly toward him.
He cleared his throat and wondered what she had planned for him-a bit of teasing, a little temptation, a breathless request for his zoology homework.
He could wait; and he did, until she stopped at the foot of the stairs, leaned on the railing and crossed one foot over the other, toe down.
'Hi!'
Her pale hair was parted down the center and gathered in two braids that flopped over her chest. Her face was flushed, her eyes wide and of a blue so dark they seemed nearly black.
Warily he smiled a greeting. He recalled her brief show of solicitude when she'd seen the damage done to his eye, saw it again as she examined his face closely, a half smile at her lips.
'Looks better,' she said.
'I barely feel it,' he admitted, unconsciously poking around the discoloration. She turned to look at the empty street; he couldn't take his eyes from her profile. 'I, uh, saw you and Tar before. I figured you guys were going to the city.'
A shrug, and a sideways look of disgust. 'He got sick. Brian had some beer in his car, and after the game they had a he-man chugging contest. Tar lost.' She pointed down the street. 'So did my car.'
'Gross.'
'The creep wouldn't even help me clean it out. Last time I saw him he was falling into the park.' A grin-full of humor, touched with malice.
'If there's a god, he'll end up in the pond.'
He chuckled and shook his head at the foolishness of kids, and did his best not to stare when she turned back to him and leaned forward on the railing, folding her arms on it and putting her chin on a wrist. This wasn't happening, he knew; this was something his mind had dreamed up to punish him for thinking he could somehow rule the world and make it fair again.
'Were you at the game?'
'No. I had ... other things to do.'
An eyebrow lifted. 'We won.'
'We always win.'
'Really?'
'Every year,' he said, making it clear there was a book somewhere filled with things he thought more important, or less boring. 'Especially since Brian and Tar got on the team.'
'Oh?' Her eyes drifted closed. 'You gonna be down at Beacher's later?'
'I don't know. Maybe. It depends on my folks.'
She pushed abruptly upright and he almost gasped, thinking he had said something to make her mad. The expression on her face was a dark one, the lines stabbing from the corners of her eyes deeper and longer, giving her age, turned her soft white-blonde hair into a hag's wig, her softly pointed chin into a boney dagger. The transformation startled him, and he leaned away from it slightly, could not meet her gaze.
Instead, he turned to the right where he saw in dismay the station wagon approaching.
Aw shit, he thought; not now!
