She takes an instinctive backward step.
“Heard a story about you,” Tony says genially. “Heard you partied with the whole fucking hoop team New Year’s Eve.”
She is backing away another step and saying no before he finishes speaking. Her knees are weakening and she can’t think of anything else to say but no.
“Whole goddamn team,” Tony goes on. “And Hot Shot. Here I try to look out for your best interests, I tell you to stay away from him and what do I hear? The overgrown retard’s punching you around the school parking lot. How can I help thinking the stupid shit knows you better than he oughta. Well enough to get aggravated with you. I mean, I love you to death, darlin’, and I get aggravated with you.”
Knees backed against her cot, she struggles to control her shaking.
“I didn’t do anything! It’s a lie!”
When Tony reaches out, she flinches but his hand comes to rest lightly on her jaw and he smiles. “Show me.”
Behind him, J.C. grins at her.
She wants to say no to him but she is dumb with the effort of being brave. For a long moment she meets his eyes and he meets hers and his mouth tightens. Slowly and shakily she smiles a crooked, prideful, courageous smile.
“Don’t touch me,” she whispers. “Don’t you ever touch me again. I’ll tell. Sam’ll kill you.”
Tony’s fingers drop to her neck chain and close around it and he yanks her to her stocking feet and then off them. Her toes struggle frantically to make contact with the floor and the chain chokes her and she can’t breathe. She doesn’t see it coming, the pistoning arm, the fist that drives into the left side of her face at an angle as she flops and twists like a bass on a hook. There’s a sudden stunning impact, a blinding explosion of pain from a force that rocks her head to the right and the sound of J.C. shouting as Tony flings her to the floor.
“Fuck!” Tony bellows. “My hand!”
In shock, she crawls, groping her way toward the cot. Red drops spatter the floor. She is half under it when he grabs her ankle and drags her back out. She kicks back, catching him in the kneecap, and he bellows again.
Using her cot as a handhold, she scrabbles to her feet. There is no thought in her head, just roaring terror and bone-deep pain. Her hand closes on the chains she has left on the cot. She swings out with all the force she has as she turns toward him, swaying between her and the door, the exit, the way out. The chains slice through the air and his face bursts in a spray of tissue and blood. She feels the impact up her arm and across her back and she staggers as he screams and J.C. screams and she screams too, ragged with the agony of moving her torn facial muscles.
She loses the chain at the end of its arc and it spins upward, over Tony’s head, into the mirror. The air explodes with swirling flakes of glass, as if they were inside a snowglobe that some god has just given a good shake. Tucking herself into a crouch, she tries to protect herself. Tony judders through the doorway into J.C.’s arms and they dance a crazed drunken waltz toward the couch, where Judy sits, staring in dazed horror. Bloody flecks of spittle and blurred obscenities spray from the hole of Tony’s mouth in the lurid mask of his face.
The Mutant wipes something from her mouth, stares at what looks like a mangled caterpillar and then, disinterested, flicks Tony’s eyebrow away. On her knees, she searches frantically among the mirror shards to find her chains. Wrapping them around her knuckles, she climbs to her feet again and staggers toward the door, but J.C. is there first. She raises her chained fist but he surprises her. He shoves her out the door and down the steps and she stumbles into the snow. He pukes noisily down the steps behind her.
Hurtfully the cold maps the cuts on her hands and face. Wiping at the blood running into her eyes, she smears the warm fluid into streaks of warpaint. Shaking fingers hover over the left side of her face but she’s afraid to touch it—it feels numb and slack. Loosening the edge of her headwrap, she pulls it down to cover the wound. The passage of the cloth moves the air against it and her throat screams, behind her swelling face, at the agony.
Somehow she is on her feet again, and tripping, and the snow, cold and icy as dead finger bones, grabs at her ankles, and claws at her through her socks. In blind panic and shock, she loses all sense of direction. She thrashes into the woods, moving instinctively downhill, toward the Mill Brook. It’s harder and harder to move on her numbed feet, the cold is in her bones and her mind too, like a hallucinogen, some weird winter mushroom, slowing everything down. She begins to fall again, with a brittle lucidity, pivoting with heroic effort, turning her body on a cursed spindle toward the right, and she falls a long long time, through a shattered lens of frozen time. She doesn’t have to get up again. Her right pupil blooms darkly and she sees the grain of the snow, transparent broken and fused crystals, glassy shards, billions of points of splintered light. A red star novas among them. They suck it pink.
To avoid going home, Sam spends several hours in solitary practice in the empty meetinghouse. He works to the echoing attenuated wolf howls and driven drumbeat of boombox cock-rock, sweating himself into the shakes.
The lights downstairs are dimmed when he finally lurches into the house. Standing at the sink, staring out past his own reflection
