“She wasn’t at the place I usually pick her up. I waited but she never showed.”
“Gauthier’s doing very well. Hate to see her sick again.”
“Yeah.” He shrugs and turns his shoulder and looks past her, in a hint at urgent deadlines, but she’s unmovable.
“I was in the parking lot Friday night, Sam. Warming up my car. God knows I’ve had all I could do not to slap Gauthier myself on a couple of occasions but what was going on—it didn’t look good or sound good. I don’t know what’s going on between you two but I can’t look the other way if any kid in this school raises a hand to any other kid, I don’t care who they are.”
“I didn’t hit her,” Sam mutters. “I yelled at her, that’s all.”
“All right. If you even came close to belting her, Sam, it’s time for you to back off. How’d you get your nose scratched?”
“Accident.”
Blinking behind her glasses, she waves him along without any signal she’s buying it as a satisfactory answer.
Going straight to the Office, he leans on the secretary to call the Mutant’s home number before she gets put down on the list as absent without notice.
“No answer, Sam. Sorry. Maybe she’ll turn up late.”
“The last time she was sick,” he points out, “nobody called. She might be home alone and too sick to reach the phone.”
The secretary smiles sympathetically.
“Chill out. Nobody’s going to kick her off the team today, Sam.”
Between classes, he grabs Shas Grey in the corridor and asks her if she knows anything.
“You see more of her than I do, dub,” she sniggers, and flits away down the hall.
In the weight room he progresses through his program but his mind is on Deanie’s absence. He can see her in her tatty boy’s bathrobe, barefoot and feverish. They don’t take care of her, her mother and that dickhead. They put cigarettes out on her. It was the old women who got her medical care the last time.
He thinks about asking Chapin if he knows anything but it galls him to bring her up to the smiling shithead. Just the sight of the pusbag makes him want to kill him. But when he glances at Chapin, Chapin is watching him. Eyes darting, smile building and collapsing like a house of cards, the creep has an immediate attack of nerves and nearly drops the free weights.
At lunchtime, when Sam goes into the cafeteria, she’s still not there. Mrs. Hobart gives him a resigned shrug.
Opening his lunch bucket, he stares at the contents. The cocoa has had time to work its way through the wrappings into the sandwiches and cookies, reducing a lot of his lunch to discolored muck.
Pete Fosse drops into the chair on the other side of Sam from Rick. “Hey, Slammer, how do you tell when a whore is full?”
On the far side of Rick, Sarah Kendall glances up sharply. There is preliminary snickering up and down the table.
“Her nose runs,” Rick answers irritably. “Jesus, Petey, that’s not only old, it’s disgusting.”
Amid the expected ribald outburst, Pete grins. “I just wondered if anyone ever noticed the Mutant’s nose runs all the time.”
Sarah makes an odd little noise as Pete laughs alone.
A shadow of distaste crosses Sam’s features as he looks down into his lunch bucket but when he raises his head, his face is blank and puzzled.
“I don’t guh-get it, Pete. It’s not mechanically possible. I mean, women aren’t hollow. And Gauthier’s nose runs because she doesn’t dress warmly enough for the weather.” Sam frowns with mental effort. “And she’s a smoker.”
Pete looks up and down the table, checking his audience, which has fallen silent. Some watch closely, others devote themselves with sudden intensity to their lunches.
“Bullshit,” he says suddenly. “You get it all right. The stupid act’s worn real fucking thin, Sam.”
Sam closes his lunch bucket deliberately and comes suddenly to his feet, rocking the table, sending sodas and milk cartons sliding from grabbing hands and setting off a chorus of alarm.
“Now that’s funny, Pete. I was just going to say the same thing to you.”
Fists clenching, Pete starts to rise. Todd Gramolini grabs his arm. Chairs scrape as Rick and several others prepare to leap into the fray but Sam doesn’t wait to give any satisfaction to Fosse.
Leaving the cafeteria, he takes the stairs three at a time to the Office. The secretary glances up from eating her lunch at her desk and shakes her head no. Sam takes the stairs two at a time to grab his jacket from his locker. As he yanks the pushbar down on the exit, he realizes he is probably buying himself a suspension from school, more benchtime and team troubles. It makes him feel like he might puke but he keeps on going.
He makes himself keep to the speed limit. There are no cars in the driveway of the house on Depot Street and the house itself has an abandoned look. Someone’s cookie toss is frozen on the front steps, looking more like plastic puke from a novelty shop than the real thing. He steps around it and hammers at the door but no one answers.
“Deanie!” he calls.
What if she’s so sick—or hurt, what if she’s hurt?—she can’t get to the door?
He calls again. There is only silence and he steps back and kicks in the door. It lurches open into darkness, the only source of illumination the rhomboid of daylight centered with his own distorted shadow.
“Deanie!”
He listens but hears no breathing, labored or otherwise. Finding a lamp, he gropes the switch at the neck. The door to Deanie’s bedroom stands half-open and the cot is made up and empty and sprinkled with bits of mirror glass. The front of her room is similarly peppered and there are also shards on the floor just outside her door. There are dark spots and splashes and smears on the
