Melissa Jandreau makes a face. “Oh gross.”
Her sister Melanie’s fingertips fly to the hollow of her throat, touching the delicate gold chain that carries her boyfriend’s class ring.
Pete slaps the ball in his hand to the floor impatiently.
For a moment, Sam wants to stomp Fosse but as he stares at him, he becomes aware of the others, tensing. They have to play tonight, all of them, and they are all grappling with exams. Another go-round between Pete and himself will not help, nor will dwelling on the loss of Deanie Gauthier. He makes himself relax.
“Let’s go,” he says and the knotted atmosphere dissolves in the relief of activity.
Loitering artfully outside Sam’s physics class, Rick falls in beside him. “How’d it go?”
Sam mimes gagging himself with a forefinger. “Be a frigging miracle if I passed it.”
Rick groans. “More good fucking news. All we need is you washing out academically. What happened? This is funnybook fucking physics, isn’t it? You were doing all right.”
“Fell asleep over the review last night,” Sam admits. “How you doing, slick?”
Rick turns up a casually triumphant thumb. “Hey, bud,” he chides, “you hung up on me, you dink. Like some junior high school twitch in a frigging snit.”
Sam has to grin at the image.
“So I hit on my old man. You know he never talks about the job and I figured he’d just shut me down. Surprised the shit out of me when he decided to try to pump me for what I knew, which is fucking zip on account of you’re as tight as Reverend Mother’s brownie.” Rick pivots and walks backward down the corridor in front of Sam. “He says the Mutant’s staying with you and your folks for now—”
“Don’t call her that,” Sam blurts. “She’s got a name.”
Rick cocks an eyebrow.
“All right, all right. Excuse me. I’m a worthless human being and deserve to die a fucking horrible death involving electrodes on my fuzzies. Dad wouldn’t tell me anything except what you told me. Wouldn’t tell me if it was you stripped the shithead’s face for him.”
Reaching the top of the stairwell that drops to the corridor outside the cafeteria, Sam stops. “I wish. But I didn’t. Deanie did it.”
Rick grabs Sam’s forearm. “Look, man, I really am sorry this shit happened to her.”
Nodding, Sam stares down the stairwell, watching the traffic from the surrealistic vantage point of heads and shoulders, flowing down the steps with the rhythm of a falling Slinky. Clatter and chatter boil up from the foreshortened bodies. He plunges into it with a sensation of stepping off a cliff, and Rick follows.
At the lunch table Sam deflects conversation with an open textbook. Though he’s read this material before and understood it, it’s like somebody stirred it all up again, either inside his head or on the page. The more he stares at it, the less sense it makes and the more the conversation around him distracts. Exams are quickly exhausted as a topic and the coming games anticipated in detail but gradually reserve loosens, heads edge closer together and whispers of his own nicknames and Deanie’s reach his warming ears. When he glances up, the faces of the girls are open as roses in their fullness; they are wide-eyed and excited, as if they were passing around the latest tabloid celebrity scandal. An outburst of prurient laughter from the guys around Fosse draws Sam’s eye. Pete smiles fatuously at him and then leans toward Tim Kasten to make a further remark.
This shits, Sam concludes tiredly. He shovels the rest of his lunch and retreats to the library, where he falls asleep over the text.
At halftime, the girls have a comfortable margin on the Lady Bears from Breckenfield. Sam watches with his teammates from the upper bleachers. Chapin is several tiers below him, in the middle of a little entourage of druggie suckups—Grey, Lexie Michaud, Jimmy Bouchard—not a bunch of regular boosters. Chapin cocks back his rainbowed head at Sam and jumps his eyebrows as if he were raising a beer in his direction. Chapin must know about Deanie; the grapevine’s been flashing it all day. But of all the people who have inquired after her, Chapin isn’t one.
Spectators for the boys’ game to follow begin to arrive, among them Rick’s folks and Reuben, by himself. Distracted from his ruminations about the indifference of Deanie’s so-called friends, Sam clambers across the bleachers.
“How’s Deanie?”
“Zonked,” his father says. “Probably the best thing for her, so relax. Pearl’s home with her now.”
Sergeant Woods climbs toward them. After asking about Deanie, he tells them her mother’s finally been located, in New Hampshire, but in bad enough shape to be checked into the detox unit of the hospital in North Conway. When she’s sobered up enough, the cops will try to find out what she knows, if anything. In the meantime, the Department of Human Services investigators have everything the cops do on the case, including the information that Deanie is with friends for the time being. DBS will make contact in the next day or so.
“They’re shorthanded and not just investigators. Woman I talked to was very relieved the girl’s with you folks because they’re scratching for foster homes too in this county.”
Sam’s surprised by his own relief.
“Child’s in no shape to be carted round anyway,” Reuben observes curtly.
Woods chews on the barnside broad a and swallowed r of Reuben’s pronunciation of carted a few seconds before he works it out, with a tickled grin.
At the end of the third quarter, with the Lady Bears down by twelve points, the boys leave the bleachers to change. The atmosphere is boisterous, anticipating a home-game knockoff of the Bears.
Lacing his ‘tops on the bench next to Rick, Sam pays little attention to the horseplay around him.
“What brought out Chapin and that clusterfuck of bums?” he asks Rick.
Rick shrugs. “Wondered that myself. Somebody maybe told’m
