The Mutant has coffee for breakfast and scavenges a muffin or a Danish from the teachers’ lounge or the cafeteria trash. When she’s really starved, she boosts somebody’s lunch between morning classes. The school is full of food if you’re not picky and your fingers are quick. Sometimes she’s hungry but a drag takes off the hurting edge and anyway, she’s used to it. Maybe if old Flem had to work harder to get something to eat, she wouldn’t be so quick to stick her finger down her throat.
Cady Flemming exits the stall. She yanks a huge green bottle of Scope out of an enormous handbag and gargles, spitting a geyser of the mouthwash into the basin next to the Mutant. Cady looks up into the mirror. Her eyes are puffy.
“Feel better?” the Mutant inquires.
“Someday I’m gonna stuff my fist down your throat,” Cady says. “See if you can gag it back up.”
The Mutant make a kissy face at her in the mirror.
“Gauthier’s gagged a lot more than a little puke,” Melissa Jandreau puts in from across the room.
Almost everyone except the Mutant laughs.
“That’s disgusting,” an outraged, high-pitched voice squeaks.
Everyone looks at little Kerry Hatch, suddenly blushing furiously.
“So’s that John you used, Flemming,” the Mutant says.
“Just like your face, freak!” Cady spits back.
“Eat me,” the Mutant counters, flipping Cady a double bird. “Your boyfriend’s got your lunch in his zipper.”
As Flemming shrieks and pitches her hairbrush, the Mutant ducks out the door.
By three, they are headed to the first game of the regular season, away at Castle Rock and a big deal because the two schools are neighborly rivals. The boys’ bus is less crowded than the girls’ because the cheerleaders travel with the girls’ team, but it is easily as noisy.
Sam Styles seals his ears with his headphones, closes his eyes. Tuned to the beat throbbing through the bones of his skull and the soothing vibration of the wheels of the bus over the lonesome rural roads, he goes to sleep. Still growing, he sometimes corks off as unexpectedly as his baby sister. On the trips to away games, he deliberately exploits his susceptibility to the soporific effect of the road and unplugs himself.
Next to him, Rick Woods, who is his regular seatmate, listens to his own Walkman and translates a French assignment. A glance at his friend makes him shake his head. How can Sam just crash like that before a game, when his own gut is churning, his right foot twitching uncontrollably?
The combination of Sam’s capabilities and a total lack of ambition beyond this year’s states are a frustration to Rick, whose own dreams of a professional athletic career have faded during his high school years with an almost literal painfulness. Talent Rick knows he has but his long rangy body exhibits an odd fragility. He is plagued with sprains, splints, torn ligaments, bone spurs and every other athlete’s curse. With a nervous stomach, he has trouble maintaining a reasonable weight and his stamina is unreliable. The community saddles Rick with the expectation that his skin color is proof he is a natural athlete—meaning it all comes easy. Coach and a good many local fans think he is temperamental and spleeny, if not an out-and-out hypochondriac.
In contrast, in the guise of a slow-witted, overgrown, shitkicking grease monkey, Sam Styles can do no wrong. It’s a perverse joke, a con job that lets Sam avoid dealing with his own potential. Sam could be a prince in the world and chooses to be a pauper. Every straight wench in school damp for him, the doofus is still cherry. Ever since his idiot sister Karen went off the rails, Sam’s gotten steadily more tight-assed and not just about sex. Never mind getting loaded—to the best of Hick’s knowledge, Sam hasn’t cracked a solitary beer since the prank with the ice dick. For all Sam’s mockery of religion, there’s a streak of genuine Holy Roller in him. It’s no secret Sam carries a paperback Bible in his duffel bag and sometimes reads it, right in front of everybody. Rick used to think it was just Sam’s way of countering the rumor that he can’t read, but it wouldn’t shock him at all if Sam suddenly announced he’d accepted Jesus as his personal savior and coach.
Rick checks on Sam again. Sleeping like Smaug the dragon on the gold of his own life. The big boy draws the deep even breath of the innocent. Well, maybe not innocent. Sprawled in his seat, Sam’s developed a noticeable rise in his Levis. Considerately, Rick blankets Sam with his own duster.
3
Between Greenspark and Castle Rock, Sam dreams. He is on the floor of the Bangor Civic Center. Above him the cavernous roof is studded with television spots like miniature suns that turn the polished floor into a glassy field of light. The shining court is vast, with just him on it. As the bleachers fill, he banks shots, gleefully making the backboard thrum and rattle. It feels good to be here again, this one last time before his childhood ends for good and all. Suddenly he knows it is the state tourney he is about to play. And it’s game time. He looks around: where is his team?
The crowd roars as the opposition team bursts onto the floor. He sees he is playing the girls’ team. He looks around again, expecting to see Rick and Todd and Kev and Billy and all the others on the bench, grinning at him, enjoying this peculiar prank at his expense. But his bench is empty.
He looks at the board and it clearly reads Sam vs. the Babes. At center court, the ref is waiting, ball in one hand and whistle between his teeth. The Mutant steps from the cluster of five girls who will start and positions
