It’s not as if they’ve never seen the toll the world takes sometimes. They have all gotten used to the sophomore with leukemia and the paraplegic junior in his wheelchair. They have become accustomed to Gauthier’s old Mutant weirdness.
But this is different—this naked trauma that has distorted one side of her face. It would be one thing if it were merely the result of an accident but the knowledge that this was done to her with a man’s fist is much more disturbing. Some of them played Romans to her gladiator in the parking lot, demanding she be beaten, much too close to the time when she really was. Stripped of chains, earrings and nose ring, she stands barefaced, all too fragile and female, in their midst. Her wound indicts them all and the shame and guilt are suffocating. There is an instant when the air is all unbreathable edges, a moment when they could as easily stone her as accept her.
Instinctively, Sam moves closer to the Mutant, ready to protect her.
“Gauthier,” her coach exclaims from the door and Deanie spins to look past Sam and the moment passes.
Coach takes her by the elbow and draws her aside and the others go about their business. There is a sudden outbreak of blustering, almost hysterical joking, and none of it, conspicuously, concerns the Mutant.
After the coach lets her go, the Mutant takes a basketball from the rack and climbs onto the bleachers to watch them scrimmage. Sam immediately falls out of play and hustles her to the highest one to minimize the remote chance of her being struck by a loose ball, or being fallen on, say by a clumsy center tumbling ass over teakettle like an out-of-control missile.
When Sam looks her way again, she is resting her chin on her hands on the basketball. The wistful posture slackens the wind in his sails but then she lifts her head and sticks out her chin and cocks a mocking eyebrow at him.
In the weight room, no one talks of anything but the war. There is an undertone that wasn’t there when they were all assuring each other it wasn’t going to happen. The ones who say they wish they were there already, the others who say they’ll go if called and the minority who insist they won’t die for oil all speak with the same bravado, but what Sam hears most clearly is the first understanding it really is possible they could find themselves, one day too soon, in the desert. It really might be them doing the dying.
He lets the music on the boombox fill his head. He doesn’t want to think about the war, where Frankie is. When they ask him if he will volunteer or what he will do if the draft is reinstituted, he shrugs and answers, “I dunno.”
Whatever they have said in the spirit of macho, most of them feel the same way. Their open young faces are still those of boys, interchangeable with those in the Brady photographs of the soldiers who fought the Civil War thirteen decades ago. We dunno, Sam concludes. Frankie dunno, either. And he’s right there in the desert shitstorm’s weather system. Suddenly angry, Sam punches up the volume on the boombox.
Deanie has every excuse not to sit for any exams but she only has one scheduled for the day anyway and is sure she has it down cold. Still, the algebra exam is harder than she expects—maybe the painkillers are making her mentally sluggish—but she gets through it and that’s one down. Afterward she is tired and beginning to hurt as her morning medication wears off. She is doled out her painkiller in the school nurse’s office and allowed to lie down, ‘god comes looking for her and makes her eat her lunch and sits with her until the dope kicks in and she gets sleepy.
When she comes to again, the nurse has left her desk on a coffee break. Deanie listens to the life of the school going on around her—a boy hoots down the corridor and is reprimanded in a genial way by a voice she recognizes as Paul Romney’s, a trio of girls goes giggling by, someone a few doors away is giving an emphatic lecture. Doors open and close, a toilet flushes somewhere overhead, and the wet wool smell of cafeteria food creeps up the stairs and under the door.
She feels safe here in the bosom of the educational mill. If school is mostly bullshit and pettiness from the teachers and administration, if her fellow students frequently exhibit the social habits of sharks and hyenas, it’s still a warm and busy place, a warren of hidey holes she knows better than anyone, even Mr. Moody the janitor. If it weren’t such a long public trek, she would have long since swiped a key from old George and made herself a warmer ground than the one at the Mill.
Tugging the blanket up under her chin, she digs into the soporific warmth of her cocoon.
“Hey,” J.C. says from the doorway.
Her heart bolts in the sudden cage of her chest.
He drops his books against the doorframe, seizes the lintel to chin himself and drops over the threshold into the room. Sticking his hands in his pockets, he tilts his head to study her, his eyes moist with concern.
“Oh shit, you’re some fucked up,” he observes.
Dry-mouthed, throat tight, she holds her breath. She dreads his touch but he keeps his hands to himself as he sinks to his haunches next to her.
“You know ol’ Tony moved so fast I couldn’t stop him, don’t you, D.? I mean, I never thought he’d do something like that. No way. Anyway, you gave it back to him.” There is in J.C.’s
