“Peteybird, you’re the wrong guy to be trying blackmail.”
Fosse’s face reddens. “Fuck you, Styles.”
Sam rolls the key in the lock and it clicks open. He glances at Pete. “I’ll make you a deal,” he says.
Glaring at him, Pete waits. Sam flops the ring of keys, splaying them over the palm of his hand.
“I’ll tighten up your frigging bumper.”
Pete blinks.
“In shop,” Sam continues. “For ten bucks. As a favor.”
A suspicious grin distorts Pete’s mouth. “And?”
“And nothing. Just don’t fuck with me anymore. There’s been enough shit going down. I’m willing to do you a favor and overlook what an asshole you are so I can finish the season with no more aggravation. This is no big deal. I need you as my backup and you need to be my backup if you want my job next year.”
Pete wilts into sulkiness. “You’re not invulnerable, Sambo.”
Sam nods. “Neither are you, Peteybird.”
Initially, the other players in the morning practice session are wary of the tension between Sam and Pete. Sam ignores Pete’s attitude, electing to work him steadily into the ground. Eventually Pete runs out of the energy to maintain a sneer.
Taking a rest on the sidelines, Rick demands the skinny. “What’s this shit Bilbo just told me about you and Pete playing bumper cars in the parking lot with Fosse?”
“You didn’t miss anything,” Sam says, “it was stupid. I got it straightened out with Pete before practice. I’m done playing these asshole you-shove-me-I-shove-you-back games.”
“You think you got a choice, you’re dumber than you look. Sometimes you fucking gotta fight, Slammer.”
“Sometimes you fucking gotta grow up,” Sam says. He smiles but Rick just shakes his head.
Rumor traces a distant seismic shimmy epicentered in the Office. A yearbook staffer passing through the Office on an errand reports Laliberte and the coaches in-conference over the local weekly. By Wednesday noon, the day the paper publishes, stories having to do with the school are usually posted on the bulletin board outside the Office.
By end-of-classes this Wednesday the board sports the usual range of coverage. Some lines have been scissored from the one about the basketball games. To Sam, the empty slots in the newsprint look just like the frames he puts down over what he’s reading. They cover up all but short, one-line windows of text so the other words don’t distract and confuse his eye—one of the learning techniques Paul Romney taught him. In censoring the newspaper, the administration might as well have highlighted every copy and informed every kid in school they were going to be tested on the material.
While the girls have their afternoon practice—Deanie on the bench taking play-by-play advice from her coach—Sam slips out of the school long enough to pick up an unexpurgated copy of the weekly at the pharmacy.
Under the fold of the sports page there is a photograph of her. Black-and-white does not soften the damage to Deanie’s face. If the stringer with the camera did not see it when taking the picture, someone had picked it up after developing the print. The censored lines of the article concern what the picture shows. Gauthier’s facial injury is clearly more serious than the school has let on, the piece says, and raises immediate questions about when she will return to play, and whether she should in this season. Until school officials provide more complete information about the nature of the injury, the reporter asserts piously, the public can only speculate.
Obviously Deanie’s coach has seen the article but she makes no move to interfere when Sam brings it to Deanie on the bench. He sits behind her while she scans it. She folds it, hands it back to him, returns her attention without a word to the drills her teammates are performing.
He climbs the bleachers to watch until it’s time to change for his own practice. Rick and Todd Gramolini settle on either side of him and have a look at the paper.
The photograph makes Todd wince. “Aw, shit. Sam, I’m sorry about all the bullshit. I didn’t know anything about the rat till it was done but I wouldn’t have gone along with it. I’ve had enough of Pete’s crap.”
Sam offers his hand silently and Todd shakes it.
“Can we get through this season as a team?” he wants to know.
Sam shrugs. “That might be up to Pete.”
“Break his fucking arm,” Rick observes, “break his fucking leg. We don’t need him. Skouros can do the job and he’s not full of shit.”
Todd laughs. “Jesus. I hear you say that and I’m laughing, Rick, but it ain’t good, talk like that about a teammate.”
“Pete’s his own worst enemy,” Sam counsels. “Maybe he’ll break his own leg.”
On the way home, he asks Deanie if she wants to stop and see the old ladies. She shakes her head. Her face will still be ugly enough to trip their pacemakers when she goes back to work for them on the coming Saturday, she assures him.
It tells him better than anything what she really feels about the photograph in the paper. It seems to him she no longer shaves her head as an act of rebellion but in abnegation, like a nun. Why else has she taken to covering it all the time? She ties the loose end of the headscarf to fall over the left side of her face. The strut seems to have gone out of her most of the time. She meets no one’s eyes anymore and she moves like a ghost, weaving invisibility around her.
Next morning when he stares up at his own ceiling on waking and realizes again she has slept through and so has he, he thinks he should feel relieved. Her face is healing, the color fading and shrinking, the normal contours reappearing, despite his stupid antics. Give her time to heal inside too and she’ll be herself again.
Then when she’s gotten used to whatever comes next for her, the foster home—if it’s no good he’ll just take her out
