Deanie ignores them, gathering her concentration for the game. Freshly shaven, her head is as bald as a baseball. The clear plastic mask throws a glassy reflective light. Under the transparent shell, the scar is like a long crack in porcelain. The straps that keep the mask in place divide her head and face into irregular geometric shapes and have the contrary effect of appearing to hold the broken pieces together.
She could be, Sam decides, a comic-book heroine, the victim of some technological accident that rends her forever from a normal human existence, and in exchange gifts her with some unlikely superpower.
With a delicacy that is unexpectedly moving, her fingers adjust the mask. She catches him watching and her eyes are brilliant with irony. He thinks hard at her, telling her she is devastating, transcendent, the newest thing under the sun. Killer eyes, smart mouth, primitive profile, she wears her exoskeleton with the insouciance of a model flaunting opulent, overdone jewelry. The fingers of one hand rest on the wing of a hipbone as she leans into the huddle to take her teammates’ hands, and the tuft of hair in her armpit is visible.
“Heal me, Lord!” he hears an adolescent male voice call mockingly from the other side of the gymnasium. “I bin struck blind by ugly!”
On either side, Rick and Todd pull him back down as Sam starts to rise in the outburst of jeers and laughing but it is really the warning look the Mutant throws him that keeps him in his place.
“Asshole,” he mutters at the humorist.
On the floor, one of the officials speaks to the Ravenswood coach, who turns to her assistant coach. The AC stops laughing, arranges her face in a frown, and climbs the bleachers to have brief but harsh words with a group of boys wearing Ravenswood jackets in the area where the witticism originated. When she gets backtalk, she is promptly reinforced by Vice-Principal Liggott. The group of hecklers begin to exit, smirking.
From the floor, the ref warns that abuse of players from the bleachers will result in forfeit of the game. For all the good it does. The Greenspark girls tear up Ravenswood, 70–49, and twenty-seven points are Deanie Gauthier’s, in thirty-two minutes of play. She dances down the waiting parade line of boys, her faceguard tipped up onto her crown like a welder’s mask. She is glowing with triumph. Radioactive. She looks, he realizes suddenly, just the way she does when she’s just had an orgasm.
When he takes the floor with his own team, he is deep in himself, unperturbed by Ravenswood’s decision to target him. His team has practiced for this eventuality. By the middle of the first quarter, they have broken the three-guard gang-up completely. Once Ravenswood discards the futile strategy and reverts to man-on-man, it is just a matter of the Big Machine patiently chewing them up.
As the margin widens, the atmosphere on the visitors’ side of the gym becomes mean and fractious. The buzzer brings down a rain of spitballs, stale popcorn, and drink cups, some of them not entirely empty. Lining up to palm off after the game, Sam rolls an ankle on a spill of ice on the hardwood and only avoids falling on his ass by grabbing onto Joey Skouros and Billy Rank. The losers are sullen, hardly making palm contact at all, let alone eye contact. Passing close to the stands, Sam takes a lunger in the face from an enraged red-faced old man.
Stunned, he wipes at his cheekbone, and stares up at the man.
“Hey, Pops,” he calls up, “eat shit and die!”
“I heard that!” the Ravenswood coach screeches. “I heard that!”
“You’re shittin’ me!” Sam exclaims. “That old goat loogeyed on me!”
Rick and Todd seize him, trying to propel him into the locker room.
“I’m making a complaint about this,” the coach scream’s.
Middle fingers rigid, Sam offers him a brace of birds as Coach throws himself between his star and the foaming Ravenswood coach.
“You goddamn idiot!” Coach explodes.
“That old shit hawked a loogie on me! Look at the crap on the floor! I almost wrecked an ankle on that ice!”
“Shut up!” Coach commands.
Glowering, Sam withdraws into the locker room.
Anticipating trouble over this game, Poloniak has two police cruisers at the high school. The cops find themselves quelling parking-lot fistfights. Some Greenspark fans decide to give the Ravenswood buses a good rocking by way of imparting a few manners and Greenspark’s finest are compelled to cordon the buses to get the Ravenswood teams safely onto them.
In the locker room, Coach tears up one side of Sam and down the other, explaining his deficiencies to the entire team.
Sam fingers his left earlobe. Maybe he should get it pierced. Deanie would like that. You have to start with a stud, he knows, until the hole is healed. A little smooth nub of a stud, like the one she wears in her nose. It’s smoother than skin. To his tongue, it feels a lot like the button of her sex, that she let him kiss and tickle again last night. He closes his fist on his upper thigh in concert with the tightening in his groin.
“Are you listening to me?” Coach snarls.
“No sir,” he admits.
Some of his teammates snigger.
“What are you listening to? The wind blow between your ears?”
“No sir,” he repeats.
“No sir, no sir,” Coach mocks. “Just what are you doing, besides taking up space?”
“Thinking,” Sam confesses humbly.
His teammates’ snickers grow louder.
“Thinking!” Coach roars. “Thinking! And what great thoughts were you thinking, Einstein?”
“About whether to pierce my ear, sir.”
With a moan, Rick covers his face, Bither shrieks, and the others are convulsed.
Coach’s face is as purple as Sam’s is red. “Sweet Baby Jesus!” he moans. “You don’t need
