On the way to school, Deanie reads Sam the game coverage in the Portland morning paper. There is another picture of her, fully as startling in her mask as the one the local paper ran of her while she was benched. Noting the officials had to warn against displays of bad sportsmanship and harassment of players by fans, a sidebar focuses on Gauthier and reactions to her return to play. It quotes an anonymous Ravenswood parent: “Hey, a kid who needs to wear a protective mask shouldn’t be playing. It’s too risky. She gets hurt again, who gets sued? Some player on another team? Their parents?” And an equally anonymous Greenspark fan: “You ask me, it’s embarrassing. A person wears the school colors, they represent the school, they shouldn’t look like some kind of skinhead Nazi. Makes Greenspark look bad. I don’t care how good she is, she’s only one player. Same rules for her as anyone else.” What rules is she violating? the reporter asks the fan. “The ones they should have. Girls should look like girls. They should have hair on their heads.”
About the danger of reinjury, Gauthier herself is quoted: “They lost. That’s their problem, not what I have to wear for protective gear. How many of their players use mouthguards, rec specs, tape bad ankles and knees, whatever?” Deanie looks up from the paper. “I also said jocks for the guys but they cut that.”
“Of course,” Sam agrees.
She rattles the paper and continues.
The column notes Greenspark’s backup center, Peter Fosse, is out for the rest of the season with a serious injury—a knee badly damaged in a fall in an icy parking lot.
“The guy from the paper never asked me anything how I got hurt,” Deanie interjects. “I had myself all ready to bullshit him about it and what he wanted was a comment on this Ravenswood yupster’s bellyache. Anyway,” she points out, “since I’ve been out, we haven’t lost any games and the only one you guys lost was the one those jerks threw away. You don’t need Pete to win. My team doesn’t need me to win, either.”
“We could use Pete. He’s more experienced than Skouros. And the girls do need you, Deanie. You’re their edge, the difference between maybe and a sure thing.”
She nudges his leg gently with her sneaker. “You’re just trying to get into my pants.”
He blinks but can’t stop the pink in his face and she laughs at him.
The needle feels like a hard pinch as Deanie pushes it through his earlobe and that’s all there is to it. Her hand falls and he sees his ear in the handmirror, the darning needle transfixing the center of the lobe. No visible blood. The discomfort is less than being stung. The most notable physical reaction is the one in his crotch.
“ ‘You have put a hole in me, seenyoor,’” he tells her.
Then he nuzzles between her tits again while she shoves the needle out the other side and daubs the hole she has made with alcohol and that stings, ouch and goddamn, that really stings. It hurts a lot more than the needle. It’s as good an excuse as any to get himself a good titty facewash, though, which gets them both snickering. After a while she makes him stop fooling around so she can finish up disinfecting his earlobe. Then she puts the stud in, one of her old ones. When he looks in the mirror, it looks like it’s always been there, except his earlobe is a little red.
“Now me,” she insists. “Do me.”
He’s been dreading this part of the deal. There on the kitchen table are the five studs she wants him to reinsert but first he has to open up the holes in her left ear with the other needles they have sterilized. With nothing to keep them open since she got hurt, the holes have closed almost completely. She could merely shove the studs into the partially closed holes but is repiercing instead to prevent infection.
He draws out prepping her, bathing her earlobe and the curving edge of the pinna with alcohol-soaked cotton balls. The tension in his stomach is no longer the least bit sexy; he is scared to death he’s going to hurt her. One of the reasons he insisted on her piercing his ear first was so he would know just how bad it hurt. If it turned out to be bad enough, he would refuse to do it for her. Even now, the thought of doing it five times raises gooseflesh. At least he doesn’t have to try to center the first hole in the lobe or place any of them. They’re all there, like machine-sewn buttonholes that just need to be opened.
She kneels in a kitchen chair, her forehead on his chest. It’s a mechanical operation, he tells himself, and focuses tightly on the delicate petal of flesh he grasps between thumb and forefinger. Steady, steady, as he places the point of the needle into the pucker of the closed hole, and they both hold their breaths and there is a tiny resistance and he punches it quickly all the way and the first one’s done. They breathe again, simultaneously.
He wipes his hands on his jeans and picks up the next needle.
That was the easy one. The lobe is a little pillow of tissue. Millions of people puncture their earlobes and decorate them with jewelry—have for thousands of years. No big deal. But the four holes are not through soft tissue but what she calls her pinna, the curling edge. And it’s mostly gristle, that stiffens the external structure of the ear the better to collect sound by lifting it away from the skull.
“Maybe you should put another one in for me,” he suggests.
She knows he is chickenshit about this. “I told
