The coaches tick off their players on their clipboards and look anxiously at their watches. They meet a diplomatic halfway between the buses.
“I’m short a player,” one coach tells the other.
“Me too. Lemme guess which one you’re missing.”
The boys’ coach nods gloomily and shrugs his collar up against the raw of the day. “Would be those two. He never used to be late for anything, I’ll tell you.”
The girls’ coach nods toward the highway. “There they are.”
Cheering and applause rise from the idling buses.
The coaches shake hands and wish each other luck, as they will again later on debarking and yet again before their games. They don’t like each other—she resents his seniority, his power and the sex bias of his funding; he knows it, and comes besides of a generation that suspects all female coaches of being lesbians—but like most coaches and indeed athletes, they are fundamentally superstitious.
As Sam brakes the truck, to the bellowing of two basketball teams from the opened windows of the buses, Deanie flips them all off, which only increases the volume of their welcome.
“I told you we were gonna miss’m if you didn’t hurry up,” he chides her, grabbing their gear from the floor of the cab.
Deanie takes his free hand and slides out of the cab. “Oh shut up. You took your time, dub.”
He heaves her gym bag up into the bus to Melanie Jandreau, who has jumped up from her front seat next to her sister to catch it. Deanie starts to brush past him. He catches her wrist and holds her at the bottom of the steps.
“You wanted to come twice,” he reminds her in a whisper.
Deanie sticks her tongue out at him.
Her teammates react with applause, shrieks and faked orgasms. From the other two buses, he is being urged to get his ass on board.
“Promise?” he teases, backing to his own bus. In turning away from her, he trips over his own feet and nearly falls under the wheels. His teammates greet him with lewd suggestions as to why he is so late—several of them pretty much right on the money—and Coach shouts them down. As the buses move, there is an immediate distraction to be had in hanging out the windows, encouraging the whooping and cheers of their fellow students, teachers, parents and miscellaneous fans who have come to see them off.
As the boys’ bus slowly passes the girls’, Sam jams himself out his window and reaches across the gap to Deanie, kneeling on her seat to reach out to him. Their fingertips touch lightly.
Breathless, the Mutant sinks back into her seat. Billie Figueroa throws herself down next to her and hurriedly informs her that everybody’s gym bag on all three buses has been searched for contraband—this year including not just alcohol, drugs and tobacco, but Super Glue, squirt guns, slimy or sticky substances, anything in an aerosol can, anything that looks like a tool or hardware, balloons—basically anything that isn’t absolutely necessary to the trip. Rumor has it a vast supply of rubbers was also confiscated.
As Billie chatters, Deanie realizes there is something new about Billie. A stud gleams from the right side of her nose.
“Look at you!” she exclaims.
Billie turns her head proudly from side to side, showing it off. “Bitchin’, huh?”
Nat Linscott pops up from the seat in front of them. “That ain’t all.”
Slowly, Nat raises her baseball cap and reveals she has cropped her red curls to a tight cap and razored swooshes right to red fuzz on the sides.
“My mother just about shit!” she crows. She clasps her hands to her chest and imitates her mother, in an alarmed falsetto, “ ‘Oh my Gawd! Natalie Marie, what have you done! What about the prom!’”
40
Through winter-weary countryside the bus growls and wheezes while its riders settle down to the long two-lane blacktop passage. Rick wanders back to his seat and finds Sam heavily asleep. The stud in Sam’s ear has been replaced with a filigreed gold ring, which Rick recalls having seen in Gauthier’s ear.
It’s got to be the weirdest coupling in the school’s history. Rick still can’t quite believe it but there’s also something predictable in it—like one of those TV preachers getting busted with a hooker. All the same, he still wants to punch the idiot out; it makes him furious to know that one of these days the Mutant is going to fuck Sam over but good. And Sam’s the kind of guy, something like that would half-kill him.
Imitating Sam, he hangs his headphones over his ears and closes his eyes, but he doesn’t sleep. He elaborates a long-running fantasy about the Jandreau twins—half as smart as Sarah between the two of them but twice as many tits.
Sam yawns and squints at the Portland town line marker. He stretches, wrinkling his nose at the inadvertent whiff of the sharpness in his pits. A deep breath of the whole bus would fell a dumpster-dwelling wino with the nervous funk. The decibel level emitted by their assorted suitcase blasters is paralyzing to the uninitiated. To them, it’s a legal upper, a blood-pressure raiser, a testosterone pumper.
The mood on arrival is distracted, everyone suddenly aware it’s almost high noon in Dodge. Spectators are beginning to arrive. TV crews are setting up. Uniformed cops loiter near the auditorium doors. The band hustles to unpack instruments and stands and cheerleaders posture with mirrors, lipstick, hairspray. The Boosters’ Club makes for the second tier of the stands on the side assigned to Greenspark to hang banners.
Sam keeps the boys together long enough to line them up to high-five the girls on the way to their lockers. He gets his first look
