Todd takes the rebound, passes to Rank, who starts it toward Greenspark’s paint. Sam and Lucas move in the same direction, together.
“Sammy, you got a lace untied,” Lucas kids.
“Lucas, you’re tripping on your dick,” Sam answers.
“Temper, temper,” Lucas teases.
Todd makes a nice jump from the key and Clutterbuck claims the rebound. Kasten moves to strip Clutterbuck, the ball goes loose, and in a second, the players are in a snarl. Sam is sandwiches by Lucas and the other guy guarding him, trying not to inadvertently foul again. In that kind of free-for-all, the refs have their choice of fouls; it is random bad luck who catches one. Or gets caught. Lucas gets caught, fouling not Sam but Kevin Bither in the melee.
Mouth’s first line shot wobbles around the rim forever and falls off and Seeds moves for it. Sam bops the ball from underneath and Lucas surges for it as it sails free. He trips on Seeds and his momentum carries him into Sam. One flailing hand grabs Sam by the wrist and the heel of one palm drives into Sam’s mouth.
Coach is on his feet, demanding a foul call as Sam staggers back a step. His hand goes to his mouth, comes away red from a split in his lower lip. Lucas extends his hands in a who me? gesture.
The official calls an intentional on Lucas, bringing the Castle Rock fans to their feet in outrage. Castle Rock’s coach is already there, his AC trying to restrain him from lunging onto the floor.
For once that night, Lucas Priest loses his composure. His face closes up in misery and his mouth tightens in a grimace of pain. Head down, he turns slowly toward the bench. Sam lopes to catch up with him, and seizes his hand to shake, an act that probably prevents the Castle Rock stands from showering the floor with debris in protest.
Lucas accepts Sam’s hand draggingly.
“You were great,” Sam tells him.
“Oh fuck you,” Lucas blurts, eyes welling.
Sam breaks into a grin before he realizes Lucas isn’t kidding around. “I’m sorry,” he mutters but Lucas brushes past him without another word.
Lucas’s bitterness feels like poison, like bad luck.
Sam seeks out some glimpse of Deanie in the crowd. They are all singing “Na Na Na Na, Hey Hey Goodbye” and she is singing it with them, jumping up and down, fists pumping over her head in a little victory dance. Then she cups her hands around her mouth and calls something else and he can’t hear it over the riot of noise but he knows what it is: This ain’t no disco. This ain’t no foolin’ around.
Rick comes back into the game for the final moments. “We got this dicked,” he advises Sam with a happy grin.
Clutterbuck knocks in a three-pointer with four seconds to go, making the final score Greenspark, 88, Castle Rock, 75; but the game’s been over, the regional title settled, since Lucas Priest fouled out.
The Indians are already on their feet and leap upward as one at the buzzer, then flow around Sam. Almost immediately, though, he shoulders his way through his teammates toward the Castle Rock bench, and this time Lucas Priest, whose face is red with the effort not to cry, takes Sam’s hand like a drowning man. Sam grabs his neck and yanks Lucas against him, and the two boys embrace roughly, as in sudden grief. When they separate, Sam raises Lucas’s hand with his, in a gesture of triumph, and Lucas laughs shakily, and shakes Sam’s hand again. “This was your game,” Sam tells him. “We won but this was Castle Rock’s game.”
A little while later someone thrusts a microphone in Lucas Priest’s face and asks him what Sam Styles said to him and he repeats it, word for word, with the amazed grin of a small child who has just been handed a five-dollar bill.
42
Not since Sonny Jesus was in short pants has Port Rose competed for a state title. All of Port Rose is in the stands, finally—a relief to the Twin Cities’ cops, who have had to cope with the confusion of a couple of thousand Roseporters who have never before encountered a middle turn lane.
In the upper tier of seats on the Greenspark side, Sam Styles climbs into the section the boys’ team has staked out. None of them enter the seats by the normal bipedal act of walking; they clamber over the backs, hop on the seats, and splash bonelessly into their chosen roosts.
The floor below shines like a field of gold. Used for the past several seasons by the state university at Orono, its paint is sapphire blue. It bears the university athletic program’s mascot, a cartoon bear cub’s head.
With his earring, a scrub of Roger Clemens–style beard around his mouth, and wearing the Mutant’s brocade headrag, Sam is sufficiently piratical to amuse himself and inspire his teammates—as soon as they saw how it looked on him, they all hit up girls for bandannas and scarves and to a man have ragtied their heads.
Port Rose’s colors are maroon and white by the book, but they look like raspberry and cream to Sam, a thought that makes him hungry. The food groups represented at the food kiosk are steamed hot dogs, nachos with hot cheese, popcorn, potato chips and candy bars, coffee and cola. The smells drift up the stairway from the concourse below, eliciting a rumble in Sam’s stomach, but he still craves raspberries and cream. Fortunately, there is distraction in the girls coming out for
