“All right,” he says, lifting himself away from her after a moment’s breathless collapse. “All right.”
He pulls up his pants and goes upstairs.
Silently, she yanks off the scarf and swabs her bleeding lip with it. The blood is just a dampness on the black silk. She curls up close to the fire. It’s a trip to watch, and so warm. It makes her sleepy. The Chapins’ house is the nicest she has ever been inside. She would probably let J.C. screw her just to spend a little time in it once in a while.
J.C. comes down again with a small paper bag he tucks into her gym bag. It contains weed—most of which she will stash away from home to keep Tony or Judy from appropriating it—and her b.c. pills.
J.C.’s dad is a pharmaceuticals salesman—like father, like son, J.C. likes to joke. The Chapins want J.C. to go to med school. He fully intends to oblige. He can’t wait to get his hands on his own prescription pads and samples. In the meantime, he is too smart to steal from his old man, except for mere trifles, among them birth-control pills for the Mutant. It’s easy to make a single month’s supply disappear; the old man just assumes he miscounted or somebody at the factory fucked up.
He presents her with a piece of ice in a wet facecloth for her lip before he flops down next to her again.
“Sorry. I lost it.”
She shrugs. But for the soreness between her legs and her tender lip, already it seems as if the sex never happened.
“Boys win tonight?”
“Sure.”
“I’ve been thinking about Samson,” J.C. says, reaching for the cold number.
The Mutant’s lashes drop suddenly.
“Slammer’s an android,” she says. “He has the brains of a video game. His circuits just sit there, blinking, waiting for somebody to insert either a shop cartridge or one for round ball. Yank the cart and the meat machine goes on walking, talking and whacking off but there’s nothing going on upstairs but radio static.”
J.C. chortles and extends the fired-up joint. She takes it, drags on it and holds the smoke in her lungs.
“If you could get him interested in some product,” J.C. finally says, “I’ll give you some samples to lay on him. Maybe he’s looking for boosters. You let him know I can get him anything he wants—powder, uppers, steroids—anything on the jock aisle. He buys anything, I’ll give you a little something on commission.”
She’s willing to risk suspension from the team—there’s a certain boot in flirting with it and she never wants to look in the mirror and see another ass-kissing conformist jock—but only suspension. She never carries more than a single easily-disposed-of joint or a couple pills at a time. And she adamantly refuses to deal for J.C.
“Come on, he’s so straight I could use him for a T-square in drafting class. I told you before, I won’t hold shit for you. If—and this is right up there with the likelihood I’m in the running for Miss America—if Samson should happen to get a Post-It note from Jesus to get in touch on the 800-blotter line, I’ll set it up but that’s all.”
J.C. pauses, the jay an inch from his lips, and smiles. “Whatever. Your trip, babe.”
With a plaintive yowl, the Siamese spooks from the shadows and twines around Sam’s ankles as he climbs the steps to the back porch. Hunger pangs triggered by the woodsmoke in the air deepen almost to cramps as the first warm whiff of supper leaks out the door his father opens for him. Reuben gives him a high five for the good game. Pearl, with Indy climbing distractingly on her, pecks his cheek.
Headachy with hunger, Sam has his spoon in his supper before Reuben lets go of the soup plate. Pearl has knocked herself out; her paella is spicy and thick and filling. While he tucks it away, he shuffles the little pile of mail next to his plate—college recruiters and other unwelcome reminders the future is bearing down on him. He’s got a file full of shit from recruiters, from summer basketball camps. Though he’s played exhibition games, he’s never accepted any invitations to sneaker camps or to tour colleges. When Coach tries to talk to him about His Future, Sam remembers compelling business elsewhere.
His spring SATs were a disaster. He froze. It was like he’d never taken the practice ones with Romney, or the state assessment exam that was so similar. Everybody in school knows he handed in his book forty minutes into the exam and went directly to the lavatory to puke his guts out. Romney has tried to persuade him to sit for them again and he says he will but he keeps losing the application form. With substandard scores, he’d have to take the Prop 48 back door to play college hoops—maybe even do a year or two at some junior college that specializes in academic rehab. Not smart enough to compete academically with your peers? We’ll do you a favor because you won a genetic crapshoot that made you big and strong and athletic. It’s humiliating, a reminder of those forty minutes trying to keep his sweaty grip on the pencil and his guts. Somehow it sours his genuine accomplishments, on and off court.
There’s a postcard, the usual brief cheerful scrawl from his brother Frankie, in the Persian Gulf where it’s been heating up to a shooting war since August. Sam doesn’t know how he could live with himself if he was collecting free sneakers and faking his way through bullshit courses in some juco,
