“Shut’m down,” he shouts.
His boys grin at each other. In moments, the girls are giving each other frantic looks. The glee vanishes. The nonplayers stop dancing to watch and exchange low-voiced commentary. The Mutant calls for Deb Michaud to replace Megan Black and Meggie looks relieved.
Sam takes the ball from Nat Linscott—again—and passes it to Skouros. The Mutant is on Joey in a flash, darting around him, trying to cut him off.
“Prick,” she remarks to Sam as she runs past him.
“Eat me,” he answers with a grin.
“You wish,” floats back to him.
At his elbow, Rick Woods sniggers.
It is part of the ongoing revelation: treat the Mutant like another guy. She reads it as respect.
When the warning bell for classes rings, the Mutant bends, panting, to grasp her knees.
Cradling the ball, Sam stoops over her. “Okay?”
“You son of a bitch,” she gasps. “I feel like a minge trying to fuck an elephant.”
“You want the state or not?”
She glances up at him irritably. “Oh fuck you, ‘god.”
Sam fights to keep a straight face. “You wish.” Still short-winded, she laughs and it turns into a coughing fit.
Rick Woods crosses his arms and tips back his chair at the lunch table. His girlfriend, Sarah, is next to him, a proprietary hand on his knee.
“So we beat the shit out of a bunch of pussies.”
Sarah slaps his thigh hard and he starts. His face knits in a frown. “I don’t like that word,” she says.
“Tough shit,” Rick snaps.
Sarah jumps up and stalks away. The guys all watch her leave.
“Another thing to thank you for,” Rick mutters to Sam. “As I was saying, it was fun, but what’s it got to do with the real world?”
Sam extracts a mussel shell from the leftover paella in his Thermos cup. “It’s got to do with them taking the state. They can beat us, they can beat anybody.”
Pete Fosse claps his empty corn-chip wrapper between his palms in a kind of Bronx cheer. “Who gives a shit if they take the state? Fuck’m.”
Sam leans forward and speaks intently. “What’s gonna beat us is some team from nowhere that shouldn’t, on account of they really want it and we’re not used to being up against somebody wants it so bad they think they can take us. You can’t beat this buncha girls for intensity. Gauthier plays like she’s got veins in her teeth. So we play them just the way we did this morning. Run’m into the floor. Don’t give’m a friggin’ break.” He pauses, trying to remember if he’s missed anything. “Just don’t foul any more than you have to, so nobody claims any of us copped a feel.”
“Shit on that!” Kevin Bither explodes. “If you’re gonna make us play girls, then we’re entitled to a grope if we can get it. You got to cop’m all, Sambot. We got our needs too.”
A round of crude commentary as to the perverse nature of Bither’s needs erupts.
Rick Woods is quiet.
“I think you’ve lost it, Sam,” he says finally. “That shit you listen to has finally shorted out your brain cells.”
Sam rocks the empty shell in his cup with the tip of his finger. “When it’s warm we play volleyball with them, we play softball. Chill out, Rick. If it doesn’t work, we’ll go to alternate days.”
Rick shakes his head doubtfully.
Sam pokes him in the ribs and Rick glances over his shoulder. On the other side of the cafeteria, Sarah and the Jandreau twins are demonstrating dance moves they must have picked up from MTV to a circle of girls. Sarah looks Rick’s way and undulates her hips.
“Oh my God,” Rick says. “She’s gonna make me eat shit to make up, you know.”
Raising his eyebrows, Sam nudges a packet of Saltines toward Rick and asks, “Wanna cracker?”
5
Bepimpled boogerhookers clot the corridor outside the Office. The freshman lockers are located nearby and at the end of the day the place is a rat maze of glandular wretches desperate for the exit. Sam’s forward passage is halted by two freshmen suddenly throwing punches at each other.
One of the combatants he recognizes as Kevin Bither’s younger brother Bobby, the shortest male in the freshman class, and the other is a slobby fat kid with thick glasses and a Bart Simpson spike. It is not a heroic or edifying engagement, just a lot of grunting and ineffective pummeling. Sam doesn’t care who started it or what the issue is. The boogers are in his way. He yanks Bobby off Fats Four-eyes and shoves him ungently against a locker, while Four-eyes, a little crazed, keeps popping the air as Bobby is lifted out of his reach.
“Take it outside,” Sam says. “You’re blocking traffic.”
Laliberte gestures from behind his desk, summoning Sam past the secretary into his inner office. The two coaches are already ensconced there, sucking up bad office coffee from Styrofoam cups. Like the Siamese twisting between his ankles at home, the Mutant materializes disconcertingly and slithers in behind Sam. She drops into one of the two chairs in front of the principal’s desk and swings her sneakers up to park them on the polished mahogany.
Her coach barks, “Gauthier! Feet on the floor! And get rid of that gum!”
The Mutant promptly drops her feet to the floor and sticks her finger in her mouth to retrieve a wad of gum. She examines it closely, looks around and finally sticks it between her eyebrows.
“Gauthier!” her coach growls.
The Mutant crinkles her forehead and the gumwad drops into her palm. Leaning to one side, she puts it into the trash can next to the principal’s desk. “Bingo,” she says.
Sam slouches in the other hot seat, aware of his coach glaring at him.
Frowning, Laliberte leans forward and taps the tips of his fingers together. He clears his throat and smiles his I’m-a-reasonable-kinda-guy smile.
“The use of the gym before classes is a privilege, not a right. This morning the two of you took it on yourself to reinterpret that privilege without approval of the proper authorities or even
