Chapin confides genially, “Samson, she shaves her head.”
“Sure.”
“She does,” he insists.
Slow puzzlement dawns across Sam’s face. “Why?”
Nobody is this shit-numb, J.C. tells himself. This is a put-on. But he has to say something. “She’s a freak. Get it?”
Contemplatively, Sam nods. “Wicked sweet hook shot, though.”
Chapin forces a polite chuckle. “That’s only one of her talents. You ought to have a bald chick go down on you.”
Blinking in momentary confusion, Sam is amazed. “Go down? You mean, like—?” He looks down at his crotch as if he cannot quite visualize the act.
J.C. cups his hands in front of himself and pops his hips at them and winks. “Talk about giving head.”
Suddenly J.C. is aware of Rick Woods staring up at him from the bench with an expression of disbelief. Belatedly he hears the locker room braggart in his own words. It stings to realize Rick Woods finds him uncool. J.C. is no great fan of the local jocks but Woods is by definition cool. There is nothing more cool than a black jock.
“Oh.” Sam studies the floor for a moment, lashes fluttering with the unaccustomed effort of heavy thought. At last he shakes his head. “Don’t get it,” he confesses solemnly. “Maybe you could blow me, Chapin, show me how it’s done.”
Around them, the other guys break up and Rick is making strangled noises again.
J.C. makes a huge effort, smiling to cover his fury at having been had.
“You’re cute but not that cute, asshole,” he says.
Smiling innocently, Sam shrugs off his disappointment.
Chapin backs away, smile fading with him, to make a hearty pretense of socializing with the other guys.
Rick heaves the bar into its cradle and sits up. “Goddamn. You were awesome, Sambo. I was getting hot, all that talk about oral sex.”
“I’m sort of relieved he didn’t take me up on it,” Sam tells him. “He’s such a romantic guy, he’d probably think it meant we were going steady.”
Rick coughs violently and Sam pounds his back helpfully.
They change places, Rick spotting Sam while he lifts.
“Tell you what, I could not get it up for that freaky bald chick.” Rick shudders eloquently. “No shit, Sambo.”
Sam exhales.
“I was wondering how she can stand making it with a douchebag like Chapin.”
“Hey, dude, you know it ain’t romance. It’s capitalism. She’s closing her eyes and pretending his tiny white worm’s the doobie she’s earning. I don’t know what he’s pretending and I don’t want to think about it either, or it’ll make me a sexual cripple. Like you.”
“What do you mean? Sarah seems to like my corncob collection—”
“Shut up, Sambo,” Rick interrupts.
“Yessir,” Sam says humbly.
On his way to lunch, Sam spots the Mutant going upstream against the flood and heads after her. The Mutant’s hand is on the pushbar of the exit, on her way to the smoking area, when he calls to her to wait up.
Leaning against a locker, her hand tucked behind her, she stares up at him. “Make it fast.”
“Be nice if somebody else brought some music in the morning. I thought maybe you’d like to bring in a mix.”
“Hey, genius, if I could dub from a yardsale clock-radio to a Walkman, I could break into the Pentagon’s mainframe with a pencil and start World War Three.”
She has the pleasure of seeing the face of ‘god nonplussed.
“Oh.” He blinks. “I didn’t know. Maybe one of the other girls could do one.”
With her head back against the locker, she grants him a disdainful smile.
“I’ll ask. Don’t blame me if it’s some shitkicking country twang and I have to puke on the court. Now if you don’t mind, I need to get out there and suck in some passive smoke before I die.”
“You mean so you will,” he twits.
Sardonically she shows him a double bird as she backs toward the door.
“You do that better than anyone I know,” he mocks her. “It’s the kinda skill a person can really use in life, too. What happened to your hand?”
“Your fault, asshole.” She rips the Band-Aid off it and thrusts it in his face. “I was kiting a butt from my mother and she put out the one she was smoking on me. All right? You happy now? If you’d minded your own fucking business, I’d have been smoking my own.”
Sam flinches. He reaches for her wrist and she allows him, briefly, to turn the hand to look at the wound before jerking it away and stuffing it into the sleeve of her coat. She flings herself against the pushbar and stumbles out of doors.
For some reason the lights glow a little more strongly, not so much as if there has been a surge on the line but more as if Sam himself has faded, from a loose plug, a bad connection. His stomach cramps. Without haste, he turns down the hall toward the cafeteria and enters the lavatory near it. It’s crowded, lines at the urinals, all the stall doors closed. For a fraction of a second he stands still, as if he doesn’t remember just why he came in here.
The wound on the back of her hand had looked like a nail hole. The pale skin had been red where she tore off the Band-Aid.
“Shit,” he mutters.
For a fraction of a second he wavers, his head nodding weakly as if he were fighting nausea. Then his whole oversized body seems to contract like a spring. All the tension releases at once as he goes straight up to drive his fist through a ceiling panel. It descends in a rain of fibrous shards. Spinning on his heel, he kicks up into the mirror over the nearest handbasin, twisting away from the explosion of glass and staggering against the adjoining wall.
At the urinals, cursing boys hunch to protect themselves from flying glass. There is
