Today there are defections among the girls. The Mutant would be there if the gym were held by a joint Libyan-Iraqi terrorist squad but if the morning session is going to make it, they can’t afford to lose Nat or the M & M’s or Billie. At least the boys have all turned out.
Sam and Todd Gramolini are teasing Nat Linscott with the ball when the Mutant explodes onto the floor between them. Todd passes the ball to Sam and he spins it on one fingertip high overhead while the two girls leap futilely after it. He keeps it there until smatterings of applause break out from the other players and spectators trickling into the gym.
“Hot dog!” the Mutant hisses in his face.
Laughing at her, he dances down court, tantalizing her with the ball. She stays right with him. All at once he is aware she is suppressing the shakes. Her ribs and hipbones protrude hungrily. He hasn’t felt the cold in the gym but then he’s dressed for it.
Backhanding the ball to Rick Woods, Sam fades to the sidelines, where he watches the Mutant relieve Rick of the ball. The boys can’t get it back. She hooks one neatly in the bucket and Todd snags it on the rebound.
Sam pulls his well-aged shapeless orange sweatshirt over his head and catches up with her in the backcourt, wordlessly extending the shirt. She spares only a fraction of a second of attention, hesitates, then grabs the shirt and disappears inside it. It reaches past her bottom. The sleeves hang well below her hands. She rolls the sleeves back into great thick fuzzy cuffs and races to join the traffic at the boys’ post. The shirt bounces and billows and swirls around her.
Sam covers his grin.
On Tuesday afternoon, the buses depart for Ravenswood Academy in Prosper with Sam on board and still eligible to play. The Disciplinary Committee has let him off with a written contract to repair the damage, a written apology and a warning, all entered into his record.
The rivalry with Ravenswood is much nastier than the one between Greenspark and Castle Rock, for it is founded in class. As several boarding schools in Maine do, Ravenswood also acts as the local public high school but regards itself as a prep school and has a headmaster to prove it. The sight of all those smooth-skinned beautiful inheritors of the earth with their perfect teeth provokes Greenspark to displays of blue-collar crudity. Ravenswood always reacts with well-bred surprise before bringing to bear a ruthless capitalist bloodthirst.
As usual, the girls meet first. The girl facing the Mutant for the tip cannot suppress a derisive giggle, triggering an explosion of muffled amusement in her teammates. Sneering, the Mutant wipes her nose on her arm. Ravenswood controls the tip but the Mutant drops sharply onto the terribly amused Wren’s left toe.
With that, her amusement value for Ravenswood fades rapidly. She uses the floor as if it were a water slide, diving into otter-sinuous slides that take her over yards of the court and into the middle of everything. Already scabbed and lurid with bruises, her bare legs and arms acquire fresh abrasions and contusions.
The crowd gasps and groans as she hurtles herself through the game with the abandon of a hockey player. The row of Wrens perched on the bench flutter, covering their mouths in trepidation. The Greenspark girls grin, give each other thumbs-ups, high fives, pats on the ass. Before the half, the Mutant succeeds in putting the Wren who giggled at her in danger of fouling out. In the fourth quarter, she fouls out herself with two minutes on the clock. A three-pointer by Nat Linscott gives Greenspark a 50–47 decision.
The Ravenswood bleachers are feeling resentful when the boys come onto the floor. At first sight of the ponytailed blond giant in the green-and-silver of Greenspark’s travel colors, there is a flutter in the home bleachers. Like the Mutant, Sam is well remembered from previous seasons’ encounters.
“Steroids! Steroids!” cry a trio of slim, beige-cashmere-to-their-bones daddies’ darlings. They burst into giggles at their temerity, fingers fluttering to their throats to the ghosts of pearls that await them in family safe-deposit boxes.
In response, Sam hunches forward to drag his knuckles on the floor and gibber. He curls his lip and scratches an armpit, sending the bleachers into waves of laughter and even producing a faint smile from an official.
From the upper bleachers, Reuben’s roar of laughter breaks over Sam.
A wave of exceptionally good humor lifts him. He takes Ravenswood to school, driving his teammates before him until they are nearly as exhausted keeping up with him as the Ravens are. It is one of the occasions when he outplays both his own team and the opposition. He doesn’t usually let that happen—sometimes exuberance gets the better of him, or even more rarely, he gets a little ripped at the opposition. Even this time, he doesn’t really unleash himself. He tries never to forget that the rest of the team has to believe in themselves or there won’t be a team anymore.
Leaving the building, the Greenspark teams discover Ravenswood is taking its losses with ill grace. The buses have been spray-painted with much edifying advice: EAT SHIT GREENSPARK and THE BIG MACHINE SUCKS and MASSACRE THE INJINS and STEROID SAM SUCKS and BURN THE BALD WITCH and RAZORHEAD FREAKAZOID BITCH and SHITKICKERS GO HOME. It only makes the Greenspark players more raucous in their victories. The last sight the Ravenswood campus has of the Greenspark buses is massed rigid middle fingers arrayed against the windows as they pass the Ravenswood dorms.
At the
