So long as she says she’s with J.C., Tony doesn’t give a shit if she stays out all night. He thinks J.C. is queer, on account of his dyed hair and his twice-pierced ear. Of course J.C. is too smart not to play to the delusion around Tony. Besides, J.C. has the most endearing quality Tony could imagine—he’s a reliable source of good shit.
J.C. makes sure she gets to the supermarket to meet Miss Reggie. Buys her another cup of coffee. She gets teary. Sometimes he’s so sweet to her, she doesn’t know how to react. She can’t figure out what he wants.
The Mutant manages to get through the grocery shopping but when she’s putting the stuff away, she starts coughing and nearly strangles on the phlegm. Miss Reggie has already noticed her hot eyes and bloodless skin and how bad she’s wheezing. But the Mutant insists it’s just a cold—she can’t very well tell them it’s too much toot and way too much Popov vodka.
At teatime, the Mutant gropes her way rustily down the stairs. She apologizes for her uselessness. The old women fuss stoutly. They feed her. In the middle of listlessly stirring her tea, she begins to cough again.
“Well, I know rales when I hear them,” Miss Katherine declares. “You’re going straight to the doctor’s, young lady.”
The pain in her chest when she coughs scares her. Miss Reggie drives her, very carefully, not to the doctor’s office, because of course that’s closed on a Saturday night, but to the Emergency Room. Pneumonia it is and the Mutant is too sick to argue about it when Miss Reggie drives her straight home.
It’s just bad luck Tony and Judy are in the middle of a fight.
“Tell somebody gives a flying fuck,” Tony tells Miss Reggie when the old woman tries to explain about the pneumonia.
From the depths of hot-eyed fever, the Mutant is furious with him and humiliated too, as she creeps to her room. She pulls her blankets around her, slides off her cot with her pillow clutched in one hand and crabs her way under the cot. Her chest feels like it is full of broken glass but she tries not to cough so as not to draw Tony’s attention.
11
Like a Guilty Smoker sneaking a drag, Sam sits in the truck on Monday morning, working up courage to go into the school. What’s he supposed to say to her? How’s he supposed to act? What will she say to him and how will she act? Maybe she’s already told all her burn buddies how she had him going, or that she sent him home with his nuts in a knot, or maybe that they really did it. What if he gets excited just seeing her?
The inside of his nose itches. Drying up from eating decongestants like M & M’s since Saturday afternoon and why did he have to go thinking that? He’ll be on his knees at center court with his face in the crotch of Melissa—or Melanie, it doesn’t matter—Jandreau’s shorts. He has to get a grip on himself—there’s an equally unfortunate thought. He doesn’t want to think about how often he had his hands on himself over the weekend. Jeez-us, Jeez-us, his head is blocked, like there’s a big bubble of air under pressure between and behind his eyes that wants to explode. He gives his raw nose a swipe and grabs his gear.
It all goes to prove what a distraction women are. All he did was make out with a girl he can hardly stand and it’s ruined his concentration all weekend, to say nothing of having given him a frigging head cold. Even the Sunday pickup game with his dad that was usually so much fun had sucked.
Just imagine if he were going out with someone. He isn’t so dim as to believe having a girlfriend would solve the problem, not right away. First you sweat do you like each other or not, and you make out a little and get all worked up, and then you make out more and you’re out of your mind with horniness and if you don’t break up, you start doing it and then, to go by the way Rick and Sarah and his father and Pearl and other couples he has observed, you’re more obsessed with it than you were when you were just hot for each other. And that’s just the sex. Nevermind you have to make friends with each other, go out, spend time on the telephone, get involved in each other’s lives, all of it distracting and time-consuming. And expensive. And if anything goes wrong—you say the wrong thing or she sees you talking to her best friend or you see her flirting with somebody, one of those idiot things that happen to his friends—you’re fighting and maybe breaking up and your head’s fucked up with that kind of shit when you should be thinking about basketball. So far, nothing that’s happened to him, nothing he’s observed has contradicted his own assessment you have to be smarter than he is to make it all work at the same time.
Everybody’s waiting for him except the Mutant. For a moment, he can almost breathe. Once on court, though, he feels like he is moving in another medium. Underwater. Or in cold molasses. Or on another planet. He doesn’t know why he isn’t leaving gummy fingerprints on the ball, trailing gooey slime wherever he steps.
When the practice breaks and there’s still no sign of the Mutant, he asks Nat if she knows where Gauthier is. Nat shakes her head, says she’ll find out.
Just outside the gym, he runs into Coach, who moans at
