“Jesus, Sam, look at you. Raccoon eyes, white as a sheet, and you’re breathing through your mouth. You look like you spent the whole damn weekend whacking off.”
“Just a cold,” Sam protests, feeling the heat flood his face. “I’m okay to play.” He has a sudden inspiration. “Lot a colds around.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Coach glooms. “You’ll give this one to the rest of the team. Try not to French any of ‘em, okay?”
Catching a glimpse of Shasta Grey while changing classes, Sam shoulders his way through the hordes and corners her. “Gauthier missed practice. The office never got a call from her mother. Is she sick?”
Shas snaps her gum and grins. “I bet. Friday night, she was doing some severe partying. Probably still hung over.”
After what she pulled at the Mill and the park, the wench went out partying? Whatever made him think she was ever serious about a state title?
“You got a number for her? I should call. She could lose her eligibility if nobody calls her in sick.”
Shasta fumbles a pen. “Oh, yeah, I forgot. You jocks, it’s like you’re in kindergarten. Gotta sign up to pee practically.”
Abruptly she gives up the search and pats his chest as familiarly as Aunt Ilene, full of bonhomie and sherry on Christmas afternoon. “Better let me call her, Samson. That creep lives with her mother is a real shit to her when she gets calls from guys. I mean, we’re talking major asshole, you know?”
At lunchtime, Shas finds him to tell him the Mutant’s home sick with pneumonia.
“Tony—Mr. Buttcheese—answered the phone. Said one of those old bags she cleans for brought her home Saturday. She’s got pneumonia. The asshole says she’s keeping him awake, hacking. Do you believe it?”
Pneumonia. No trouble at all believing that. He wishes he’d never gone into the Mill with her. It had all started there.
The school secretary agrees to call and check. This is not a favor for the wretched Mutant, of course; this is strictly for Sam.
Then he hurries to lobby the cafeteria boss, Mrs. Hobart, to hold the job open. He makes a powerful argument: everyone knows how valuable the Mutant is to the girls’ team. She really needs the job. The fattening up. If she needed to eat before, coming back from pneumonia, it could be crucial.
Mrs. Hobart’s a soft touch for a sob story, especially if it comes from a growing boy. They’re all puppies to her, hanging around the kitchen wagging their tails for crumbs and handouts. Teasing him about his ponytail, she tucks a couple of brownies into Sam’s shirt pocket.
“Take care of that cold yourself,” she admonishes him. “You kids.”
Everything short of redemption, promises the label on the liquid cold medicine Sam slips out to the pharmacy to pick up after school. What matters is it won’t make him drowsy. The dosage chart doesn’t cover his size so he doubles the high end. Tastes—yuck—like it should turn him into a frog. Though he feels weirdly light-headed, the potion gets him through the two hours of drills, patterns and scrimmage in real time instead of slow motion.
All of the distaff Indians except, of course, the absent Mutant, are hanging out after their practice to watch the boys. Not cheering, not flirting anymore. Scouting. It makes him grin inside.
While the truck warms up, he gulps another double shot of old Froggie’s glug. The nasty taste makes him decide he’s definitely mutating into a frog. A two-hundred-thirty-five-pound (thereabouts) six-foot-ten-inch (start of the season) frog, with his mouth and throat all glassy with this fermented-fly-flavored muck. Skin cold and damp, he sure feels green inside and out.
He runs his tongue out and flicks it around at an imaginary insect. Froggie went a courtin’, he did go, Unh Huh, unh huh. Time to hop down the road to Center Slime, back to the old Pond, the old lily pad. Hope he doesn’t get squished by an eighteen-wheeler. Already he feels very flat, oozing and leaking onto the pavement, an attractive treadmark ironed down his leathery back. The right tape comes easily to hand; the Buzzcocks croak and thump from his speakers.
The road seems strangely empty without the Mutant. He feels like he’s forgetting something, not picking her up. Abruptly it strikes him he doesn’t know how she gets to school in the mornings. Four miles between Depot Street and the high school at the edge of town. The buses don’t roll early enough for her to make the early session in the gym, of course. Sometimes she gets out of Chapin’s Sunbird, sometimes out of Shasta’s rolling wreck of a Chevelle, but the morning she was outdoors on the court so early, she was all by herself and he doesn’t recall either of those vehicles being in the lot. She must walk, at least some of the time.
He should go see her. Make sure she’s all right, or as all right as she can be, with pneumonia. Bring her a box of dead flies. There are things he really has to say to her. But let it go today. Let her rest and get better. Go home and take care of his own cold. He’ll go see her tomorrow. The hell with her mother’s boyfriend. The way Sam feels, the thought of thumping some asshole’s head into a wall has considerable appeal.
Next day brings a home with Chamberlain.
The Chamberlain girls—the Lady Colonels—blitz Greenspark in the first quarter. Without the Mutant, the girls seem unfocused. At the half, the Indians are trailing significantly. When Melissa Jandreau takes a tumble, her sister, coach and assistant coach bend over her anxiously.
Sam wedges himself in behind the girls’ bench and leans on Nat and Billie.
“You’re letting them get to you,” he tells the two girls. “Gauthier’s gonna be out awhile. You gonna have to do it without her. Get your shit together. Billie, get your head up. Where was your concentration when Mellissa made that pass? You acted like you never saw a ball
