Hastily the Mutant recovers the candle and the butt. The floor paint is alligatored with black blisters.
“Gimme that candle.”
She fails to respond quickly enough and he wrenches it from her hand, grabs her by the back of the neck and forces her face to the blistered paint. It is still hot.
“Eat that,” he says.
Sam notes in passing that the town office is burning lights and his father’s truck, along with others, is in the parking lot. At home, he lets himself into the kitchen. His supper is on the table. Upstairs, it sounds like bath time for Indy—plashing and chortling and Pearl singing
She drank up all the water,
She ate up all the soap,
She tried to eat the bathtub
But it wouldn’t go down her throat.
Slipping past the bathroom to his room, he flops wearily onto his bed. There is an unpleasant gluey cobweb behind his eyelids and in his throat that is either hangover from the cold medicine or a fit of weeping waiting to happen.
Some time later he is vaguely aware of Reuben’s hand brushing back his hair to check his damp brow and the solidity of his father sitting on the edge of the bed next to him. Drifting, he weaves his fingers through his father’s on the bed. He is a big strong boy who sleeps as easily and suddenly as an infant. When his father tucks the covers over him, the boy in his oversized man’s body takes a long shuddering breath and snuggles into their warmth.
Hobbled hand and foot, he struggles frantically to free himself of the tangle of sheets trying to drag him back down into nightmare. In this abrupt wakening the dark sits on his diaphragm like a malevolent succubus. He is wet, snared in soaking linen. Sweat—just sweat. His stomach muscles tremble with relief that he hasn’t pissed the bed. His headphones are askew, poking into his neck. A glance at the clock: it’s only just past midnight; he hasn’t been sleeping all that long.
Then he hears her, in throaty ecstasy. His father finds voice for some urgency and then she cries out again. Slipping off his ‘phones, he rolls over and yanks the pillow over his head. Down the hall, his father and his father’s wife whisper to each other.
By Thursday morning, Sam’s cold is on the run. As he works out in the weight room, he feels as if he is sweating yet more poison out. It’s like he’s been compressed and now he’s expanding again into his normal shape and size.
Spotting Rick, Sam overhears Chapin holding forth to an audience around the Soloflex machine he is using. One eye on the assistant coach prowling the room, Chapin keeps his voice low enough so the details fade in and out but the tone is clear. The Mutant. Lexie Michaud. Deb’s little sister. Jesus, Lexie’s a freshman.
The girls were back in the gym first thing Wednesday, back to work, putting the loss behind them. The Mutant’s pneumonia and what it cost the girls means nothing to Chapin, the way the Mutant means nothing to him but lumber to build his own bad legend. The Mutant isn’t the only one the noisy little prick is damaging.
As Chapin gladhands his way out, his gaze passes over Sam and stops.
Sam jerks his head toward the corridor. “Word with you.”
“I don’t feel like fucking around, Samson.”
Sam’s reassuringly earnest. Air of a man looking for a deal. “Not,” he says.
The empty corridor is only a few steps away.
“What’s up?” J.C. asks once they are there. He pats himself for a cigarette before he remembers he’s in sweats.
“You and Gauthier, you’re buddies, right?” Sam asks haltingly. “Hang out, party, whatever.”
Curiosity wars with caution in a sudden restless shifting of Chapin’s stance. He’s not buying the village idiot act again. The last time he had a conversation with Samson about the Mutant, the bastard put him down hard. Buying time while he figures out what script they’re playing, what role he’s going to create for himself, J.C. delivers up a little amiable corridor chitchat. “Myself, I haven’t talked to her but Grey did last night. Said she was better. But upset the girls dropped it.”
“Heartbreaker,” Sam agrees.
Still mentally gossiping over the fence, J.C. shakes his head sympathetically.
Sam leans back against the wall, studies the laces in his new tops. “Some people blame her for the loss, being out sick when her team needed her. Say she parties herself sick.”
J.C. laughs.
Loitering in the corridor, shoulder to shoulder with Sam, he is suddenly conscious of the sheer physical presence of the fucker, the space the gorilla takes up. He breaks into a sweat and babbles. “Yeah, well, Friday night was a maximum blast, no argument. She was stoned when I picked her up. That was for starters. Never woulda guessed she was getting sick.”
Sam stares at Chapin’s all-American happy face. Good teeth, good skin, well nourished, muscled and handsome, a child of indulgence and prosperity. The ripple of rainbow hair like a flag of exuberance. The urge to send J.C.’s boy president’s face a Sluggergram is almost irresistible.
Instead Sam is confidential. “It gets back to the Office Gauthier was partying with you Friday night, they could drop a drug screen on her. You’re a friend of hers, you’ll want her to be clean so she can keep on doing what she likes. Playing ball.”
J.C. shakes his head. Get real. It’s the Mutant’s lookout whether she can pass a drug screen. She can always just say no. This numb shitkicker doesn’t seem to understand she likes being loaded as much as she likes playing ball. And considerably more than she likes balling.
“And so nobody ever asks where the fuck she gets the shit you supply her,” Sam continues.
Chapin’s smily face freezes. “What is this shit?” he protests. “You’re talking like Sister D.’s some kind of junkie and I’m the mean old pusher hanging around the schoolyard. She parties a little—what’s the big
