He got up. She saw as she backed around the corner. He got up and drove away. Fuck him.
If she could stop seeing him fall, maybe she could sleep. A little smoke would do the trick too but what little she’s got is stashed at the Mill where Tony can’t get at it. She curls up and pulls the blanket over her head.
After a while her head spins and it feels like falling. She can see herself becoming the first fold of a kaleidoscopic separation of descending Mutants. As the shutter slices her into fractions of motion, she closes her eyes against the vertigo, against actually seeing the blade descend like the blink of a glass eyelid. Slowly, slowly, she comes to rest, folded into herself again in a chaste snow. It is all cold edges, microscopic crystalline feathers, flakes of glass, weeping from the corner of the moon’s blind eye.
Though he works late, Sam’s at the meetinghouse first thing Saturday morning. The small cut on his scalp is a little tender and his shoulder has stiffened up some, though not as much as it might have if he hadn’t used it as much as he could manage during his evening shift at the garage. He tests his shoulder, works the ball. Walks it, runs it, trots and paces it. Explores its every inch, circumnavigates it, orbits it, kicks it into warpspeed, sails solar winds on its humpback and beams back. By the time the other guys turn up, he’s warmed up and loose. He feels the shoulder but it’s going to be okay.
“You coming to the dance?” Rick wants to know.
It’s the Christmas dance, a significant occasion. He should turn up for at least a while, be one of the guys.
“I was going to but Dad’s sick. He’s got my fucking head cold. I’ll have to work until at least ten.”
Rick looks skeptical. “Suit yourself. I can’t do the diner this morning. Gotta work myself.”
Sam feels the same judgment from the other guys, most of them cutting the usually high-spirited breakfast at the diner, refusing to look him in the eye. A harsh laugh drifts back from Fosse as he leaves, his head bent to make some remark to Dupre. Maybe it’s not about him, Sam thinks, and then Pete glances back, and he knows it was.
What makes it so unfair is for once he really wants to go to a frigging dance. Nat had been pretty direct. Maybe she would be there on her own—last he heard she wasn’t going with anybody just then—and they could—dance, or something. Talk about basketball and get comfortable with each other and maybe he’d ask her about a movie or something during the break.
The snow has sweetened the air and it’s mild out, as it often is after a storm. It doesn’t look as if the few inches that fell are going to stick either. The roads are already mostly clear, shining black with melt, and there are puddles on the pavement around the garage.
“Isn’t there a dance tonight?” Reuben wants to know. Sick or not, he’s at work, eating aspirin and drinking juice and tea.
“I should work. I need the bucks.”
Coughing into a fistful of handkerchief, Reuben waves the off hand dismissively. “It’ll be quiet tonight. Jonesy can handle it.”
“I need the bucks too,” Jonesy chimes in.
“Why don’t you quit at eight, eight-thirty and go anyway? Thing doesn’t even start until eight, does it?”
Sam shrugs. “You should be home in bed.”
“You sound like Pearl. I can be sick just as well here as I can at home. You’re just trying to change the subject. It’s your senior year, Sammy. You ought to have some fun.”
Sam zips his coveralls decisively. “I am having fun. I’m saving up to get a Harley tattoo. I figure it’s the closest I’m ever gonna get to a bike. With the right tattoo, at least I’ll meet some cute bikers.”
Jonesy chortles.
Reuben shakes his head. “It must be that stuff you listen to. Look what the stuff we listened to did to my generation. Yours—I dunno. Probably be cannibals.”
“Dad?”
Reuben looks up from his workbench.
“There’s a card on the board at the diner. Alf Parks has got a litter of beagles.”
“We already talked about this, Sammy. I miss having a dog too. It’s just a terrible time for a puppy, with the baby on the floor all the time and putting everything in her mouth, and the house crowded too. Imagine that kitchen with a dog underfoot at suppertime. Next year’ll have to do.”
“Right,” Sam says. “Nevermind.”
Frowning, Reuben looks down at the workbench with an air of trying to remember where he left off.
“The hell with it,” he says abruptly. “I’m going home.” Shrugging into his jacket, he pauses at the door. “Why don’t you go to that dance, Sammy?”
Sam looks up and nods. “If I do, I’ll be home early.”
The weirdness of melt overwhelms him from the time he leaves the garage—not at eight-thirty but at ten-thirty, when he makes the decision impulsively as he closes up the garage. Twenty-four hours earlier he was pushing snow around and now it’s balmy, though with that little rusty tinge of cold on every deep breath.
There is as much going on in the parking lot as in the gym—people standing around cars and trucks, bullshitting and sneaking beers or passing smoke around. Some of them have come from partying in houses where the parents are conveniently absent or willing to look the other way. The cops will pass through the lot at irregular intervals through the evening but it’s impossible to sneak into the place unnoticed and so there’s plenty of warning to dispose of the evidence.
In the morning, the parking lot will be littered with empties, a few baggies with a residue of seed and stem, heaps of ash and cigarette ends
