“Spare me your homoerotic fantasies, Mouth,” Sam retorts.
The others break out laughing. Bither puts his hands on his hips like an angry girl and tosses his head and makes a gross wet smooch at Sam.
Stupid, Sam chides himself. Once started, Mouth never stops. He’ll find a way to be a pest in practice. Kev can be a major friggin’ weasel.
Running patterns to start, Sam loses himself in the rhythms. After hours of inactivity in classes, his body is eager to be exercised, sweated, used for something besides a brainrack. Not that the brains, such as they are, mind; this is work they like—running, handing off, stealing, hooking, pivoting, jumping.
The team splits to scrimmage. With Pete Fosse, the team’s backup center, Bither double-teams Sam. The two of them crowd him relentlessly, Mouth talking trash, fast and gross, every time they are out of earshot of Coach. The object is not insult—the insults are too convoluted and extravagant to be taken seriously—but to make Sam laugh.
When Sam makes a sudden feint, Fosse follows it and Sam pivots to drive between Fosse and Bither. Surprised, Bither trips over his own feet. As Mouth flails for balance, Sam attempts to rise over him. The two boys tangle and plunge over the empty bench and into the girls’ team, waiting for their own practice in the first two rows of the bleachers. The shorter Bither is caught on the first bleachers as he and Sam descend into the shrieking girls, who scramble with limited success to get out of the way.
Sam tumbles into female bodies in nylon jerseys and shorts, into a perfumed chaos of legs and arms and breasts, bottoms and braids and bangs, velvet hairbands and delicate winking little earstuds. He comes to rest between bleachers, on top of the slippery nylon of a practice uniform filled with girl.
Long muscular legs splay on either side of him. A hard-breathing tummy heaves under him. He struggles to get off her but they are walled in, his shoulders wider than the space between the bleachers. He will have to turn and lift himself out at an angle, the way he came down. Desperately he gropes for purchase, finds he has hipbone in one hand and a clutch of small, springy breast in the other. In a roar that is greater inside his head than the noise of his teammates convulsed at his expense and this unfortunate girl’s, Sam heaves himself up and looks into the ironic bitter-chocolate eyes of the Mutant.
Deanie Gauthier, aka the Mutant.
Once a scrawny anonymous townie, the nobody child of a long-gone daddy and a biker mama, Deanie Gauthier has transformed herself, by this her sophomore year, into the Mutant.
The mohawk fashion history, she now shaves her head to a stubble of black hair. Her eyes are kohled in thick eyeliner, her mouth a slick of unnaturally colored lipstick. By contrast her skin is the fragile, easily bruised white of a narcissus petal. To play hoops, she is compelled to remove most of her normal jewelry but off court, the ring in the lobe of her left nostril is the terminus of five chains from five separate rings in her left ear. A single chain scallops through five rings in her right ear before falling to a collar of cruder, thicker links around her neck. While she is unchained for practice, the tracks of her facial chains are marked in sittings from her mascara across her left cheek.
In her practice uniform, her tattoos are fully visible: a winged death’s head holds a rosebud in its teeth on her nicely formed right bicep and on her more powerful left, the man in the moon weeps from one eye. A very small broken rose spills its petals like teardrops of blood above her bony knee. One leg she shaves; the other sports a natural growth of fine black hair, as do both armpits.
Even as a freshman point guard, she was good for twenty points a game. The Mutant plays as if she is possessed, intimidating the hell out of other teams. Five feet seven inches and a hundred and nine pounds of skinny, self-balded scare queen, she has wrested for herself the peculiar status of Greenspark’s Bad Girl. But everyone knows she is in fact merely Deanie Gauthier, weirdly shaved, tattooed and wrapped up in chains and rags, a scrawny little townie gone Mutant.
“You okay?” asks Sam.
From her sprawl between the bleachers she shrugs ungraciously. He reaches down. She hesitates. Accepts his hand and lets him set her on her feet. Her sulky underlip is like a sullen squeak of hunger.
Sam remembers the cage of her ribs against him, her rapid heartbeat inside it.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“Asshole,” she spits, and drops back onto the bleacher, crossing her arms and staring up at him scornfully.
Jesus. Sam retreats.
The Coach dusts off Bither, who has bitten his tongue and scraped his chin on the edge of a bleacher.
Rick Woods digs an elbow into Sam.
“Smooth move, Sambo. Copping the entire girls’ team at one time. I was gonna do that, I’d try to land on the Jandreau twins. The Mutant, that’s too close to necrophilia for me.”
Sam’s head feels as if he has gone Mutant himself; left his locks on the floor around the barber’s chair, had black lines and the word Spalding tattooed over his shorn skull. He thinks of a Dharma Bums lyric, a wailing lament:
I’m gonna crawl, I’m gonna fall, gonna be a punkin-head.
The Mutant watches him stumble, wretched with blown cool, to center court. Whispering and sniggering, her scattered teammates settle around her again like birds on a wire.
Melissa Jandreau crouches behind her. “Did you feel it? How big is it?”
The Mutant rolls her eyes up and drops her head back abruptly as if her neck were suddenly broken.
“Fuck off,” she says.
Melissa leans toward her twin, Melanie, to whisper audibly: Bitch.
Sam knots himself into a fury. The incident will be a school joke for weeks. Possibly forever.
