Stunned, he examines the box again. No prescription sticker—but he can’t believe it. She’s putting him on or else she thinks he’s flatline stupid. It’s a legal drug and a cheap one too. She can’t really be fucking Chapin just for this. Closing it, he hands it back to her.
“Deanie, they only run about twenty bucks a month. Less than your cigarettes. Which you shouldn’t be smoking anyway if you’re taking the Pill. No shit—I picked up Karen’s prescription once for her. Why don’t you just get them from a doctor?”
She sticks her tongue out when he tells her she shouldn’t be smoking but he doesn’t miss the first shock in her face. She really didn’t know how cheap they were. How could she be so ignorant?
“It’s thirty-five, forty-five dollars to see a doctor just once and they want you to come back.”
“There’s good reasons to go back. There’s side effects. Sometimes women have strokes from them. Women who smoke,” he emphasizes.
“Oh, and when did you go to medical school?”
“Same time Chapin did.”
It’s a relief to hear her laugh, even a short resentful one. Among her little pile of belongings, he notices the comb again and idly picks it up. It is the kind with thick fangs, except this one has most of its teeth broken off. A pick—that’s the name—for extremely curly hair. This girl has no hair at all on her head.
“What’s this?”
“A key. Unlocks those plastic frames the stores put cassettes in to keep people from stealing them. Made it myself. It works.”
“Jesus, Deanie!”
“Jeez-us yourself! Tapes cost a lot of money.”
Sam snaps the homemade key in two.
“You prick!” she says.
“You gotta stop that stealing shit.”
“No! You gotta stop trying to run my life, you asshole.”
“We’ve been through all this shit already,” he says, “about ten thousand times. You start it up as soon as we finish screwing. I think you’re scared to death you’re gonna make it one of these times.”
Ignoring him, she crouches over the heap of her clothing and extracts a sock. He reaches for his own garments.
“Tomorrow afternoon, want to do some hacking?” he asks, trying not to sound as desperate to make up as he suddenly is.
Her face lights up and for an instant she’s so beautiful it hurts. When she pleases so easily, it’s like a branch whipping him in the face, reminding him of the scrawny bones of her life. Then she looks away.
“I better not. I got a paper to write.” She curls back up on the mattress under her coat. “I’m staying.”
Trying not to feel rejected, he checks the heater before he goes. She should be all right. He stumbles on the way out, and out of frustration, curses with disproportionate vehemence.
The door crunches over icy grit as he closes it behind him. Then she is alone. The sound of the wind wheezing asthmatically through the trees outside makes her shiver, despite the proximity of the heater. Close call—almost lost him tonight. For once it was worth Tony backhanding her when he hadn’t been able to get it up. He’d left no evidence for Samgod’s suspicious fingers. Once Tony quit bothering her, she’d needed a number, even though she knew ‘god would be angry with her if she turned up stoned. But so far His Holiness is still forgiving her when he gets hard.
Bitterly she thinks of the con J.C. has been pulling on her. Fuck him. She’ll find another way to get her Pills. Get Samgod to take her to a clinic somewhere out of town. Give a false name and lie about her age if there’s any stupidity about contacting her parents for permission, ‘god wants it bad enough; he’ll pay for them.
On Monday morning, the shadow of bruise that spreads around the corner of her mouth could easily be a stain from her purplish lipstick. She wears a different headrag, a red bandanna, with a small wispy blue-jay feather hooked to one of the rings in her left ear. The way she eats the muffins from the paper bag on the seat, it’s like it’s the first food she’s seen all weekend.
“Get your paper finished?”
In the quick glance he takes at her, he catches the flash of confusion; she has forgotten her own lie.
Swallowing, licking her fingers, she covers it with disdainful indifference. “Oh yeah.”
Though they are first at the gym, girls start arriving before they have gotten the rack of basketballs out of the closet. Sam plugs in the mix that starts with “Let’s Work Together,” by way of setting the tone. Guys trickle in and stand on the sidelines, in groups of threes and fours, watching the girls warming up but making no move to join them.
Dribbling to center court, Sam halts there, keeping the beat of the music with the ball. He looks directly at each of his teammates, one after the other. Polling the jury. Only some of them meet his eyes and Rick’s not one of them. Behind the sidelined boys, the coaches of both teams appear in the open doors but none of the players notice them.
He palms the ball hard into the floor and then lets it bobble away from him across the floor toward his teammates.
Coach’s question on the bus was the wrong one. Of course they all want to wear Greenspark’s colors. The real question is whether they want Sam to go on wearing them.
Silently, Sam strips off his sweatshirt. Under it he wears his practice jersey. When he drops his sweatpants to reveal the rest of his practice uniform, the Jandreau twins burst out giggling and the Mutant wolf-whistles.
The only response from his teammates is a few grins at the girls’ reaction to his strip.
“Well?” he asks.
The answer is a wall of glares from the bolder ones, head-hanging by the fencesitters.
Suddenly he yanks the jersey over his head.
“Take it all off!”
