Offended, the Mutant’s ringed nose lifts snootily. “Only guys are that weird.”
It’s amazing how prudish she is sometimes, for a girl with her reputation. This is the same girl who shook her tits at him in the Mill and the Playground, who put the moves on him from the git-go.
“My stepmother told me someone with a lot of pet names is well loved,” he says.
“That certainly explains why some guys name their dicks.”
Suddenly she snakes across the seat, sinking as she goes until she is prone on the bench with her face below his belt. Her fingers move swiftly to his belt buckle and buttons.
“Are you out of your mind?” he asks weakly, hands hovering above her head as he surveys the parking lot anxiously. Shit. Both coaches’ vehicles are still there. The janitor’s old van too. Romney’s rust-eaten Olds.
He closes his eyes and rests his head against the top of the seat. He isn’t sure he likes it any more than he did the other times she used her mouth on him. He fights the urge to move, to thrust, which would be awkward to do while seated and besides, he is afraid if he does he will choke her or hurt her bruised lip. Occasionally he feels her teeth, which also makes him nervous. What she does to him is too obviously a learned skill—it even has a certain rote quality to it. Remembering Chapin bragging, he projects what a major legend it will instantaneously become if he gets caught getting blown by the Mutant in the parking lot. Despite intense excitement, there are so many inhibiting factors, he is almost unable to come.
Immediately after he does, he opens his eyes and the first thing he sees is Coach, slip-sliding his way toward the truck. “Oh shit. Coach!”
As he sits up abruptly, his sudden movement unbalances her. She coughs and sputters his ejaculate back onto him.
While he tucks his wet, softening cock back into his jeans, she slithers floorward and flattens herself into the shadows of the footwell. He gets half his buttons done and his buckle closed and Coach is there, looming at the window, his long face scrunched up against the cold.
Rolling down the window, Sam leans forward to hug the wheel and incidentally block Coach’s view into the cab.
“Hi,” he says.
Coach squints at him. “Problem with your truck?”
Sam shakes his head. “Just warming it up, Coach. Listening to some music.”
Coach grimaces. “That ain’t music. It’s a soundtrack for degeneracy.”
Sam nods agreeably.
Coach gives him a funny look and then mutters, “Well, goodnight,” and wanders off.
Cranking up the window, Sam rolls his eyes.
The Mutant pounds the floor with her fists and sobs a muffled laughter.
“Great, I bet he smelled it, he thinks I was sitting here jerking off,” he says. “Stay on the floor till we’re out of the parking lot, okay?”
She hiccups.
“You okay?” he asks.
With several spastic gesticulations, she indicates she is. When they are on the main road, she creeps up into the seat and rests her head against his thigh. He touches her chains.
“Deanie,” he says and stops.
She waits, attentive to the sound of her name.
“What’s wrong with your foot?”
She sits up and tucks herself against the far side of the cab. Staring out the window, she speaks without tone. “Wracked it on a corner of my bed.”
“Oh. You know you’re favoring it? That’s what’s throwing off your shot.”
“No shit.” She’s sarcastically bored.
He glances at her. At her mouth. Back to the road and then at her again. Under her headrag, under the chains, her narrow face is set resentfully but the fixity of her facial muscles does not disguise how young she is. Sixteen, supposed to be sweet.
They are nearly at Depot Street before she speaks again, as the Dickies tape spins into silence.
“You didn’t like it, did you?” she asks with a tinselly lightness.
Carefully he makes the turn. “I don’t know.” He tries to soften it. “I mean, with Coach bopping out to pass the time of day, you know.”
“Right.” Her voice goes flat. “There’s no pleasing some people, I guess.”
He reaches out toward her but she’s out of the truck and gone. He watches her march angrily down the street. Such a ridiculous girl. If she could see herself, with her backpack and gym bag and the way the tag ends of her headrag bounce and her long coat jerks with her stride. She doesn’t look back but he knows what her face looks like angry, a glitter of tears in her dark eyes and her mouth set and those chains bouncing light and her hurt little face white underneath them, her skin so transparent. Close up, a veinous blue like an inadvertent mark of blue ink, faded but not entirely washed away, is visible in certain places—near the corners of her eyes, one place near her jawline.
He sees her clearly now. She’s not a Mutant. She’s Deanie Gauthier. She lies and she thieves and she knows how to do things a sixteen-year-old girl shouldn’t know. And she has too many bruises.
He glances at himself in his rearview mirror.
“And you’re fucking her, Preacher,” he jeers at himself.
Next morning, they are back in the gym. A sharp whistle from Rick punctuates the ripple of amusement from the gathering players at Sam’s choice of a dance mix of “She Drives Me Crazy” as the first cut on the new dub he plugs into the sound system. The Mutant—Deanie, he amends—Deanie laughs loudest. Though he intends a self-deprecating joke, Sam’s ears glow. At least it kicks off the session playfully.
Stopped by Coach in the corridor after his first-period physics class—Coach wants to know what the hell is wrong with Billy Rank, who is playing as if he left his basketball brains on the bus somewhere—Sam is a few minutes late for lifting. Chapin’s already into it, working the machines. Sam makes himself ignore the prick. The music on the boombox is Zep.
“Fucking Zep,” Rick bitches. “We had to listen to old
