They exit the gym together and have the ill luck to meet Rick and Pete and Todd coming out of the cafeteria. Billy blanches and hustles in the opposite direction and Pete stares after him.
Rick falls in next to Sam and they head downstairs to motor shop.
“I’d ask you what that was about but from the way Pete just looked at Billy, I don’t have to. Billy the Kid puking his guts to you?”
Sam grins at him. “What are you asking for if you don’t have to?”
“So I can tell you not to be an idiot,” Rick answers, grinning himself.
Sam doesn’t believe Rick’s grin any more than Rick believes his.
After school, Sam heads for the library to do homework in the time before the game. The room is full of Greenspark players with the same idea. There is an empty chair next to Nat Linscott, who gives him a warm, welcoming smile. Blushing, he dumps his books next to Rick instead. Going to the card file for the reference he needs, he wanders into the stacks. The free-standing shelving goes eight feet high, making shadowy corridors. Hearing a page turn thickly, he peeks around a corner.
Deanie sits cross-legged on the floor, leafing through an art folio. When his shadow cuts the meager light, she glances up. A bloom of color burns suddenly on her pallid cheekbones.
Holding a silencing finger to his lips, he sinks to the floor next to her. She turns the book to show him the plate.
It is a picture Sam has seen before, in a history textbook once, and several times in magazines. A famous one. Nude Descending a Staircase. The figure, presumably a woman, stutters down the curve of the stairs like a multiple exposure. In a monotone of tattered tarnished golds, her motion is mysteriously hobbled and somehow mechanical. Sam pauses, staring harder at the figure. She appears to have no hair.
Deanie touches the plate reverently with her long beautiful fingers. The cigarette burn on the back of her hand is a small dark shadow now.
“I always feel calmer when I look at this. I don’t know why. It’s so mysterious,” she says in a low voice.
They look up from the folio at each other. Sam reaches out and touches her mouth with the tip of his finger. Her lips are warm and full and the tip of his finger rolls over their curve and slides along the slick moist inside. Her eyes fixed on his, she moves her head with his finger, following its pressure. The light wavers and she tips her head away from his finger and stares past him. He turns to see Rick standing there, one hand falling casually to the stack.
“Excuse me,” Rick says and moves away.
Deanie takes back her folio and Sam rises. Stooping again to Deanie, he kisses her quickly, and then again and takes his time. She reaches up to grab the chain that dangles from his open shirt collar.
Feeling a little dizzy, he straightens up and backs away, bumping into the nearest stack. The whole thing shudders and he puts out a steadying hand. Blindly he fumbles along it, looking for his reference.
At the table, Rick asks, “You get any?”
Sam folds himself into the chair next to Rick.
“Any what?”
“Anything. Tongue, tit, crabs, whatever.”
“It didn’t mean anything,” Sam murmurs, dropping a heavy hand on Rick’s thigh. “You’re the only one I care about.”
Slapping Sam’s hand away, Rick jumps as if someone has just spilled hot coffee in his lap.
“I’m being molested,” he complains loudly.
The librarian looks over her glasses with a pained expression.
“He asked for it,” Sam says. “He came on to me.”
Everyone is laughing behind their hands.
“Quiet, please,” the librarian says, “or I’ll have to eject you both.”
Sam pouts at Rick.
“Bitch,” he murmurs.
Sweeping his books down the table, Rick gets up and puts a chair between them.
Sam makes kissy-faces after him.
Twice-twinned in the glass, wearing their hair in spouts, one to the left side of her crown, the other to her right, the Jandreau sisters solemnly adopt mirror-image poses, rising to their toes, lifting their arms to push imaginary basketballs into imaginary arches through an imaginary hoop. Then they burst out giggling. This pantomime is ritual with them before games.
The Mutant nudges Nat. “You think I’m weird.”
Nat grins. “Go look in the mirror, Gauthier.”
The Mutant leaps to center bench and struts down it. Except for her earrings and chains, she is stark naked. The other girls laugh at her; even the twins are distracted from their posturing. At the end of the bench, the Mutant stares into the horizontal mirror above the makeup counter. She narrows her eyes in mock seductiveness and caresses her bare breasts. She runs the tip of her tongue over her lips.
“I can’t help it,” she pants. “None of us can. As soon as we take our clothes off, we have to”—she whimpers—“touch ourselves.”
The other girls shriek and applaud.
Tying her laces while the Mutant skins hastily into her uniform, Nat stops giggling and grows serious. “You’re really banged up. What happened to your instep? It’s all purple.”
“Caught it in a car door,” the Mutant says dismissively. “It looks worse than it is.”
On the other side of Nat, Deb Michaud sniggers. “Come on, Gauthier, we all know you’re into S & M.”
“Whip me, beat me,” the Mutant begs, “make me sit on the bench.”
“Is that a hickey on your tit?” Deb asks.
The Mutant glances down.
“No, but that is a hickey on my ass.”
Up and down the lockers the girls groan.
“That’s gross,” someone murmurs.
“No, the one that’s gross is on my—”
Coach slaps open the door. “Ladies,” she says, “two minutes to blast-off.”
“Ladies? Blast-off?” Nat asks the Mutant and they both snicker.
Once uniformed, the Mutant goes to the mirror. Nat is already there, examining a small bump on her chin. She tsks with disgust at it.
“What’s going on with you and Sam?” Nat asks.
