“Relax,” Rick murmurs, nudging him. “The babes’ll pull it out.”
The foul shot bounces off the glass and falls away. She spins away, going for the rebound, and shoots another air ball. It is a relief to have the action reverse toward Mount Grace’s goal.
“Come on, Bigger,” Rick urges, “time to change.”
In the locker room, they hear the buzzer and the outburst from the Greenspark fans. Sam grins and Rick describes triumphant circles with a closed fist.
As the girls pass the boys on the way to their locker room, Sam offers Deanie a high five. She looks right through him. They have barely spoken since Tuesday night. Though he’s continued to chauffeur her, he keeps the volume up on the music and conversation is no more than the barest exchange of necessary information. Loping onto the floor with his teammates, it hits him with a jolt that what’s going on between him and Deanie is eerily like the tight-lipped tension he recalls between his parents back when they were married.
Their baggy red uniforms flapping around their skinny white legs, the Demons look woefully boyish. This team is very young and green. Sam sits out much of the game, watching Greenspark’s juniors and sophomores try out what they have been learning. Joey Skouros, at big forward, looks better and better to him. On the bus ride home, he will suggest to Coach that Joey has the makings of a center. Though Pete Fosse is supposed to replace Sam at that position when Sam graduates, it wouldn’t hurt to have Joey ready to back up and eventually replace Pete. Among the sophomores, there are two other candidates for big forward so the bench would be deep at all positions.
On the bus, after successfully bending Coach’s ear, he takes his seat next to Rick.
Rick stretches comfortably. “Sarah rented a couple vids, Sambo. Why don’t you come over and watch them with us? My dad’s got the late shift and Mom’ll go to bed by eleven so we don’t have to cover our eyes during the gushy kissing scenes and we can OD on popcorn.”
“Sure you and Sarah wouldn’t rather be alone?”
“Of course we would. You’re the next best thing, doofus. For some weird reason, my mother is under the impression Sarah and me won’t do anything to offend your boyish modesty.”
“So if it looks like Sarah’s going to try to jump you, I should throw myself bodily between the two of you?”
“Nothing that heroic, bud. Just keep your eyes on the tube and if we’re a long time in the kitchen, just assume we’re popping a shitload of corn.”
Sam frowns. “You know how many people die choking on popcorn every year?”
Rick wraps his hands around Sam’s throat and pretends to throttle him while Sam shows the whites of his eyes and sticks out his tongue.
“Maybe,” Sam finally accedes.
As the bus backs into the parking slot behind Greenspark Academy, Sarah calls and waves from the window of Rick’s car.
“Ain’t that nice,” Rick smirks. “Baby’s got it all warmed up for me.”
The girls’ bus pulls in behind them. Sam lopes to his truck to start it, get the heater going. As he shivers behind the wheel, the Mutant cuts past his truck, headed for the main road. How could she miss him? The truck hasn’t moved since she got out of it in the morning. He toots the horn at her and she fails to respond, so he does it again, more urgently, but she doesn’t even look his way. All at once he is certain she is shanking him so she can meet Chapin somewhere and go partying.
He pulls up next to her and rolls down the truck’s window. “Come on, Deanie.”
She answers him with a rigid middle digit.
Spinning the truck into a swooping turn in front of her, he leaps out in her path as she swerves to go around it.
“Get in the truck!” He tries to sound amused but it comes out faked and edgy.
Gritting her teeth, she zigzags. He makes a wall of himself. She loses her grip on her gear as she struggles to evade him and immediately they are a tangle of feet and canvas, grappling at each other to stay upright.
“Get in the goddamn truck!” he commands.
Laughter and catcalls reverberate around them from exuberant students in the process of departure. Sarah and Rick are distracted from their necking in the front seat of his car to watch.
The knowledge that they have a large avid audience does nothing for Sam’s equanimity. Seizing her gear, he heaves it into the cab of the truck. When she spins to stalk away, he catches her by the arm and waist and yanks her into her own momentum, so she falls back against him.
“Slug her one, Sambot!” one of the Jandreau twins yells and raises a supporting chorus, Nat among them.
Her eyes go blank and she stiffens in his arms. He is stricken for her, furious with whichever bitch-twin set it off and the others too for participating and enraged with himself for not just leaving her be. He boosts her bodily into the truck. Jumping in behind her, he slams his own door and stretches over her to lock the right-hand door. She crawls away from him, slipping to the floor of the cab.
“Stop it! I’m not going to hit you. I’d never hit you.” Tightening his grip on the wheel convulsively, he stares over it and mutters, “Might kill you, though.” He glances at her. “I don’t mean that, it’s a joke.”
She wipes her nose with the back of her hand. Crawling onto the seat, she puddles there like a discarded rag.
“What is this shit? You’ll get sick again. I don’t mind taking you home.”
“Don’t put yourself out,” she spits at him. “Just leave me the fuck alone.”
Tight-lipped, Sam puts the truck in gear and turns it for the road.
Her body rigid with fury, she screams at
