She felt desired in amounts equal to her desire.
When her workout was finished (three sets each, serves, spikes, and digs), AK grabbed a towel from the shelf and walked out, pretending cool indifference to the warm, admiring stares on the backs of her legs as the frosted Plexiglas door slid shut behind her.
Between the weight room and the girls’ shower, three pairs of glass doors looked out to the practice fields behind the school. Two of them opened with a sucking sound and AK felt the thick heat balloon in the hallway before the cool, forced air of the school pushed it back. Two runners in tank tops and billowing weightless nylon shorts walked past to the boys’ locker room. A third, whom she knew from chemistry, mumbled a bashful “Hey, ’K” and hurried on. A fourth, trailing the others, paused and smiled at her. She waited for the locker room door to shut behind the last of the other runners before saying hello, but she couldn’t get the greeting out of her throat before the boy ducked into the wrestling room.
Anna Kat followed.
In announcements and on bulletin boards the wrestling room was called the auxiliary gym, but aside from certain PE classes, hardly anyone other than wrestlers used it for practice. It was a small room relative to the main gym – maybe forty feet square – and thick green-and-yellow mats were rolled against the walls. The boy sat on one of these with his palms next to his hips, grinning.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” she said.
AK sat beside him. The windowless room smelled like hot vinegar from fifteen years of adolescent sweat and poor ventilation. No place Anna Kat knew smelled just like it. It smelled like the worst of boys in close quarters. Like prison, she imagined. The odor depressed her.
“What’s going on?” she said.
“Nothing,” he said. “I got another disc for you in my locker. Some classic stuff. The Clash. Dire Straits. The Mekons.”
She said, “I’ve been listening to that Mekons disc you gave me last month.”
“And?”
“It’s growing on me.” She stared at the blank wall on the other side of the room.
He said, “Are you okay?”
AK didn’t want to talk about her dad. Well, she did, but not with him. She tried to dispose of the matter quickly. “I was at the clinic this afternoon. It’s just sometimes I think I’m competing with all those little embryos in test tubes. Other people’s kids. I know he cares about me, but he spends more time with them than he does with me. This will really be my last year at home. It’s frustrating, that’s all.”
The round of mat beneath her felt spongy and sticky to Anna Kat’s nervous hands, but she remembered how much like concrete it had seemed against her back during a karate elective her freshman year. When the mats were up like this, the wrestling room was floored with thin, sandpapery carpet, and AK removed her right shoe and scratched her toes against it through her sock. It wasn’t meant as an advance, necessarily, but in a few seconds the boy had kicked off his left Nike and pinned her shin against the curve of the mat with his calf.
He leaned over and kissed her and she kissed him back, draping an arm over his shoulder and touching the wet fade of his sweaty crew cut. In an instant, he had a hand on her breast.
“Sam,” she said, pulling away.
“Hmmph,” he said, reattaching his lips to hers.
“Sam,” she said, disengaging again. “Let’s see a movie tomorrow.”
“Like a date.” It was a clarification more than a question.
“No,” she said. “Just… just something.”
Sam slid his hand up the inside of her thigh and snapped the elastic of her panties with his thumb. “This isn’t something?”
She pushed his arm away and laughed. “It is. It’s just weird.”
“Dating is complicated, AK,” Sam said. “This is un.”
“Un?”
“Complicated.” He looked for a smile and didn’t get one. “Look, you go to the movies or even Starbucks together and people are talking. You’re seeing Daniel-”
“Sort of.”
“You’re sort of seeing Daniel. I’m seeing Chrissy-”
“And Tanya. And Sue.”
“You know about them?”
“What’s the matter? More complicated than you thought?”
“Nah.” He looked at his feet. “Is that what this is about? I mess around with other girls?”
“No.” She shook her head. That wasn’t it. The problem she didn’t want to admit to was guilt. She felt a bit used. She felt a bit like a user. No one was forcing her to meet Sam, of course. She liked being with him. They did things together that seemed grown-up. They did things together that frightened her. Things that excited her. That was the problem. She liked the way he could thrill her, the dangerous feeling she had when they were together. When she thought about it, though, she didn’t much like him. Although he was intelligent, Sam could be cruel to people he didn’t like, and he treated his friends only marginally better. To get laughs he said mean things to people’s faces (instead of following the widely accepted high school policy that called for saying mean things behind people’s backs). He was indifferent and selfish and cynical, and while these things made him cool and even a kind of popular, that didn’t mean that anybody really liked him. If they were dating, she would have to defend him, and Anna Kat didn’t know how she would do that.
Sam’s hand was inside her shirt and flat against her bare back, pushing her toward him. They were sweaty and gritty and aroused. Sam’s teeth closed around her right earring and pulled just the right amount too hard. “Did you lock the door?” he whispered.
“No…,” she said, as if an apology were coming.
“Good,” Sam said, and he pulled her down on top of him in the narrow space between the rolled-up mat and the wall.
In her locker, several walls and halls away, Anna Kat’s cell phone was ringing.
– 7 -
There was no place she knew where Dr. Joan Burton felt more useless than in a hospital emergency waiting room. In a building filled with sick people, sick people she had been trained to help, she could do nothing but sit and do triage helplessly in her head. That boy, twelve or so, has a broken finger. The young man – newly minted from college, she suspected – folded into a chair across from the television like a passenger waiting for his plane to crash, possibly appendicitis. An older woman, escorted irritably by a husband of too many years, most likely psychosomatic something or other; she becomes ill to force him to pay attention to her, Joan quietly diagnosed.
Gregor and Pete, the other partners in New Tech, sat in chairs equidistant from her, the three of them facing different directions. No one spoke. They were worried about Davis (although, secretly, Joan suspected that she cared for his health more than they did, even if they’d known him longer), but there was another element to their concern: it could be any one of them bleeding out in the operating room just now.
The clinic building was on the television, monitored by a rerouted traffic helicopter. From the air it looked institutional and generic, which is what Gregor and Pete and Davis had in mind when they moved in, Joan guessed. The building was nonthreatening, its cube shape unobjectionable to anyone but an architecture critic. Deliberate police paced the lawn in front. She could see yellow evidence flags stuck in the ground at varying radii to the spot where Davis fell. Curious bystanders assembled at a safe distance. A banner of text across the bottom titled the events “Clone Clinic Terror.”
Frantic nurses had led Davis’s sobbing wife and daughter to another room inside. Joan was thankful for that, mostly because she wouldn’t know what to say to them. She had always been uncomfortable around Jackie Moore. Even under these circumstances, every glance between them would be loaded with subtext in Joan’s mind.