From that day on, Suzanne continued to flirt with Sam as though he and she had an intimate understanding; yet to Sam it was all teasing and toying. She was playing with him; that was all he could imagine. “Why me?” he would ask himself. He never considered the possibility that she might have a serious personal interest in him. Sam was far too insecure to read Sue’s overtures as anything other than teenage terrorism. But that didn’t mean he could cast her out of his mind. It seemed to Sam that she was everywhere: in the halls, on the streets, in his dreams, and even in the library. Of course she wasn’t everywhere, but Sam was certain of her omnipresence just the same, and he regarded her with all due trepidation. Still, he couldn’t help feeling a deep, strange thrill, yet that thrill that arose from within him seemed like just another tease that he could not trust anymore than he could trust a stranger, or worse yet, Suzanne Coswell.
Armen and Sam rarely crossed paths over the following summer. Armen spent the break either on his ten-speed bike or propped between the folds of some map or the pages of some atlas. No kid knew the surrounding grid of the Sink like Armen did, for what little that was worth to anyone but Armen.
For Sam, summer didn’t arrive as a break from school so much as a break from Sue. He welcomed the long days at the dairy like never before. She would creep into his head and he’d just turn up the tempo. He fought off the memory of her amorous bullying as if it were a bad addiction, which of course was precisely what he was up against. Still, Sam was equal to the challenge, and the addiction slowly loosened its grip. Unfortunately for Sam, it released him too slowly for him to be free before school returned, starting the whole traumatic dance all over again.
School came around the seasonal bend with the mysterious punctuality of a ghost train, and Sam and Armen were back at Slough City High before they knew what had hit them. They were sophomores now. They’d heard that being sophomores would be a lot better than being freshmen, but it turned out to be about the same.
Slough City High’s first team needed a good defensive back, so Sam was promoted to the varsity squad, and his reputation grew as the town’s star assassin. Sue wasn’t the only girl who noticed him anymore, though she was the only one who let him know it. Word around campus had it that Sue was Sam’s girl—though most who knew Sue at all doubted that she could be possessed in any way by anybody. Sam was still something of a loner, carrying Buck’s leash around in his belt loops and keeping such unremarkable company as Armen and Cindy Adroushan. Cindy, at least, had a reputation as a dead shot with the bow, but that skill hardly satisfied any entrance criteria in the society of teenage girls—to the contrary.
Fall faded imperceptibly into winter under the California sun with a smattering of uncelebrated leaves, as Sam proved himself quite deserving of the varsity distinction, well on his way to a letter jacket, not that he was looking for anything to direct more attention to himself.
Just as silently, spring emerged from the fogs of winter. The sun, so often a white disk in the fog, was casting shadows again. It was baseball season. Though Sam retained some fondness for the game, he’d never played organized ball, so he never tried out for the school team. He couldn’t quite target a ball like he could a body, so he had more free time that spring than he’d had in the fall.