Winger

in the boys’ dorm

ON THE DAY THEY FOUND joey, the police sealed off O-Hall, and we never went back there again.

Never.

They talked to Chas and me for hours, separately. I told them almost everything, but not the stuff I didn’t think would matter.

They didn’t ask, anyway.

Casey Palmer and Nick Matthews killed Joey that night of the dance. They got drunk. They were mad. They beat him until he stopped being Joey.

I loved Joey Cosentino.

After I told the police what I knew about Casey, they went to his home.

Casey Palmer and Nick Matthews never came back to school. I heard they both confessed right away, and I figured it was because Casey didn’t want it coming out in his trial about how he’d been chasing after Joey for so long. That’s what I think, but I could be wrong.

Either way, I didn’t care about Casey’s reasoning.

Pine Mountain closed down O-Hall. None of us ever saw Mr. Farrow or Mrs. Singer again. They were gone, cut loose. Nobody needed them, and nobody needed anything like O-Hall again, either.

I’ll be honest. I was actually sad about them closing down O-Hall, as weird as that sounds. I wished I could go back to the noise and the smell, the crowded and dirty bathroom.

They moved me and Kevin and Chas in together at the boys’ dorm, each of us with our private bedroom, and the big living room where we’d sometimes fight over what to watch on our television.

We talked about it once, much later, and we decided that we were all better suited to live in O-Hall, so I told Kevin and Chas that I was going to do my best to get them to reopen it and then I’d do something bad so they would have to send me there for my senior year.

Chas said, “You’re a fucking idiot, Winger.”

Yeah. I know.

Chas Becker and I became friends. He didn’t turn me into an asshole, and I didn’t teach him how to draw comics. It was a balanced relationship, but a weird one.

Wingers and forwards are not allowed to be friends.

But Chas and I needed each other.

He picked on me. That was to be expected. Kevin Cantrell, like always, was the calming peacemaker in our new three-man family. We played poker on Sundays. We invited Seanie Flaherty and JP Tureau to the games.

There were no more consequences.

How could you top the magnificent shit we had done in O-Hall?

How could you ever make anything worse?

The thing about rugby is this: You can hate a guy off the pitch who will save your fucking balls on the pitch when you play on the same side. There is nothing more glorious than that.

One time, in the boys’ dorm, while we were playing a game of Hold ’Em, I made JP Tureau laugh.

I thought, When we are seniors, me and JP are going to be cool again.