Winger

prologue

JOEY TOLD ME NOTHING EVER goes back exactly the way it was, that things expand and contract—like breathing, but you could never fill your lungs up with the same air twice. He said some of the smartest things I ever heard, and he’s the only one of my friends who really tried to keep me on track too.

And I’ll be honest. I know exactly how hard that was.

Chapter One

NOTHING COULD POSSIBLY SUCK WORSE than being a junior in high school, alone at the top of your class, and fourteen years old all at the same time. So the only way I braced up for those agonizing first weeks of the semester, and made myself feel any better about my situation, was by telling myself that it had to be better than being a senior at fifteen.

Didn’t it?

My name is Ryan Dean West.

Ryan Dean is my first name.

You don’t usually think a single name can have a space and two capitals in it, but mine does. Not a dash, a space. And I don’t really like talking about my middle name.

I also never cuss, except in writing, and occasionally during silent prayer, so excuse me up front, because I can already tell I’m going to use the entire dictionary of cusswords when I tell the story of what happened to me and my friends during my eleventh-grade year at Pine Mountain.

PM is a rich kids’ school. But it’s not only a prestigious rich kids’ school; it’s also for rich kids who get in too much trouble because they’re alone and ignored while their parents are off being congressmen or investment bankers or professional athletes. And I know I wasn’t actually out of control, but somehow Pine Mountain decided to move me into Opportunity Hall, the dorm where they stuck the really bad kids, after they caught me hacking a cell phone account so I could make undetected, untraceable free calls.

They nearly kicked me out for that, but my grades saved me.

I like school, anyway, which increases the loser quotient above and beyond what most other kids would calculate, simply based on the whole two-years-younger-than-my-classmates thing.

The phone was a teacher’s. I stole it, and my parents freaked out, but only for about fifteen minutes. That was all they had time for. But even in that short amount of time, I did count the phrase “You know better than that, Ryan Dean” forty-seven times.

To be honest, I’m just estimating, because I didn’t think to count until about halfway through the lecture.

We’re not allowed to have cell phones here, or iPods, or anything else that might distract us from “our program.” And most of the kids at PM completely buy in to the discipline, but then again, most of them get to go home to those things every weekend. Like junkies who save their fixes for when there’s no cops around.

I can understand why things are so strict here, because it is the best school around for the rich deviants of tomorrow. As far as the phone thing went, I just wanted to call Annie, who was home for the weekend. I was lonely, and it was her birthday.

I already knew that my O-Hall roommate was going to be Chas Becker, a senior who played second row on the school’s rugby team. Chas was as big as a tree, and every bit as smart, too. I hated him, and it had nothing to do with the age-old, traditional rivalry between backs and forwards in rugby. Chas was a friendless jerk who navigated the seas of high school with his rudder fixed on a steady course of intimidation and cruelty. And even though I’d grown about four inches since the end of last year and liked to tell myself that I finally—finally!—didn’t look like a prepubescent minnow stuck in a pond of hammerheads like Chas, I knew that my reformative dorm assignment with Chas Becker in the role of bunk-bed mate was probably nothing more than an “opportunity” to go home in a plastic bag.

But I knew Chas from the team, even though I never talked to him at practice.

I might have been smaller and younger than the other boys, but I was the fastest runner in the whole school for anything up to a hundred meters, so by the end of the season last year, as a thirteen-year-old sophomore, I was playing wing for the varsity first fifteen (that’s first string in rugby talk).

Besides wearing ties and uniforms, all students were required to play sports at PM. I kind of fell into rugby because running track was so boring, and rugby’s a sport that even small guys can play—if you’re fast enough and don’t care about getting hit once in a while.

So I figured I could always outrun Chas if he ever went over the edge and came after me. But even now, as I write this, I can still remember the feeling of sitting on the bottom bunk, there in our quiet room, just staring in dread at the door, waiting for my roommate to show up for first-semester check-in on that first Sunday morning in September.

All I had to do was make it through the first semester of eleventh grade without getting into any more trouble, and I’d get a chance to file my appeal to move back into my room with Seanie and JP in the boys’ dorm. But staying out of trouble, like not getting killed while living with Chas Becker, was going to be a full-time job, and I knew that before I even set eyes on him.

Chapter Two

NO ONE HAD TO KNOCK in O-Hall.

The knobless doors couldn’t be locked, anyway.

That’s the biggest part of the reason why my day started off upside down in a toilet.

So when I heard the door creak inward, it felt like all my guts knotted down to the size of a grape.

It was only Mr. Farrow, O-Hall’s resident counselor, pushing his mousy face into the room, scanning the surroundings through thick wire glasses and looking disappointedly at my unopened suitcase, the duffel bag full of rugby gear stuffed and leaning beside it, a barrier in front of me, while I slumped down in the shadows of the lower bunk like I was hiding in a foxhole, preparing for Chas Becker’s entrance.

“Ryan Dean,” he said, “you’ll have time to unpack your things before picking up your schedule, but I’m afraid you’ll need to hurry.”

I looked past Farrow’s head, into the dark hallway, to see if he was alone.

I was still missing one shoe.

“I can do it this afternoon, Mr. Farrow,” I said. “Or maybe after dinner.”

I leaned forward and put my hands on my suitcase. “Should I go to the registrar?”

“Not yet.” Mr. Farrow looked at a folder of schedules in his hands. “Your appointment is at one fifteen. You have time.”

A shadow moved behind him.

“Excuse me, Mr. Farrow.”

And there was Chas Becker, pushing the door wide and squeezing past Farrow as he hefted two canvas duffels that looked like the things a coroner would use to cart away bodies, and dropped them with a thud! in the middle of the floor.

Then Chas noticed me, and I could see the confused astonishment on his face.

“I’m rooming with Winger?” He turned to look at Farrow, like he didn’t know if he was in the right place. Then he leered at me again. “How’d Winger end up in O-Hall?”

I didn’t know if I should answer. And I didn’t know if Chas even knew my actual name, because, like a lot of the guys on the team, he just called me Winger or Eleven (which was the number on my jersey), or the couple times when I’d dorked a kick, he called me Chicken Wing, or something worse that included the French word for “shower.”

I glanced at Farrow, who shrugged like he was waiting for me to say something. Oh, and besides the sports, no cell phones, and the neckties and uniforms, PM had a very strict ethics policy about telling the truth, especially in front of officers of the Truth Police like Mr. Farrow.

“I stole a cell phone.” I swallowed. “From a teacher.”

“Winger’s a boost?” Chas smiled. “How cool is that? Or is it dorky? I don’t get it.”

I felt embarrassed. I looked at my hands resting on my suitcase.

And then Chas, all six-foot-four inches and Mohawk-stripe of hair pointing him forward, stepped toward the bed, loomed over me like some giant animated tree, and said, “But you’re sitting on my bed, Winger. Don’t ever sit on my bed. You get tops.”

“Okay.”

I wasn’t about to argue the Pine Mountain first-come-first-served tradition. Anyway, I thought he was going to hit me, so I was happy that Mr. Farrow was watching our heartwarming get-acquainted moment. Even though I’d always liked school, I suddenly realized how shitty this particular Sunday-before-the-school-year-begins was turning out after the simple addition of one Chas Becker. That, and the whole head-in-a-toilet thing.

And Mr. Farrow cleared his throat, mousylike, saying, “You’re going to need to reinvent the haircut, Chas.”

Nothing that bordered on the undisciplined or unorthodox was tolerated at PM. Not even facial hair, not that I had anything to worry about as far as that rule was concerned. I’d seen some girls at PM who came closer to getting into trouble over that rule than me. The only thing I’d ever shaved was maybe a few points off a Calculus test so my friends wouldn’t hate me if I set the curve too high.

“I’ll shave it off after schedules,” Chas said.

“You’ll need to do it before,” Farrow answered. He explained, “You know that ID pictures are today, and you’re not going in looking like that.”

I waited until Chas backed up a step, and then I stood up, hitting my head squarely on the metal frame beneath my new sleeping spot. And as I rubbed my scalp I thought Chas was probably just waiting for Farrow to leave so he could reassign me to the floor.

“You need to wear a scrum cap when you go to bed, too, Winger?” Scrum caps are things that some players wear to protect their heads in rugby. But wings don’t wear them, and all they really are good for is keeping your ears from getting torn off, so second-row guys like Chas had to wear them. In fact, I clearly saw one on top of his kit bag when he came in and I felt like—really felt like—giving him a clever comeback so Farrow could see the new, eleventh-grade version of me, but I couldn’t think of anything witty because my head hurt so bad.

I fucking hated Chas Becker.

There were chairs at each of the desks in the room, but I knew better than to pull one out, because Chas would just say that was his too. And as I fumbled with climbing up onto the top bunk, wondering how I was ever going to get in and out of bed if I needed to pee in the middle of the night, already mentally rigging the Ryan Dean West Emergency Gatorade Bottle Nighttime Urinal I would have to invent, Farrow slipped backward out the door and pulled it shut behind him.

So it was me and Chas.

Pure joy.

Bonding time.

And I couldn’t help but wonder how much blood could actually be contained by the 160-pound sack of skin I walked around in.

Well, to be honest, it’s 142.

Yeah . . . I am a skinny-ass loser.

And I’d had a talk with my very best friend, Annie, just that morning when we showed up at school. Annie Altman was at Pine Mountain because she chose to enroll at the school. Go figure.

Annie Altman was going into eleventh grade too, which meant she was two full years older than me, so, most people would think there couldn’t possibly be anything between us beyond a noticeable degree of friendship, even if I did think she was smoking hot in an alluring and mature, “naughty babysitter” kind of way. I was convinced, though, that as far as Annie was concerned, I was more or less a substitute for a favored pet while she had to be here at PM, probably a red-eared turtle or something. At least she usually got to go home on weekends and see the pets she really loved.

I had hoped that she’d get over it, but there’s no balancing act between fourteen-year-old boys and girls who are sixteen, even if I did grow taller over the summer, even if I didn’t sound or look like such a little kid anymore.

Even if Annie knew everything in the world about me.

Well, I didn’t tell her about the toilet thing.

Anyway, Annie told me that this was going to be my make-it-or-break-it year, and that I was going to have to suck it up if I was going to survive in O-Hall, which is about the same as a state pen as far as we were concerned.

It kind of made me feel all flustered and choked up when she told me that I might have to take a few lumps in order to gain the respect of the other inmates so they’d learn right away not to mess with Ryan Dean West.

She said she’d learned that particular strategy by watching a documentary about guys who get killed in jail.

So now that Chas and I were alone, I closed my eyes and tried to relax, wondering if I was taking my final breaths or taking the first steps toward standing up to Chas Becker and becoming someone new.

Or something.

There weren’t any lights on in our room. That was bad, I thought. People like to do terrible things to other people when the lights are out, even if it’s daytime.

In the unvoiced and universal language of psychopaths, a flipped-down light switch is like one of those symbol-sign thingies that would show a silhouette stick figure strangling the skinny silhouette stick figure of a fourteen-year-old.

I could see the swath of Chas’s Mohawk pointing at me, and the whites of his eyes looking straight across at me, where I sat on the bunk bed.

Chas began unpacking, stuffing his folded clothes into the cubbies stacked like a ladder along one side of our shared closet.

“You got any money?” he asked.

And I thought, God, he’s already going to start with the extortion. I tried to remember what Annie told me, but the toughest, most stand-up-for-yourself thing that wasn’t in Latin I could think of was “Why?”

Chas folded his empty bags and kicked them under the bed. He turned around, and I could practically feel him breathing on me. He put both of his hands on the edge of my bed, and at that moment I felt like a parakeet—but a tough, stand-up-for-yourself variety of parakeet—in a stare-down with a saltwater crocodile.

“After lights-out, a couple of the guys are going to sneak in here for a poker game. That’s why. We always play poker here on Sundays. Twenty-dollar buy-in. Do you know how to play poker?”

“Count me in.”

I don’t know if the choking or unconsciousness urge was stronger at that point, but I survived my first private, witness-free encounter with the one guy who I was convinced would end up trying his hardest to thoroughly ruin my life just before killing me sometime during my eleventh-grade year at Pine Mountain.

Capter Three

AFTER CHAS TRIMMED HIS MOHAWK down to a buzz cut, we put on our shirts and ties and went to the registrar to get our schedules and ID photos taken—not that we actually walked there together.

I saw my former roommates, Seanie and JP, waiting in line for pictures, and it made me feel good to see my old friends, but sad, too, because I missed rooming with them. We all three shared a room for our first two years at PM.

In the regular boys’ dorm, the rooms were big and comfortable and usually had three or four guys per room, not like O-Hall, where the rooms were like tiny cells with those dreaded metal bunk beds.

Seanie and JP played rugby too. We hung out and got along because they weren’t forwards either. Seanie played scrum half, even though he was really tall and skinny, but he had a wicked pass and flawless hands; and JP played fullback, which is the position usually given to the all-around fittest, most-confident guy on the team, and with the highest tolerance for pain. This year, they’d both be moving up to the varsity team since about half the starters from last year had graduated.

One of the things about rugby that’s an inescapable tradition is that everyone on the team has to sing, and everyone also gets a nickname. It’s not conscious or thought out, it just happens. Like salmon swimming upstream, or the universe expanding . . . or contracting . . . or whatever it does, I guess. And, when someone finally settles on calling you by a nickname, you’re stuck.

Forever.

So, no matter what happened to me in life, as far as the guys on the team were concerned, my name was always going to be Winger. JP’s nickname was Sartre. His real name was John-Paul, so, naturally when I started calling him Sartre, the name just stuck even though most of the guys on the team didn’t get it and they just assumed that since I was so smart it probably meant something ultraperverted in French (which I hinted it did). Seanie was lucky. He inherited the most nontoxic kind of nickname; his real name was just Sean.

Chas Becker’s nickname was Betch, a nonaccidental shortening of “Becker” combined with what a lot of guys didn’t have the guts to call Chas to his face.

But there’s no arguing nicknames once a rugby team tattoos yours in their heads. You just have to forget about it and smile.

“The Winger’s still alive,” Seanie said as we shook hands.

“God, Seanie. What’ve you been doing?”

“Nothing. I played two-and-a-half straight months of video games since school let out. This is the first time I’ve seen the sky since last June. It’s so bright, I think I’m going to have a seizure.”

Seanie was kind of a geek, and I completely believed what he said was true.

“They didn’t put anyone new in our room with us yet,” JP said. “So maybe that’s a good sign that you’re going to be coming back. How’s the O-Hall, anyway?”

I almost said, The toilets smell real nice!

But I didn’t.

“I’m sharing bunk beds with Betch.”

I saw a horrified look of grief wash over my friends’ faces.

“He’s going to turn you into an asshole,” JP said.

“Or kill you,” Seanie added. “You’ll never get out of that shithole.”

We moved a step forward in line, toward the beacon of flashes at the photographer’s booth. Each of us clutched a class schedule in our hands. After the pictures, we’d be free for the rest of the day to mourn the final moments of our unstructured summer.

“He actually did something kind of nice, kind of weird,” I said. “He asked me to play poker with some of the guys tonight after lights-out.”

“Winger, you know he’s going to end up getting you in so much trouble this year,” JP said.

And Seanie added, “Why do you think so many of the first fifteen are permanently assigned to O-Hall, anyway? And everyone knows about those games. You just better look out for the consequence.”

The consequence was what they’d assign to the first guy who lost his way out of the game. It was usually innocuous and embarrassing stuff, like the time they made Joey Cosentino run around the rugby pitch naked in the middle of the night, and then, when he snuck back into the room, they made him do it again because he accidentally ran counterclockwise, something the team never allowed; or the time they made Kevin Cantrell swim across Pine Mountain Lake in his boxers (also in the middle of the night). Of course, all the consequences had to be performed in the middle of the night since just playing the poker game after lights-out would get the guys into a lot of trouble. And getting caught by anyone from school during the commission of the consequences was sure to be even worse.

And anyway, I considered myself to be a pretty good poker player, so I wasn’t too concerned about the consequence. No sweat.

After our pictures were taken, and fresh, chemical-smelling laminated ID cards were spit out into our hands, we agreed to catch up to each other again at dinner. JP and Seanie left to finish unpacking, taking off in one direction and leaving me sad and envious of their start of our junior year in the nice dorm room I used to live in.

So I set off, alone, already feeling weak and small and sorry for myself when I swore I wasn’t going to be any of those things this year, on the narrow and kind-of-Ansel-Adamsish trail along the lake toward Opportunity Hall, the leaking, dilapidated, and lonely two-story log building that at one time was the only housing structure on this entire campus.

“Hey! West! Did you get everything taken care of?”

Annie came running up on the path behind me.

She called me West. I liked it, I guess. Nobody else called me that.

I stopped and turned around and quietly held my breath so I could get the full impact of watching Annie Altman coming toward me like it was some kind of movie where she actually wanted me to throw my arms around her or something.

I held up my schedule and ID card to answer her question.

“How’d it go? This morning, with Chas?”

“Not a mark on me,” I said. “I was scared about nothing. He was kind of nice to me, in an edgy and predatory sort of way.”

“He probably is counting on banking up frequent disappear-for-half-an-hour-so-he-can-have-sex-with-Megan favors from you,” she said.

Megan Renshaw was Chas’s girlfriend.

Smoking hot, too.

“Or my money. We’re supposed to play poker tonight.”

Annie Altman went on, in a scolding tone. I’ll admit that I had fantasies involving Annie. And scolding. “You haven’t even been to one day of classes and you’re already doing something idiotic that could get you into trouble.”

We began walking toward O-Hall.

“Yeah. I know.”

I tried to swallow the dry and hairy tennis ball in my throat.

Annie did that to me.

Especially when she used the scolding tone.

I looked at my feet as we walked.

This was actually a beautiful place, especially with Annie walking beside me. The lake was about a mile and a half long, half a mile wide, and surrounded by tall pines that stood like an army of giants stretching all the way up to the tops of the mountains surrounding us.

Of course, Annie stayed in the girls’ dorm, which was a good walk in the opposite direction down the lake from the secluded O-Hall. It was built near the mess hall, class and office buildings, the sports complex, and the boys’ dorm.

The top floor of O-Hall was for the boys, with the ground floor segregated for girls. But, girls being girls, it almost never had any residents. It was perfectly clean and unoccupied now, except for the resident girls’ counselor, a frightening mummy of an old woman named Mrs. Singer.

“Well, what classes do you have this semester, West?”

Annie and I sat on an iron bench facing the lake and exchanged schedules. I looked at her ID card. Her picture was so perfectly radiant, it burned my eyes. She just had this faint, closed-mouth, typically Annie smile, like she knew something embarrassing about the photographer. And she looked so confident, too, staring straight ahead with her dark blue eyes and the most perfect-looking black eyebrows, her hair hanging down across her forehead. I could never tell if she wore lipstick and makeup; her skin and lips always looked so flawless and, well, Annie-like.

“West. You’re just staring at my ID. The schedule’s on the bottom.”

“Oh. Sorry. Nice picture, Annie.”

I saw her thumb my ID card over. And there I was, staring out from behind the lamination, necktied and looking all lost between my goofy ears, mouth half-open in a not-really-a-smile smile, short-cropped dirty blond hair that never sat even, and that pale skin of mine that looked like it would never, ever so much as sprout a stray strand of peach fuzz.

“Aww,” she said. “What a cute boy.”

Okay, I’ll be honest. I think she actually said “little boy,” but it was so traumatizing to hear that I may have blocked it out.

She might as well have kicked me square in the nuts.

I am such a loser.

I had two PE classes—Conditioning in the morning and Team Athletics at the end of the day—but at least Annie and I had one class together, American Literature, just before lunch break. Annie’s sports were cross country in the fall and track in the spring. Rugby season started in November, so playing on the team was a year-round commitment since it didn’t end until May.

“Cool. We got Lit together,” I said. “I better go.”

I stood up abruptly and handed Annie her stuff.

“Are you mad or something, West?”

“No. I gotta go and get my stuff unpacked, or Farrow’s going to get after me. O-Hall. You know,” I lied.

“If you’re sure you’re okay,” she said. She stood up.

“Yeah.”

I took my schedule and ID from her and started off toward my new home.

“Look,” she said, “I’m going on a trail run before dinner. You want to come with me?”

“I can’t,” I said.

And without turning back I went straight for the O-Hall doorway.

Little boy.

What a bunch of crap.

Chapter Four

IT TOOK ABOUT FIVE MINUTES for me to unpack. That’s all. I didn’t have anything. Of course Chas wasn’t there. He’d be out goofing around with his friends, or sneaking off somewhere with Megan Renshaw, who I also thought was unendurably sexy, but not in a mature, Annie kind of way; it was more like an intimidating and scary female-cop-that-arrested-me-in-Boston way. But she was still hot. And, yes, I did get arrested in Boston when I was twelve. It’s what inspired my parents to enroll me in Pine Mountain Academy in the first place.

I know you’re going to ask, so I might as well tell you: It was for breaking into and trying to drive a T train.

I was twelve.

Boys like trains.

Back to unpacking.

Chas had left the bottom cubbies open and bared enough of the closet rod for me to hang up my school jacket and sweater, as well as the uniform pants and shirts that would supply me from wash day to wash day. After I did that I was alone, so I just stared out the window at the lake and sat there in the dark room on a chair that I wasn’t really sure I’d be allowed to sit on.

I sighed.

My parents had dropped me off that morning, along with my bags, a supply of cash, adequate stereophonic warnings about my behavior and what they expected from me now that I was a full-fledged “young man,” and instructions to phone them at the usual time every Saturday afternoon. They didn’t even get out of the rental car; they had to hurry back to the airport to catch their flight to Boston, where I lived for the few unfrozen months out of the year.

When I saw Annie run by, alone, out on the trail around the lake, I immediately tore off all my clothes, pulled on my running shorts, and dug around in my formerly organized cubbies for my running shoes. I had been so busy sitting there moping and feeling lonely that I’d nearly forgotten my commitment—well, plan, at least—to try reinventing myself this year, to not be such an outcast. I took off out the door, leaving it open wide, displaying the wreckage of scattered clothing and footwear I’d left behind in my hurry to catch up to Annie Altman.

I knew where she was going. It was a trail we’d run together many times, winding to the north side of the lake and then along a rock-lined switchback path through the forest to the highest point around, a lookout post called Buzzard’s Roost where you could see out in every direction—the entire valley where our school had been built on one side, and, on the other, a faint and hazy flatness that was the Pacific Ocean.

I estimated that by the time I got my shoes on and was out on the trail, Annie would be nearly a mile ahead of me, so as I ran along the lake I tried to script the innocent-sounding lies I’d say to her when she caught me on her way back down from the top. Because of course I really did want to take the run with Annie when she asked, and if it wasn’t for that kick-Ryan-Dean-in-the-balls comment she’d made, I’d be up there with her right now, and we’d be talking about all kinds of things that just naturally come out of your head when you run.

The trail cut away from the lake through the densest part of the forest. Last year, in a clearing cut by loggers, Annie and my then-roommates and I built a circle of stones. We called it Stonehenge.

I stopped there to shake the twigs from my shoes.

Although some ferns had overgrown the outer ring of rocks, our monument was still standing. I didn’t have any socks on, or a shirt, either. Just my running shorts, because I had been in too much of a hurry once I saw Annie run past O-Hall. My ankles were streaked with dirt from the combination of dust and sweat. It was hot and muggy, and I was slick and dripping as I started up the switchback trail, following Annie’s shoeprints.

Anyway, I thought maybe she’d notice that I’d been lifting weights over the summer, that I was taller, that I really wasn’t a little boy.

Yeah, right.

Just before the summit, the trees gave way to nothing but scrub brush and grasses, and the trail wound around the point of the mountain. I was almost to the top when Annie rounded the corner in front of me on her way down. And I could tell I startled her, too; that she wasn’t expecting to run into anyone up here. She tensed and froze up when she saw me, but I could see her shoulders relax when she realized it was just me.

I put my head down and kept running, only stopping when I came up right next to her.

“I thought you couldn’t run today,” she said.

“I finished early. I had some energy. I didn’t think you’d come up here.” It wasn’t really a lie, but then I added, “I’m sorry.”

“Oh. No big deal,” she said. Then she started running, going downhill again. Without me.

“See ya, West.”

“Hey, wait!”

She stopped about twenty feet down the trail.

“Did you go to the top?”

She gave me a “duh” look, hands on her hips.

“Well, could you see the ocean?”

“Yeah. It’s really clear today.”

“You want to go back up?” I asked.

“No,” she said, so matter-of-factly, like she was singing a song in grade school, like nothing at all mattered to her. The way she always sounded. “I’m going back.”

I quickly calculated my alternatives. If I just stopped there, turned around, and followed along with her, that would make me look pathetic and wimpy. And, after all, she was the one who told me just this morning that I was going to have to get tough this year. I said the same thing to myself, even if I had serious doubts about my ability to pull off the transition from little boy to something else, something less insignificant—if “less insignificant” is actually a combination of descriptors that doesn’t cause some kind of literary black hole. Plan B meant sprinting like hell to the top, taking a quick three-sixty just so I could say I saw the ocean too, then running like hell again back down the trail to catch up to her before she got to Stonehenge. That would work, but I’d have to burn it, because Annie was a damn fast runner, and I had this feeling that she was going to try to not let me catch up to her.

So I took off for Buzzard’s Roost as fast as I could. My legs burned, but I had to get even with her somehow, to try and salvage the last day of summer, and the last wimpy shreds of my little-boy ego.

There.

I made it to the top. I was dizzy and dripping with sweat. My hair lay plastered, flat and dark against my scalp, and when I rubbed it, a misty spray of soothing droplets rained down on me. I lifted my arms to let the faint breeze blow a cooling breath under my arms and across my aching ribs. I looked down at the school, the narrow black strip of lake that cut a gash through the dark green points of the trees, and turned around to see where the sky faded down to a grainy fog-gray over the distant line of the Pacific.

Did it. I took off back down the trail after Annie as fast as I could.

I almost fell three times sprinting down that trail when my feet shot out in front of me, rolling over loose rocks. But after I came around the corner of the final switchback, before the trail flattened out through the forest, I saw Annie ahead of me.

And part of me wanted to just stay back and watch her, seeing her legs and arms move so smoothly while her black hair swung from shoulder to shoulder like a pendulum. She was one of those girls who never seemed to sweat. Everything about Annie Altman was perfection.

The shade beneath the pines was cool and fresh, and the air smelled like summer and freedom, the smell of never having to go home.

“Hey!” I called out.

She turned back, looking over her tan shoulder as her hair brushed across the line of her jaw. I couldn’t tell if she smiled, but she did slow down to a jog so I could catch up to her.

“You’re hard to catch,” I said between gasps.

“Did you go to the top?”

“Yeah. It was awesome.” We slowed our pace even more. “Look, Annie, I’m sorry about not running with you. I was mad, I guess.”

“I know,” she said. “You think I couldn’t tell?”

“It’s nothing.” And then I told a major lie. “I’m just mad about being in O-Hall. Away from my friends.”

Our eyes met. She had that same look she had in her picture, like she knew the truth.

“You know what we’re going to do this year?” Annie said, and my heart just about stopped cold, because I was really scared she was going to say something, well . . . scary. “I’m going to find you a girlfriend.”

I stopped running, and Annie took about three more strides and stopped too, but she kept on talking. “What freshman girl wouldn’t just die to go out with you? I mean, it’s the best of both worlds: You’re the same age, plus you’re an upperclassman and a varsity rugby player. Don’t worry, West, I’ll find you the best one.”

“What if I don’t want a girlfriend?” I said.

Then she got this smirky look and said, “You want a boyfriend?”

And I know she was just teasing me, but I turned away and walked off the path and into the trees.

I heard her following. “Come on, West. Don’t get all I-can’t-take-a-joke on me. I’m just looking out for you.”

“Don’t do me any favors, Annie.”

I stopped, knee deep in ferns, sweating, at the edge of the circle of stones.

“Hey, it’s still here,” she said.

“I looked for it on the way up.”

I wouldn’t look at her. I was still mad. But I felt her heat; she was standing so close to me.

Stonehenge wasn’t much like Stonehenge. The rocks were small enough to position with just the four of us working on it. Sure, some of the outer rocks were fairly heavy—they were the ones stacked in threes, a ring of doorways like the monument on Salisbury Plain—but it wasn’t, like, an amazing feat of engineering to get them there. It was more a feat of boredom last spring as we all got ready to go off in separate directions for a break from school.

In the middle of the circle was a spiral path; two lines of evenly spaced smaller stones that wound around and around, coiling in on themselves until the path ended right in the center of the ring. That was the part of our Stonehenge that took the longest time to create. We started in the center and worked our way out, and when we finished, I think the path might have been a quarter-mile long if you could stretch it out straight.

Annie proclaimed it a wishing circle and told us if you walked it all the way in and then all the way out without saying anything, you’d get your wish. Of course I knew she had just made that up, because I’d only ever wished for one thing whenever I walked in and out on that path, and that one thing never came true.

“I don’t want you to do it, Annie,” I said. “I don’t want you to look for a girlfriend for me.”

“Suit yourself,” she said, shrugging. “I was just trying to help.”

“Like you said, things are going to be different this year. But I’m going to do it for myself.”

“Okay.”

We stood at the opening to the spiral path.

“You want to do it?” she said.

You know, there have been times when I would have just about cut a finger off to hear Annie, or any girl for that matter, but especially Annie, ask me that question. Do you want to do it? Of course I knew she was only asking if I wanted to walk the pathway with her, but on that Sunday just before the school year started, I guess I was feeling pretty down about things. And I almost said no, but then I decided to do the usual Ryan Dean West retreat from reality and try to make her laugh, just so I could take my mind off of things, off of how I felt.

I noticed she was looking at me. She was staring at me.

“Oh, yeah,” I said, holding my arms out and turning my open palms upward. “It’s not easy getting all this going. Every day, all over the world, countless men endure the pain and humiliation of laser treatments and waxing to achieve a body like this. It really is a burden.”

I flexed.

Annie laughed. I liked the way I could so easily see the water building in her eyes when she laughed. It was a real laugh.

“You know, that’s the only thing I even like about this craphole school,” she said.

“What?”

“Having you as a friend.”

“Shut the fuck up, Annie.”

Okay, well . . . yeah, I didn’t really say “Shut the fuck up,” because I honestly don’t cuss. But I wanted to. I think, in reality, I raised my finger to my lips and said, “Shhhhh,” so she wouldn’t say anything else as we spiraled into the center of that wish circle.

Chapter Five

“OKAY, DOUCHE BAG.” CHAS SHOVED me, sending me back against the doorjamb as soon as I crossed the threshold into our room.

Now, this was the Chas Becker I had been expecting earlier that morning.

“I had to pick your shit up off the floor—your stinky socks, your sweaty underwear—and put them away all nice and folded like your mommy, or we’d be restricted by Farrow. And, not only did you leave your shit all over the floor, you left the door wide-fucking open too, so he could see how WE left it. This is O-Hall, Winger. You don’t get caught doing stupid shit like that.”

That doorjamb really hurt between my shoulder blades. And Chas was standing so close, the only thing I could do besides watch his fist clenching just at the bottom of my field of vision was offer him a semiwheezing but fully sincere, “Uh. God. I’m sorry, Chas.”

Chas pushed me again, his hand pinning me against the jamb. And I estimated, hand, door frame . . . I am about three and a half inches thick right now. Maybe less.

“Yeah, well, this is the one time. The one time, Winger. If you were someone not on the team, I would probably kill you right now. But Coach would get pissed.”

He slackened his pressure on my sternum. I thought about saying thanks, but I just kept my mouth shut and my eyes down. I went over to my cubbies and pulled out some clean clothes and a towel and disappeared down the hall for the showers.

It was time for dinner, and I missed my friends.

Chapter Six

I FOUND SEANIE AND JP seated together in the mess hall. They were already on dessert, or maybe their entire meal consisted exclusively of desserts.

One of the only good things about PM was the food, because nobody stopped you from making poor choices. Our rugby team had a “physio,” which is what we call a nutritionist-slash-doctor, though, and during season, there were only certain things we were allowed to eat and drink, and he’d keep watch on the mess hall from November until May.

I had been having such an all-around crappy day, and seeing JP and Seanie didn’t make me feel too much better. I felt isolated, even though we were right there together. I felt like I couldn’t tell them how frustrated I was about this whole Annie thing. Even though we were all juniors and going through reasonably the same kinds of crap, Seanie and JP both had two years of extra confidence on me. So I always struggled with pretending that maybe my friends could overlook that I was only fourteen, even if I couldn’t.

“Hey. I made it,” I said.

“It’s about time, Winger,” JP said. “I don’t think I’m liking this new living arrangement. Seanie and I were just talking about leaving after dessert.”

I sat down across from them with my tray of tacos and salad. I scanned the hall for Annie. She wasn’t there. Among the hundred or so students who were having dinner, I saw Chas sitting with Megan, over where all the seniors hung out. I didn’t get the Megan thing. She was so smart; she was going to be in the Advanced Calculus class with me, and Chas could barely count.

Megan Renshaw played Chas Becker like he was a pair of pocket aces. She knew what his alpha status was worth in social settings, but all the kids in the smart classes saw the obvious softness Megan Renshaw had for intelligent and sensitive boys who would never have breeding rights in the wolf packs run by the Chas Beckers of the world.

That was just another reason why I thought Megan Renshaw was so untouchably hot. She gave hope to losers like me.

JP was wearing his ever-present striped beanie, pulled down over his ears so that just the last inch or two of his wavy light hair curled out over his eyes. He was so popular and smart, and seemed to just go from girl to girl without ever taking it the slightest bit seriously.

“I’m going back for more, anyway,” Seanie said. “So don’t worry about being late, Ryan Dean.”

“Dudes,” I said, “I do honestly believe Betch was just about to kill me before dinner.”

I told them about my run up to Buzzard’s Roost, but I also told them Annie and I ran the whole way together. They listened quietly to my story about our walk in the circle at Stonehenge. I knew they were kind of jealous, too. Not one of us had a girlfriend, and we all recognized how unattainable—and hot—Annie Altman was. Then, of course, I ended the story with my return to O-Hall and a very pissed off Chas Becker.

“You’re not going to make it to the end of the semester alive,” JP concluded.

“You ever seen Betch’s MySite?” Seanie said.

We both looked at him. Seanie was such a video-game-Internet geek with a strong stalker flavor to his personality. I guess he could see what we were both thinking, because Seanie said, in a surprised kind of tone, “What? Well, haven’t you seen Betch’s MySite?”

“I haven’t,” I said.

“Me neither,” JP added.

“Well, it’s creepy, that’s all,” Seanie said. “It’s nothing but pictures of Betch. Almost every one is Betch without a shirt on. Betch wallpaper. Betch in front of a bathroom mirror. A downloadable Betch calendar, which, by the way, I downloaded and printed out and have right now in our room . . . just in case a perfect opportunity should ever arise. And then there’s all these comments about what a stud Betch is. I made up a fake account with a picture of a hot girl just so I could get him to friend me.”

“You’re really kind of sick, Seanie,” I said.

“I know.” Seanie smiled, like he was letting us in on a dark secret.

Then JP said, “Sometimes I lie awake at night thinking about how horrible my life could be if you hated me,” and he added, “stalker.”

I took a bite of taco. “Maybe that should be his new nickname.”

Seanie just stared at us both with his unblinking stalker eyes. He had one of the strangest senses of humor of anyone I ever knew, because it was always so hard to tell whether he was joking around or if you should really be afraid of him. Either way, I guess it was a good thing Seanie was our friend.

“And, dude, anyway, you gotta tell us what happens at the poker game,” JP said.

“Hey,” Seanie said, “I could loan you my deck of Betch playing cards.”

And he said it so straight-faced, but he had to be joking.

Seanie, expressionless, with his unblinking dead eyes, exhaled and stood, saying, “I’m going for more ice cream.”

I watched Seanie get up and walk across the mess hall, stopping for a moment to say something undoubtedly creepy and demented to a group of freshmen, and JP just smiled and shook his head. That’s when I saw Annie come in. She was with her roommate, Isabel Reyes, who was also kind of hot in a faintly mustached kind of way. Annie smiled and waved at me, and I waved back as JP just sat there, watching me watch her.

Chapter Seven

LIGHTS-OUT CAME AT TEN O’CLOCK every night, except for Fridays and Saturdays, when they’d let us stay up until midnight. Usually, guys would hang out in the common areas, where we didn’t have to wear uniforms—we could just wear T-shirts if we wanted to—watching television until bedtime. In the regular dorms, there was a common area for every two or three bedrooms, but in O-Hall, there was only one TV room for the entire floor, and we currently had twelve guys living here, along with Mr. Farrow and Mrs. Singer, who got the first-floor living room all to herself since there were currently no girls in O-Hall.

So when the TV went off at ten, we all went back to our rooms. As I closed our door behind us, I saw that Chas had already set out a deck of cards (regular, not “Betch” cards, which I highly doubt ever existed unless Seanie made them himself, which is something Seanie would actually take the time to do) and a case of thirteen-gram poker chips on top of one of the desks.

I’ll admit I was kind of scared about Chas’s poker game. I really didn’t want to get into trouble on day negative-one of my junior year at Pine Mountain.

I pointed at the empty desk, nervously trying to make conversation.

“Is that one going to be my desk?” I asked.

“Yeah, sure,” Chas said, obvious in his lack of enthusiasm at engaging his new roomie in conversation. “Whatever. Turn off the lights and get in bed.”

“Oh. Okay.”

I turned off the light and began taking off my pants.

“What are you doing, you idiot?” Chas whispered. “Keep your clothes on. We’re going to play poker, asswipe.”

I honestly thought we were going to bed.

I pulled my pants up.

“Oh. Yeah. Sorry.”

I really didn’t get it, but I knew if Chas said keep my clothes on, I was keeping them on. I climbed up onto the top bunk and instantly fell asleep.

I woke up to a burning flashlight beam stabbing my eyes as Joey Cosentino thumbed one of my eyelids up and whispered, “Nah, he’s alive.”

It took me a minute to register where I was and what was going on. I looked at the red numbers on the digital alarm clock. It was midnight. Actually, 12:04.

They start their games at midnight when there is going to be school in the morning?

“Wake up, kid. I thought you wanted to play,” Chas said.

I sat up.

There were four of us: me, Chas, Joey, and Kevin Cantrell. The three guys I was playing with were all seniors. There was something especially scary about that. I swung my feet over the edge of the bed, and, rubber-legged, hopped down onto the floor.

Chas collected twenty dollars from everyone and put the money in the chip box. He handed out stacks of chips and explained the blinds. The game was Hold ’Em. I rubbed my eyes. The other guys looked perfectly awake, like it was lunchtime or something. I tried to straighten my hair, but it always did whatever it wanted to do, anyway.

There was a towel stuffed along the floor at the bottom of the door, and another covering the creepy tilting-window thing on top, so no one would see the light from our room.

None of us wore shoes. Kevin and Joey obviously had to keep it as stealth as possible, sneaking through the hallway past Farrow’s door. I was wearing my school uniform pants, my belt, unbuckled and twisted halfway around to my back, and a wrinkled T-shirt. Chas was still in his uniform shirt from dinner, but without the tie, and Joey and Kevin wore loose sweatpants and T-shirts. And the funny thing is, I noticed they were wearing their black and blue hoop rugby socks, too, and I thought, God, either these guys are really dorks, or they just can’t wait for the season to begin.

We sat on the cool linoleum floor, all facing each other, Chas with his back resting against the bottom bunk. The floor space was barely big enough for us, and those three other guys were monsters, anyway. Kevin played lock alongside Chas, so he was exactly Chas’s height; and Joey, who was six-one, played fly half, number ten, which is kind of the equivalent to quarterback in American football. So I had more dealings with Joey in practice and during games, since we were both in the back line, and I got along with him and trusted him, too, and I wasn’t creeped out or anything about Joey being gay.

Everyone on the team knew that Joey was gay, but no one ever had a problem with it, either. He was honest about it with the guys, and they accepted him because of it, plus he never acted or talked like the stereotypical gay guys that people think are caricatures of the entire population. I mean, who does that, anyway?

That’s one of the other things about rugby too: I think that because it is such a fringe kind of sport that practically borders on the insane, rugby guys stick up for and tolerate one another more than boys tend to do in other sports. Sure, sometimes the guys would make teasing jokes behind Joey’s back and even to his face, but they did that to every single player on the team, and being gay, or uncoordinated, or only fourteen and in eleventh grade for that matter, didn’t really have anything to do with it, because there was absolute equality of opportunity in being picked on in a good-natured kind of way. But no one on our team ever took it too seriously.

Chas was kind of the exception on the team, and maybe he was always overcompensating through his bullying because he recognized that he didn’t fit in very well; and maybe, too, the guys and the coach just put up with his being such a colossal asshole because he was a great athlete.

I yawned and folded my legs, Indian style, as we put in the first blinds and Chas shuffled the non-Betch cards.

Chas looked across at Joey and Kevin and said, “Did you bring the refreshments?”

“Sure did.” Kevin smiled, and then he and Joey stretched their legs out straight, so their socks were practically in my face, and pulled up their sweats from the bottom. That was when I could see why they wore their rugby socks. Both of them had two tall cans of beer on each of their legs, snugged down tightly inside our team hoops.

So when they rolled their socks down and made a little shrine from eight twenty-four-ounce cans of beer on the floor beside us, I really felt scared . . . because three didn’t divide evenly into eight, and I had never, never, taken a drink of alcohol in my life.

What if it stunted my growth?

“And they’re still pretty cold,” Joey said. He obviously was the designated beer-passer-outer. He handed a can to Chas, then Kevin, and then he grabbed one from the shrine and tilted it toward me, a calm and serious look in his steady, fly half eyes.

“I never had a drink before in my life,” I said.

“It’s okay, Winger,” Joey said. “I was just offering. I understand.”

I was so relieved, and I liked Joey even more at that moment, but I mean that in a totally non-gay way, because I felt like he was sticking up for me.

Chas and Kevin had already opened their beers and were drinking before the first deal, and Joey took the beer he’d offered me and popped it open for himself. Then Chas reached across our little poker circle and grabbed a can of beer away from Joey’s arrangement, pulled the tab forward so I could hear and smell that beer trying to find a way out of the can, and placed it on the floor beside my knee.

“It’s time for you to lose your beer virginity, Winger,” he said. Then he raised his can to the center and said, “Cheers.”

And we all tapped cans. Six eyes watched me, and I closed mine as tight as I could and took my first-ever swallow of beer.

As Chas began dealing the cards out, all these things kind of occurred to me at once:

1. The taste. Who ever drinks this piss when they’re thirsty? Are you kidding me? Seriously . . . you’ve got to be kidding.

2. Little bit of vomit in the back of my throat. It gets into my nasal passages. It burns like hell, and now everything also smells exactly like barf. Nice. Real nice.

3. I am really scared. I am convinced something horrible is going to happen to me now. I picture my mom and dad and Annie (she is so smoking hot in black) at my funeral.

4. Mom and Dad? I feel so terrible that I let them down and became a dead virgin alcoholic at fourteen.

5. For some reason, Chas, Joey, and Kevin are all looking at me and laughing as quietly as they can manage.

6. Woo-hoo! Chas dealt me pocket Jacks.

An hour later, I had finished an entire beer. I needed to pee so bad, there were tears pooling in my eyes. I forgot what my home phone number was—I don’t know why it mattered, I don’t even know why I silently asked myself the question Hey, Ryan Dean West . . . what’s your home phone number?, but I was emotionally devastated, crushed, that I forgot my home phone number—and I was the first player to lose all his chips, too.

By two in the morning, the game was finished. Joey won everyone’s money, which gave him the right to determine the consequence.

Oh, yeah . . . the consequence.

Chapter Eight

THANK GOD IT HAD NOTHING to do with getting naked.

Thank God, again, it had something to do with peeing.

I needed to pee so bad, I sat rocking back and forth in a near-catatonic state, with my hand jammed down between my legs.

Then Joey told me, “Here’s all you gotta do, Ryan Dean. This is an easy one. All you gotta do is go downstairs and take a pee in the downstairs girls’ bathroom.”

“But Mrs. Thinger is down there.”

(I couldn’t remember her name.)

“Singer,” Chas corrected.

I rocked. I thought he was telling me I had to sing, too. Oh, well. I kind of felt like singing.

Yeah, 142 pounds gets pretty stupid when you add twenty-four ounces of beer to it.

“Hey,” I said, continuing my journey into stupidity, “Do any of you guys know my home phone number? I think it’s got a twenty-four in it, too.”

At that moment, I think everything in my universe had a twenty-four in it.

“Come on, retard, before you piss in your pants,” Kevin said, pulling me up by my armpits. It felt like I was standing on ice skates, and I nearly fell down, but Chas was right there behind me, holding me steady.

“Hey, thanks,” I said. “You guys are really awesome.”

I would have shaken hands with them, but I didn’t dare let go of my dick.

They turned out the flashlight and pushed me toward the door.

“You remember what you gotta do?” Chas said.

“Yeah,” I said, confidently. “What?”

“Go pee in the girls’ bathroom downstairs,” Joey reminded.

“Oh, yeah,” I said, “And sing, too.”

I don’t know exactly where I got the singing part from, but Chas, Joey, and Kevin weren’t about to stand in the way of my willingness to compound my idiocy.

“Come on,” Chas whispered, pushing me out the door. “And you better do it, ’cause we’re going to be following.”

“You guys are the best,” I said, and they all three whispered “Shhh!” as we made our way down the lightless hall to the stairwell.

And every step I took made me feel like a water balloon filled to the bursting point. I was convinced I would explode in a shower of pee and guts right there on the stairs. It hurt so much to move, but each foot forward brought me closer to relief.

I was sweating like a heroin smuggler at a border crossing when we cracked the door open onto the girl-less girls’ floor. I ice-skated in my socks down the dustless linoleum hallway. It felt nice under my feet, so nice I almost began laughing, but I wasn’t stupid enough to do that, yet. Chas, Joey, and Kevin made their way around the outside of the building. They instructed me to pull open the window once I’d gotten into the bathroom so they could help me get away if I needed to.

And I thought, no wonder I couldn’t remember my home phone number (but it still choked me up, nevertheless), because I drew a mental Ryan Dean West Brain-Capacity-Allocation Pie Chart, and it came out like this:

So there you go. It’s a miracle I didn’t forget to breathe.

I am such a loser.

I found the bathroom. When I got inside and shut the door, I reached over to flick on the lights, but the switch was on the opposite side of the door from the boys’ bathroom, and this gave me time to realize how stupid turning on the lights would actually have been.

But, drunk or not, at least I was smart enough to latch the door behind me.

And then I thought, Wow, this is a really nice bathroom, so clean and spotless, with nice clean curtains hanging across the row of shower stalls. It was so nice, I almost wanted to lie down on the cool, clean floor and take a nap. But I had to pee too bad. So I turned toward the wall opposite the showers and hurriedly unzipped.

The urinals were gone!

Oh, yeah.

So, standing there as I was, pulled halfway out of my pants, made me want to pee even worse. I literally almost began to cry. Then I heard a scraping at the window and ran over and unfastened the catches.

Chas lifted up the window and stuck his head inside.

My pants fell down around my ankles.

I pushed open a stall.

The goddamned toilet seat was down!

Too bad. I couldn’t slow down for such genteel considerations as raising a toilet seat (something for which I hadn’t been yelled at since I was about seven).

Sweet mother of God, it felt good to pee. And it wasn’t just peeing, it was something more: It was the God of Peeing, it was Zen archery, but with a stream of piss rather than a bow and arrow.

And it was so loud and musical sounding, which reminded me to start singing. Heck, I figured the stream wouldn’t likely slow down before dawn, anyway. So, while I am sure that the natural sound of Zen Peeing was, in itself, loud enough to roust Mrs. Singer, the girls’ floor resident counselor, from her sleep, my choice of song ensured the fact.

I began singing a rugby song called “Proper Ranger,” whose lyrics include some of the most tasteless imaginable descriptions of sex acts. And it doesn’t even rhyme very well, either, but some of those words just don’t have good rhyming matches, anyway. The thing about the song, though, is that if you are a rugby player and are present when another rugby player begins to sing it, you have to sing along . . . so, Chas, Joey, and Kevin all joined in at the appropriate time while I continued the liberation of my unstoppable torrent of pee.

And, Zen-like, everything came together at the end. I shook off, pulled my pants up (failing with the complexities of my zipper), the song finished (with words I won’t repeat here), and the very unhot Mrs. Singer began rattling the doorknob and trying to pound her way in.

“What are you doing in there?” she demanded through the door.

And I giggled, because I thought, That’s a dumb question. Who, within a hundred feet, door or not, couldn’t tell what I was doing in there?

Pound pound pound.

“Who’s in there?”

And Chas said, “Come on, Winger!”

And just as Chas and Kevin grabbed my wrists and pulled me through the window, I heard the exceedingly never-spent-a-fraction-of-a-minute-in-her-life-being-hot Mrs. Singer say through the door, “I am going to put a diarrhea spell on you.”

Well, I can’t be sure exactly, but it sounded like that was what she said to me.

I fell down, giggling, in a clump of ferns beneath the windowsill.

“Hey. Where are my shoes?” I asked. I studied my feet, where I had propped them up on the outside of the log-constructed O-Hall.

Yeah, I was ultrastupid.

“You weren’t wearing any, retard,” Chas whispered.

“Then why’d I come outside if I wasn’t wearing shoes?”

It was like I’d forgotten everything that had taken place in the past two hours and was willing to have a conversation about it so I could fill in the holes. I realized then that the Ryan Dean West Pie Chart of Brain Activity was an empty tin. Not even a crumb of crust left in that skull.

Thank God I had my teammates there to look after me.

Well, at least I had Chas, because Joey and Kevin had already climbed up the outer wall of O-Hall and squeezed back inside their window.

“Come on, Winger. We gotta go,” Chas said. He began climbing up the corner logs on the bottom floor and whispered over his shoulder, “I am not carrying you, so you better get moving now or your ass is toast.”

Chapter Nine

THE NEXT THING I CAN remember is thinking, What is that fucking noise?

Somehow, I had managed to get out of my clothes and under the sheets. So much for memory. And for a brief instant, a thought flashed of all those cheesy and predictable crime dramas where someone kills another someone and then doesn’t remember doing it. I thought I should check my hands for blood or something, but it felt like I’d left my arms in another room, in another state, or maybe on another planet.

Please make that goddamned noise go away.

The alarm clock was blaring. It was seven o’clock, the first day of school, and I was lying there twisted up in my bedding on the top bunk, alone in my O-Hall cell.

Chas was gone.

Maybe I killed Chas Becker.

The alarm clock would not shut up.

And when I sat up and tried to get my feet down off the bed, it felt like I left the inside part of my head, the invisible Ryan Dean West part, on the pillow next to me.

This wasn’t good.

I was almost about to start crying because the alarm clock wouldn’t leave me alone. I tried to remember what happened the night before, but everything seemed disjointed and out of sequence. I felt horrible. I somehow had convinced myself that everyone in the world had woken up to the news that Ryan Dean West had gotten drunk off one giant beer and had ruined his entire life in the span of about three hours.

By the time I could stand, it was 7:04. The alarm clock and my head were still buzzing.

Classes began in fifty-six minutes.

I finally got the alarm turned off, opened the door, and stumbled down the hallway toward the bathroom, wearing only my boxer shorts and one dirty pulled-down sock with bits of what looked like ferns on it, pie chart still empty, with no idea how I ended up like this. If I could have thought clearly enough at that moment to formulate a plan of action, I would certainly have killed myself on the spot.

I did not kill Chas Becker.

Chas was in the bathroom, wrapped in a towel, shaving. I saw him smirk at me in the mirror when I staggered through the door. I stood at the sink beside him, turned the water on cold, and held my face in front of the mirror with both of my hands propped on the tile countertop, elbows locked, like I was steadying myself on one of those godforsaken crab boats in the Bering Sea. And I don’t know why I turned the water on either, because I just stood there, looking horrified at my reflection in the mirror as Chas smirked and shaved and smirked and shaved.

“I think you can skip a shave today, Winger,” he said, and wiped some menthol-smelling shaving cream on my never-so-much-as-fuzzed cheek. And Chas just looked so normal, too, like he could do shit like that every night and it didn’t even affect him.

I suddenly felt very sick.

“Oooh, Winger partied too hard last night,” Chas said, and I heard some other voices laughing, but I really can’t say for sure who else was in there. Ghosts of dead teenage alcoholic former O-Hall inmates, probably. I pushed away from the sink, leaving the water running, and I thought, Why did I forget to put my face under that flow and drown myself? And then I thought, Oh yeah, because . . . I . . . need . . . a . . . toilet.

I stumbled past the row of shower stalls with their torn and moldy plastic curtains, and the bank of urinals opposite them, and I began to remember being in this place, but it was different, too.

God! I was sick.

I made it to a toilet stall and slammed the door shut. I hardly had time to pull my boxers down and sit, and that’s when it all came back to me, and I remembered Mrs. Singer’s cursing me.

A diarrhea spell.

You have got to be kidding me.

I knew it was just a weird coincidence—it had to be—but this really, really, sucked.

Welcome to the eleventh grade, loser.

As I stumbled out of the stall, my skin cold and sweaty, feeling like one of those eyeless white cave salamanders, Chas was there, still smirking, wiping his face, and watching me.

“Hey, asswing, you better hurry up if you want to have time to eat,” he said.

Asswing? That was a new one. Clever.

“Eat?”

“Yeah. You know. Breakfast. Eggs. Milk. Yogurt.”

Bastard. The yogurt part did it. Why the hell did he have to say yogurt?

I went back into the stall.

Chapter Ten

ALL THE BOYS IN O-HALL left before me. I’m sure they were enjoying their yogurt and talking about their classes, or about how Ryan Dean West got drunk last night and ruined his life.

Somehow, I managed to get myself dressed: gray socks, tan pants, white long-sleeved shirt, black and royal blue striped school tie, dark navy sweater vest, black shoes. And I thought, what a stupid waste of energy since period one was Conditioning 11M (that meant it was for eleventh-grade boys), and I’d just have to take all these stupid clothes off right away, but at PM you couldn’t walk anywhere on campus during the school day without being in the proper uniform.

I thought about going to see the doctor, because I had to make two more trips to the toilet before I was fully dressed, but I was afraid that the doctor would discover that I was a fourteen-year-old with booze in his system, and that was too scary for me to deal with. So I decided I’d have to be tough, like Annie told me, and suck it up, even if it felt like I was dying.

I made certain this time that our room was entirely clean and the beds were made before I grabbed my schedule and backpack. It was seven forty-five. I wondered what Chas had done with those beers, and then, just thinking about it made me realize another stop at the bathroom was required.

And as I went downstairs and pushed through the double doors that opened on O-Hall’s large mudroom, I saw the so-not-hot-you-should-never-look-at-her-when-you-have-a-hangover Mrs. Singer, just standing on the other side of the window in the door that opened onto the hallway of the girl-less girls’ floor, with her arms folded across her withered breasts, breathing on the glass, watching me as I left for school.

Nothing in the world could convince me at that moment that she didn’t know I was the sick and guilty sonofabitch who woke her up five hours earlier.

How could she not know?

I practically ran out of O-Hall, which was a mistake, because the speed at which I was moving made me feel sick again.

I kept my head down as I walked through the crowds of uniformed kids clustered around the main campus, smelling all the nauseating smells of brand new clothes, brand new backpacks, brand new shoes, and hair gel. It was like I was a bug trapped inside a Macy’s bag. I felt like every one of the eight hundred students at PM knew about what I’d done the night before, and what a loser I was, so I just concentrated on the path that would lead me to the locker room at the sports complex.

I ran through my schedule in my mind as I staggered to first period:

1. Conditioning 11M. Seanie and JP would be in that class with me.

2. Advanced Calculus. Scary-hot Megan Renshaw and Joey Cosentino, who knew what an “asswing” I was, were both in that class.

3. AP Macroeconomics. Megan and Joey, hour two of two.

4. American Lit. Ultrahot Annie. Oh, and JP, too.

5. Lunch. I could find a shady spot away from my friends to die.

6. Team Athletics. The first day of rugby, a possible reason for rising from the grave of lunch.

“Hey! West! Wait up!”

It was too late to just put my head down and pretend I didn’t notice her. Annie came running up behind me, fantastically perfect in her school skirt. I knew I looked so guilty, too, like I had done something wrong to her. I felt sick. And I almost wanted to cry when I saw her, but I didn’t have any idea exactly why.

“Where were you? I was looking for you this morning,” she said. Then I noticed her expression change when she got close enough to see my eyes.

“I’m sorry, Annie. I am really sick.”

“Oh my God, Ryan Dean, you look terrible!”

And it was so wonderful to hear her actually say my first name like that.

I sighed. “Gee, thanks.”

I looked at my watch. There were no bells at PM. You just had to be where you had to be, when you had to be there. It was 7:55.

“Maybe you should go see the doctor,” she said. “What’s wrong with you?”

“I’ll be okay,” I said. “I didn’t want to miss first day. I’m going to be late for PE. I’ll see you in Lit, okay?”

I turned away, and she brushed my hair with her hand and said, “I hope you feel better.”

Chapter Eleven

ON THE FIRST DAY OF conditioning, we had to go out on a three-mile run to the north shore of the lake and back. I knew Seanie and JP could tell something was wrong with me. We all stayed in the back of the pack, jogging slow so we could talk.

“What happened last night?” JP asked it first.

“The game got started at midnight,” I said.

“That’s when it started?” Seanie said.

“A little bit after midnight,” I said. “Kevin Cantrell, Joey Cosentino, me, and Chas. And they brought beer with them.”

Just saying it made me feel sick again.

“God, Ryan Dean, you could get so thrown out of school for that,” JP said.

“Did you drink?” Seanie asked.

“They kind of made me.” We ran a few steps in silence. I thought I could tell what they were thinking, and I said, “I got drunk. And I lost out first, too.”

“Oh, God,” JP said.

And Seanie, always the cheerful one, added, “So . . . what’s it feel like to be a fucking alcoholic?” Then he pushed me, and I almost fell into the lake. I knew he was just joking around, but Seanie was always so creepy about how he said things.

“Man, Seanie, I am so fucking sick.”

Well, I didn’t actually say “fucking,” because I really never do cuss, but I was fucking sick. I sure thought the word, even if I didn’t say it. And then I wondered, does cussing count in the general scheme of things if you only cuss in your head and not out loud? And I added, “I am never going to do that again.”

“That’s what all fucking alcoholics say,” Seanie deadpanned. “Then they go home, get shitfaced, and shoot their wife in the fucking forehead while she’s cooking a meatloaf and green beans.”

I had to laugh. I also had to get back to the toilets in the locker room.

“What did they do to you when you lost?” JP asked.

I tried to remember, but it seemed so grainy and unclear, like those films of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon.

“Wait,” Seanie said. “If Joey was there, maybe it’s something you should talk about, like, with your dad.”

“You’re a freak, Seanie,” I said. “They made me go downstairs and pee in the girls’ floor bathroom. And sing. And there’s no girls there, except for that—eew—Mrs. Singer.”

“She is so freakin’ hot,” Seanie said. “Did she look at your wiener?”

I had to stop. I doubled over laughing. And Seanie still didn’t even crack a smile.

“I locked her out. She was pissed off. The guys pulled me out the window.”

“So then,” Seanie said, emotionless, “did Joey look at your wiener?”

“That’s messed up,” I said. “I like Joey. And he’s a hell of a fly half.”

“Joey’s cool,” JP added.

And Seanie yelled up to the sky, “Universal takeback! I am sorry, Joey! I will never, ever make fun of your gayness again!”

Of course Joey, who was a senior, wouldn’t have been anywhere near the class, anyway.

We had reached the turnaround spot and were heading back to the gym.

JP asked, “What song did you sing?”

“Proper Ranger.”

“Oh. Nice.”

Then Seanie and JP started singing it, and I had to join in, and some of the guys ahead of us heard it too, and the ones on the rugby team were singing up there right with us. But I didn’t tell Seanie and JP about the diarrhea spell, because I didn’t believe it was anything more than a sick coincidence—karma, kind of. It served me right for being stupid enough to get drunk in the first place.

And I didn’t tell them about seeing Mrs. Singer staring at me from behind the door when I left for school, either.

Chapter Twelve

BY THE TIME I MADE it to calculus, I felt like the hangover/diarrhea spell was losing strength, but now I realized that I desperately needed to go back to sleep too. The only real sleep I had gotten the night before was when I dozed off before the game even started.

I have never slept during a class, though, and I was honestly afraid that if I did, two horrible things would happen. First, I would have a dream about that witch downstairs (I had now convinced myself, after two more stops at the toilet—I must be caving in! I must have lost 30 percent of my skinny-bitch-ass body weight—that Mrs. Singer was an honest-to-God witch); and, second, I would get an extension on my sentence in O-Hall. After the night before, I realized that I needed to get out of there before Chas succeeded, as my friends warned me, at turning me into an asshole.

When I thought about it, as inevitably I did, stumbling down the corridor toward the mind-numbing experience of Calculus, I figured out that most of the guys in O-Hall except for me (the cell-phone hacker), and three compulsive class ditchers, were in Opportunity Hall for fighting. Eight of twelve of us were fighters: five football players, and Kevin, Chas, and Joey.

Of all the guys you’d think would never get into a fight, you’d have to pick Joey. I never asked him about it, but I figured it had to have something to do with him sticking up for himself when another guy was trying to start some shit. Probably.

And, because Advanced Calculus was pretty much the end of the math highway (unless you took Statistics, which I planned to take in twelfth grade), the class had only eight students in it. I was the last one through the door.

There were so many empty desks. I was overwhelmed by the pressure of choosing where to sit. And every single person in the goddamned room, even Mrs. Kurtz, the teacher, who was actually kind of hot in a bespectacled-Lois-Lane kind of way, seemed to be watching the Ryan Dean West Show, aware of the internal dialogue taking place in my headachey-hangovery-diarrhea-dehydrated head:

RYAN DEAN WEST 1: Sit in the very back of the room. Close to the door.

(Ryan Dean West glances at the solitary desk beside the door.)

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: Dude, that is entirely . . . three . . . four . . . five empty desks away from the closest other person. They will think we’re a pathetic fourteen-year-old loser with no social skills.

RYAN DEAN WEST 1: Uh. So? We are.

(Ryan Dean West drops his Calculus book. It weighs almost as much as he does. Suppressed laughter among the students in the room. He turns red.)

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: Are you turning red? You are such a fucking loser.

(Ryan Dean West picks up the book.)

MRS. KURTZ: Why don’t you come up front and sit close to everyone else?

RYAN DEAN WEST 1: How the fuck did she get in the play?

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: I don’t know, but she’s kind of hot.

(Ryan Dean West looks at the seats in the front of the room.)

RYAN DEAN WEST 2 (cont.): If you sit next to Joey, the other kids might think you’re gay.

RYAN DEAN WEST 1: They might just think I’m confident, and comfortable with my own sexuality.

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: Dude, “Ryan Dean West,” “Confident,” and “Sexuality” are entirely distinct concepts which cannot exist simultaneously in the same universe. It could cause a black hole or something.

RYAN DEAN WEST 1: Fuck you. I’m sitting next to Joey.

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: Is it because you feel guilty ’cause Seanie the Stalker made fun of him being gay?

RYAN DEAN WEST 1: I don’t feel guilty. And I’m going to sit next to him. And I don’t care what you or anyone else thinks, ’cause you know I’m not gay.

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: Score! That’s right behind Megan Renshaw (five out of five chicken potpies on the Ryan Dean West Heat Index). Maybe her hair will accidentally brush against your hand.

RYAN DEAN WEST 1: Chicken potpies?

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: Whatever.

(Ryan Dean West takes seat next to Joey.)

“Hey, Ryan Dean.”

“Hey, Joey.” I cleared my throat. “Hi, Megan.”

“Hi, Ryan Dean!” She smiled and turned around in her desk. Her soft blond hair swept across my desktop and over my hand. It felt so cool.

Score.

Then she even put her hand on top of mine and said, “Look at you! You must have grown a foot. You look totally hot! How was your summer?”

I almost lost consciousness; I could feel all the blood in my dehydrated skinny-bitch-ass body surging downward to some useless region below my belt.

“Amazing.”

“What did you do?”

“I can’t remember.”

“I heard about you last night.” Megan patted my hand. “Sounds like you had a little fun.”

I looked at Joey.

“I didn’t tell her,” he said. “Are you okay?”

“God. I am so sick. Don’t ever let me do that again.”

“I tried to stop you. You know. Chas wouldn’t let me.”

“I know.”

We all sat in the same arrangement in Macroeconomics, too: Megan in front of me, Joey on my right. I wondered why teenagers do that sort of thing, but I’ve seen it happening in classes ever since I can remember. I guess it’s like an unconscious way of making the universe consistent and uniform, even if your anchors to reality happen to be (1) extremely hot and unattainable, and (2) gay.

After Econ, we had a twenty-minute break. I just looked around for a bench in the shade and stretched out on it. I put my backpack over my face so I wouldn’t have to see anyone and, maybe, no one would see me either. I could have stayed that way forever, but I heard Seanie and JP standing over me, laughing about something.

“Hey, hangoverboy, we’ve been looking all over for you,” JP said. “Come on. Get up. It’s time for Lit class. We’re almost through to lunch.”

Oh, yeah—another thing about the charms of PM. Since nobody can have cell phones and stuff, the kids here actually talk to each other. And they write notes, too. I know these are both ridiculously primitive human behaviors, but what else can you do when your school forces you to live like the fucking Donner Party?

The reason I mention this is that as I lifted the backpack away from my sweaty face, Seanie slipped me a folded square of paper with flowers and hearts drawn on it, and said, “Here. Read this. I wrote you a haiku about how gay you are for sitting next to Joey for two classes in a row.”

“I also sat right behind Megan Renshaw.”

“That’s called compensation.”

I slipped my hand inside my vest and put Seanie’s note in my front pocket.

“Nice,” I said. “In Lit class I’m going to write you a sonnet about how nothing could possibly be gayer than writing your friend a haiku.”

Chapter Thirteen

IT JUST PROVED THAT EVERYONE was right about Seanie being a stalker.

Why would he be so obsessed as to find out exactly where I sat in my classes? He probably kept little stalker charts and notebooks on everyone he knew.

I had been feeling so sick that day that I wasn’t even thinking about Annie until I saw her in our American Literature class.

Just seeing her made me feel momentarily healed.

I walked down the aisle beside her desk and sat in the empty seat next to hers. She just glanced at me and then refocused on a paperback she was reading.

“Hi. Can I sit next to you?”

“I don’t care.”

Whoa. The very last time I had seen her, she actually touched me; she rubbed her hand through my hair, she called me Ryan Dean, and she said she hoped I’d feel better.

And now?

All of a sudden she was so obviously pissed off at me. JP sat down on the other side of her. I saw him look at me. He had watched our little exchange. I could tell he saw something was up too. But, before I could ask her about it, Mr. Wellins began blathering away about American Literature and Nathaniel Hawthorne (an author I honestly do like, but how was I supposed to pay attention to him when I felt like crap and Annie Altman had just about slapped me across my face with her “I don’t care”?).

Note to self: Now, that last paragraph ended with a cluster of punctuation marks I have never seen together—in that order—in my life.

I took Seanie’s note out and unfolded it. He actually did write me a haiku (and there was no way I was going to waste my time responding with a sonnet). The top of the page had been decorated with a rainbow. Beneath it were two crudely drawn stick figures holding hands. Arrows pointed to each of them from identifying names: “Winger” on one side and “Joey” on the other.

And I wrote underneath it:

I wrote it on the edge of Seanie’s note. I put a smiley face next to the question mark.

She leaned over and scrawled:

And that was that. She ignored me for the rest of that endless lecture on Hawthorne, which I couldn’t listen to. My ears were ringing.

I sat there, wishing I could just die.

And, underneath the note I had left for Seanie, I wrote one more line:

ANDFUCKYOUFORTELLINGANNIEIGOTDRUNK LASTNIGHTTOO!!! GOODFRIEND.

When Mr. Wellins dismissed us for lunch, Annie sprang out of her chair and rushed out the door.

“Annie, wait.”

But I knew I wouldn’t catch her.

“What’s going on?” JP asked.

“Nothing. She’s pissed off at me.”

“You think?” JP tried to smile. “Let’s go get lunch.”

“I’m not feeling good,” I said. “I’ll see you at rugby.”

JP just shrugged and packed up his stuff.

Chapter Fourteen

NOW I REALLY FELT TERRIBLE. I wanted to give up, and I wanted to kick Chas Becker in the teeth too.

Just about everyone was crowding into the mess hall, all buzzing with first-day-back stories. Those who didn’t hang out inside sat in segregated groups on the grass between the mess hall and the stadium.

I followed the path along the lake, alone, and found a bench near O-Hall. I put my pack down as a pillow and kicked off my hot, brand new shoes that turned my socks black in spots. I lay down, staring up into the branches on the pines that towered over me.

This was the worst day of my life.

Scarcely twenty-four hours had passed since my parents had abandoned me here, and already my life was spiraling out of control. I got drunk with Chas Becker, the ultra-unhot Mrs. Singer downstairs did something weird to me, my best friend hated me, which made me realize that I would never have any chance with her or any other girl for that matter because I was a fourteen-year-old-skinny-ass-loser-bitch, and I felt like steaming hot dog crap.

Other than that, things were just swell.

Then I did something I actually, honestly, have not done since I was in, like, fourth grade. I actually, honestly, started to cry.

I am such a loser. I really didn’t belong here.

I folded my arm across my eyes. I think only about two tears came out before I got hold of myself and stopped feeling so stupid and useless. Well, maybe I got hold of myself; maybe those two tears drained all the fluid I had left in me. And I just lay there like that until I began hearing the motion of kids on their way to afternoon classes, so I straightened up, put my shoes on, and headed back to the locker room for the last class of the day.

Chapter Fifteen

IT MADE ME FEEL ALIVE to lace up my rugby boots. As long as they were on me, I could forget about everything else that swirled around inside this 142-pound sack of dehydrated failure.

I love the sound of all those metal cleats moving around on the cold concrete floor in the locker room. There was something ancient in that noise, the music of a coordinated herd. I sat on the bench between Seanie and JP while we changed. I pulled the folded haiku from my pocket and gave it back to Seanie.

“You suck at poetry,” I said.

Seanie was tying up the drawstring inside his shorts.

“You pissed off Annie, too,” JP said.

Sometimes, just sometimes, Seanie could be sincere about things. He said, “I’m sorry I told her about you, Ryan Dean. I thought she’d think it was funny too. Really. I’m sorry.”

JP sat on the bench and pulled his long socks up to his knees.

“God,” he said, “I’ve been dying to play all summer. I need to hit someone.”

“Me too,” I said.

“You want to hit me, Ryan Dean?” Seanie asked.

“Get a ball in front of me on the field and you’re going the other way, yeah,” I said. “Other than that, I don’t think I’d ever hit anyone off the field.”

“Me too,” JP said.

And that was all we needed to say to let Seanie know it was okay.

I couldn’t wait to see Coach McAuliffe—Coach M, we called him—again. He was a little guy, a former winger too, and he was a transplant from England who could talk the most civilized-sounding shit you would ever hear, and he could cuss you out with the most vicious obscenities and it would sound like he was reading from Shakespeare. But Coach M was a die-hard traditionalist as far as the sport was concerned, and everything had to be perfectly maintained that way, from the words we used (and didn’t use, because on the pitch nobody could cuss except for Coach M) when we were around him, to the clothes we wore during practice. He’d make us wear the shortest rugby shorts anyone ever saw. Now, inexperienced observers do not understand why the shorts in rugby have to be the way they are, but just trust me, that’s how they need to be.

Nowadays, pretty much all the guys wore compression shorts under them anyway, and those would just about go down to our knees, but compression shorts were crucial because you’d almost never make it through a game without getting a square hit, punch, elbow, grab, or sometimes even the bottom of a foot, right in your balls.

One of the funniest things I ever saw happened when Seanie first started playing after he’d quit the basketball team. Since Seanie was so tall and skinny, Coach M wanted us to try to lift him in lineout practice. A lineout is when the ball gets thrown in from out of bounds and players can lift up a teammate (by his shorts, usually) so he can reach the ball. Well, Seanie, at the time, was just wearing boxers under his shorts, rather than compression shorts, and when the forwards lifted him, he said it felt like his balls ended up in back of his nipples. His eyes bugged out, his hands both went right down to his crotch, and he said, “Ohmyfuckinggod!” Of course, the ball just sailed past him. He had other things on his mind.

And he never came back to the pitch without some tight compression shorts on under everything.

We shook hands with the other guys (the team always had to do that) when we passed through the locker room, and the three of us walked together up the hill path that cut between the other practice fields to the rugby pitch. This, of course, took us right beside the fields where the soccer and football teams practiced.

We always got along well with the soccer team; they tended to be pretty clever with the jokes they’d play on us and were always appreciative of what we’d do to them. But, for whatever reasons, the football team just absolutely hated us. I don’t even think “hate” is a strong enough word for the emotions we stirred in them, which is why two of them had no problem whatever in deciding to put my face in a toilet the day before.

I figured there was a sort of predictable pattern to a football-player-versus-rugby-player exchange that went something like this: The football player fires a put-down he’d probably been thinking about all day; then the rugby player comes up with an even more-scathing comeback and laughs; then the football player, who can only think of one thing to say and nothing else, says something about wanting to fight and walks away.

So, as I fully expected, when JP, Seanie, and I passed the football field, Casey Palmer, the quarterback and practically my next-door neighbor in O-Hall, and Nick Matthews, his roommate and coconspirator in the give-Ryan-Dean-a-welcoming-bath-in-the-toilet plot, were standing by the fountain trough at the edge of the sideline, and Casey shouted to us: “Oooh! Rugby players! Nice shorts, gayboys!”

Good one. What a predictable dipshit.

And Seanie, as stoic as ever, said, “You wanna know how I know you’re gay, Palmer? ’Cause you got a picture of some guy’s ballsack on your MySite, that’s how! Ha ha!”

“Are you the one who did that, Flaherty? If you are, I’ll fucking kill you!” Casey yelled back.

JP and I just looked at each other, and then at Seanie.

“Does he have a picture of some guy’s balls on his MySite?” I asked.

“Sure,” Seanie said. “Haven’t you seen it?”

“No.”

“No,” JP added.

Then Seanie just looked at us with his cold reptilian eyes and said, “Okay. It took me about ten straight hours on Friday to hack his password and put that picture on. I guess he hasn’t been able to resolve the issue yet. Maybe he’ll figure it out if he goes home this weekend. I sent a mass e-mail out to everyone on the football team, saying, ‘I wonder why there is a picture of some guy’s nutsack on Casey Palmer’s MySite.’ ”

JP and I began laughing, staring right at Casey, who looked at that moment like he could kill someone.

“The best part is, they’re my balls,” Seanie said, absolutely straight-faced. “I have a printout, if you guys want to see it.”

“Sean Russell Flaherty,” I said. “You are so disturbed.”

“That’s fucking demented,” JP agreed. “In an elegant way, though. And, no, you don’t have to show me the printout of your balls, Seanie.”

“Dude, Seanie,” I said. “You put a picture of your own balls on the Internet.”

“I know.” Seanie actually laughed. Twice. Monotone. Weird.

“This is probably the best reason I have right now for why I don’t have a MySite,” I said.

“Oh, but you do have a MySite, my friend,” Seanie said in an incredibly creepy voice. “I’ve seen it. You friended me. And JP’s got one too.”

“You are fucking kidding me,” JP said. He sounded pissed.

“Ha ha!” Seanie said, “Yeah. I’m just kidding.”

And again, that was what was so fucking creepy about Seanie. Who could tell if he really was kidding?

And then, as we were about halfway up the hill toward the pitch, as if Casey Palmer’s inflated sense of masculinity hadn’t been assailed enough, we all heard a soft, familiar voice with an English accent say, “Why are you boys staring at my players’ asses?” Because I guess Casey and Nick just kept watching us as we walked up the hill.

Coach M knew what was up. He’d never let the football team get away with any shit on us.

Not ever.

Chapter Sixteen

PRACTICE WAS LIGHT. COACH M said we weren’t going to start hitting until he could see what he had; and I was okay with that because I was weak and felt so shitty after what I’d gone through.

We ran through a usual warm-up: a slow jog, some stretches, a few quick-hands passing drills, then we ran some forties and suicides, and that’s when Coach M noticed that I was definitely not the fastest guy out there.

He said, “Did you slow down over the summer, Winger? You’re going to need to put on some speed if you expect to keep your job.”

And that made me feel even worse, because not only did I screw things up for myself and Annie, but I let Coach M down too. So, before we broke up into teams for a little touch sevens, I asked Coach M if I could talk to him.

“I’m sorry, Coach, I’m just really sick today. I’ll be back up to speed tomorrow.”

“What’s the matter, Ryan Dean?”

“I just . . .” And then, “Last night was my first night in Opportunity Hall. And I couldn’t sleep at all. I feel horrible.” It wasn’t really a lie.

He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “I understand, Ryan Dean. Let’s hope you can get your shit straightened out this year and get out of O-Hall.”

See? That’s just how he talks, but it sounds so musical and soothing with that English accent. And then he added, “Before Chas Becker turns you into an asshole.”

Coach M picked four guys to be team captains, and then we had a little sevens tournament. Sevens is a scaled-down version of rugby where there are only seven, as opposed to fifteen, players on a team. And we were playing touch instead of tackle, so the entire game was really based on speed and ball handling.

I was still surprised, though, when Joey, who is our regular Backs Captain, picked me first to be on his team. JP was also on our team, along with a couple centers and some of the second-string loose forwards.

Seanie actually ended up on a team with Chas and Kevin, so I knew the games would be really competitive, and, when it came down to the end, it was our two teams in the final match. I scored first off a sweet fake-loop pass from Joey, because as soon as I had that ball in my hands I was gone. But that was all we managed to put up, and Chas’s team came back with three unanswered scores to win the tournament.

Sometimes, losing in rugby is more fun than winning. On that day, at the end of practice, Coach M made the three losing squads jog down to the practice fields and sing a song to the football team. Joey led us, and we all decided to sing “Oh! Susanna,” but we changed “Susanna” to “Casey.” And we are horrible singers, but we sing really loud, so Casey and the other football players couldn’t do anything about it. They tried to ignore us, but they were helpless, and all they could manage to do was fire out comments like “What a bunch of faggots.”

When we were finished, some of the football players actually clapped. At least they got it, that it was all in fun and that if you messed with the rugby team, we were going to mess right back. But it wasn’t a threatening or intimidating “messing with”—it was always meant to show that we could take a joke, and joke back, too.

Casey started it with his “nice shorts” comment at the start of practice, and now he had to endure being the object of our serenading. When we finished the first verse and one chorus, we jogged down to the locker room.

The day had finally ended, and as I sat down on the bench and took off my cleats, the horrible day I’d had came back to me, and I thought again about what a loser I was already turning out to be on the first day of my eleventh-grade year.

Chapter Seventeen

I THREW MY CLOTHES ON without showering. I could do that back at O-Hall, even though the showers here in the locker room were so much cleaner and more private. But all I wanted to do was get away from school and deposit myself into bed. So I just wadded up my gear and stuffed it into my locker. I put my sweater inside my backpack and sloppily hung my tie over my shoulders without even buttoning or tucking in my shirt. The day was over, and now it didn’t matter if we were dressed properly or not.

I didn’t even wait for Seanie and JP to get out of the showers. I shook hands with a few of the guys as I left the locker room.

I guess it was about four thirty when I made my way down the hill on the path toward the lake. I could see some people walking around the campus below, but most kids at that time of day were either back in their dorms or finishing up whatever team sports were being practiced in September.

I noticed Joey walking on the path, maybe about a hundred yards ahead of me, obviously heading back to O-Hall too. But when he got down to the football field, I saw Casey and Nick step out of a crowd of players who were standing around doing nothing (which is what most football players do all practice) and run over to Joey. And I could tell just by the way they were moving that they were looking to start shit with Joey, so I turned around, but no one else from the rugby team was walking down from the locker room yet.

Great.

Me and Joey versus the entire steroid-crazed-dumbass football team.

I started walking faster. Casey and Nick didn’t even notice I was coming. They looked up the hill toward the locker room as Joey got closer, but who would notice my skinny-bitch-ass body coming down that way? Or, if they did notice me, what would it matter to them, anyway?

Then I saw Casey, puffing his chest out, walk right up to Joey and push him hard, knocking Joey back. And Casey said, “You think you’re funny with your song, queer?”

I threw my backpack down and ran as fast as I could.

I knew Joey would fight. He wasn’t afraid of anyone. You had to be like that to be a fly half, and I’m sure that Joey had been hit square against his unpadded body at least a thousand times more than Casey ever had. But I wasn’t going to let him get gang-jumped by those assholes.

So I ran faster than I did in practice. I had to. And just as Joey was making a fist, Nick was circling behind him, and Casey was in the process of throwing the first punch, I launched myself, head up and shoulder down, right into Casey’s knees and wrapped my arms around his legs, driving him, crashing, to the ground.

I sprang up off Casey.

Casey said, “What the fuck?” and he punched me in the face just as I got to my feet, knocking me down into Joey.

And just then, one of the football coaches saw what was happening and yelled at us to cut it out. The coach just stood there, down the field, holding a clipboard and spitting tobacco, watching us like he was too lazy to come over and see if this was really a fight or not.

All I can say is that if Coach M had seen what I did, my ass would be done. Over. Off the team. Kicked out of school.

“What the fuck you think you’re doing, you little piece of shit?”

I could only assume Casey Palmer was talking to me.

Then I noticed my chest was covered in blood and my unbuttoned, once-white school uniform shirt was splattered with red. My knees buckled. I had to sit down.

Okay, I thought, this was it. I had done as much to my body as it could take in the last twenty-four hours. Now I was surely dying. I prepared myself to look into the tunnel of light and see my great-grandma and the little Chihuahua dog I had when I was four that got run over by a UPS van.

Well, they didn’t both get run over by the UPS van, but you know what I mean.

Then I heard a whistle, and the football coach screamed at Casey and Nick to get back over to their standing-around drill, and I knew I wasn’t dead, but my nose was bleeding pretty good.

“God. I am such an idiot,” I said.

“Why the fuck did you do that?” Joey sounded pissed off.

“Overlap. Two on one.”

I slipped my shirt off and held it over my face. I pulled it back and looked. I wasn’t bleeding so bad anymore.

Maybe I was empty.

“You better get cleaned up, or you’re going to be in a lot of trouble.”

I wiped off the blood as much as I could with my ruined shirt and stood up.

“I’ll just say it happened in practice,” I said. “Tackling a guy. It’s the truth.”

I’d gotten more bloody noses playing rugby than I could count.

Well, actually, I only have one nose that’s been bloodied, but it has happened dozens of times.

“God. I am so done for today.”

I balled up my shirt and stuffed it into my backpack. I took off for O-Hall just as I saw the guys from our team coming out from the locker room and making their way down the hill.

Joey just stood there at the edge of the football field, looking at those assholes practice, waiting for our teammates to catch up to him.

Chapter Eighteen

THE WATER ON THE TILES in the shower stall turned pink around my feet where the dried blood washed down from my body. When it was finally clear, I turned the water to full cold and stood there for thirty seconds. It almost made me scream. I toweled off and went to bed.

It was five o’clock.

I lay there with my books, finishing the small amount of homework I’d been assigned—just a couple review problems in Calculus. Then I opened a paperback and began reading. We were supposed to read “Rappaccini’s Daughter” and write a response paper on it, but I had until Wednesday. So I read the first page, then put it down beside my pillow and stared up at the ceiling.

I love the way Hawthorne said things. I wished that I could also find “no better occupation than to look down into the garden” beneath my window, but I had, in such a short time, gotten myself so occupied with crap that I lay there convinced there was no way I would make it through my eleventh-grade year.

I opened my notebook and wrote a letter to Annie. Even if I never gave it to her, at least I felt like I could write down what I wished I could tell her. In true Ryan Dean West fashion, I drew a Venn diagram on the note, trying to explain to her something about myself, the little boy, hoping that maybe she would realize what I thought was so obvious about the people we deal with, who are all around us, everywhere and every day. And as soon as I’d written the first couple of sentences, I reread them and they sounded so pathetic and lost that I just tore the page from my notebook and threw it away.

I was so tired.

I climbed down from the bed, undressed, and turned off the light.

Chapter Nineteen

“WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG with you?” Seanie said.

The light came on and I woke up.

My books were scattered around my head, and I was lying, face up, on top of the covers.

Seanie, JP, and Joey were standing just inside the door, dressed in their shirts and ties, like they had just come from dinner at the mess hall.

I propped myself up on my elbows and looked at them.

I rubbed my hair and sat up. My head nearly touched the ceiling, but not quite.

“I just needed to sleep,” I said. “What time is it?”

I looked at the clock. It was eight fifteen.

“Everyone was looking for you,” JP said. “You missed dinner.”

Yeah. I bet Casey Palmer was looking for me too.

“I wasn’t hungry.” But now that they mentioned it, I felt like I was starving.

“Well,” Seanie kind of whispered, glancing around, “we smuggled you some food, just in case you were.”

Taking food from the mess hall was a definite violation. But as far as rule breaking was concerned, having visitors from the regular dorms in O-Hall was probably just as bad.

Seanie placed a wadded napkin and a paper coffee cup on top of the Calculus book next to my pillow. “It’s a ham sandwich and some tomato soup.”

Now, that was awesome. It sounded so good.

“Thanks, Seanie,” I said. “And thanks for not wrapping it up in your printout from Casey’s MySite.”

JP laughed.

“Have you ever seen Casey’s MySite, Joey?” I asked.

Seanie had a sick and pissed-off expression on his face.

“No. Why?”

“Well, when you go home this weekend, look it up,” I said.

“Okay.”

Joey’s parents were ultrarich. They lived in San Mateo and flew him home every Friday after school. I saw how Seanie was looking at me, so I just fired him back a Ha-Ha-I-just-got-Joey-to-look-at-your-balls-so-write-a-haiku-about-that, fucker expression, if there is such a thing.

But whether or not there actually is such a look, Seanie and I just had an intense and wordless conversation about Japanese poetry, his balls, and our gay friend, Joey Cosentino.

“I got you something to drink,” Joey said.

I looked at him. Maybe I still had the balls/haiku expression on my face, so I guess Joey thought I didn’t trust his evening beverage selection.

“Not beer,” he added, and smiled. He pulled a bottle of water and another of Gatorade from his school pack.

Now, that was a miracle. I was so thirsty, I opened the Gatorade and emptied the bottle without even taking a breath.

“Joey told everyone what happened,” JP said.

“Dude, you’re like a superhero, laying out Casey Palmer, sticking up for your fly half,” Seanie said.

“I wasn’t sticking up for Joey,” I said. “I was sticking up for me. I have to walk up and down that hill every day too. We can’t let them start off with crap like that on the first day of practice. So I just kind of closed my eyes and took him out. I was so pissed off about everything anyway, so I did something really stupid that I’m lucky didn’t end up with me being killed. Like we said in the locker room, I wanted to hit someone, and a game of touch rugby didn’t quite do it for me today.”

“How’s your nose?” Joey asked.

I hadn’t even thought about it since seeing that blood in the bottom of the shower stall. I took a bite of the sandwich—it tasted better than anything I could possibly imagine—then touched my nose.

“It’s not broken or nothing,” I said, inhaling. “I think. Just stuffed up. Man, thanks so much for the food. I think I actually feel normal again.”

But feeling normal meant I immediately thought about Annie, too.

“Did any of you guys see Annie tonight?”

“I talked to her,” JP said. “She is really pissed off at you, Ryan Dean.”

Maybe my head was still a little off, but I kind of got the feeling that JP was glad about Annie feeling that way.

“Dude, her being pissed just shows how much she cares about you,” Seanie said.

That sounded like something you’d tell your kid before giving him a spanking.

“I think she feels like you didn’t tell her the truth,” JP explained.

“I never had the chance to. I never had a minute to talk to her about it.” I guess I sounded pretty whiney.

Then the door pushed open. I expected it would be Chas coming in, and that he’d tell my friends to get the hell out, but it was Mr. Farrow. And he looked pissed, too, because he was going to be the one to tell them that.

“What are you two boys doing here?” he said. He fired a displeased look at me as I sat on my bunk, eating my dinner. I pulled the sheet over my legs. Mr. Farrow had a way of making me feel so uncomfortable.

JP said, “Ryan Dean was sick. We just brought him something to eat.”

Mr. Farrow took a step toward the bed and looked more closely at me, which, like I said, creeped me out because he was practically exhaling on my chest and I was only wearing boxers.

“Are you sick, Ryan Dean?”

“I’m feeling better now. I just woke up.”

“Maybe we should have the doctor take a look at you in the morning.”

“No. Really. I’m okay,” I said.

Then Farrow pulled a scrap of paper and a pen from his pocket and looked sternly at JP.

“You boys are obviously not new students. You know the rules,” he said. “What are your names?”

JP swallowed one time and answered, “John-Paul Tureau and Sean Flaherty.”

“Mr. Farrow, please don’t get them in trouble,” I said. “Really, they were just looking out for me.”

“Ryan Dean, sometimes when boys take it upon themselves to look out for one another, there are unpleasant consequences.”

Holy shit if that wasn’t the recap of my first day here. Then I thought, they must have picked him and Mrs. Singer to run this place because they’re like Satan’s minions or something.

And Mr. Farrow continued, “But, Mr. Tureau and Mr. Flaherty, I do appreciate your apparent concern for Ryan Dean. However, I expect you to leave immediately, and that you won’t do this again without asking me ahead of time.”

Then Farrow tucked his slip of paper back into his pocket and stepped out into the hallway, leaving my door standing open.

“Because we have plenty of room here in Opportunity Hall,” he added, then disappeared down the corridor in the direction of our common room.

“I guess that means we’re leaving,” Seanie said.

“Hey. Thanks, guys,” I said as Seanie and JP turned to go. Out in the hallway, Seanie swung around and flipped me a middle finger with a smile and a fuck-you-for-getting-Joey-to-look-at-my-balls expression on his face, if there is such a thing.

I finished my sandwich. I didn’t say anything, but I suddenly felt really awkward being here, in my bed, alone in my room, with a gay guy. And then I immediately got pissed off at myself for even thinking shit like that, for doing the same kind of crap to Joey that everyone else did, ’cause I knew what it felt like too, being so not-like-all-the-other-guys-here. And I don’t mean I know what it felt like to be gay, because I don’t, but I do know what it felt like to be the “only” one of something. Heck, as far as I know, there’s just got to be more gay eleventh graders than fourteen-year-old eleventh graders, anyway.

I wondered if it bothered Kevin Cantrell, though. Joey and Kevin had been roommates for two years, and no one ever talked shit about Kevin or wondered if he was gay, because everyone knew he just wasn’t.

I am such a loser.

“I feel so much better,” I said. “You want this water, Joey?”

I held the bottle out for Joey.

“No, thanks. I’m going to go watch TV with the guys until lights-out. You want to watch some too?”

“No,” I said. “I really think I just need to sleep. And anyway, aren’t Casey and Nick going to be there?”

“So what?” Joey said. “I’m not afraid of them.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

“They can fuck off,” Joey said. “They’re not going to do anything else. Trust me. You’re not afraid of them, are you?”

I thought about it.

“Yes. I honestly am.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Joey said. “That was a fucking awesome tackle. But don’t ever do shit like that again. Do you want the light off?” He was halfway out the door.

“Yeah. Thanks. See you in Math.”

Chapter Twenty

I HEARD CHAS COME IN that night, but it didn’t fully wake me up. I was in that kind of sleep that just feels so paralyzingly restful and deep, like my body had become the mattress. So when I woke up around two o’clock, needing to pee, I actually did consider using the empty Gatorade bottle I had saved from my dinner in bed. But I decided it was a good opportunity, early on in our life together, for me to see if I could actually climb out of bed without inspiring Chas to beat the crap out of me. I thought I’d go ahead and save the Gatorade bottle for the future, though. Just in case.

And I was like some kind of ninja climbing out of bed, only my invisible and silent mission dealt with peeing, as opposed to murder.

O-Hall was completely still and dark when I stepped out into the hallway. Every part of my body felt so alive and healed; I had finally recovered from the idiocy of the previous night, and my bare feet felt so good on the slick and cool linoleum floor as I made my way down the hall toward the bathroom.

I stretched and yawned. I was actually looking forward to the morning, to the opportunity to find Annie at breakfast and try to make things right again. I had to try. It was making me crazy. After not seeing her for two-and-a-half months over the summer, we’d already had two I’m-pissed-off-and-don’t-want-to-talk-to-you episodes, and that sucked.

After I finished peeing, I switched off the light in the bathroom and headed down the hallway to bed. That’s when I saw a flash of light through the window on the door to the stairwell. It was one of those things that you just catch in the corner of an eye, but it stopped me cold and I stood there in the middle of the dark hallway, silently watching that door to see if it would flash again.

It did, but only for a second, maybe less.

It was a pale green light, the kind you see from one of those snap-activated glow sticks; it lit the stairwell, and then everything was suddenly dark again.

I thought that maybe Chas and Joey and Kevin were doing something they shouldn’t for the second night in a row, but that didn’t seem right, because I was certain I’d seen Chas sleeping in his bunk. And I was kind of scared, too, but there was something about that light that made me want to go see what the person responsible for it was doing there.

I know. Pretty stupid. And I wasn’t even drunk.

And as I padded in my bare feet to the end of the boys’ floor, I kept thinking about all the horror movies I’d ever seen where you just sit there yelling inside your head, “Don’t open that door, you fucking idiot!”

So what did I do? I opened the door.

Then I almost screamed like a little girl, but I was too scared to do that, and if I hadn’t just done what I did a minute earlier, I would have peed myself too, because when I opened the door, I was standing there, in nothing but my underwear, face to face with the so-unhot-she-is-quite-likely-the-only-two-legged-female-besides-his-mom-no-wait-including-his-mom-Ryan-Dean-West-wouldn’t-want-to-run-into-at-night-when-he-is-only-wearing-boxers-and-nothing-else Mrs. Singer from downstairs.

And I thought, I am never going to not-have diarrhea for the rest of my life.

I am such a loser.

And she was standing right there, inches away from me, in a black robe and her black hair tied back in a black scarf, looking like some kind of child-sacrificing Druid, or a bad illustration from an endless volume of Dickens; and for a moment, I was so startled, I just froze.

I should have used the Gatorade bottle.

When my knees thawed, I spun around and ran back down the hallway without saying anything or turning around, my feet frantically slapping their way back to my bedroom.

I felt something cool on my chest. My nose was bleeding again.

Okay, I thought, she’s not a witch. Casey Palmer made your nose bleed; it wasn’t that creepy Mrs. Singer. I pressed my hand to my nose, and it was immediately covered in blood.

When I got back to my room, I pulled the bloodstained shirt I was wearing when Casey punched me from my school pack and held it to my face. That shirt was beyond salvation at this point anyway. Then I attempted to one-handedly maneuver my way back to the upper bunk.

To make matters worse, I kicked Chas in the head when I climbed back up onto my bunk, not that there wasn’t a pretty big part of me that was deeply satisfied by kicking him in the head after he forced me to get drunk and caused Annie to hate me. It probably would have been more satisfying if he woke up, but he just grunted and rolled over as I pulled myself up onto my bed.

My heart was pounding. I panted. I rubbed my hair as I stared up at the ceiling, pressing the wadded-up shirt against my nose to stop the bleeding. I was actually sweating. I couldn’t get comfortable, and I guess I was fidgeting a bit, convinced that Mrs. Singer had it in for me and was just slowly working on some weird method of killing me. Then Chas punched the mattress from below; I felt the thud of a fist in my kidney.

“Please tell me you’re not doing what I think you’re doing up there, you fucking homo.”

What was he thinking? What an absolute moron Chas Becker was.

“I’m not doing nothing,” I said, my voice muffled in my ruined shirt. “I got a bloody nose. Sorry.”

He went back to sleep.

I tried to relax, but I kept thinking about that weird woman downstairs, imagining the horrible crap she was going to put me through in the morning. What could possibly be worse than day one?

I sighed, and drifted off to sleep again.

Chapter Twenty-One

WE BOTH WOKE UP AT the same time to the buzzing jangle of the alarm clock.

I felt so rested and ready for a real, and hopefully normal, day of school. When I got down from the bed, Chas saw the bloody shirt and said, “Is that from Casey Palmer?”

I said, “Yeah.”

“I heard about that. You want me to fuck him up?”

And I thought, wow, I could almost fool myself into thinking Chas Becker cared about me or something.

“Naw.”

I threw the shirt down onto the floor of our closet; then I picked it up and put it into the laundry bag marked WEST as Chas glared at me.

“He’s a puss, anyway,” Chas said. “And I heard you laid him out pretty good.”

“I guess.”

“You got some balls for a little kid.”

And I thought, Screw you, Betch.

Little kid.

Chapter Twenty-Two

I COULD FEEL MYSELF GET lighter; my heart beat faster, and my scalp kind of tingled when I saw her. Maybe it was just the dandruff shampoo I used that someone had left in the shower that morning.

I’ll be honest. If someone asked me am I in love with Annie Altman, I’d have to say I don’t know, because I really don’t know. I have nothing to compare with how I feel about her. But I do know that I feel this kind of a need where she is concerned; I need her to notice me more than she does; I need to think that I make her feel lighter when she sees me. And there’s no way I could ever believe that was possible, because it was just little me, Ryan Dean West, fourteen years old, walking around in the exact same clothes and tie as four hundred other guys here at Pine Mountain, every one of us so much the same, except for me, except for that one thing she noticed that she couldn’t get over, that made me so unattractively different from every other eleventh-grade boy in this shithole.

It’s what I tried to tell her in the note I threw away the night before.

It was a waste, anyway, because I knew I’d given her enough of a good reason for not ever talking to me again: I had crossed over, tried to make myself so much the same as a guy like Chas Becker by breaking the rules and playing poker and getting drunk, as if those stupid behaviors could ever incite some magical evolution in the ape of Ryan Dean West and cause him to shed his tail and walk upright in Annie’s eyes.

But I could hope, even if I was such a loser.

She sat across from Isabel Reyes at breakfast, eating a bagel and sipping from a carton of orange juice. And despite JP calling out “Hey, Ryan Dean,” and Seanie trying to wave me over to where they sat by the door so they could see every girl who came and went, I ignored them, but not in an unfriendly, stuck-up way, because I was kind of scared and had this jumping-off-the-highest-ever-high-dive feeling as I kept my eyes focused forward and walked right to where Annie sat.

She saw me coming up, but I couldn’t tell from her expression whether or not she was happy to see me. As always, Annie looked totally hot, but so did Isabel in her rustic, more-facial-hair-than-Ryan-Dean-West-will-have-in-college kind of way (God! Why do I think that’s hot?). And then I saw Annie lean over and whisper something to Isabel, and I could only imagine what they were saying.

ANNIE: Here comes that fucking alcoholic Ryan Dean West. Observe how I treat him like he’s some kind of pathetic red-eared slider turtle.

ISABEL: His ears look kind of pink to me. I think he’s cute.

ANNIE: You think he’s cute? He’s just a little boy. I’ll probably just ignore his skinny-bitch ass, pretend like he isn’t here.

ISABEL: You always told me how much you liked him.

ANNIE: He acted like an asshole as soon as we got to school on Sunday. First he wouldn’t talk to me, he lied about wanting to go for a run with me, and then he got drunk with Chas Becker. Definitely so not-cute.

And then I thought, Would you really ignore me, Annie? Do I really want to keep walking toward you just so you can kick me in the nuts again?

I glanced back and saw that JP and Seanie were watching me.

Crap!

Something happens when guys watch guys doing things like this. They knew what was going on, and they got to watch the Ryan Dean West suicide mission from the front row. It’s like jumping out of a plane. There’s no time-outs or do-overs, there’s just gravity. That, and lots of witnesses to see your chute collapse as your body plummets helplessly toward certain death.

All I could do now was hope I didn’t cry like a little girl in front of the hundreds of kids having breakfast.

It was a surreal comic of my life, and I pictured the worst possible outcome:

“Annie. Would it be okay if I sat down with you for a minute?” I said in the sweetest, most injured tone of voice I could manage. (It’s not like my voice hadn’t changed last year, though. I was no candidate for a position in one of those churchy boys’ choirs.)

Then she looked at me square in the eyes, and at that moment I knew everything was going to be okay. There’s just ways friends can see things in each others’ faces, kind of like the ha-ha-I-made-Joey-look-at-your-balls/haiku conversation I’d had with Seanie the night before, except, of course, the way Annie looked at me was really nice.

“Hi, West. Sure,” she said.

Score.

Except I really wished she’d call me Ryan Dean.

And I lucked out again, because Isabel was sitting right across from her, which meant I had to sit beside Annie, which gave me the opportunity to ever-so-gently brush my thigh against hers, which caused a very dizzying and embarrassing migration of otherwise fully employed red blood cells to a highly depressed and underemployed (as my Econ professor might speculate) region of Ryan Dean West Land.

“Hi, Isabel.” My voice cracked when I said it. I felt like an idiot. I don’t think there was any blood left in the northern provinces. “Did you have a good summer?”

“Yeah,” Isabel said.

Okay, now go away, moustache-girl (not that your moustache isn’t kind of hot). Ugh. I think I’m passing out.

I cleared my throat. I looked at Isabel. God! I wanted her to leave, because I knew exactly what they’d do after this whole uncomfortable scene ended: They would replay and reinterpret everything that happened, and they would make stuff up, too—things they thought I’d said that never came out of my mouth.

“Annie,” I began.

After that, I didn’t have any idea what to say. I just sat there staring at her. I was so lost, I even thought about the Preamble to the Constitution.

I, the people, am such a loser.

And then, thank God, Annie saved me.

“Are you feeling better this morning?” she asked.

Okay. That’s when I knew, knew, I was totally, totally, in love with her. And that realization made me instantly sad, too, because I’m a smart kid; I knew I had absolutely no chance at all.

I looked at my hands where they rested on the table next to a mustard stain. And I thought I actually did feel pretty good, relieved that Mrs. Singer hadn’t coincidentally caused me to come down with a fit of projectile vomiting or something.

“Yeah. I feel a lot better. How about you?”

“Good. I started reading that Hawthorne story.”

“So did I. It’s weird.”

“Yeah.”

I squeezed my fists as tight as I could. They turned white.

Time to jump.

“Annie, I am really sorry about how stupid I was. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into, but now I’m smarter, but I’m also worse off because I made you mad and I would never do anything, ever, to purposely make you mad, ’cause you’re my best friend in this whole pathetic place, so I’m really sorry and I guess I’ll go now, but I just had to tell you.”

Zen archery of run-on-sentence apologies.

And I almost looked up to see if my chute would catch air or just flutter around up there like a giant dirty sock.

I pressed my hands on the table and started to stand.

Then she put her hand on top of mine and said, “It’s okay, West. I don’t want you to go. And I’m not mad anymore either. You were just temporarily stupid. What boy doesn’t hit that mark at least ten times a day?”

I sighed and relaxed in my seat. My leg touched hers again.

Please don’t move your hand, Annie.

When she started to pull her hand away, I covered it with mine and squeezed. And she squeezed back.

Ryan Dean West was actually holding hands with a girl who wasn’t his mom.

People began moving around us, hefting their books and packs. The day’s first class would be starting in five minutes, but I didn’t want to move. Besides, I probably would have collapsed if I tried to stand up.

Then Isabel got up from her seat and said, “Bye, Ryan Dean. See you later, Annie.”

And, still holding on to Annie’s hand, I said, “Can we just talk later? Alone?”

“Sure.”

“Will you meet me at Stonehenge after practice?”

“You want to go for a run?”

“No.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

FOR CONDITIONING CLASS, WE DID tear-offs in weight lifting on Tuesdays. Tear-offs can make a guy scream if you do them right. Seanie and JP were spotting the bar and pulling off weights until I was just down to the bar and nothing else, until I couldn’t even lift the bar anymore and they had to help me just to get it back on the braces.

“Damn. Winger’s been lifting weights,” JP said.

I just lay there on the bench and rubbed my shoulders. I felt so good.

“Winger’s pumped,” Seanie said. “What’d Annie say?”

“If I told you, you’d probably make a MySite about it.”

“I already did make an Annie and Ryan Dean MySite,” Seanie said.

“Yeah, right.”

I wasn’t buying his shit anymore.

“Yeah. I did,” Seanie said. “And nothing ever happens on it.”

“Annie’s pretty hot, dude. You really not going to tell us?” JP asked. I grabbed his hand, and he lifted me up so we could trade places.

“She’s not mad at me,” I said. I matched the weights on my side to Seanie’s. Of course, at his size, JP was almost twice as strong as me. And then I added, “And we held hands, too.”

“No way!” Seanie said. “You are such a fucking loser, Ryan Dean. You’re in eleventh grade, not kinderfuckinggarten.”

I flipped Seanie off and then had to pull one of JP’s weights from the bar.

“Just remember, Seanie. I made Joey look at your balls.”

“Dude, Joey’s gay. You can’t make him look at my balls. But you could charge him to. And he hasn’t actually seen them yet.”

Yeah . . . in the weight room, we often have deep, philosophical conversations.

We pulled off another round of weights, but JP was struggling because he started laughing.

When it was Seanie’s turn, JP and I got him all loaded up, and just when he raised the barbell and locked out over his chest, we walked away and left him there as he yelled, “Hey! Fuck you guys! Assholes!”

Of course we didn’t leave him like that. We were just messing with him. But Seanie always had a way of obsessing about things like they were the greatest trespasses ever committed against his pitiful soul. Maybe that’s one of the things I found so funny about Sean Russell Flaherty.

And when we were changing back into our school clothes for the second class of the day, JP asked if I thought there was going to be any trouble about them coming to visit me in O-Hall the night before.

“As weird as he is, I think Farrow understands that you guys were just trying to help me,” I said. “I wouldn’t expect he’ll turn you in to the headmaster, and even if he does, you guys won’t get into trouble for what you did.”

“I hope you’re right,” JP said.

“I’d kind of like to get put in O-Hall,” Seanie said. “So I could kick your ass at poker.”

“No you wouldn’t. It sucks. And I think that woman who lives downstairs, Mrs. Singer, is a witch or something.”

“You’re fucking crazy, Winger,” JP said.

“Yeah,” Seanie agreed.

But they didn’t see what I’d seen.

Chapter Twenty-Four

MEGAN RENSHAW WAS A STRESS case. When we went over the Calculus review problems Mrs. Kurtz had assigned from day one, Megan got every one of them wrong. She spun sideways in her desk (her hair brushed across my hand again—yes!), and she practically had tears in her eyes as she complained to Joey and me, “I think I became completely stupid over the summer!”

And then Joey said what I didn’t have the guts to say: “I think hanging out with Betch would lower anyone’s I.Q.”

“Look,” I said, moving my pencil over her paper, just near enough to her hand that I could feel her warmth and smell the ginger lotion on her skin, “here’s where you got this step backward.”

Megan swept her hair back from her face and propped her head on an elbow, resting on my desk. She sighed in defeat.

She was definitely the hottest defeated multivariate calculus student I’d ever seen.

Megan said, “You guys who get this stuff . . . ,” and she looked from Joey to me. When our eyes locked, I had to look away. Megan Renshaw was looking at me like she liked me or something. And she said, “Smart guys are such a turn-on.”

Joey cleared his throat.

Chas Becker must have been a genius in at least one thing Megan Renshaw liked.

Mrs. Kurtz had been looming over us, watching Megan’s frustration, and she said, “Why don’t the three of you form a study group to work on tonight’s assignment?”

And I thought it was just like Seanie’s haiku coming true, except for the Megan part. And the Megan part practically gave me an aneurysm when she put her ginger-lotion hand on my arm and said, with pleading and helpless eyes, “Will you help me, Ryan Dean? Please?”

I wasn’t sure if I could physically tolerate all the up-and-down surging of blood I’d been experiencing that morning. I swear I could actually see my heart thumping in my chest beneath my sweater.

“Sure.” And I was kind of scared—no, terrified—so I said, “Joey can, too.”

And, just like that, the three of us agreed to meet in the library after dinner that night, with Mrs. Kurtz’s approval. Students were allowed to do homework in the library until lights-out, but O-Hall kids had to have a teacher’s consent. So, thanks to Mrs. Kurtz’s facilitation, I had scored my second smoking-hot-girl date on just my second day of eleventh grade.

Things were definitely looking up.

The day before, the day after the poker game, postconsequence, I felt like I had been stuffed with a combination of cement and sleeping pills; but that Tuesday I practically floated through the entire school day.

Chapter Twenty-Five

NOTE TO ANNIE DURING LIT class:

Don’t forget.

Then I drew a picture on the bottom:

And, yeah, she did think I was a pervert.

Chapter Twenty-Six

THIS TIME, I SHOWERED AFTER rugby. I put my school clothes back on and tied my necktie as neatly as I could. I even borrowed some cologne from Joey. I got some gel from Kevin Cantrell and put it in my hair and tried to comb it.

Everyone knew something was up.

This time, Casey Palmer and Nick Matthews weren’t waiting at the side of the football field as the guys came streaming down from the locker room.

I would have run on my way to O-Hall, but I didn’t want to get all sweaty before seeing Annie. I planned to just drop off my school books in my room so I wouldn’t have to carry my pack with me all the way to our stone circle.

O-Hall looked deserted when I got there. I guess I must have been the first boy back from school. Despite all the attention I’d paid to my clothes and hair, I’d still rushed to get out of the locker room and managed to make it back to O-Hall before anyone else. So when I opened the outer door to the mudroom and stairwell, I wasn’t expecting to see anyone; and this time, I did kind of squeal more than a little bit when I ran straight into the not-even-hot-on-Pluto Mrs. Singer.

And I don’t know why I was so terrified, but after that diarrhea spell I was convinced she’d laid on me, and the spontaneous bloody nose of the night before, I completely believed that she was determined to do something horrible to me, like turn me into her eunuch slave former-boy, or breathe poison into me.

Maybe that Hawthorne story was getting to me, I don’t know.

Our eyes met as I stood, petrified, at the bottom of the stairwell. And I don’t know where all my blood went, but I know it didn’t go anywhere I particularly cared about.

Then she said, “I am going to suck your fucking soul out through your eye sockets with my lampreylike tongue.”

Well, to be absolutely honest, she actually just said, “Oh, hello. It’s you again,” but I wasn’t about to stand there and listen to her demonic incantations. I was on a mission. I ran upstairs, wondering whether or not I should jump out the window so I wouldn’t have to see her again on my way down.

Damn! I was starting to sweat.

I threw my door open and tossed the book pack up onto my bunk.

I looked out the window, and I could see Chas, Joey, and Kevin returning from practice. At least I knew I wouldn’t have to jump, because Chas and Kevin’s souls were way more suckable than mine; they had to be much more liquefied, since they were forward-pack guys. But what sucked most of all was that just as I was about to leave so I could go meet Annie, Mr. Farrow appeared, blocking the doorway out of my room.

“Ryan Dean,” he said, “it looks as though you’re feeling much better today. Let’s have a chat, shall we?”

On second thought, I would rather have had my soul lamprey-sucked from my skull.

Mr. Farrow stood in the open doorway, just watching me like he was waiting for some kind of confession. My head spun, because there sure was a lot of crap I could potentially be confessing to, pulled from the Ryan Dean West record of the past forty-eight hours. So all I could do was try my best to look and sound innocent, and of course my voice cracked like a Cub Scout’s when I said, “Mr. Farrow, I’m supposed to meet someone before dinner. It’s about a homework assignment, and I’m afraid I’m going to be late.”

I heard the sound of the guys coming up the stairs.

“I’m concerned you may have gotten off to the wrong kind of start this semester, Ryan Dean.”

Oh, God. It sounded like he knew everything.

Now there’d be the inevitable call home; and next thing you knew, Ryan Dean West would be an ex-PM junior on a plane to Boston with a goddamned unaccompanied-minor-smiley-airplane-name-tag-that-says-hi-my-name-is-fucking-loser stuck to his skinny-bitch-ass-fourteen-year-old collar in the morning. I could only hope the stewardess in charge of feeding and toweling me off would be, well . . . five out of five steaming bowls of chowder on the Ryan Dean West In-Flight-Entertainment-Things-You-Don’t-Mind-Burning-Your-Tongue-On Heat Index.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Farrow. I can do better.”

“I expect you can, Ryan Dean, especially if we’ve set a goal of getting you placed back in the boys’ dorm by the semester break.”

It sounded like there was hope after all.

Now, careful, Ryan Dean. Don’t say too much.

“But as far as the food in the room and your two visitors last night are concerned,” Farrow said, “I think I’m going to have to put you on in-room detention.”

Which was even worse than being kicked out. It meant no Annie. No Megan Renshaw.

What a cruel deal it is to have been born with testicles, and to have to carry them around along with me on my miserable path through life. They may just as well have been the size of Volkswagens for the burden they had become.

I tried my hardest to make some tears pool in my eyes. Thinking about peeing usually does it for me; at least, it works on my parents.

“Please, Mr. Farrow,” I said. “I was really sick, but I forced myself to go through the entire . . .”

Think about peeing. Think about peeing.

“. . . first day of classes because I want to try so hard . . .”

Think about peeing. Think about peeing.

“. . . this year to show I can be better. But then I fell asleep . . .”

Think about peeing. Think about peeing.

“. . . and my friends were concerned, so they woke me up and brought some . . .”

Think about peeing. Think about peeing.

“. . . food.”

To kind-of quote Ovid: “Tears at times have the weight of speech.”

Just as the guys spilled noisily out from the stairwell, one perfect tear streaked down from the corner of my eye. And I quickly wiped it away, pretending I’d be embarrassed if the other guys had seen I was crying.

And I could see by Farrow’s pained expression that the time-tested and sparingly applied Ryan Dean West pee-tear scam worked beautifully.

Ryan Dean West, performance fucking artist.

“Please,” I added, so sweetly, like a bullfighter inserting the final estoque. I imagined the ultrahot and impassioned Annie and Megan throwing a shower of blooms at my feet, and I’d pick one up, smell it, and clench it between my teeth; and the impaled Mr. Farrow looked at the boys coming down the hall, then leaned close as though he were protecting my vulnerability, and whispered, “I’ll let it go this time, Ryan Dean. You just take care. Now run along.”

Yes!

And when I sailed through the hallway, past Joey, I raised my hand and slapped him with the hardest and loudest high five ever executed in the history of gay-straight high fivery, and said, “Thanks for the hair gel, Kevin. Thanks for the smells-good, Joey.”

And I flew down the stairs, not even slightly concerned that I’d run into that soul-sucking-and-so-unhot Mrs. Singer.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

ANNIE LAUGHED WHEN SHE SAW me. Her eyes squinted, full of water like they get when she laughs. She held the note I gave her in Lit class and waved it at me like a surrender flag.

“You are such a pervert, West. Babysit? Bathe?”

“ ‘Here, Beatrice,’ ” I said, quoting our Hawthorne story, “ ‘see how many needful offices require to be done to our chief treasure.’ ” And I swept my hand downward along my body and pointed.

To me.

She giggled. “Per-vert!”

“You would not believe the bullet I just dodged, Annie.”

We sat on a mossy and black tree trunk that had fallen down in some storm years before I’d ever entered Pine Mountain. I told Annie all about my run-in with Mr. Farrow, and how hard I worked, thinking about peeing, to make myself get a tear from one eye, and she laughed and leaned close to me, so close that we were almost touching. And, unfortunately, at that moment I realized that all my pee-mantra meditations with Mr. Farrow and the recounting of the story actually did make me want to pee, but I wasn’t about to move, either.

“I’ve never seen you with gel in your hair, West,” she said. And she leaned her face really close to my neck (I tipped just a little closer toward her, hoping her lips would touch me), and she inhaled and said, “And you smell like cologne.”

“I always wear this stuff,” I said, trying to sound as confident and masculine as possible, considering the magnitude of my certain and fourteen-year-old wimposity.

“Well, you look absolutely adorable,” she said.

I just stared at her soft knees, where they peeked out from beneath the perfect hem of her skirt.

I hate that word. “Adorable.” Especially the way Annie said it. Because it sounded like something any girl might say about a pink hoodie sweatshirt in a Hollister catalog, not something she’d say about a boy. Unless he was wearing diapers or drop-seat pajamas with feet on them and had a pacifier in his mouth, which kind of gave me a semiperverted idea for a Halloween costume I’d like to wear just for Annie. Okay . . . I’ll be honest. It wasn’t semi-, it was totally perverted.

I sighed.

“Thanks, Annie,” I said. “You look totally hot yourself. Want to make out now?”

Well, I didn’t actually say the “want to make out” part, but I sure wanted to say it. But just thinking it was a mistake, because I suddenly couldn’t think of anything else and found that, once again, Ryan Dean West’s brain was strained to its capacity with thinking of . . . well, sex. And, as usual, I couldn’t get my mind off of it, so I quickly drew up a brain-function chart in my bloodless head:

I am such a loser.

“Hey, Annie, did you really mean what you said when you told me that having me as a friend was the only thing you like about this school?”

“Well, I did like the smoothie I had at lunch today, but, yes. I do mean it.”

“Thanks.”

And I wanted to hold her hand so bad right then, but I was afraid. Can you imagine that? Yesterday I took down Casey Palmer, and today I was scared of touching a girl’s hand.

And I said, “Are you going back home this weekend?”

Annie’s parents lived near Seattle, so it was an easy trip.

“Yeah.”

“It sucks being here alone on the weekend. All my friends are gone,” I said. “Maybe one weekend you could stay, so we could do something together.”

She stood up, and we walked into the center of our Stonehenge, toward the spiral path.

“I know,” she said, “I’ll ask my parents if you can come home with me one weekend. That would be fun. They’ve been dying to meet you.”

Score!

“Have you told them about me?”

“Of course.”

I wondered what she’d said. If she made me sound like a pitiful little boy to them.

“Do you promise to ask them? This weekend, ask them, okay?”

“Okay.”

Suddenly, my brain was at 100 percent imagining spending a weekend with Annie at her house. I could have peed in my pants right then and not even known it.

We started following the spiral wish path toward the center.

I gulped.

I reached over and held her hand.

She held mine back.

We stopped walking, and Annie said, “Hey, West, are we holding hands?”

“Uh. Yeah.”

“Weird.”

“I know.”

“Want to let go?”

“No.”

“Okay.”

And that’s all she said. Okay. In that singing, relaxed kind of voice she had that made everything sound painless, like it didn’t matter, like there were no big deals anywhere in the universe.

When we walked back out of the path, she said, “What did you wish for?”

And I said, “I didn’t think you were supposed to tell.”

“Tell this one time.”

“Okay,” I said, “come here.”

And I led her over to where we’d been sitting on that log. I brushed the dirt on the ground flat with my brand new shoes and kneeled down. I drew two overlapping circles: a Venn diagram.

“That’s what I wished for, Annie.”

“It looks like a Venn diagram, West.”

“It is.” I put my finger in one of the circles. “These are all the boys here at Pine Mountain. We’re all almost totally the same. We dress the same, we all pretty much like the same stuff, we all play sports, and every one of us thinks you, Annie Altman, are totally hot.”

“Shut up.” She laughed.

I put my finger in the narrow crescent of the other circle, the outside part.

“And here’s Ryan Dean West. Well, at least, it’s the one tiny part of Ryan Dean West that makes him stand out as being so different, the only thing that everyone notices about him. The number fourteen. And you think that makes me so different, like I’m a little kid. But the thing is, everyone has that little part that’s outside the overlap of everyone else. And a lot of people zero in on that one little thing they can’t get over. Like for Joey, ’cause he’s gay, I guess. Some people are better than others about not getting that outside-the-overlap part so noticed, but not me. So that was my wish. What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” she said. She looked suddenly serious.

“I didn’t mean to make you feel bad,” I said. “Sorry. What was your wish?”

“Maybe I shouldn’t say.”

“No fair, Annie.”

“Seriously?”

“Serious.”

“I wished for you to get your wish.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

AFTER DINNER, JOEY AND I walked to the library with our Calculus books to meet Megan. I guess I didn’t feel right after seeing Annie out in the woods, like maybe I’d said too much and it was going to ruin our friendship now, so I was a little depressed and didn’t say anything to Joey.

I kept picturing those circles in my head. I hoped I’d made sense to Annie, that I didn’t sound like a whiny little crybaby. And I thought about Joey too, and how bad and terribly lonely he must feel sometimes; and that’s why I tried to always go out of my way to not notice the thing about him you couldn’t notice anyway.

We stayed in the library until they kicked us out, at nine forty-five. Megan looked so deliciously good, and she smiled so broadly when it finally all started coming back to her. I guess Joey and I counteracted the brain-loss effect caused by Chas Becker’s brilliance.

Megan walked us back to O-Hall, between Joey and me, with her arms locked inside each of ours. I will admit that twice I feigned tripping on a rock just so my right arm would brush against her breast, and that was awesome.

The performance artist was on the mark that day.

When we got back to O-Hall, Joey and I said good night to Megan and started for the door.

“Thank you boys so much for helping me,” Megan said. “You are such good friends, and I love you both.”

“No problem,” Joey said.

“Yeah.”

Then Megan stepped up to Joey and kissed him on the cheek, and I could see he kissed her back too, all suave and mannered, like he did that kind of stuff all the time. He pulled open the door to the mudroom, and Megan turned to me.

I thought I was actually going to die. Megan Renshaw, in all her smoking five-out-of-five-habanero hotness, was going to kiss me, Ryan Dean Never-Been-Kissed-by-Anyone-Who-Wasn’t-Alive-When-Sputnik-Got-Launched West.

I closed my eyes.

She put her hands on the sides of my jaw.

She kissed me right on the mouth.

AND SHE STAYED THERE.

I think she actually had to hold me up when she slipped her tongue past my lips.

Then she put her face to my ear and whispered, “I think you are really adorable.”

Okay . . . I’ll admit I no longer hated that word.

Then she whirled around and left us there.

In the stairwell, I gave Joey the all-time-record-breaking gay-straight high five.

And he said, “You don’t have to worry about me. I won’t tell Chas about you making out with Megan. He’s a douche bag, anyway, and you know he’d kill you for it.”