Winger

Chapter Twenty-Nine

BY THE FIRST WEEK OF october, it was freezing cold up there in the Cascades at Pine Mountain Academy. And things just continued along from day to day in their usual way.

We’d played poker a couple more times, always on Sunday nights, because that’s when the guys got back from their weekends. But I never drank beer again after that first time. Chas tried to make me do it, and I thought I was actually going to get into a certain-death-for-Ryan-Dean-West fistfight over it, but Joey got between us and let Chas know that he was ready to fight him about it too. I even lost again, the second time we played, and that time the guys made me swim across the lake in the middle of the night wearing only my boxers. It was so cold, I could hardly breathe, and I was convinced as I paddled through that liquid hell that Mrs. Singer was going to turn herself into a multitentacled monster and drag me down to her icy black lair.

In Lit class, we had finished reading Billy Budd, Foretopman, and I was convinced by that time that Mr. Wellins was some sort of pervert, because he believed that everything we read had something to do with sex. According to him, “Rappaccini’s Daughter” was about incest, and, he argued, Billy Budd was about homosexuality. Mr. Wellins said it didn’t matter what a writer intended his work to mean, that the only thing that mattered was what it meant to the reader, and I guess I could see his point, but I still thought he was a creepy old pervert. Anyway, I just thought Melville wrote a good story, but what do I know?

And by mid-October, Coach M had pretty much named the first fifteen on the rugby team. I kept my spot and my nickname, at number eleven, JP made fullback, Seanie made scrum half, and the rest of the team were the returning seniors from last year, including Chas, Kevin, and Joey. We were also getting ready to play our first preseason friendly match against Sacred Heart Catholic School in Salem. So, with that game coming up, we were all pretty damned excited and nervous.

And, on the topic of being excited and nervous, that night during the first week of school—the night I’d made out with Megan Renshaw—I remember that when I got back to my room, I could hardly face Chas. I felt like I had stolen something, but I felt damned good about it too. And after that, anytime Chas laid it on thick with his put-downs and threats, I’d just smirk and think to myself, Your girlfriend puts her tongue in my mouth and she likes it, and my smirk would piss off Chas even more because he had no idea why I had suddenly become so confident around him.

Megan Renshaw and I flirted constantly in Calc and Econ, and sometimes we’d get kind of perverted about it. Joey just watched it and laughed at us, and he never said anything to anyone, because that was the kind of guy Joey Cosentino was. But I was still kind of afraid of Megan, and had no misconceptions as to who was holding the power in our quirky relationship.

One time, she even followed me out of class when I left for the bathroom, and we made out for about thirty nonstop and frenzied seconds in a drinking fountain alcove, and then she just left me there, completely unable to walk to the bathroom, much less back to class.

I felt really weird about the whole fooling-around-with-steaming-hot-Megan-Renshaw thing. First of all, and I’ll be honest, I felt really guilty before and afterward. It was during, though, that I didn’t feel anything even close to guilt—when Megan had her mouth all over mine and let me slip my hand up inside her sweater. When that was going on, it definitely was not guilt that occupied my mind.

When I was away from her—and could think sanely, that is—if I wasn’t having any perverted fantasies about airline stewardesses or Halloween costumes, I felt terrible, because I knew I was being the same kind of asshole to Chas Becker that he was to everyone else; and I tried to do anything I could to not think about how Annie would feel if she found out about us.

It tore me up, except for the couple minutes here and there when Megan would sneak off and get that nasty-policewoman-who-wants-to-arrest-bad-Ryan-Dean look in her eyes, but I felt like there was nobody I could talk to about it. If I talked to JP and Seanie, everyone else would know. Shit, Seanie would make a website about it. I definitely couldn’t talk to Annie, because I knew I was being bad and doing something that was just plain wrong (even if I liked the occasional chance to play Bad Ryan Dean). The only person I could talk to about it, of course, was Joey, who was gay.

I tried asking Megan about it, but she played me off. I got the impression she really did like me, which made me feel worse about Annie. In the end, it just seemed to me that Megan Renshaw was the kind of girl who only wanted a Chas Becker trophy mate because all the other girls at Pine Mountain wanted him. It was a game to Megan, and I felt sorry for how sad and lonely she was going to end up.

The Monday before the team took the bus to Salem to play, Joey and I walked back to O-Hall together after practice.

“Oh. I’ve been meaning to ask you, Ryan Dean,” Joey began, “what’s the deal with that Casey Palmer website? I didn’t think he was so . . . extroverted, I guess, but I could be wrong.”

Score. I had succeeded in making Joey look at Seanie’s balls.

This was, indeed, the stuff of future epic sonnets.

“I only heard about it,” I said. “I haven’t seen it.”

“Oh, sure,” he said, and laughed, like he didn’t believe me. “Then why are there so many comments posted by you on there about how gay Casey is?”

Seanie. Even when you think you’ve caught up with him, you realize he’s always pushing it a step further.

“Seanie Flaherty’s a dick,” I said.

Joey laughed.

I sighed.

And Joey said, “You guys shouldn’t mess around with Casey Palmer’s ego. I’ve seen that guy do some pretty crazy shit.”

“Like what?” I said.

“He flips out. He can hurt guys,” Joey said.

“Oh.” I shrugged. “I’ll tell Seanie to lay off. He won’t listen, though.”

“Seanie never does.”

“Joey, I need to ask you. You’re the only guy I can talk to about this, and it’s really bugging me. What do you think I should do about Megan?”

“You’re going to do whatever you want to do, it looks like. Or, whatever she wants you to do,” Joey said.

“Someone’s going to find out.”

“Bound to,” he agreed.

“Really. I don’t care what Chas does to me if he finds out, ’cause I do deserve it. I just think it’s unfair to treat a guy like that, even if it’s Chas, but especially if we’re on the same team. But I really do like Megan. She’s supersmart. And she is so freakin’ hot.”

“Ryan Dean, I know you’d feel terrible if someone you care about ended up getting hurt over this.”

“Like Annie.”

“Exactly. And, anyway, don’t you love Annie or something?” Joey asked.

“Dude, I am so insanely in love with Annie Altman that I can’t even think straight. No gay pun intended.”

Joey smiled.

“Well, obviously you can’t think, straight or otherwise,” Joey said. “That’s why you’re messing around with Megan.”

Then Joey stopped walking, and he looked directly at me. He looked pissed off, too. “It’s one thing to be an asshole to Betch. He deserves it. But why would you hurt Annie? Why don’t you fucking grow up, Ryan Dean? At the very least, you have to talk to Annie about it. She is your best friend, isn’t she?”

I stopped in my tracks.

I had never been told off like that by Joey.

It stung.

And he said, “Sorry.”

“No, Joe. You’re right.” I sighed.

We started walking again. “How come you don’t have these problems?”

“Are you fucking stupid, Ryan Dean?”

I pushed him. “Just kidding, Joey.”

Joey smiled, and I said, “But you know, I really don’t get this liking-boys-better-than-girls thing. No offense, ’cause you know I’d like you the same, no matter what. I just don’t get it.”

“Ryan Dean?”

“What?”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“Okay.”

I am such a loser.

No matter what Megan offered, or tempted me with, I never got over being totally crazy for the totally hot Annie Altman. And playing with Megan was like playing with a rattlesnake. Well, a smoking-hot rattlesnake. With incredible boobs. That Ryan Dean West had actually touched.

I knew Joey was right.

I had to stop.

Chapter Thirty

ANNIE KEPT THE PROMISE SHE’D made that day we told each other our wishes at Stonehenge. Her parents had spoken to mine, so Annie and I got tickets to fly up to Seattle together on Friday after school. I was going to spend the weekend at my best friend’s house. And every time I’d almost get up enough courage to ask where I’d be sleeping (and what I should wear, since I don’t have any drop-seat pajamas with feet on them—in fact, I don’t have any pajamas at all), hoping she’d say something ultrahot like, “On the couch in my room,” to which she might add, parenthetically, “And I believe that sleep is something that should only be done while completely naked,” my throat knotted up and my ears turned red. God! What a dork I am.

It was blissful and it was terrifying at the same time. And as I made my way through the week, I just stumbled around in the stupidest kind of daze.

I fantasized about our first game and the prospect of receiving just the perfect degree of injury so Annie would want to play the naughty nurse all weekend long as I lay on her couch, naked, in constant need of sponge baths and hernia exams. At 1,492 total thought episodes per day, it was my Columbus-discovers-perversion fantasy.

So of course it was next to impossible to concentrate at all on schoolwork while keeping meticulous tallies of my impure thoughts, much less for me to listen to Mr. Wellins blather on and on about sex, because, now that I look at it, every single thought in my head—Annie, Megan, Chas, the game—all, in some way, had something to do with sex. So maybe Wellins was right after all, that everything does have something to do with sex, even though I found his argument about the underlying sexual themes in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court to be a bit of a stretch, and totally perverted, too.

Hello, Central![1]

I mean, come on!

Annie and I met for lunch at school that day. It was Tuesday; two days before the game, three days before the weekend that I hoped would change my life. JP and Seanie sat across the table from us, and I was between Annie and Isabel, which was kind of hot because Isabel kept brushing up against me, and, even though there wasn’t really room for it in my head, I imagined Annie and her having a warrior-princess-fight-to-the-death for breeding rights with me. I noticed Seanie was particularly fascinated by Isabel’s faint fuzzy moustache. Joey, who almost never sat with the other seniors, was with us too.

“Do you guys know that this weekend West is coming to my house for two days?” Annie announced.

I hadn’t told anyone. I noticed Joey glanced at me with a have-you-told-Megan-yet look on his face.

Seanie kicked me under the table and raised his hand.

“High five, Winger,” he said. He slapped my hand over our burritos, and I watched Annie’s expression to see if that was the wrong thing to do. Seanie added, “Why does this remind me of salmon swimming upstream to spawn and die?”

I thought about my white, bloated corpse floating in Puget Sound. At least I imagined I had a contented smile on my face. Fins and gills, too.

“Probably because you’re a sick freak,” Annie answered.

“You know, Annie, Ryan Dean doesn’t wear pajamas. So . . . where’s he going to sleep?” Seanie asked.

“Probably on the couch,” she said.

OH MY GOD! YES!

I know . . . she didn’t say which couch, but I figured I was halfway home. Just hearing her answer, so comfortably and honestly, caused yet another of my chronic blood-and-attention-migration episodes, and I nearly jerked my hand skyward for another high five with Seanie, but controlled the urge.

“Stop being such a pervert, Seanie,” JP said.

“You’re just in denial that you weren’t thinking the same thing, even if it was about permavirgin Ryan Dean,” Seanie said.

Permavirgin?

The moment had come to strike swiftly. I kicked Seanie’s shin and brushed up against Annie’s thigh in the process. Two scores at once.

“Speaking of perverts, what did you think about Casey Palmer’s MySite, Joey?” I asked. My voice cracked again. I am such a dork.

“Pretty sick,” Joey said.

“It’s nasty,” Annie added.

“You’ve seen it too?” I said.

I saw Seanie turning red. He also looked really pissed off at me. Oh, well, that’s what he gets.

And Annie said, “You told me to check it out, West, so I did. And it’s gross. What do you expect from a football player, anyway? It’s probably the only way he can get someone to look at those small, pitiful things.”

Despite Seanie’s tortured expression, I found myself suddenly thinking about the deeper meaning of the last statement Annie had made there.

Yeah. I know. I’m such a loser.

“Are you okay, Ryan Dean?” JP asked.

“Huh?”

“Dude, you looked like you were sleeping with your eyes open for the last five minutes,” he said. “Didn’t you hear anything I said?”

“About what?”

“Halloween.”

“Oh,” I said, “what did you say?”

And I thought, did I accidentally babble something about what I’d like to wear for Annie?

“About the dance,” Seanie said.

Halloween was coming up on the Thursday after our game.

Whenever Halloween fell during the week, since we were so isolated, Pine Mountain would have a dinner dance. I hadn’t even thought about it, beyond my perverted fantasy about Annie, but it suddenly dawned on me that I couldn’t go. Pine Mountain’s rules did not allow O-Hall boys to attend such events.

“Me and Annie are going together,” JP said.

Okay. I really wanted to cuss. But I didn’t.

I felt my eyes get big, and a little watery. I looked at Annie with a what-the-fuck-is-he-talking-about look on my face, but she just looked perfectly normal; perfectly, hotly, matter-of-fact Annie.

I looked at JP. “What?”

“Dude. You don’t want her going alone, do you?”

I looked at Annie again.

“No. You’re right.”

I stood up. My head was spinning, and I felt like I was going to end up on my face. I needed to get out of there. Now I knew what it meant, all those times I noticed JP looking at her, watching me, too. I wanted to kick his fucking head in right there, so I just left. I went for the doors and stepped out into the cold afternoon.

And I could hear her calling, in her I’m-singing-a-song voice, all relaxed and sweet, “West? West? What’s wrong now?” But I didn’t even turn around.

Joey came after me.

“Hey,” he said. “Are you okay?”

“I cannot believe that crap, Joey.”

“It’s just Annie and JP. It’s no big deal,” Joey said.

I was practically crying, but there was no way I was going to cry in front of a gay guy, even if he was my friend.

“I can’t believe he’d do that to me,” I said. “We’re supposed to be friends. Why would he do that?”

“You know what, Ryan Dean? You’re a fucking hypocrite. So now what are you going to do?”

And Joey turned around and walked back into the mess hall.

Chapter Thirty-One

RUGBY PRACTICE CAME. IT WOULD be our last hard practice before the game.

I wanted to hit someone. I wanted to get hurt, too.

After two hours of running drills, backline plays, and conditioning, we were all of us covered in sweat and grass and mud. It was the toughest practice we’d had all year, and Coach M told us he wasn’t going to let us play a game, which is how we usually ended, because he didn’t want to see us making any mistakes.

Instead we ended with a resistance drill we called Sumo, a one-on-one drill where a ball carrier had to drive the ball in and touch it down to a very small circle in the grass against one tackler. And the drill would not stop until the ball got there, no matter what; so there have been times when I’ve actually seen guys collapse from exhaustion if they couldn’t get the ball in against a very tough tackler.

After we’d gone about halfway through the team, Kevin ended up in the middle, as the tackler against Chas. It was an intense fight. They were equal in size and strength, and Kevin just kept taking Chas down, inches before he could touch the ball into the circle, taunting Chas and pissing him off.

Finally, I think Kevin either got tired or felt sorry for Chas, because Chas slipped his arm through and got the ball down into the circle, diving onto his belly as he did and saying, “Fuck you, Kevin.”

Then Kevin helped him up to his feet, and I looked at Coach M, who seemed to be pretending he didn’t hear Chas cuss.

Now Chas was in the middle, and the way we play is that the guy in the middle gets to call out whoever he wants to have run against him.

I already knew who I’d call when I got a chance.

Chas looked around the circle of our dirty and tired teammates, and he bullet passed the ball to me and said, “Winger.”

What a jerk.

I smiled.

Chas stood in front of the small circle in the grass and crouched in a hitting position, just staring at me. I took two steps toward him and stopped. He was so flat on his feet, I knew he wouldn’t be able to touch me. I head-faked, then cut back the other way and sailed around him, touching the ball down without Chas even wiping a finger’s width of sweat off me.

The guys on the team laughed at Chas, murmuring “Betch,” and he turned to me and mouthed, “Fuck you,” in a whisper so Coach couldn’t hear.

Now I had the ball. Normally, I’d call out Bags, one of our other wings, because we were about the same size, even though he was older, but I’d made my mind up ahead of time that if I got the ball, there was one guy who’d have to run against me.

“Sartre,” I said.

Everyone had to figure this would be no contest, that a guy who was built with JP’s strength and drive would be able to stay low and plow right through me, that I had to be insane for calling out our fullback.

I heard a bunch of low-toned “oooh”s from the guys, and I threw the ball at JP, low, at his knees, so he had to bend down to catch it. It was a dick move; I’ll admit it. Because I took off as fast as the ball, and as soon as it was in his hands, I flew, shoulder first, into JP’s legs and twisted my body as I wrapped him up and drove him into the ground.

“Fuck,” JP grunted as I hit him.

Springing to my feet, I pushed myself up by putting my left hand firmly down into his nuts, and JP groaned and doubled up, letting go of the ball. When he tried to scoop the ball back in, I hacked it out of his hand, kicking his fingers as I did. I know this was dirty, but I was pissed off at JP and now, I’m sure, he knew it too; because he had to get up and chase after the ball and try to run it in again.

JP broke through the circled boys who stood watching us. When he ran to get the ball I’d kicked, I followed right behind him. I noticed that Coach M was moving toward us on the outside of the Sumo ring. He looked amused.

As soon as JP had his fingers on the ball, I took him down again, this time pulling his jersey up out of his shorts and dragging him with it until it was fully inside out and covering his head. We were about ten feet out of the ring now, and the guys opened a gateway for JP to run through so he could get to the score. If he could make it past me.

JP stood up, leaving the ball at his feet as he tucked his jersey back into his shorts.

There were streaks of grass and black mud on his face.

“What the fuck, Ryan Dean?”

“Watch your mouth, JP,” Coach M warned. He added, “Nice job, Eleven.”

I don’t think I’d ever been so physically aggressive in my life, but all I could think about was JP and his smug I’m-taking-your-girlfriend-out announcement over lunch, and how Annie told me to get tough this year. So I was sick of this shit, of being treated like a little kid, especially by my best friends, and I wasn’t going to let it keep on happening to me.

“Trick or treat, assbreath,” I said.

I’m certain Coach M had to think about that one, and, since he didn’t say anything, he must have concurred with me that “assbreath” is not a true cuss word.

JP smiled. “Oh. I get it. Okay, Winger. Happy Halloween to you, too.”

Now it was clear to everyone. JP and I were in a full-scale fight, the only kind you could possibly get away with at PM.

He ran at me again, but this time he slipped my tackle and I fell, managing only to wrap the crook of my arm tightly around his left ankle. I rolled, and JP fell on top of me, dropping his knees (on purpose, I’m sure, but it was totally fair for him to do it) right into my back. It felt like he broke my ribs, but as he went down JP dropped the ball, and his left cleat came right off his foot and into my hands.

I got to my feet. I was sweating and in pain. I could feel my heart drumming against the bones inside my chest. I knew I was just about finished, that I couldn’t keep JP out of the circle much longer and he was getting really pissed off about it.

I think what probably pushed him over the edge was that, as he was getting up again, I threw his cleat as far as I could down the pitch and some of the guys laughed.

I could hear Seanie saying, “JP’s Winger’s bitch,” and the guys laughed even more.

JP stood there, panting, the ball tucked into his arms. He looked to where I’d thrown his cleat, then he looked back at me, not even a hint of friendship in his expression, then he got low, put his head down, and wearing only one shoe, came at me full speed.

When I hit him from the front, JP went straight into my tackle and landed squarely on top of me. He went down, too, but he brought his knee up into my face and I heard something pop—like stepping on a grape—when he hit my eye. I remember hearing the “ooh”s from the guys when I sat up, and as I tried to get to my feet I saw a blurry red image of JP scoring behind me, and the next thing I knew, Seanie and Joey were there, putting their hands against my shoulders and telling me not to stand up.

Everyone began crowding around me.

I looked down at my lap. I was covered in blood, could feel it pulsing down my face and onto my jersey, splattering my muddy legs.

Coach M kneeled beside me. “Let’s have a look,” he said. I realized my left eye was closed for some reason, so I turned my head to look at him.

“That’s going to need stitches,” he said.

And then Seanie was right in my face, saying, “You can see his skull! You can see his skull!”

Which is probably just about the last thing you want to hear at a time like that, even if Seanie did sound overjoyed by the discovery.

I started to lie down, but they wouldn’t let me. The physio was there, wrapping gauze and tape like a headband tightly around my pulsing head, over my left eye. Then Seanie and Joey each took an arm and helped me to my feet.

I was sore and dizzy, but I willed myself not to collapse.

I remember Coach M telling them to put me in the cart and drive me down the hill to the doctor’s, and I saw JP standing in front of me, holding the cleat I’d thrown.

“Hey. Sorry, Ryan Dean.”

“Yeah. Whatever.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

IT TOOK EIGHTEEN STITCHES TO close the cut across my eyebrow, some inside the skin, and some outside. But the cut itself wasn’t that big. The doctor let me look at the stitches in a mirror when he was finished, but I mostly paid attention to how horrible the rest of me looked. I was filthy and damp and covered with blackened crusty blood that clotted on my skin and in my hair.

Seanie and Joey stayed there with me while the doctor stitched me up, but he wouldn’t let them stand too close when he was doing the actual sewing part. I didn’t say a word the whole time I was there; all I could do was think about JP and Annie and how mad I was.

Then the doctor left the room, and his exceedingly five-out-of-five-possible-fruit-arrangements-on-your-head-in-a-Brazilian-dancer-kind-of-way-on-the-Ryan-Dean-West-Samba-mometer nurse came in and asked me to lay my head back on the pillow.

“Let’s take off that bloody shirt,” she said, so sweetly. “Here. Raise your arms.”

And—oh my God—she had a stainless-steel basin of warm damp towels with her!

She pulled my jersey up out of my shorts and lifted it, so gently, over my head. When it was all the way off, I quickly looked around the room to see if my great-grandma and that run-over Chihuahua were present. I was convinced I had died and gone to a much, much better place.

Thank God for compression shorts.

“Boiiing!” Seanie said.

I had to laugh. “Shut up.”

You know, I sometimes disappoint myself. Because at that moment, if anyone had asked me about Annie, I know I would have said, “Who is that?”

“Does it hurt?” she asked. She softly swiped a warm towel around my face and began rubbing my hair clean with a second wet towel.

I tried to look extra sad. “Just a little.”

I lied. I couldn’t feel it at all.

“Aww,” she said.

If I was a cat, I would have purred.

If I was an alligator, I would have been hypnotized.

But since I was only me, all I could do was lie there and contemplate everything perverted I had ever dreamed about since I was, like, seven years old.

She dropped the first blood-rusted towels onto a tray by the bed and grabbed two more. She wiped off my neck and shoulders. She sponge bathed me where blood had dried on my chest and belly, right down to the waistband of my shorts. She even toweled off the thin hair in my armpits, which kind of tickled, but there was no way I was about to giggle. And I wanted to close my eyes, but I couldn’t stop staring at her extreme hotness. Then she gently wiped the blood from my knees and up my thighs, all the way to where my compression shorts ended, and at that point I got so flustered, I began hiccupping.

I am such a loser.

She put all the dirty towels in a pile beside the bed and said, “Now you look perfectly handsome again. There’s no concussion, so you won’t have to stay here tonight . . . .”

Damn. Uh . . . you look pretty good yourself.

“. . . but you’ll need to take it easy . . .”

I can’t move right now anyway.

“We’ll call your parents and let them know. Would you like to speak with them?”

NO!

“Uh.” Hiccup. Crap. “Just tell them”—hic!—“I’m okay.”

“Do you have any clothes you can put on?”

No, you better take the rest of these dirty things off me. I don’t mind.

“We can get his stuff from the locker room,” Joey said.

Shut up!!!

“That’s so sweet of you. Thank you,” she said, then she bundled up the towels and threw them into a hamper by the door as she left. “I’ll be right back, boys.”

“Dude,” Seanie said. “That was like watching a porn flick. Nurses Gone Wild.”

“Ugh.” I closed my eyes and dropped my arms out from the sides of my bed. “I thought I was going to lose”—hic—“con . . . consciousness. Please tell me that really happened just now.”

“All I can say is, no matter what, I’m cracking my skull open tomorrow,” Seanie said. “And if you want me to, Ryan Dean, I can go get her and tell her she missed a spot.”

“Oh my God. Would you do that for me, Seanie?”

“Dude, you are such a perv for a little guy.”

I laughed.

The door opened again and Coach M came in, carrying my clothes from the locker room on a hanger he held over his shoulder. He had my shoes and book bag in his other hand.

“I brought these for you, Ryan Dean,” he said. “Save you an unnecessary trip.”

“Thank you, Coach.” I sat up, dangling my feet over the side of the bed. Before the door swung shut, I could see that there were a number of guys from the team, showered and changed back into their school clothes, waiting outside. Knowing they had come made me feel really good, but not as good as that warm-towel session did.

“And thanks to you two for looking after your mate,” Coach M said to Joey and Seanie. “Here, let’s see that.”

I tilted my chin back so Coach could have a good look at my stitches.

“Welcome to the Zipper Club, Ryan Dean,” he said. That’s what rugby guys said when they got stitches.

“Flaherty,” Coach M said, “why don’t you go back to the showers and get dressed. I want to speak with Ryan Dean and his captain.”

“Will you be able to make it to dinner?” Seanie asked me.

“I’ll be there.”

Seanie left. I could hear him talking to the guys outside as his metal cleats clacked against the shiny infirmary floor.

I began changing into my clothes. I pulled off my shorts. Right about now, I thought, it would be really cool if that nurse came back.

“You can’t get those sutures wet,” Coach said.

“They told me,” I answered. “Eighteen stitches. But no concussion.”

I knew where this was going. If I’d gotten a concussion, I’d be off the roster for a long time.

“I’ve never seen you hit like that before, Ryan Dean,” Coach said. “That was inspired, to say the least. Is there something going on between you and Tureau you’d like to tell me about?”

I was stuck. I’d have to tell the truth, especially in front of Joey. And Coach M did not tolerate fighting among the team. He’d probably have to kick me off, and I probably deserved it. I changed my socks and began buttoning my dress shirt, avoiding their eyes, trying to think of how I’d say it.

I felt sick. Maybe it showed in my eyes.

I said, “Coach, JP and I . . .”

Joey interrupted. “Were just seeing how hard they could go. And Ryan Dean proved why he belongs in the first fifteen, Coach.”

“Oh. I thought I picked up on something else going on there.”

“Ryan Dean and JP are best friends, Coach.”

Now, that was going a little too far, I thought. I looked at Joey and then at Coach. I pulled my pants on and began knotting my necktie.

Coach M turned to Joey. “Who can play left wing on Thursday?”

“I can,” I interrupted before Joey could answer.

“I can’t let you play like that, Ryan Dean. What would I tell your parents if you hurt yourself again?”

“You’d tell them what they already know. It’s part of the game. Please, Coach. I don’t have a concussion. I’ll prewrap it and tape it up. Guys do it all the time. It’s no big deal. I really want to play, sir.”

I wasn’t going to do the fake-tears thing. I could bring real ones up at the thought of being benched for our first game.

“I want Ryan Dean in my line, sir. He’s our best wing. You know that,” Joey said.

Note to self: In your prayers tonight, be sure to thank God for making (a) that unbelievably hot nurse, (b) compression shorts, and (c) Joey Cosentino.

“I’ll have to think about it,” Coach said. Then he went to the door, cracked it open, and called out, “JP?”

JP came in, walking slowly, looking down. I could tell he felt bad, but I didn’t care about his feelings, anyway. Why would I? He didn’t care enough about mine. He held his hand out, and we shook. Coach wouldn’t have made him do that if he didn’t already know we’d been fighting.

“I’m sorry, Ryan Dean.”

“You already said that on the field, JP,” I said. I slipped my feet into my school shoes. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Coach.”

I grabbed my cleats and the rest of my bloody practice clothes, threw my pack over my shoulder, and quietly walked out without turning back once.

Chapter Thirty-Three

I WAS ALMOST BACK TO O-Hall when I heard someone running up toward me from behind. I didn’t care who it was. Because once again, now that I was alone in the quiet beside the lake, all the anger and frustration over Annie and JP, and my possibly sitting out of the game, came swirling back through my aching head.

It felt like JP was trying to ruin my life in every way possible.

“What’s your fucking problem, Ryan Dean?”

I should have known it was JP behind me.

I thought about just going on into Opportunity Hall. He wouldn’t follow me there, not after getting in trouble for it the first week of school. But I stopped and turned to face him.

He was out of breath, panting fog in the cold as he caught up to where I stood.

“You know what this is about, JP,” I said. And then I really did cuss. “Fuck off.”

I turned around, thinking how stupid those words actually sounded coming from my mouth. It almost made me want to laugh, hearing myself say something like that, which is kind of hard for me to understand, because I don’t have a problem writing words like that.

I started walking toward the door again.

“You want to have it out right now?” JP said. “No one’s around. You want to fight again?”

I just kept walking and ignored him.

“Fuck you, Ryan Dean.”

I opened the door.

I went inside.

Chapter Thirty-Four

AT DINNER, I SAT ALONE at a table full of kids I didn’t even know. They were freshmen. They were all my age. And I didn’t understand them at all. It was like they were from a different planet entirely.

This is how much of a loser I am: I am such a loser that I don’t even fit in with other kids who are exactly my age.

Annie, JP, Seanie, Joey, along with everyone else, were sitting where we all usually sit, the way teenagers do, but I didn’t go over there. I was tired, sore, and pissed off, and I wanted to be left alone, exiled to this other world I didn’t know. As far as I could tell, my friends didn’t even know I was there, anyway.

I just kept my head down and ate my dinner. The freshmen around me probably thought I was a new kid or something. I could hear, a couple times, one of them say, “Who’s that kid?”

“Hey.”

I felt a hand on my shoulder. I lifted my head and saw Megan standing behind me.

“I heard you got hurt,” she said.

“I did.”

It felt so good just to look at her, to feel the way her hand rested on my shoulder.

I glanced around to see if Chas was anywhere in sight. And, of course, I saw Joey, across the room, watching us. I looked away. I didn’t want to hear it, what I knew he was thinking.

“Let me see.”

Megan sat down beside me. I felt all the eyes of the freshman boys on us, like they were wondering if she was my older sister, or maybe a teacher, or a cop coming to arrest me, because there was no way a girl who looked like Megan Renshaw should be sitting there next to someone like me.

“I think stitches are sexy,” she said when I turned my face to her.

I almost choked on a crouton.

She had that look in her eyes like she was going to pin me down on the table and make out with me right there in front of the whole school. She touched the stitches over my eye.

“Are you okay?”

“You shouldn’t be doing this, Megan,” I whispered.

“What? Making sure my friend’s okay?”

“Come on, Megan. No girl here at Pine Mountain cares about me. I’m not a prize like Chas Becker. You can stop being nice now.”

“Is that what you think, Ryan Dean?”

She dropped her hand down onto my knee and rubbed my leg.

Stop looking at me, Joey!

“Hey, Meg. Where you been?”

Chas appeared out of nowhere, standing right next to me like the tree I was about to be lynched from. And Megan just left her hand on my leg, and I know Chas saw it, but she innocently said, “Did you see Ryan Dean’s eye?”

Chas lowered his face so that it was mere inches from my nose. He looked real serious. He looked like he could kill me and not even think twice about it.

“How many stitches, Winger?” he asked.

“Eighteen.”

“Looks like you won’t be playing.” He said it like he wasn’t just talking about the game.

“I can still play.” My voice cracked. Loser. What was I doing? I felt like I was facing off in a gunfight.

Chas didn’t move. He stayed there, staring at me.

“Everyone says you’re in a fight with Sartre.”

“I am.”

“You really do got big balls, kid. You better watch it.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Chas straightened. “C’mon, Meg. Let’s go sit at the big kids’ table.”

Megan patted my leg and stood. “Don’t forget, Ryan Dean. Tomorrow. Calculus in the library. You and Joey. Okay?”

I tried to say “okay,” but nothing would come out. I squeaked like a doggie chew toy in Megan Renshaw’s unyielding pit bull teeth.

And Chas practically pulled Megan away, leading her off to where the seniors were sitting. But I saw him turn his face over his shoulder and look at me once, and I’ll be honest, it scared me. I considered scrawling a makeshift will on the back of a napkin, but as I took mental inventory of my life’s possessions, I realized no one would want them anyway.

I was as good as dead now.

Images of my funeral again: both Annie and Megan looking so hot in black; Joey shaking his head woefully and thinking how he told me so; JP and Chas high-fiving each other in the back pew; Seanie installing a live-feed webcam in my undersize casket; and Mom and Dad disappointed, as always, that I left this world a loser alcoholic virgin with eighteen stitches over my left eye.

“What the fuck are you doing all alone over here in loserland, Ryan Dean? How hard did you hit your head?”

Seanie pulled the chair out across from me and sat down. Annie stood behind him. No one else.

“I didn’t want to talk to anyone.”

I could see by the way Annie tilted her head that she was trying to look at the cut or trying to look at my eyes, but I didn’t really want her to. As much as I wanted to just see her and nothing else on this whole weird planet, I felt so terrible about everything that had happened to me and the shitty things I had done to myself that I just couldn’t bring myself to face her.

Seanie tapped the shoulder of the freshman boy who was sitting beside him. “Hey. Kid. Move so she can sit down.”

The boy picked up his tray and moved farther down the length of the table.

“By the way,” Seanie said as Annie took the vacated seat, “I forgot to tell you, I liked the ‘Trick or treat, assbreath’ comment at practice.”

I sighed.

Sometimes I just wanted to grab Seanie by the neck and shake him.

I was finished eating. I really wanted to leave. Then Annie reached across the table and lifted my chin with her soft hand. I know that Annie had touched me before—how could it be avoided? Friends touch. But it never felt like that. And she held my head there and looked at the cut above my eye, then she just looked right into my eyes and we didn’t blink or anything. I don’t know what I looked like to her, because I don’t think there was any expression on my face at all, and it didn’t matter. All we could see were each other’s eyes.

“Wow,” Seanie said. “This is one heavy moment. Are you two getting ready to make out or something? ’Cause if you are, it’s about time.”

Annie pulled her hand away, and I looked down.

“Are you okay, West?” she asked.

“Yeah. I’m fine.”

“You still planning on coming to my house this weekend?”

Nothing, especially not John-Paul Tureau, could stop me.

“Is it okay if I do?”

I was scared she’d say no.

“Best friends,” she said. “It’s going to be fun.”

“Best friends.”

Then she stood and left us there. It was getting late, and most of the students were making their way back to the dorms. I was so glad she didn’t say anything else, anything about JP.

She didn’t have to.

“Damn,” Seanie said. “Why don’t you just get it over with and fucking kiss her, Ryan Dean?”

“Shut up, Seanie. Annie knows what’s going on.”

“Everyone on the planet knows what’s going on. Except you.”

“Seanie?”

“What?”

“Thanks for not saying nothing about JP and me.”

“There’s nothing to say.”

Chapter Thirty-Five

I WAS AFRAID THAT JOEY would be waiting outside when I headed back to O-Hall. I didn’t want to hear him lecture me about Megan again. But there wasn’t anyone there, and I walked along the trail by the lake in the dark alone.

I got lectured anyway.

I stopped by the shore so I could just stare out at the blackness of the lake, and that’s where I got that arguing and taunting voice in my head that went something like this:

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: Now what are you going to do about Megan?

RYAN DEAN WEST 1: What are you going to do about Megan—times infinity?

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: You are such a loser.

RYAN DEAN WEST 1: And she’s so five out of five Space Needles on the Ryan Dean West Reasons-Why-Male-Architects-Design-Structures-Shaped-Like-That-in-the-First-Place Hall of Fame.

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: You must spend a lot of time thinking up perverted stuff.

MR. WELLINS: Proof that sex actually does motivate everything.

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: Sex doesn’t even exist in Ryan Dean West’s universe. Not even in the architecture. Everything is skinny-ass-bitch flat and flabby.

MR. WELLINS: Good point. Maybe I need to go fine-tune my theory.

RYAN DEAN WEST 1: Hey! How did an old pervert end up in my play?

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: Your head is a freaking watering hole in the desert of purity for all things perverted. So . . . back to the issue at hand: You know what you got to do about Megan. So do it.

MRS. KURTZ: Don’t forget your study group tomorrow night, Ryan Dean!

RYAN DEAN WEST 1: Ugh.

(Ryan Dean West throws a rock out into the lake.)

ANNIE: What are you doing, Ryan Dean?

Oh, wait . . . that was real.

“What are you doing, Ryan Dean?”

And she called me Ryan Dean.

“Nothing. I was just thinking.”

I turned around and looked at her.

She was so beautiful, standing there in the dark. I kept thinking about what Seanie had said—about why I didn’t just get it over with and kiss her. I mean, what’s the worst that could happen, right? We’ve known each other for more than two years, and I’ve only held her hand a couple times. God! I wanted to kiss her so bad, but I didn’t have the guts.

I am such a loser.

“What are you thinking about?”

I smiled. “God, Annie. Don’t you know me by now?”

She laughed. “Oh, yeah. You are so perverted, Ryan Dean.”

Wow. She called me that twice.

And I could see the real smile in her eyes. I loved that about her.

She touched her fingers to her eyebrow, like I was a mirror or something. “Does that hurt?”

“Not really.”

“You’re mad at me, aren’t you?”

“Kind of.” I sighed. “It’s stupid. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

“Seanie said you and JP were really in a fight.”

I looked out at the lake. I didn’t want to talk about this with Annie.

“I’m going to be in trouble if I don’t check in at O-Hall in, like, two minutes, Annie.”

“Come on,” she said. Then she held my hand and walked me to my dorm.

We stopped in the dark outside the mudroom door.

“Good night, Annie.”

She didn’t let go of my hand.

“Wait,” she said. “Don’t be mad at me, Ryan Dean. I’m so looking forward to this weekend. Please don’t be mad at me.”

And I thought, Crafty girl almost sounds like I did when I fake-cried for Mr. Farrow.

“Okay, Annie.”

Then she got real close to me. Her unbuttoned jacket even tickled, brushing against the zipper on my pants, and I suddenly forgot everything in the world about JP and stitches, or anything else that existed at an altitude higher than my waist besides Annie Altman. Our lips were just inches apart, and I could feel her heat and smell that awesome stuff she uses on her hair, and I thought, Oh my God, she is finally going to kiss me. We are finally going to kiss, and this is going to be the best thing I’ve ever felt and tasted in my entire pathetic life, and I knew we were going to kiss; and just then the door opened and the glacially unhot Mrs. Singer stuck her head out and said, “Young man, you are going to be late if you do not check in with your resident counselor immediately!”

And that was like a Niagara Falls of razor-sharp ice cubes pouring right through the fly on my pants. Oh . . . and some of those ice cubes were shaped like rusty bear traps and triple fishhooks, too.

She had to be a witch.

Annie released my hand and turned away.

“See you, West,” she said.

I sighed. The biggest part of me wanted to go after her and just get it over with, like Seanie told me, but my only chance was gone, and Mrs. Singer stood there watching me, unblinking, holding the door propped open against the cold and dark.

Do not look into her eyes.

As I passed Mrs. Singer, I kept my eyes on the floor, unwilling to battle the soul-sucking-diarrhea-spell-casting witch that she was. Then I felt her arctic fingers on my shoulder, and she said, “Your head would happen to look nice on a serving platter.”

And I squeaked like a frightened baby mouse and hurried for the stairs.

Well, to be perfectly honest, I am pretty sure she said, “What happened to your head? Is something the matter?” But that could just have been part of the spell-thing-whatever-it-is she’d been working on me ever since she caught me peeing in the girls’ bathroom. And as I made my way up the darkened stairway, she said either “You better be afraid” or “Why are you afraid?” But, again, I can’t be sure which it was, to be totally honest. But I swear, I swear, I really do think I heard her say something about “a catastrophic injury to your penis” just as I slammed shut the door to the boys’ floor behind me.

Diarrhea I can handle, but the catastrophic-penis-injury thing strikes the deepest imaginable chord of fear in any boy’s mind.

I was sweating, stitched-up, panting, and terrified. But at least I wasn’t late.

I am. You know.

Such a loser.

I made it to the common room just in time to sign off on our check-in sheet with Mr. Farrow. The TV had just gone dark, and most of the guys from O-Hall were sluggishly making their way to their rooms. After I signed in, I went down the hall to the bathroom.

I stood in front of the mirror for a few minutes, looking at the stitches closing the cut over my eye. As I stared, the cut seemed to get bigger, blacker, worse than it was. I was tired and wanted to go to bed. I ran the water and washed my hands and face.

The door opened, and Chas came in. I hadn’t entirely forgotten about how he’d looked at me as he was leading Megan away, but I also figured that my fear had a lot to do with my own guilt about what his girlfriend and I were doing behind his back.

But I was wrong, because before I could even get my dripping hands on a towel, Chas grabbed me by the neck and spun me around, pinning my back against a hand-soap dispenser, right in the same spot where JP had knee-dropped me.

Yeah . . . it was definitely a four out of five possible mousetraps-on-the-balls on the Ryan Dean West Pain-ometer.

“What’s up with you and Megan, Winger?”

When one of my shoes came off, I realized my feet were actually dangling above the floor, and four mousetraps became a definite five.

“I saw how you two were looking at each other tonight,” he said. “Everyone says you flirt with her all the time.”

“Chas, who wouldn’t look at Megan like that? She’s smoking hot,” I gurgled.

I was sure he was about to hit me. And, like I said, I deserved it. So . . . ouch.

There was nothing else I could do. I had to hit him. I balled my right hand into a fist and drove an uppercut just below his sternum. I’ll be honest. I have punched guys before, but punching Chas Becker hurt my hand. Chas loosened his grip, and I was standing again, but he held on to my necktie with his left hand as he raised a fist with his right.

Whoever invented neckties must have never gotten into fistfights.

Okay. This was really going to be ugly, because I could quickly calculate the trajectory of his intended punch, and I estimated the point of impact would be somewhere between my tenth and eleventh stitches. All I could do was hope my saddest possible stitched-up-lost-puppy-injury look might earn me some sympathy.

Chas froze midswing when the door opened. He released my tie and dropped his fist. He turned around to see that Joey had followed him into the bathroom.

“What the fuck are you doing, Chas?” Joey said. “Can’t you see Ryan Dean’s hurt?”

And Joey was a fighter. He looked really pissed off, and stormed over to Chas and shoved him down the entire length of the bathroom, practically into a shower stall.

Then Joey yelled, “Don’t ever touch him! I’ll fucking kill you, Betch!”

I slipped my foot back into my shoe.

“It’s nothing, Joey,” Chas said calmly. “It’s no big deal. I wouldn’t hurt him. I just don’t like the way he looks at my girlfriend. No big deal. I just wanted him to know.”

And then Chas walked out of the bathroom, but as he pulled the door open, he grumbled, “You guys are fucking queers.”

Joey just stood there, leaning against the pale green tiles of the wall, his arms folded, staring at me. I could tell he was mad.

“You should have just let him punch me, Joe.”

Joey didn’t say anything.

I left and went to bed.

Chapter Thirty-Six

WEDNESDAY MORNING BROUGHT ONE of those cold Pacific rains that makes you feel like the gray of the sky has worked its way inside your skin.

When the alarm sounded, Chas and I both sat up. Usually, when we woke up, we would say things to each other—stupid things, the kind that Chas could understand. I never really minded sharing a room with him, either, to be absolutely honest. But that morning, our silence was ominous. Like a funeral. I kind of felt like telling him I was sorry for punching him, but then I thought it would just remind him that he was in the middle of returning the favor when we got interrupted by Joey, so I thought I’d better just leave the whole thing alone.

I lowered myself from the bunk bed to the cold floor, grabbed my towel, and headed down the hallway. The doctor told me I’d be able to take a shower that morning, as much as I’d have liked that nurse to help me out again.

I was really sore. My head, my back, my shoulders—I felt like a 142-pound sack of broken shards of glass. Actually, I was 152 now. I’d put on some weight since school started, and my skinny-bitch-ass pants were getting too short in the leg for me, too, which made me look like even more of a dork. Annie told me she’d let them down for me when we went to her house, which, of course, made me think of the perfect oh-I-didn’t-know-I’d-need-to-actually-take-my-pants-all-the-way-off-for-you-to-do-that plan.

When I got out of the shower, I saw Chas standing at the same spot where I’d punched him the night before, bent over the sink, shaving. He stopped and watched me as I padded, barefoot and wrapped in my towel, behind him.

I didn’t say anything to him.

He didn’t say anything to me, either.

Annie wasn’t in the mess hall for breakfast. I saw Isabel, though. She told me that Annie was sick and staying in bed. At first, I thought Mrs. Singer had put a diarrhea spell on Annie, but I shrugged off the idea. I was mostly disappointed because there was no way I’d be able to see Annie now until Friday. Boys were not allowed inside the girls’ dorm, and the team would be leaving early the next morning to drive down to Salem for our game.

I felt like I desperately needed to find out something from her. And I knew I could tell the truth by just looking at her, that I wouldn’t have to actually ask her if we’d really been about to kiss, because I don’t think I’d ever have the guts to say it.

But Isabel did give me a folded note from Annie, so I thanked her and told her I’d give her one later to take back.

I couldn’t go sit in my usual place; JP was there with Seanie. I knew I couldn’t keep avoiding JP forever, but I wasn’t ready to be around him yet, either, because I still wanted to fight him, and I believed I would if we were forced to be too close together. I knew that now, after punching Chas the night before, and I still really felt like JP and I needed to have it out some more.

So I took Annie’s note and tucked it inside my heavy coat and headed up to the locker room, half an hour early for Conditioning.

I straddled the bench by my locker and looked at the paper.

It wasn’t folded fancy, like some girls do. It was just in half, and then in half again.

On the outside, she’d written Ryan Dean West.

I opened it.

So I knew she really did want to kiss me. And, as far as I was concerned, her it-won’t-happen-again was nothing more than a challenge. I had a perfect plan, thanks to her confession, and I had to get it down on paper before I forgot it. I tore open my backpack and began writing.

Perfect.

Now we’ll see about it-won’t-happen-again.

I folded the note just as the guys began coming in to the locker room. I wanted to change and get out of there before something else happened between JP and me.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

WE TOOK A SLOW THREE-MILE run in the rain for our conditioning, but I wasn’t about to lag back with Seanie and JP. I felt bad about it, because I missed Seanie, but since they were roommates, I couldn’t expect him to ditch JP just so he could talk to me. At least I was relieved that I’d only have to sit through one class, Lit, with JP; and Annie’s empty desk would be between us.

There aren’t many things I like more than running in the rain, even if I wasn’t supposed to get my stitches too wet. I stayed right at the front of the pack, and I was completely drenched by the time I made it back to the locker room.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

JOEY WATCHED ME WALK THROUGH the doorway to Calculus class. We hadn’t said anything at all to each other since practice, not even after the fight in the bathroom with Chas, but he didn’t need to say anything. His pissed-off look was enough. I know what he would have said, without the words.

As soon as I stumbled to my seat, Megan spun around, her amber hair sweeping silently across my desktop and over my fingers—damn!—and, smiling at me, she said, “Hi, Ryan Dean!” like nothing ever happened.

And then Joey intervened, looking as serious as he did the night before, after Chas backed down. Joey leaned over between Megan and me and grabbed my chin firmly and said, “Let me see that.”

He tilted my head like an unskilled barber and looked quickly over my stitches. My hair was still wet from the run.

“You going to be good to play tomorrow?” Joey said flatly, still holding my head steady.

“Uh-huh. You know I will.”

Then he kind-of whispered, even though I know Megan heard the whole thing, “Get your shit together, Ryan Dean.”

I didn’t know if he was talking about JP or Megan or Annie or just me. No . . . I guess I did know.

Then, birdlike, and in a hot-therapist kind of way, Mrs. Kurtz was looming over us, chirping, “Oh my goodness, Ryan Dean! What happened to you?”

Joey let go of my face.

“I play rugby,” I said. “I got eighteen stitches.”

“What a stud!” Mrs. Kurtz said. She always said the dorkiest things, but I never met a student who didn’t love her. Then she tousled my wet hair, which, due to her mysterious, my-best-friend’s-mom-kind-of-hotness, made me feel weak and flustered and convinced that I was destined to keep making the same kinds of stupid mistakes with girls over and over, no matter how spectacular my 2 x BALLS argument to Annie was, and she said, “Maybe you should take it easy today, Ryan Dean.”

“I think Ryan Dean should skip our study group tonight,” Joey said. “So he can rest. We have our first game tomorrow.”

I fired a look at Joey, then at Megan.

I sighed.

Joey was right, and I realized then that I was still just making excuses to avoid dealing with my out-of-control Megan thing.

Megan said, “I’ll miss you tonight, Ryan Dean.” Then she put her hand over mine.

Ugh!

“You should definitely stay in bed tonight,” Mrs. Kurtz said. I, of course, thought this was a very hot thing to say.

“Thanks, Mrs. Kurtz,” I said. “Thanks, Joe. Sorry, Megan.”

But to me, my voice sounded so pathetic, almost like I was crying.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

IT HAPPENED AT PRACTICE.

The worst thing imaginable.

Practice is always relaxed and fun the day before a game, especially in the rain. Coach would usually just talk about a game plan, then we’d play a fun little scrimmage, just so we could get all muddy. Nothing serious.

My head was taped up, so I was okay, and I was glad Coach could see that I was ready for the game. We were all just having fun.

Seanie and I ended up on opposite teams, playing sevens, which, like I said, is a much more wide-open and fast game with fewer pileups. I had the ball and was running downfield when I got caught up in a tackle from a flanker who was playing on Seanie’s team.

In rugby, when you’re tackled, you have to let go of the ball. Usually, you do it in a way that makes it easy for your own teammates to pick it up. But when I released the ball, no one was there to get it, so Seanie stepped right over me and poached the ball away for his team.

And the terrible thing is, right when he stepped through, he planted his foot between my legs.

Yeah.

Like the world wasn’t big enough for Seanie to find somewhere else to put his fucking foot.

And that’s how Sean Russell Flaherty, my good friend, the same guy who contrived so many Internet hoaxes about so many people, the same guy who’d told Annie Altman, the girl I am insanely in love with, that I got drunk with Chas Becker the night before school began, that same guy, wearing size twelve metal cleats, stepped right onto my balls.

I became a black hole.

Let me explain the physics of having your balls stepped on.

The entire Ryan Dean West universe instantly collapsed to the size of a five-eighths-inch metal cleat stud, and everything I knew, everything I would ever know, got sucked into that pinpoint of agony.

Newton obviously skipped that one crucial law.

When my hearing came back, I heard Seanie saying, “Uh-oh.”

And I’m pretty sure that everyone in the Pacific Northwest heard Ryan Dean West shout, “YOUSTEPPEDONMYFUCKINGNUTS YOUSONOFABITCH!”

Yes, I will admit to cussing that time.

My universe gradually began expanding, but so did the agony. I could think again, and the thinking led to a heightened sensation of pain, if there could be such a thing, and a frightening realization, too.

Mrs. Singer.

Catastrophic penis injury.

You have got to be fucking kidding me.

I must be out of my mind.

And as I lay on my side, in the fetal position, hands clutching for what I could only imagine in my most horrific visions had been damaged beyond salvation, my teammates formed, for the second time in the past twenty-four hours, a mournful and morbidly fascinated circle around me.

“He’s dead,” one of them said.

“If he isn’t dead, he should kill himself immediately,” another added.

“Did you really step on his nuts?” A third one.

I tried to answer them, but the only sound I could make sounded something like ehhhhrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggh, and, shuddering, lying there with my face in an expanding puddle of mud, I realized I couldn’t unclench my jaw.

Coach M blew his whistle to break practice.

I rolled onto my back in the mud, my face turned up into the rain, eyes blurred, scanning the darkness of the clouds for the giant face of a mocking God who might be up there laughing at my stitched-and-stomped-on-skinny-bitch-ass.

“Not exactly the best two days of your life, eh, Ryan Dean?” Coach tried to smile, looking down at me, rain dripping from the brim of his hat. “Can you move?”

And Seanie fell beside me, trying to help sit me up.

But he was kind of laughing when he said, “Dude, my bad, Ryan Dean. And I know you’ve probably waited all your life to hear another guy say this to you, but, dude, how are your balls?”

And, all at once, I somehow instantly composed a haiku in my mind about how much I hated Seanie Flaherty, and, in a simultaneous flash of inspiration, derived a kind of mathematical, tautological formula about reality, that I could easily envision as a Venn diagram:

Finding Humor in Getting Hit in the Balls = The Universe Minus One

Seanie helped me to my feet. My head was groggy, my eyes swirled with tears of pain, and I felt like throwing up. The other guys were already making their way into the locker room and the warmth of the showers.

I slipped my hand down inside my compression shorts, just to make sure everything was still attached properly. Something stung, and when I pulled my hand out and looked at my fingers, there was blood on them.

Crap.

Chapter Forty

“Here,” I said, dropping the folded paper beside Seanie where he sat eating dinner. “I wrote a haiku about how much I hate your stinking guts, Seanie.”

“Dude, how gay are you?” Seanie said in his usual deadpan, focusing on his food and opening the note. “You wrote me a haiku about your balls.”

JP was just sitting down across the table. I didn’t care. I wasn’t talking to him, and he wasn’t going to keep me away from my friends.

And then Joey asked, “What did the doctor say, Ryan Dean?”

Yeah. Here’s another thing I realized: You’d think that receiving an injury to your balls is probably the worst thing that can possibly happen to any guy, but it’s not.

Going to the doctor for an injury to your balls is much, much worse.

So here I was, sitting down to eat among friends and enemies alike, with the alluringly hot and faintly moustached Isabel, wide-eyed in rapt attentiveness, no doubt taking it all down so she could get right back to the recuperating Annie Altman and deliver an update on the status of Ryan Dean West’s testicles.

“Was that hot nurse there?” Seanie practically drooled.

“No,” I said. “Just Doctor No-gloves.”

“Eww,” Seanie said. “Did he touch your little Westicles?”

I took a bite of chicken, pretending that was all I was going to say about the matter. I looked over at JP, and he looked away.

“Are you going to tell us, or what?” Seanie said impatiently.

I paused to gather my thoughts.

“Do you believe in witches?” I asked.

“I give up,” Seanie said, and took a drink of milk.

I looked at Isabel. It was kind of embarrassing, but not as embarrassing as telling everyone in the infirmary why I showed up, scared pale and covered in mud with my hand thrust down my shorts, holding onto my balls. Even my friends were too embarrassed to go there with me, afraid they might have to face their own fears and watch in that cold examination room while I sat naked on a rustling paper sheet and the doctor looked me over. Head wounds were one thing, but, like I said, no boy ever wants to come face to face with a catastrophic penis injury.

“It’s just a cut,” I said. “On my balls. He put a Band-Aid on it.”

“Was it a SpongeBob Band-Aid?” Seanie asked, almost spitting out his milk when he said it.

Even Joey laughed.

I am such a loser.

“Dude,” Seanie announced, “how awesome is that? You are the only guy I’ve ever known in my entire fucking life who had to have a doctor put a Band-Aid on his ballsack. That’s the kind of thing you just can’t make up. Ryan Dean West, you are going to be a fucking legend!”

“Seanie,” I said, “I can’t even begin to put into words how much I hate you right now.”

“Aww . . . I love you too, Ryan Dean,” he said.

Chapter Forty-One

I NEVER COULD SLEEP THE night before a game, especially a first game.

After dinner, Joey kept his appointment for our Calculus study group with Megan at the library, and I came back to O-Hall alone and tried to relax in bed. But it was absolutely impossible to get comfortable, considering the locations of my injuries. And I know I’m a pig for thinking it, but I really wanted to make out with Megan again.

So I just lay there, staring up at the ceiling with my knees bent, listening to Chas’s breathing, wondering if Annie had read my note, and what she was thinking about at that moment, if she was awake like me.

And I knew that if you could keep score for such a thing, and, of course, I did keep that score, my Degree of Loserdom would be nothing short of godlike.

To make matters even worse, by midnight I had to pee. But there was no way in hell I was going to go down that hallway on the night before a game and run the risk of a face-to-face with Mrs. Singer again. So I held it as long as I could, but that just made my Band-Aided wound hurt more. When I couldn’t stand it any more, I fumbled around the side of the mattress where I stored that Gatorade bottle Joey brought me when I was sick. I unscrewed the top—Mmm! It still smelled like lemon—and, kneeling on the top bunk, I filled it to within half an inch of overflowing.

The Ryan Dean West Emergency Gatorade Bottle Nighttime Urinal was an invention of depraved genius. After a quick check on the snugness of my Band-Aid, and, pausing momentarily to wonder how many days it might take to fall off, since—sweet mother of God—there was no way I was going to yank it and all the hairs affixed to it off, I screwed the lid back on as tightly as possible, tucked the bottle down by my feet, where I noticed it produced a very pleasant warmth, pulled the covers back over me, and finally went to sleep.

Chapter Forty-Two

AT SIX IN THE MORNING, we were all on the bus heading down from Pine Mountain to play our first rugby match of the year. It had stopped raining during the night, so it was going to be a perfect and soggy day for rugby. Twenty-five players rode on the bus, most of us stretched out in our own seats, along with the coach and a couple other adults, and I swear I had to go from seat to seat and personally tell the story of the Band-Aid on my balls to every one of the boys who hadn’t been there at dinner the night before.

It was a four-hour bus ride to Sacred Heart. Our kickoff was scheduled for one o’clock; and, as always after the game, in a rugby tradition called a social, we would sit down with the opposing team and have dinner before our ride back to Pine Mountain. We always had to wear our school uniforms and ties whenever we showed up for a rugby match; that was just the way things were done. So every one of us knew it was going to be a long and tiring day.

But we didn’t know just how tough, and unexpected, things would actually turn out to be.

We sang almost the entire way there. I don’t know how Coach M put up with it. It was like he was deaf or something, because he never showed the slightest expression even when the songs got completely vulgar. It was like singing was the only time he’d tolerate our cussing, and he’d just keep his attention pinned on his notebook, where he’d organize rosters, medical forms, and notes on plays. But I could tell the singing was making the driver of our chartered bus really agitated. He started looking so frustrated and mad, but I could hear Coach M explain to him in his Henry Higgins tone of voice, “They are a rugby team. They sing. There’s nothing I, you, or God can do about it beyond hope that they eventually tire.”

And just before we got to the field, someone got into our first-aid kit and secretly passed around Band-Aids to everyone on the team except me. So when we arrived at the locker rooms at Sacred Heart, and the headmaster, who was dressed in his full priestly attire, and a couple nuns from the school greeted us, every one of our players with the exception of me came down the steps at the front of the bus wearing a black and blue school tie, white dress shirt, and khaki pants with a Band-Aid stuck across his fly.

Nice.

We changed into our uniforms and took the field to warm up. I had my head taped up, and I felt like I was completely ready to go. When Sacred Heart came out to begin stretching, we ran around them on the field, singing “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,” which was the only song we were allowed to sing at a Catholic school because it wasn’t really dirty, it was just about a guy who fathers an illegitimate child and then gets his balls shotgunned off by the girl’s father. Tame by our standards, and as Coach said, it wasn’t likely to incite a religious war or anything since it contained a moral lesson.

But the Sacred Heart boys didn’t think it was very funny, and instead of singing something back at us, which is what any decent and proper rugby team would do, they just scowled and prayed.

I am not religious at all. Some of the kids at PM are, though, and we do have a nondenominational chapel on the grounds for kids who don’t go home on weekends. But we always prayed before games, and praying with the team was the only kind of praying I ever felt good about. So, a few minutes before kickoff, we would all take to our knees in a circle and put our arms around each other, and Kevin Cantrell would stand over us and give thanks for the day and for the other team that was there to play with us, and for being able to play the greatest sport that was ever created, and hope that everyone, even our opponents, would be safe and have fun.

Then, just a few minutes before the game, Coach M pulled me aside and told me that he wasn’t going to let me start, that he was putting in Mike Bagnuolo, a sophomore winger who was actually older than me, because he wanted to see how Bags could handle himself.

Of course I was crushed, but I knew better than to say anything or try to plead with Coach. That’s just something you never do on the sideline of a game. At least Bags was wearing number sixteen and I got to keep the eleven, so everyone knew who the real left wing was. That’s how numbers work in rugby: a player doesn’t pick his number, his position on the team determines that, and it’s something that never gets messed with. So all I could do was watch the game start from the sideline and just hope that by some miracle I’d get a chance to sub in.

Joey was standing there with us when Coach M made his decision, and I could see he was upset about the call, because he looked like he felt sorry for me too. But he shook Bags’s hand and said, “I’ll be looking for you out there,” and then he said, “Sorry, Ryan Dean, Coach is just being careful,” and he tapped the bandage on my head.

“I know that, Joey, but I still totally hate JP.”

“You remember how I told you to get your shit together? Well, Megan couldn’t stop talking about you last night. So when’s it going to happen, Ryan Dean?”

Then Joey ran off to his spot on the field, and all I could do was watch the game begin.

The worst part of it, worse than Joey’s scolding—because I knew he was right—was that it was the kind of game I love to play in. Our teams were so evenly matched, and every time it looked like a score was about to happen, the other team would crank up its defense and force a turnover. So it went that way, scoreless, for almost the entire thirty-five-minute half, and then finally JP got called on a dangerous tackle and Sacred Heart scored a penalty kick just as the half ended, to go up 3–0. And I was kind of glad that JP was the one who gave up those points, because everyone could see how terrible he felt about it.

Bastard.

In rugby, halftime only lasts five minutes and the players are not allowed to leave the field. And unlike other sports, there are no substitutions where a player can go out and come back in, which, I think, is one of the reasons the football team hated us so much—because rugby players had to be in such better condition than players in just about any other sport. During halftime, though, Coach brought the team in and said, “Bags is coming out. Ryan Dean, mind your head,” and that absolutely made my day.

Joey shook my hand, and I pulled him close to me and whispered, “Look, I swear I will take care of the Megan thing as soon as I can. Just get me the ball.”

“Okay,” he said.

And he did. About five minutes into the half, Joey skipped the ball past both of our centers, right into my hands, and all I had to do was beat the opposing winger, who had no chance of catching me. I centered the ball right between the posts and put it down to score a try, and I did think about Annie as soon as I got to my feet.

Seanie was our team’s kicker, and he scored the conversion, so PM went up 7–3. We chest bumped each other after his kick, and Seanie laughed, saying, “I think that’s the gayest thing I’ve ever done.”

And I said, “No, it’s not even close. You wrote me a haiku and you asked me how my balls were yesterday, remember?”

The score stayed locked at 7–3, and we ended up winning the game.

We had to shower and change back into our ties before the postgame social. The food was great, and the best part of the afternoon was that the Sacred Heart boys all had cell phones and Coach let us borrow them to call our parents and tell them about the game.

I borrowed the phone from the number fourteen winger, the boy I outran to score my try, and he was real nice about it too, but he did promise they’d even it up against us when we played them during the regular season.

And yes, cell phones apparently can be used to dial directly into hell, because my call went something like this:

MOM: Hello?

RYAN DEAN WEST: Hi, Mom. It’s me, Ryan Dean.

I always said that on the phone, like there was someone else who might call her “Mom,” even though I don’t have any brothers or sisters.

MOM: Oh my God, baby. Are you hurt again? How’s your head?

I was never allowed to call during the week. PM rules.

RYAN DEAN WEST: I’m fine, Mom.

I wasn’t about to say anything about the Band-Aid-on-the-balls thing. God! Who would ever have the guts to talk about something like that with their mom?

RYAN DEAN WEST (cont.): I’m calling from our game. We won. I scored a try.

MOM: Your dad’s going to be so happy to hear about that.

RYAN DEAN WEST: Is Dad there?

MOM: No, sweetie. He’s in New York.

Then she sounded really serious.

MOM (cont.): Ryan Dean, how did you get a phone?

RYAN DEAN WEST: Well, I just wanted to tell you, Mom, ’cause Coach is letting us use the other boys’ phones today since we’re not at school. But I wanted to let you know, and to say thanks to you and Dad for letting me go stay with Annie this weekend.

MOM: Oh. Ryan Dean?

RYAN DEAN WEST: What?

MOM: Is that why you wanted to talk to Dad?

Awkward silence.

MOM (cont.): Do you need to ask him . . . about . . . girl things? Because I spoke with your father in New York, and so yesterday I FedExed you a box of condoms and a pamphlet about, you know, how to have sex the first time. You should be getting it this afternoon, sweetie.

You know . . . I have lived my entire life and never once, not one time, have I ever talked to my mother about “condoms” and “how to have sex the first time.” I felt my ears turning red. I am such a fucking loser. My life is hell. No—worse than that. My life is a Band-Aid on my ballsack.

RYAN DEAN WEST: No! Please, God . . . . Tell me you did not do that . . . . Mom? FUCK!!!

Okay. I’ll be honest. I do not say “fuck” to my mom. During the ensuing and second awkward silence, I spend a moment seriously thinking about killing myself.

MOM: Well, you should ask your friend if she would like to visit Boston sometime.

“Your friend.” Ugh. Oh, yeah, Mom, just stock up on the rubbers and porn.

RYAN DEAN WEST: Okay, Mom.

I realized how deeply I hated talking to my mom ever since I became a teenager. And if there’s a more potent deterrent to perversion than the Niagara Falls of razor-sharp ice shards poured down your pants, it has got to be talking to my mom about “condoms” and “how to have sex the first time.”

RYAN DEAN WEST (cont.): Well, tell Dad I said hi. I should probably go now, Mom.

MOM: I love you, Ryan Dean.

RYAN DEAN WEST: (Garbled, so hopefully the boy next to him doesn’t understand) Iloveyatoomom. Bye.

Click.

I suddenly felt so dirty.

Chapter Forty-Three

THE SOCIAL BEGAN WINDING DOWN a little after four o’clock, and we moved through the cafeteria shaking hands and migrating out toward the bus for our long ride back to Pine Mountain.

Seanie and I were among the first to leave. I don’t think either of us really paid much attention to the group of four boys who were waiting around for us by the bus. If we had, we surely would have noticed that they were not Sacred Heart kids, because they weren’t dressed in ties and slacks.

They were just scrub kids from Salem, out to watch a rugby game, I guessed.

As Seanie stepped ahead of me onto the bus, one of the boys said, “Congratulations. Good game.”

“Thanks,” I said. I put my foot up on the first step into the bus.

“I’m waiting to say hi to my cousin,” the boy said. “He’s on your team. Joey Cosentino. Is he coming out?”

I turned around and saw Joey and Kevin leaving the cafeteria.

“He’s right back there.” I hitchhiked a thumb over my shoulder.

Then the four boys walked back to where Joey was, and I watched them, but it didn’t look like Joey was expecting them at all. In fact, Joey looked startled when he saw them. And the next thing I knew, all hell broke loose and someone yelled to look out because the kid had a knife in his hand.

I’ve seen people do some pretty stupid things in my life, but trying to jump a rugby player in front of his whole team has to be about the stupidest. One of the boys ran off right away. I saw Chas going after him, but the punk had too much of a lead on Chas, so I thought I’d help him out, which was also pretty stupid considering my stitches and that other injury I’d been trying to forget, but couldn’t, because I felt the sting of pain every time I moved my right leg.

I caught the kid and took him down right on the wet black asphalt of the Sacred Heart driveway. I didn’t get hurt, because he was wearing a down jacket and I landed on top of him, but he scraped up his face pretty good when he hit the pavement. I just pinned him down and tried to not get his blood all over my dwindling supply of school shirts, and Chas caught up to us and kicked the kid twice in the ribs. I know he broke something when he did it, too, because Chas was never one to go soft on anyone if he decided to actually go that far.

“What the fuck are you thinking?” Chas said, but the kid didn’t answer, he just gasped and bled. A lot. And Chas continued, “You’re hardly bigger than Winger. I should just piss on you, you stupid dumb fucker.”

Well, that really didn’t do much for my self-esteem, but I said, “Let me get off him first if you do, Chas.”

When I stood up, I heard sirens. Someone had called the police.

I looked back to the crowd where Joey and Kevin had been standing, and I saw that Coach M and some other adults were holding on to the other three boys.

“Let’s take him back to the others,” I said.

And Chas grabbed the bleeding kid in a wristlock and forced him back toward the cafeteria. As we got closer, we both saw that several people were kneeling. Kevin was down on the ground, lying on his back. A nun had her hand on his forehead. Joey was saying something to him. He was holding Kevin’s hand. The front of Kevin’s shirt was covered in blood, and he was coughing and staring straight up into the sky.

Kevin Cantrell had been stabbed.

A knife lay on the ground beside his shoulder.

The sirens grew painfully loud, and the first cop car screeched up right alongside where Kevin was lying.

Chapter Forty-Four

COACH MCAULIFFE RODE WITH KEVIN to the hospital in an ambulance.

The boy who pulled the knife was taken, handcuffed, in another.

Kevin had been stabbed in the shoulder when he tried to take down the guy with the knife. He wasn’t badly cut, and Coach assured us he was going to be okay. Not so good for the guy who stabbed him, though, because Joey broke that boy’s arm and jaw when he slammed him into the pavement. I honestly think that kid might have died if there haven’t been so many grown-ups around.

By the time the cops had arrested the four boys and gotten us all to write out our statements, it was almost seven o’clock and a cold rain was falling. Coach called from the hospital and told the bus driver to take us back to Pine Mountain.

It was a quiet and dark ride home.

No singing.

I don’t think any of us could stop thinking about Kevin and why something like this happened to someone as easygoing as him. It hurt us all because Kevin could accept anyone and anything, which is why, we all knew, he didn’t mind rooming with Joey—something that would be social death to most guys.

But Kevin was just Kevin.

I hoped it didn’t ruin him.

JP was still upset about the penalty he’d given up. Every fullback I’d ever known was like that; they had the toughest job on the team, and when they made mistakes, it was usually costly, so they tended not to let go of things very easily. That was probably the biggest reason why I believed our fight was far from over—the fullback psychology. But I knew I’d have my opportunity over the weekend to ruin his chances with Annie once and for all.

Seanie sat beside JP, but JP wasn’t talking. He just stared out the window, brooding, until he fell to sleep.

I sat stretched out in a bench seat by myself. I looked back the length of the bus and saw that Joey was alone too. So I got up and stumbled down the aisle to sit with him. Joey put his arm across the back of the seat in front of him and lay his head down on it. He had to be hurting about Kevin, but who wasn’t? It wasn’t Joey’s fault.

“Hey,” I said.

Joey didn’t answer.

I never saw anyone on the team cry before, but just then I thought Joey might have been. And I felt really awkward, but I put my arm around Joey’s shoulders. And then I thought how stupid I was for feeling like that because I wouldn’t feel weird about putting an arm around Seanie or Kevin or any other guy friend of mine who was hurting.

Seanie turned around from where he was sitting up near the front of the bus, and he looked at me and mouthed “homo,” then smiled. That was just Seanie being Seanie. So I flipped him off.

“Everything’s going to be okay, Joe,” I said. “You want to talk or something?”

Then I patted his head and put my hand down so I could push myself up to stand.

“Oh, and hey, I never did say thanks for that pass, Joe. So, thanks. Oh, and I’m breaking up with Megan tomorrow. I swear. As soon as we make out one more time, that’s it. Well, maybe twice more. Okay, three more times. But that is it.”

I laughed. Joey looked at me.

He looked pissed.

“I’m just kidding, Joey.”

I stood up and looked out the window.

“How stupid was that, anyway, trying to jump a guy in front of his whole rugby team?” I said.

Joey didn’t say anything.

“Okay. I’ll go now. I guess you don’t want to talk. Sorry, I just thought this fucking ride was getting boring.”

“Since when do you cuss?” Joey said.

“I cussed when Seanie stepped on my balls yesterday.”

“That doesn’t count.”

“In that case, I take back what I just said about the bus ride, just to keep my record clean.”

“Sit down,” Joey said.

“Okay.” I sat next to Joey.

“And, yeah, it was a pretty stupid thing to do,” Joey said.

“The one guy said he was your cousin. That’s why I pointed you out. I’m really sorry, Joe.”

“He isn’t my cousin. And it wasn’t your fault.”

“At least Kevin’s going to be okay,” I said. “He might have saved your life.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you know what it was about, Joey?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Okay,” I said. “Well, you know I totally trust you, Joey. I know you can keep a secret for me. So if you want to tell me anything about it, it’s okay, and if you don’t want to talk about it, I understand too.”

Joey took a deep breath. He glanced around. The bus was dead. Nearly everyone was asleep.

He said, “The kid with the knife. His name’s Mike. His brother and I used to see each other. When his folks found out, they flipped. They sent him away to a hospital for crazy kids.”

“Oh.”

Joey said, “It fucked him up worse than anything. Mike told me he was going to come after me one day. I never believed him.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.” Joey cleared his throat. “I never tell anyone this shit, Ryan Dean.”

“I won’t say anything, Joe.”

“I know.”

“Did you tell the cops?” I asked.

Joey nodded his head. “I wrote it all down, Ryan Dean.”

“Oh. Okay.” I drummed my fingers against my leg. That Band-Aid, which had become a symbol of my life, was really starting to bug me. “Hey, Joey? Can I tell you about how stupid my mom is?”

He looked at me. In the dark, I could see he looked really serious and tired, but his eyes were kind of smiling.

“Sure.”

Then I told him the whole thing about the phone call and the condoms and the “how to have sex the first time” pamphlet, and Joey actually laughed out loud.

“Oh, your mom just cares about you, Ryan Dean, and sometimes parents don’t really understand the best way to show it. But that is fucking funny.”

“I swear to God, Joe. My life is a nightmare.”

“I don’t think so. Not compared with most guys’.”

“And I haven’t even talked to you since the other night, but thanks for getting in Chas’s face too.”

“Did you actually punch him?” Joey asked.

“As hard as I could. And I am pretty sure he would have killed me if you didn’t stop him.”

“Damn.”

“Hey, Joey? What would you do if, let’s say hypothetically, you had to sleep in a bunk bed over Betch and you had a giant Gatorade bottle filled with your own, foamy, day-old piss just sitting there getting cold in your bed?”

And Joey laughed again, like he didn’t believe I was telling him the truth.

On that bus ride home, I believe Joey Cosentino and I became best friends.

Chapter Forty-Five

BY THE TIME WE GOT back to O-Hall, it was almost midnight.

Joey and I followed behind Chas, up the stairwell and down the hall. I hoped he’d run into Mrs. Singer, but, when I thought about it, it seemed like I was the only boy in the whole building who’d ever had any run-ins with her.

Maybe she didn’t even really exist.

I decided that sometime before Halloween, I’d have to design a Ryan Dean West is-the-permafrost-eye-poison-known-as-the-unhot-Mrs.-Singer-actually-of-this-universe? experiment, fully controlling, of course, for all unexpected variables.

We checked in with Farrow and said good night to Joey, and I envied him for having a room to himself, even under the circumstances. Then I went to the bathroom-slash-execution-chamber to pee, and Chas headed off to our room alone.

When I got to the room, Chas was already in his bed, but the lights were on.

“What’s in the package?” Chas said.

I groaned.

A white FedEx mailer was sitting on my bunk.

I am such a loser.

“Some porn and a box of rubbers,” I said. “From my mom.”

“Whatever. You’re a fucking dick, Winger.” And Chas rolled over and covered his head, mumbling something about kicking my ass one day.

Confronting Chas Becker with the truth was the surest way to get him to think I was lying.

I turned off the lights and climbed up onto my bunk. I stuffed the package down between the wall and my mattress, right next to the Ryan Dean West Emergency Gatorade Bottle Nighttime Urinal repository full of pee.

I thought, pretty soon I’m going to run out of sleeping space.

I slipped out of my clothes and listened to the rain until I fell asleep.

Chapter Forty-Six

I SAW ANNIE AT BREAKFAST in the morning.

Everything seemed to click back into place and get better on the spot. The whole school was buzzing with the rumors of the “Rugby Riot,” and I heard all kinds of bullshit stories from people who weren’t even there, about Kevin Cantrell almost dying, and how “the gay kid” started a fight.

But Mr. Farrow had already told us before we left for school that Kevin was fine and would be back in O-Hall on Monday, so I just shut up when I heard the ridiculous versions circulating, except I did push one boy and call him an asswipe for saying Joey started the fight.

I sat down across from Annie. We held hands on top of the table. Isabel, the constant, fuzzy-lipped-flying-monkey companion, sat beside her. Seanie, Joey, and JP were there too.

JP noticed we were holding hands, gave me a dirty look, and then turned his face away.

“Hey,” I said. “Are you feeling good today?”

“I was back at school yesterday,” Annie said.

“I scored a try for you, like I said I would.”

“I heard all about everything from Sean,” she said. “Are you ready for today?”

“Oh my God, Annie. I’ve been ready for a week.” I fired a look at JP. He wasn’t watching, but I knew he was listening.

“Let’s meet at the front of the office at the start of lunch,” Joey said.

Kids who flew home usually rode to the airport together, since seniors were allowed to leave their cars at PM. I didn’t even find out until after the arrangements had been made that Joey would be driving Chas Becker’s SUV and taking me, Annie, Chas, and Megan to the airport with him.

Chas Becker’s driver’s license had been suspended. Go figure.

Joey was going home to the Bay Area, Megan lived in Los Angeles, and Chas, I assumed, would be going with her, but I didn’t care and wasn’t going to ask him. I just wanted to get out of there, even though I dreaded the awkwardness of the long drive to the airport and sitting in the same car with Annie and Megan. But I did come up with a couple perverted fantasies involving getting stuck in a snowdrift and sending Chas and Joey out into the cold to search for help. Unfortunately, the first snow hadn’t fallen yet.

“Did Isabel give you my note?” I asked.

“Nice Space Needle cartoon,” Annie said. “But you are a total liar about not knowing what was going on the other night, Ryan Dean West, and you know it.”

I stared right into her eyes, giving her my most innocent look. I even leaned forward over the table, just like she did to me that night outside O-Hall when Madam-Frosty Mrs. Singer caught us as we were about to kiss.

But, God! I really wanted to kiss her so bad.

“Oh, really?” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Two times balls equals they do the thinking. Oh, which reminds me . . . How’s the SpongeBob Band-Aid?”

Then Isabel laughed.

“Score,” I said. “Made you talk about my balls. And, anyway, Seanie’s making that up. It’s a Princess Barbie Band-Aid.”

Then I gave Seanie a dirty look and nonchalantly scratched the bridge of my nose with my middle finger. I stood up. It was time to go to Conditioning.

Chapter Forty-Seven

ANNIE AND I PASSED NOTES to each other all during Mr. Wellins’s American Literature-slash-Sex-Ed class; and I could tell JP was getting pretty ticked about it. Oh, well, I thought, I’ve got all weekend, buddy, and by the time we get back to Pine Mountain she won’t even know you exist.

-- Yeah, but then, with you, it’s going to beFriday to Sunday of nonstop sex talk.

In your dreams, maybe, West!!! Love, AA

Chapter Forty-Eight

I KNEW THE DRIVE TO the airport would be awkward. Chas went out of his way to make it even worse than it had to be.

After we’d loaded our suitcases in the back of his SUV, Chas informed me that I would ride shotgun—front passenger seat. And, as Chas explained, that meant the gay guys could sit up front so Chas could be in the backseat with what he called “the two hotties.”

Chas Becker was such a tool.

Not that I wouldn’t have called them that, much less given just about anything to sit between them. I even tried to argue that it would be more comfortable for Annie and Megan if I did, because I was smaller than Chas, but Chas just looked at Megan one time, then gave me a look like he was about to punch me and said, “Shut the fuck up, Winger.”

And, when we were on the road, I turned back and saw that Chas was sitting in the middle with his arms stretched over the seat backs, pretending he was holding on to both girls, just looking at me like he was the king of the world or something, which, for whatever reason, made me think about that bottle of piss I still hadn’t gotten rid of.

“What are your plans for the weekend, Ryan Dean?” Joey asked, paying attention to the road but flickering his eyes to the mirror once in a while to watch Chas and the girls. Normally, they would have been in Kevin’s car, which was bigger than Chas’s SUV; Joey’s car was out of the question, since it only carried two people.

“Nothing boring,” I said. “No TV watching. Me and Annie are going to do some running on the beach, I guess. I don’t know. Maybe go fishing if it’s not too rainy.”

“Sounds thrilling,” Chas said. “When are you two going to actually start fooling around? Or are Annie’s parents going to play watchdog all weekend?”

“Shut up, Chas,” I said. “Annie’s not like that.”

I looked at Annie, and she smiled at me. And then I saw Chas scoot himself closer to her.

“I bet she could be like that,” he said.

“Maybe I should sit up front,” Annie said.

Then Megan tried to change the subject but chose the worst imaginable direction to steer the conversation: “I bet Ryan Dean’s a real good kisser, Annie. Is he?”

As soon as she said it, all kinds of things happened at once:

1. I felt my balls actually retract up inside my body cavity. I don’t know if I turned white or red, but I definitely felt something turning.

2. Megan got this testy and challenging look on her face—definitely the very, very bad policewoman look.

3. Joey coughed like he was choking on something, then fired me the get-your-shit-together-Ryan-Dean look.

4. Chas took his arms away from both girls and folded his hands on his lap, pouting, with a look on his face that said he wanted to snap my skinny-bitch-ass neck. He had to know what was going on with me and Megan. I was convinced.

5. And Annie said, “Oh, yeah. He’s a great kisser. And he has puppy breath.”

Then Chas said, “Do you guys want to pull over and play Spin the Bottle, or should we just get to the airport in time to catch our flights?”

Megan straightened up and winked at me. I didn’t even want to look at Annie to see if she’d caught it. This could easily ruin what I was convinced would be the best weekend of my life.

I cleared my throat and said, “Annie’s just messing around. We’ve never kissed. Not even close.” And I looked directly at her and said, “Even though I’ve asked her to hundreds of times.”

So I let her off the hook. For now.

I knew she’d think about that. I knew Annie. She wasn’t going to let a statement like that go unresponded to all weekend long, so I turned back around, faced the road, and tried to will my nuts back down from behind my belly button, smiling, confident that I’d get Annie Altman to cave in to her weakness before too long.

Chapter Forty-Nine

GOD! WAS I GLAD TO see our group split up once we got to the airport.

We all agreed on a meeting time and place in the terminal after our return flights Sunday evening, then we headed off to our gates.

Annie and I checked our bags and took off our shoes to pass through the security line. And, of course, as these things happen to losers such as myself, when I was walking through the metal detector, an alarm sounded because I’d left my belt on. And just when the Transportation Security officer was waving me to stop, my Band-Aid conveniently came unglued after its two-day vacation on my balls. It fell out the bottom of my dorky, too-short school pants.

This, of course, made the guard think that I was some kind of black-tar-heroin-cakes-or-whatever-the-fuck-you-call-them-Band-Aided-to-my-ballsack-smuggler, and he and another very unhappy-looking man in a white shirt escorted me behind a thin screen, the kind you’d see in a run-down clinic.

That was where they told me to strip down to my underwear.

Nice.

Annie laughed at me.

Well, I think she was laughing at me. I couldn’t tell, because I couldn’t see her since I was standing in my boxers behind a goddamned hospital-cloth screen while one of the TSA guys turned my socks inside out and shook them.

At the same time, the other agent actually grabbed my now Band-Aid-free balls (and it was probably not in good judgment for me to ask him if he wanted me to turn my head and cough, because he just kind of nodded and said something about me being a “smart ass,” and then he pulled out the waistband on my underwear and gave my actual-not-so-smart-skinny-white-ass a glimpse of airport-terminal fluorescent light).

Annie was doing her best, I am sure, to pretend she didn’t know heroin-ballsack-boy.

Yeah.

I’m a loser.

Not just a loser, a loser who was still standing behind a screen, barefoot and in his boxers, when he heard the final boarding announcement for his flight to Seattle. The TSA guy just placed my boarding pass on top of my thoroughly ransacked and inside-out school clothes and said, “Sorry, Mr. West. You’re free to go.”

I quickly pulled on my now-beltless pants and slid into my shirt. I grabbed my shoes and the rest of my clothes and boarding pass in a bundle under one arm and walked out from behind the screen.

Annie stood there, laughing, her eyes all wet.

“Why do these things always happen to you?” she asked.

“Because I’m a fucking loser,” I answered.

Yeah, well . . . I didn’t say “fucking,” of course, because you know I never cuss, especially not in front of Annie, but to say that I wanted to say “fucking” is a fucking understatement.

“Here,” she said, “let me help you,” and she grabbed my shoes and belt as I hopped along to the gate, my unbuttoned and untucked shirt fluttering behind me as I tried to pull on one sock and my pants slipped down toward my knees. I dropped my tie and had to stop to pick it up.

I gave up.

I followed Annie to the boarding gate half-undressed and barefoot, with one hand holding up the waist of my pants.

And the attendant at the gate, who, I will say, was pretty damn hot in a paramilitary-Andrews-Sisters kind of way, raised her very disciplined-looking eyebrow as I pinched my boarding pass to her with the same hand I was using to try and keep my pants up.

“Oh, yeah,” I said, dropping my tie and one of my inside-out socks at her feet, “I plan on being completely naked by the time we get to our seats.”

Chapter Fifty

“I REALLY DO WANT TO hold hands on takeoff,” Annie said.

I slipped my hand into hers.

“Oh, yeah?” I said. “Well, considering I get naked before takeoff, I’d say that exactly nine months from the moment we fly over the Columbia River, you’ll probably be giving birth.”

She laughed. “Pervert.”

I buttoned my shirt.

I couldn’t help myself now:

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: So . . . loser, did you pack the condoms?

RYAN DEAN WEST 1: Don’t be ridiculous. Annie is not like that.

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: I bet five out of five Buffalo wings on the Ryan Dean West Spice Matrix Megan Renshaw is.

RYAN DEAN WEST 1: Hmmm . . . I haven’t been keeping up with that particular scale, but that stewardess up the aisle has got to be a four-and-a-half . . . I wonder if I could swing a trip to LA next weekend . . . . Just a thought.

JOEY COSENTINO: Goddamnit, Ryan Dean. I am going to stop sticking up for you if you don’t grow the fuck up. You are finally getting to go somewhere with the girl of your dreams, and you can’t stop thinking about every other female on the planet.

RYAN DEAN WEST 1: I’m sorry, Joey. Hey, how could you be on this plane?

JOEY COSENTINO: I’m not. I’m the part of your subconscious that actually (a) knows the right thing to do and (b) is not perverted.

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: You mean there is a part of my brain that doesn’t think about sex? You’re making that up!

RYAN DEAN WEST 1: Go away, Joe. The stewardess is about to come around to check if my seat belt is snug enough.

I actually managed to get dressed, shirt tucked, necktie knotted, one sock still inside out but at least in my shoes, before the plane was on the runway, and all this despite the fact that I was wedged into a middle seat between Annie and a drunk-bald-fat guy who fell asleep, sitting on my seat belt buckle, with his head on my shoulder.

We were still holding hands when the plane began its descent into Seattle. Me and Annie . . . not me and the drunk guy.

“This is going to be so great,” Annie said.

“What’s the best thing you’ve ever done in your life?” I asked.

“I don’t know. What about you?”

“Top three,” I said—my shoulder leaned against hers, and it felt so good—“were those last two times you and I were alone at Stonehenge, and being here right now, holding your hand.”

I looked right at her.

“You’re trying to see if you can make me do it, aren’t you, West?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I said.

“Sure.” Then she said, “It is not going to happen.”

“Stay strong, Annie.”

“You too, Ryan Dean.”

Crap.

She was playing the same game.

Chapter Fifty-One

ANNIE’S MOTHER AND FATHER WERE waiting for us when we came through the arrival gate. I had never even seen a photograph of them, but they both looked so Annie-like that I would have known them anyway. They were doctors, and they looked so young and healthy. When they saw us, their eyes smiled the same way that Annie’s did.

Annie’s father kissed her, then he held his hand out to me.

“You must be Ryan Dean,” he said. “Annie thinks the world of you.”

I looked at her; and she actually blushed. I couldn’t believe it—Annie Altman turning red; and I wondered if she had that same inner-voice thing where she was currently calling herself a loser, even if I did think it looked totally hot when it happened to her. Blushing, I mean.

“Thank you,” I said, and then I thought, What a stupid thing to say, so I added, “Doctor Altman.” Which sounded even stupider.

Then Annie’s mom hugged me, which kind of flustered me for two reasons: first, because she was a doctor, it made me immediately think she was going to ask me to take my pants off; and, second, I have to admit it, being Annie’s mom, she was really hot.

And she said, “ ‘Doctor Altman’ won’t work in our house. We won’t know who you’re talking to. But you are so polite, Ryan Dean.”

Now I was blushing. Loser.

“You should just call me Rachel, and the other Doctor Altman is Keith.”

I hated calling grown-ups by their first names. It seemed so flower-child-nineteen-seventies to me. So I decided I’d try to not use their names at all, or if I had to, I’d call them “Doc Dad” and “Doc Mom.”

Annie’s father had to drive us to the docks in Seattle to catch the ferry; it was a thirty-five-minute ride to their home on Bainbridge Island. I had never been to Seattle before, and I thought it was one of the most intense-looking cities I’d ever seen, built right up against the tree-lined coast, in the shadow of a giant volcano.

On the way to the docks, we talked about school and sports. Doc Dad was one of the only adults in America I’d ever met who had actually played rugby when he was in college, so we hit it off right away, even though he had been a loose forward. Loose forwards are usually not the most evolved primates on the planet. Still, I knew I was going to fit in just fine with Annie’s family.

Hand-holding in the backseat with Annie was definitely off, though. It took only one look from her to quietly get that message to me. And I could feel her getting a little embarrassed again too when her father and mother began talking about her.

“This is what Annie’s told us about you, Ryan Dean,” her mother said. “Tell us if we’re right. She says you are the smartest boy in the school, you’re a great athlete, and you made the varsity rugby team when you were in tenth grade. And she told us you are the best-looking boy at school too.”

Annie coughed.

My ears turned red.

“You’re Annie’s first real boyfriend,” her father said.

“Okay, that’s enough of that,” Annie said. “Ryan Dean and I are just really good friends. That’s all.”

I guess that whole “boyfriend” label did kind of make it sound like salmon spawning, as Seanie might have noticed.

“Tell us about where you live, Ryan Dean,” Doc Mom said, turning sideways to look at me.

“O-Hall,” I said, and then I thought, why am I such a fucking idiot? I wasn’t even listening to her; I was too caught up in thinking about being Annie’s “boyfriend.”

Annie coughed again, no doubt choking on the thought of bringing a delinquent to Bainbridge Island for the weekend.

“I mean . . . I live in Weston,” I corrected. “I don’t get home much.”

“That’s a shame,” Doc Mom said. “Well, you are welcome to visit us anytime you’d like.”

I looked at Annie and smiled, and she mouthed “pervert” to me.

We were paused in a line of cars making their way onto the ferry.

“Well, what brought you two together?” Doc Dad asked me.

“Annie was the first person I met at Pine Mountain,” I said. “I was really lost and out of place when I started.” I slid my hand over so I touched Annie’s fingers, and she pulled her hand away. “But Annie came right up and introduced herself and helped show me around. She’s been my best friend ever since that day, and I’d do anything for her.”

“You are such a sweet boy!” Doc Mom chirped. “Have you ever been to Seattle before, Ryan Dean?”

“No, ma’am,” I said, laying it on as thick as possible, momentarily fantasizing about that dreamed-of couch in Annie’s bedroom. “But it really is beautiful here.”

“Wait till you see the house,” she said. “We are right on the waterfront, and we look across the sound to the Seattle skyline and Mount Rainier. It’s a perfect spot.”

Yeah, I thought, how could it not be? As long as it’s got Annie in it—and you keep her gay dog off my leg—you could live in a fucking plywood lean-to.

“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” Annie said. “Did you bring any swim trunks? We have an indoor pool and Jacuzzi.”

“Wow,” I said. “No. I didn’t.”

I looked down, then shrugged and looked over at Annie and whispered, “I’ll go without.”

Annie rolled her eyes.

“We can pick some up for you on the island, Ryan Dean,” Doc Mom said.

Score.

Even if it rained all weekend, I’d still get to be Annie Altman’s pool boy.

Chapter Fifty-Two

OKAY.

I realized why my dad refuses to shop for anything, even golf clubs and fishing gear, with my mom.

For most women, I think shopping becomes something like a model of the expanding universe, only rather than relating to the Big Bang, Ryan Dean West’s Law of Shopping deals with the expansion of time, and “adorable stuff” to look at. Kind of like a supernova rather than a black hole—the opposite of having your balls stepped on, as similar as the experiences may actually be.

I can only imagine, not that I thought for even a fleeting instant about opening that goddamned package, that my mother had spent all day long asking all kinds of questions before deciding on just the right condoms and “how to have sex the first time” booklet, which she later undoubtedly exchanged for a cute pair of socks with sailboats on them before ultimately leaving the store and going to a different goddamned condom and “how to have sex the first time” emporium.

This is shopping.

And this was the Ryan-Dean-West-swim-trunk-shopping expedition with Annie and Doc Mom.

At first, Annie was messing around and tried to make a case that I was on the Pine Mountain swim team, so she told Doc Mom to look in the Speedo section.

Her mistake. I completely went along with her. What was she thinking? I actually thought it would be kind of hot to wear Speedos in front of Annie and her mom. But when Annie realized what was happening, she got this terrified, defeated look and said, “I think it’s time for you to move up to big boy board shorts, Ryan Dean.”

“No. Really,” I insisted.

Big boy board shorts. What a bunch of crap.

The only cool part about the whole experience was that every time they’d look at a new pair of trunks, Doc Mom would hold them up to my waist, pinning them with her thumbs to my hips so she and Annie could imagine how I’d look in them.

Yeah, I’ll admit I didn’t get too tired of that routine.

And the shopping went on and on until Doc Dad said he had to pee really bad. So Annie and Doc Mom settled on a pair of plain red lifeguard baggies that were exactly the ones I would have chosen for myself about an hour and a half earlier.

While they were waiting to pay, Doc Dad leaned close to me and whispered, “I don’t really have to pee, Ryan Dean, but I’ve found that the need to pee is about the only force that sufficiently shrinks Rachel’s universe to the point where she’ll cut short a shopping experience.”

Now here was a guy I totally understood.

I bet he could fake-cry, too.

Chapter Fifty-Three

GREEN.

That’s Bainbridge Island.

It’s one of the most intensely green places I’ve ever seen. And I never for a moment imagined the kind of home Annie’s family lived in.

The house was set right up against the shore, facing Puget Sound and, across it, Seattle. We drove up a long driveway through trees to the garage, and then walked a pathway through gardens that had been decorated with strange and beautiful metal and enamel sculptures of fish, animals, and native totems.

“Annie made all of these sculptures herself,” Doc Mom said, “in her studio.”

They were incredible. I looked at Annie. I always knew she was creative and brilliant, but I never realized she could do something as amazing as this.

“You’re incredible,” I said to her.

“Thank you,” she said.

Where the gardens opened up, we stepped out onto a wide grass lawn in front of the house, which was mostly made of stone and had tall windows all along the front, looking out across the water. There was a broad wooden deck on the edge of the lawn, right where the grass gave way to a slope of black lava rocks that lined the shore. You couldn’t see any other house from there; the property was surrounded by forest.

And just as we got to the front door, the sun hit the perfect angle in the west behind us, and it looked like the entire city of Seattle turned rust hued, and the peak of Mount Rainier seemed to float, salmon colored, in the sky.

“Hey,” I said, “you can see the Space Needle from your front yard.”

Annie rolled her eyes.

“If you get changed out of your strip-search clothes, we can walk on the beach before dinner,” she said.

I will admit that my inside-out sock was bothering me, but all I had besides school clothes were running shorts, sweats, and my new swim trunks.

“Okay,” I said.

Doc Dad led the way into the entry hall and said, “Annie, why don’t you take Ryan Dean to the guest room.”

Damn.

“Oh, he doesn’t want to be that far away, all alone,” she said.

Oh my God. Will it actually happen?

Annie continued, “I’ll put him in the little room across from mine.”

Next thing I knew, I heard the clicking of manicured dog nails on the wood floor, followed by the chirplike shriek of repetitive barking, and then this smash-faced little dog appeared and immediately came after my leg in a hump ambush.

“Pedro!” Annie scolded.

“Just kick him,” Doc Mom said. “He never quits, otherwise.”

You know, when someone tells you to kick their dog—the same dog who is currently in a breeding frenzy with your nicest pair of dorky school pants—it’s a difficult thing to judge exactly how hard the dog should be kicked. So I decided I’d give Pedro a conservative three out of five Cossack dancers on the Ryan Dean West How-Far-to-Kick-a-Gay-Pug Spectrum.

“That’s mean!” Annie said, but she did kind of laugh as Pedro skittered like a hockey puck toward the sunken living room.

“Good man, Ryan Dean,” Doc Dad said. “I don’t know why we haven’t cut his balls off yet.”

And why is it, I thought, that whenever boys consider such measures—despite their justifiability—we always get a bit scared, morose, and angsty?

Oh, well.

“Come on,” Annie said. Then she grabbed my hand to lead me down the hallway to our right. She stopped suddenly.

Annie must have realized what she was doing (unlike Pedro, she could control the involuntary impulse to conjugate with Ryan Dean West), because she immediately let go like my hand was a red-hot thing that gets . . . red . . . hot.

Or something.

I followed her, lugging my suitcase and the bag from the sporting goods store.

“The door on the right is your room,” she said. “Just across the hall from mine.”

I opened my door and set my bags down on the floor.

It’s amazing how much a guy can appreciate a non-bunk-bed bed and a bathroom that doesn’t have at least two other guys in it at all times. The window was uncovered and looked out at the beach and tall dark pines, and I had my own television and a huge bathroom with an ice-block shower cubicle.

“How do you like it?” Annie said.

“Please adopt me,” I said. Then I added, “No. On second thought, that could get a little weird. Let’s just hop across the border to Canada and get married.”

Annie laughed. I kicked my shoes off and said, “I’ll get changed.”

“Okay. Meet me in the hall in, like, thirty seconds,” she said.

Hmmm . . . I thought, thirty seconds meant I’d have time to get out of my clothes but not into them. Oh, well, wishful thinking. Docs Mom and Dad would probably disapprove of the clothing-optional houseguest, and that dog was out there waiting for me, anyway.

“Okay,” I said, and Annie left me alone.

Whenever I get off an airplane, I feel like I’ve been deep fried, dripping in oil. And I probably smelled like booze from drunk-bald-fat-guy slobbering on my shoulder. So it felt really good to tear all my clothes off (without a couple security guards pawing through them), and even better to just throw them onto the floor, something I hadn’t been able to do all year.

Now, with all the scattered, discarded articles of boy-clothes, this looked like a real guy’s room.

All I needed to do was mess up the perfectly smoothed bedcovers, which I did with a jump.

I put on the red trunks they bought me, as well as a gray Pine Mountain RFC (which means Rugby Football Club) sweatshirt, some clean, inside-in socks, and my running shoes, and I was out my door and in the hall in under a minute.

Annie opened her door.

No matter what she wore, Annie Altman always looked perfect. She had changed into faded jeans that were just wearing through at the knees and along the bottoms of the pockets, with a pale blue sweater that really made her black hair and blue eyes stand out, even in the dim light of the hallway.

I had never seen her dressed in “home clothes” before, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

And, I am such a loser, I couldn’t even speak when she asked, “Want to see my room?”

Her room was so . . . Annie. The walls were covered with paintings, and sculptures of fish and birds that she’d made. Her windows looked out into the forest, and she had French doors that opened to a stepping-stone path.

Next to her bed was a Wonder Horse, one of those spring-mounted things kids used to play on, like, a hundred years ago.

“Wow,” I said, but my voice cracked like a kid who suddenly realized he was alone inside the bedroom of the girl he loved, which made sense, considering the oppressive reality of my surrounding conditions. “Do you still ride?”

Annie laughed. “Come on.”

She opened the paned doors and led me onto the path outside her room.

Chapter Fifty-Four

WE WALKED ALONG THE ROCKY beach in the sunset.

The water in the sound was so black and rolling, jagged and alive. Everything smelled like the sea and trees. Between the cracks in the rocks, I could see the claws of wedged-in crabs, spitting bubbles, sometimes moving slightly like they wanted to keep an eye on us, like they were spying on us.

“Tomorrow morning we can go run out past that point.” Annie’s hand indicated a distant and darkening stand of trees.

“This is so nice,” I said. My shoes were wet from walking too close to the water. “Thanks so much for asking me, Annie.”

“I knew you’d like it.”

“I never knew you were such an artist,” I said.

“Just like you,” she said.

“Crud. You are so much more. I draw stick figures. You make stuff that’s real.”

“I can tell my mom and dad really like you.”

I pulled out the leg of my trunks. “I got the trunks on.”

“They look good.”

We stopped and turned back toward the house. It was beginning to get dark.

I was convinced she was playing the same game with me that I was playing with her, but I wasn’t going to fall for it. Not for a second. There was still that sensible and pathetic part of my mind that kept telling me Annie Altman only thought I was a little kid and nothing else.

But we did stand there for a minute, and I could smell her, and feel the warmth like a static charge coming from her. And she looked at my face, and we were so close when she said, “Your stitches look like they’re getting better.”

I leaned closer to her. Damn, she looked so nice, and I was so impressed by how she lived and the beautiful things she’d created there with her own hands, and I wanted to . . .

Do not kiss her, Ryan Dean West.

Ugh.

I am such a loser. She knew exactly what she was doing.

She started back to the house and said over her shoulder in her singing voice, the voice that knew everything and made nothing matter, “Don’t even tell me that you didn’t almost do it just now, Ryan Dean.”

Damn.

I couldn’t say anything.

Annie stopped and looked back. “So there. We’re even. Admit it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. I followed after her, and when I caught up beside her, I held her hand.

“I bet JP would be jealous,” I said.

“Don’t even go there, West. You said we shouldn’t talk about JP to each other.”

“Okay.”

I sighed. In the fading light, we hadn’t noticed that her mother and father had been standing just down the beach, watching us. But we didn’t let go of our hands.

Her father’s arm was around her mother’s shoulders. Doc Mom smiled and said, “You look so nice walking on the beach together.”

After dinner, Annie and I went out to the pool house to go for a swim.

Unfortunately, her parents came along. They just sat there reading in lounge chairs, but they were keeping an eye on us too, and I think they enjoyed doing it. But when we sat in the hot tub, I started playing with Annie’s feet and rubbing her legs with mine. It was the best feeling I could ever have dreamed up, and I could tell Annie liked it too, but it was really making me crazy. So I leaned my head back on the deck and closed my eyes because I wasn’t about to let her think I wanted to kiss her. Or something else. But I will say that all Annie would have had to do was whisper, “Let’s go skinny-dipping,” and those goddamned red lifeguard trunks would have been hanging from the rafters.

Chapter Fifty-Five

IT FELT SO COMFORTABLE SLEEPING in that bed that I guess I must not have wanted to wake up. When I did, the sun was already pouring through my window and someone was knocking on my door.

“Ryan Dean. Are you still sleeping?”

It was Annie.

“I was. Until maybe two seconds ago.”

“Sorry.”

I rubbed my eyes.

“You can come in,” I said.

The door cracked open, and she cautiously peeked her head into my room. I could see she was dressed for a run.

I folded my hands on the pillow beneath my head. This was like a dream come true: Annie Altman waking me up in the morning after we practically took a bath together the night before.

“Come get some breakfast, and let’s go for our run. It’s beautiful out there.”

It’s not so bad in here, either, I thought.

“Okay.” I sat up and rubbed my chin. “I’ll be right there after I get ready. I think I need to shave.”

Annie laughed. “Yeah, right.”

“Hey. I have one whisker. Right here under my chin. Just one. I’m thinking of giving it a name, but I don’t know if I should let it grow out or chop its head off.” I tilted my head back and put my finger on my jaw. “See it?”

“No.”

“Well, you can’t see it from way over there. You have to get close.”

She moved to the edge of the bed.

Score.

“Look,” I said. “It’s even dark and everything.”

I kept my chin up, and Annie leaned over me.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “I can see it.”

She was so close.

She said, “It looks so lonely and lost, maybe you shouldn’t shave it. And maybe you should name it ‘Ryan Dean.’ ”

I looked into her eyes.

“I better get out of here,” Annie said, straightening. Then she spun around and went to the door.

“We’re not even anymore, Annie.”

Then I heard her call “Pedro,” and that little disgusting animal came nail-tapping-panting-slobbering-excited-grunting into my room. Annie left, shutting the door just as Pedro sailed up onto my bed and began frantically mounting my foot. I scooped him up by his little sweaty armpits, his hips still pumping at the air, opened the door with my elbow, and scooted him like a shuffleboarded puck-puppy to the opposite end of the hallway.

Annie was smiling, standing there, watching me.

I looked at her and said, “So, are you going to give me time to get dressed, or is it okay if I come to breakfast in my underwear?”

She laughed, and I said, “And, no, we are not even. Ryan Dean West has officially pulled into the lead.”

“It’s not fair if you count getting Pedro to think about kissing you.”

“Good one, Annie. In that case I’m way ahead of you.”

I went back inside my room and got into my running gear.

Chapter Fifty-Six

DOC MOM FED US BAGELS with butter and sweet tomato jam she’d made from her own summer garden, and we drank black coffee and orange juice. And throughout the meal, the doc parents were both trying to talk to us, but our feet were twitching and we needed to get outside.

“I’m sorry, Doc Mom,” I said. “I don’t usually sleep this late, but this place sure is a beautiful spot for resting.”

“Thank you, Ryan Dean. Doc Mom—I like that. Poor boy, you sleep as late as you want. You can do whatever you feel like when you’re in our house,” she said.

I fired a quick and perverted, arched-eyebrow-(it hurt my stitches)-remember-the-Jacuzzi look at Annie, who rolled her eyes.

We ran so far that morning.

I’d almost forgotten that Annie’s being on the cross country team meant that anything under ten miles was a warm-up for her. I followed Annie along trails and streets, heading south along the shore of the island, and we came to a park where a stream cut a V-shaped harbor. The place was deserted, too; I saw just one small fishing boat rocking like a lazy walrus off the shore. We stopped running, and walked through wide fields of knee-high grass that made our legs wet.

The park was the site of an old sawmill, now abandoned, but the outer walls of the mill building still stood, square, like a fort, in the middle of the field. And you could tell from the outline of the perimeter of the open space, and how the forest butted up against it, that there had been tall trees there at one time, before the mill was operational.

“Come on,” Annie said. “I want you to see inside the building.”

I followed her.

It was kind of a surreal place. What was left of the old mill—the floor and side walls—had been entirely constructed of concrete. Huge openings in the sides and in the roof were the gutted remains of former doors and skylights. And just about every available surface inside was painted with bizarre and colorful graffiti, some of it very artistic, and a lot of it just nasty and drugged out. There was even a tree growing from a hole in the floor, all the way up through one of the open skylights, about twenty feet over our heads.

“Who did all this?” I said, turning in my place and scanning all the images.

“Just kids. They get bored living here.”

“They do?” I couldn’t believe anyone would ever get bored here.

“I remembered seeing something here one time,” Annie said. “And I wanted to see if I could find it again, if it hasn’t been painted over.”

She moved past one of the thick steel girders that supported the roof.

“Come here,” she said. “Look. I thought about you when I saw this last time I was here.”

Annie pointed down to the base of one of the walls, and there, beneath a big red word that spelled out SOMEDAY, in interlocking letters, was a painting of two overlapping black circles.

“You remember that?” I said.

“It was about your wish, that last time we were at Stonehenge,” Annie said. “And I thought about it a lot. I felt bad because I’d been so mean to you that week, and I realized that I was pretty unfair to you too. I mean about the ‘little boy’ stuff.”

“Oh?” I knew we were standing too close again. I was practically sweating on her, and I didn’t want her to just be playing. But she was. I backed away, but just a bit, and I looked at the circles. “So, did you get over it? The outside-the-overlap part of me, I mean?”

She looked at me. Her eyes had that relaxed, smiling look in them. She didn’t say anything. We just looked.

Then she stepped closer to me and touched my hand.

I said, “Okay. I don’t care. I lose.”

And then I kissed Annie Altman.

For, like, twenty straight minutes.

And there was no interruption from the visually abrasive Mrs. Singer; there was nothing in the entire universe except for me and Annie finally getting something over with that had been making us both crazy for so long.

I didn’t care that she’d won our little game, because for those incredible minutes, pinning her body between mine and the coolness of the painted concrete wall in that old mill, my hands holding the back of her neck, feeling the softness of her hair falling across the sweat of my arms, I finally didn’t feel like such a loser.

I was shaking.

I said, “I told you I’d do it when I wanted to. And I decided I wanted to.”

We got back to her house at lunchtime, and her father said, “Wow, you two must have gone pretty far.”

Annie smiled at me, and I know she was thinking about the perverted comment I’d normally be tempted to make at such a statement, but this was not a normal time for Ryan Dean West, and she said, “Oh, it was the perfect run, Dad.”

And I said, “Yeah. Completely perfect.”

Chapter Fifty-Seven

THAT AFTERNOON, ANNIE KEPT HER promise to fix my school pants, but her mom helped. So I stood there in the “sewing room” in my socks and underwear doing the on-off routine with my pants while hot Annie pinned and her hot mother worked the sewing machine.

You know, it’s easy to play all cool and stuff about how hot certain females are, but it’s another thing entirely to then find yourself actually standing in front of them in your underwear. I’m not really sure if I was handling the opportunity in the most advantageous manner.

I wondered if there were many guys out there who actually could.

I was so red and embarrassed, and Doc Mom tried to make small talk about how nice it was to have a boy in the house, but it was like my tongue had been bee-stung, and I couldn’t say anything because I just wanted to keep hearing both of them tell me to take my pants off again.

I am such a loser.

All I could think about was how I’d actually kissed Annie that day, and I wondered if we would ever have the guts to say anything about it, or if we’d even have the guts to make it happen again.

Then I had to stand there, waiting in my boxers while Doc Mom ironed the old hems out and made me try on every pair of slacks one last time before she was satisfied they were perfect. All I knew was that I wished I’d grow another two inches by the next morning so we’d be required to do it over again, and maybe next go-round, I’d be all suave and debonair and stuff, and make witty comments instead of just gurgling like a goldfish on a linoleum floor.

“There,” Doc Mom said. “I think you look very handsome.”

“Thanks, Doc Mom,” I said, and unbuttoned my pants and began pulling them down.

“Uh, Ryan Dean, you can leave them on now. We’re finished,” she said.

I am such a loser.

“He got strip-searched at the airport, Mom,” Annie said. “I think he’s traumatized by it.”

“Really?” Doc Mom said.

Oh, yeah. She’s a psychologist. So now she needed to hear the whole story about what happened, and how poor Ryan Dean had been mentally abused. I gave Annie an ultraterrified, oh-my-God-please-don’t-tell-your-mom-about-the-Band-Aid-on-my-balls look, but it was too late for that. Annie launched into the entire story, going all the way back to Wednesday when Sean Russell Flaherty stepped on my nuts at rugby practice and I went to the doctor for it.

And Doc Mom, being the compassionate therapist that she is, laughed until she had tears in her eyes (just like Annie does) and said that was one of the funniest stories she’d ever heard.

When Annie was finished with the getting-on-the-airplane-as-Ryan-Dean’s-pants-fell-down-again part, I excused myself to return to my room so I could kill myself.

I probably would have, too, except just as I stepped out into the hallway, three things happened at once:

1. Pedro hump-ambushed me, and I almost fell down.

2. I realized that both Annie and her five-out-of-five-leather-couches-on-the-Ryan-Dean-West-Hot-Therapist-Ink-Blot-Test mom had just had a conversation about my balls.

3. Doc Mom said to Annie, “I just love Ryan Dean.” And I swear to God, but then again, this is coming from the same boy who’s heard all kinds of twisted things coming from Mrs. Singer’s mouth, but I swear to God that Annie said, “So do I.”

Of course, I can’t be absolutely certain, because of the noise of anguished and love-starved grunts coming from that goddamned gay pug.

Chapter Fifty-Eight

WE DIDN’T TALK ABOUT WHAT happened in the abandoned sawmill, and we didn’t kiss again, either, for that whole endlessly long Saturday. And the next morning when I woke up, it was drizzling rain, and I was so depressed about having to leave Bainbridge Island and fly back to Oregon later that day that I seriously felt like I could cry.

So I stayed in bed until I heard Annie’s door open across the hall. Then she knocked.

“Come in.”

This time, she just walked right in.

“Good morning,” she said.

“Hi.”

“Are you okay?”

I pulled the covers over my face and hid. “I don’t want to go back to school, Annie. Make it be yesterday again.”

“Do you want to run?”

“I love running in the rain. Meet me in the kitchen in, like, thirty seconds.”

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s just run in the woods today.”

We sat down to breakfast with the doc parents. We had oatmeal and black coffee. I love coffee. I hate oatmeal, but I’ll be honest, I’d eat anything at the Altmans’ table. I wore my black running shorts and Pine Mountain RFC sweatshirt with a blue cap that I started to take off when I sat down, but Doc Mom told me to keep it on, that I didn’t have to be like that in their house.

“Next time you come up, Ryan Dean,” Doc Dad said, “do you think you could bring me one of those sweatshirts? I don’t have any rugby stuff anymore.”

“No problem,” I said.

“And I fully intend on coming down and seeing you play a match this season too,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the game. Too long.”

“That would be really cool,” I said.

Doc Mom looked sad. I could tell it was hard for her to always say good-bye to her daughter, but Annie told me they saw each other more often now that she was at Pine Mountain than they ever did when they all lived together full-time.

I guess things work out like that sometimes.

“I’m sure going to miss having you here, Ryan Dean,” Doc Mom said. “I want to see you back before Thanksgiving, if your folks will let you.”

“If it’s okay with Annie,” I said. “This was the best weekend I ever had in my life, I think.”

Annie tipped her coffee cup empty and said, “Let’s go, West, if you’re done.”

We went out into the gray, wet morning.

Running through the woods north of her house, it amazed me how green things grew on top of green things that were still green and growing. Trees were covered with ferns and vines and mosses, and everywhere it looked as if nothing had been dry in centuries. And in the dark woods as we ran, I could smell that living-ocean scent of the island, and I heard nothing but the sounds of our feet on the wet ground, our breathing, and the static-spark sizzle of rain dripping through the forest cover.

She was running fast, trying to push me, or trying to get somewhere that I didn’t know about.

“Hey!” I said. “Stop for a minute, Annie.”

Where a tree branch arched across the trail, black, and covered with hair of brilliant moss, Annie stopped and turned around to wait for me. I was panting. Dark rings of sweat made circles under my arms and a V that pointed at my belly, down from my neck. My cap was soaked dark with the drizzling rain.

“Don’t kiss me, Ryan Dean.”

Now, that was like getting kicked in the balls again.

“Okay.”

I bent forward and put my hands on my knees. I spit between my feet.

“Did I do something wrong, Annie?”

“No. I just think we shouldn’t do that again.”

Ugh.

“Okay with me,” I said.

I tried to sound like Annie would if she’d said it, all nonchalant and singsongy, but my voice cracked and I felt like a fucking idiot. “I just wanted to say thanks again for having me here. And how much I like your mom and dad.”

“You’re welcome, Ryan Dean,” she said. “Do you want to turn around?”

“No. I want you to make it be yesterday again.”

“Stop it, Ryan Dean.”

“Okay, Annie. I know what’s up. Okay.”

“I can’t be in love with you, Ryan Dean.”

I turned around and started running back to her house. Maybe, I thought, if I ran fast enough, like those fucking stupid old science fiction movies, I could go back in time.

I ran faster than I ever had in my pathetic life.

But it didn’t work.

I am such a loser.

What a bunch of crap.

Chapter Fifty-Nine

I JUST RAN.

The woods were dark; the clouds were getting thicker.

I took off my cap and tossed it into the blackberry vines that grew everywhere in these woods. Then I pulled my sweatshirt off, soaked and inside out, and dropped it in the mud of the trail.

I kept running.

I kicked my foot out of one shoe and threw it as far as I could into the woods to the right. And I whispered, “Fuck you, shoe” when I chucked it. I listened to it hit, falling like a dead bird somewhere out in the dark green. Then I kicked off the other shoe and threw it in the opposite direction. I threw it so hard, it hurt my arm.

My socks were black with mud.

I guess I was kind of insane.

No, I’ll be honest. What Annie was doing to me made me completely insane, and I couldn’t stand myself anymore. I pulled my socks off and left them in the trail.

Part of me wanted to strip completely naked and just run out into the woods and be some kind of free and wild boy who never had to do anything for anyone except run around naked in the forest and kill things when he got hungry. But just feeling the nylon of my running shorts against my shriveling skin, I guess, somehow reminded me that I had a plane to catch later that day, and Calculus homework, and I was supposed to be reading In Our Time; and I’d been neglecting all that stuff because I was too busy thinking I was some kind of free and wild boy ever since Friday afternoon. So now it was time again to be Ryan Dean West, the fucking loser kid who’s fourteen and in eleventh grade.

I sat on the wet concrete outside their front door, shivering.

I think my skin was as gray as the sky and I was hugging my knees to try and get warm when she came up to the house, holding my soaked and muddy sweatshirt and socks at her side.

“What are you doing, Ryan Dean?”

“N-nothing.” I was stuttering, I was so cold. “I told you I like running in the rain. I wanted to get wet.”

“I’m sorry, Ryan Dean.”

“It’s no big deal, Annie. Really.”

“Stay there,” she said, dropping my clothes on the step beside me. “I’m going to get you a towel.”

Chapter Sixty

WE DIDN’T SAY THINGS LIKE we usually do on the drive to the airport. Doc Mom asked if I had a good time and if I wanted to come back. I gave the polite one-word answers that would have been written down in a script about some other kid.

And the truth is, yeah, I had a great time, and, yeah, I wanted to come back so bad, it felt like I was getting stabbed in my skinny-bitch-ass chest, but just wanting that and feeling that wasn’t going to change my universe.

I sat at the window on the plane.

I read “Indian Camp” and held Annie’s hand for the whole flight, but I didn’t say anything to her. I just looked out the window or read.

Chapter Sixty-One

WE WERE THE FIRST ONES back, so we had to wait in the airport for Joey.

And then it wouldn’t be until Megan and suspended-license Chas arrived from LA that we’d take the achingly quiet and long drive back to Pine Mountain.

So we sat, silently, next to each other on the black vinyl seats in the arrivals lounge, waiting for Joey’s flight from San Francisco.

It was ironic that I’d read “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” the second story in the Hemingway book, because I thought it was all about how guys and girls don’t understand each other at all. And I was already guessing what kinds of ridiculous things Mr. Wellins would say about those first stories, but, still, I thought they were probably some of the best writing I’d ever read. Maybe it was just my mood, I don’t know.

I closed the book when Annie said, “Do you want to get something to drink, or something?”

What a choice. I could have something or something.

I wondered if “something” to Annie included all the possible somethings that existed to me, and then I got mad at myself for drawing a diagram of those somethings in my head.

“I’ll take some of the second something,” I said.

Annie smiled.

“Are you going to talk to me?” she said.

“The Wild Boy of Bainbridge Island doesn’t talk,” I said. “He grunts.”

She laughed. But her eyes looked sadder than they usually did.

“What do you want to talk about, Annie?”

“About how we can’t be, like, in love with each other. It would be ridiculous, Ryan Dean.”

I leaned my head sideways on the seat back. I think they make those things so uncomfortable just to remind you there could always be something worse than a seat on an airplane, or an eternity in hell.

Our shoulders were touching.

“Oh, I totally agree with you, Annie.”

I didn’t blink. I just looked right at her.

“So don’t be sad, Ryan Dean.”

We were so close.

“That would be ridiculous,” I said.

She just watched me. I wondered if she thought I was playing, because I wasn’t. I was serious then, and I had pretty much given up on everything.

I even thought that once we got back to Pine Mountain, I was going to call my dad and tell him I wanted to go home.

I needed to go home.

I was giving up.

“Did you start reading this yet?” I held the Hemingway up in front of her.

“No.”

“It’s really good.”

“Really?”

And then she leaned even closer to me. I wondered if she noticed I’d shaved that one whisker off.

“Or something,” I said.

And then I thought, Oh my God, she’s acting like she’s going to kiss me. How can she be doing that? This is absolute bullshit.

Please kiss me, Annie.

She closed her eyes, and very softly, she put her lips on mine. And I closed my eyes too, because I didn’t know if I was madder than hell or if I wanted to cry, but why was she doing this? And it felt nicer than anything, and she tasted like the air smelled on the island, full of life and energy.

When she pulled away, we both opened our eyes.

I said, “You are going to make me completely insane, Annie.”

“Me too.”

We didn’t even notice that Joey had been standing right there, watching us the whole time.

“Well, it’s about fucking time,” Joey said.

I’ll say.

And Annie kind of stammered, “Uh. We were not just doing that, Joey.”

“Yeah. That would be ridiculous,” I said. “You must have been drinking on the plane if you thought you saw us kissing.”

“Okay,” Joey said. “I timed it and everything. It was at least a minute and a half. That’s not kissing. You’re right. It’s making out. It’s practically having sex in public.”

I wanted to high-five Joey so bad, my hand was twitching.

What a fucking awesome thing to say, especially coming from a gay guy.

“Ugh,” Annie said, “I need to go get a bottle of water.”

When she left, I stood up and said, “Hell, yeah!” and, yes, a new decibel-level record was officially established for the loudest-ever, airborne (since I jumped), gay-straight high-five. Unfortunately, it was a little too loud, and Annie wasn’t out of earshot on her water-shopping trip, so she gave me the patented-Annie-Altman-that-will-never-happen-again look.

“What’s up with her?” Joey said.

“Dude, she is being really weird about it. She’s making me crazy. I don’t think she knows what she wants.”

“Maybe she’s afraid she’ll get hurt,” Joey said. “Because of the way you objectify every girl in the fucking world.”

“Dude, Joey. Are you telling me off again?”

“No, Ryan Dean. I’m just saying. You think every girl you ever see is ‘hot,’ right? Maybe Annie wants to be more than that. That’s what I’d think about, if I was you.”

“I don’t think every girl is hot,” I said. There was, after all, Mrs. Singer downstairs. “And, anyway, if you were me, I’d be gay, in which case every girl would look exactly like Mary Todd Lincoln.”

Joey laughed.

“But I think I know what you’re saying,” I said.

I envied Joey. He hadn’t shaved since Friday morning, and he had some pretty impressive stubble going. I mourned that one whisker I’d shaved off, because I would have shown him. At Pine Mountain, if a boy showed up to class with facial hair like Joey had, they’d take him into the bathroom and make him shave on the spot with a nasty old, used razor. But on weekends, guys like Joey and Chas could just skip the whole grooming thing entirely.

I sighed.

“I shaved this morning, Joey. I had one whisker. Here. Can you see it?”

I held my chin up and pointed.

Joey leaned close and laughed.

“Yeah. Sure.” And then he asked, “How was her place?”

“Incredible. I am so in love with her, Joe.”

“I can see that, Ryan Dean. More than I can see that nonwhisker, that’s for sure.”

Chapter Sixty-Two

I CALLED MY MOTHER FROM the airport.

Well, to be honest, I called home hoping I’d be able to talk to my dad, but no such luck.

RYAN DEAN WEST: Hi, Mom. It’s me, Ryan Dean.

I know. I’m an idiot.

MOM: Hi, sweetie! Are you back from Seattle?

RYAN DEAN WEST: I’m at the airport in Portland.

MOM: Did you have a good time, Ryan Dean?

RYAN DEAN WEST: It was the best weekend ever, Mom.

MOM: Oh.

I thought she sounded . . . sad? Awkward pause. Very awkward pause.

MOM (cont.): Is everything . . . okay, Ryan Dean? You sound different.

I can’t believe it. Is she actually crying?

RYAN DEAN WEST: Are you crying, Mom?

MOM: I’m sorry, baby. You just sound so grown up all of a sudden. Did you and your girlfriend, you know . . .

Please, someone, kill me now.

RYAN DEAN WEST: No!

MOM: Well, did you get the package I sent? Did everything work the way the booklet said it would?

Sniff.

Why is it a guy can have an entire conversation with a girl and it’s like she’s hearing something entirely different from what is coming out of his mouth?

RYAN DEAN WEST: Mom. I am not calling to talk about sex.

This was so creepily disgusting. Here was the one person in the world with whom I would never want to talk about the one thing I think about constantly.

RYAN DEAN WEST (cont.): I’m calling to ask you to FedEx me a new pair of running shoes. I lost mine on the island.

MOM: Oh. I’m so sorry, sweetie.

She sounded crushed.

RYAN DEAN WEST: It’s okay, Mom. They were getting too small anyway. I gained ten pounds and I’m two inches taller now than when you saw me in September. I need size ten-and-a-half. Nikes or Asics, okay?

MOM: Ten-and-a-half? Ten-and-a-half?

She started crying again.

Crap.

Chapter Sixty-Three

TWO THINGS KIND OF HIT me when I saw Chas and Megan get off the flight from Los Angeles together.

First, they looked like they were tired of each other, like an old married couple who’d gone on too long of a vacation together and did not have fun; and, second, I was kind of jealous that Chas got to spend the weekend with Megan.

I know that’s stupid.

Does that make me a bad person? No matter what Joey said, I wasn’t ever going to be able to stop thinking of Megan Renshaw as smoking hot, and in some ways she was more accessible to me than Annie.

I’ll be honest. Seeing her coming off the plane and realizing I was jealous of Chas did make me feel terrible about the whole situation. And I thought, maybe I just felt that way because in some ways I was convinced that Annie was going to throw me away again. Maybe Joey was right that Annie didn’t want to get hurt, but, goddamnit, neither did I. So maybe I just looked at Megan as some type of five-out-of-five-sizzling-white-hot-crescent-wrenches on the Ryan Dean West Safety Net Tool Chart.

I still felt bad, though, and I grabbed Joey by the collar while we were waiting at baggage claim and whispered, “Joey, tell me to grow up again.”

And he said, “Ryan Dean, grow the fuck up.”

’Cause he saw how I’d been looking at Megan.

You know, there’s this lesson in cheesy stories that says be careful what you wish for, but I was never one for cheesy stories, much less morally condescending messages, so it was kind of like dying and going to that special place with Great-Grandma and that two-dimensional Chihuahua of mine when pissed-off-at-Megan Chas grumbled that he wanted to sit in front so “Asswing can sit in the back with the other two girls.”

Yeah. Whatever, Betch. Call me a girl. Call me Asswing. But, for a two-hour car ride, my legs would be simultaneously touching the legs of Megan Renshaw and Annie Altman, and I fully believed that would precipitate the all-time lowest blood-pressure reading north of Ryan Dean Westworld’s metal-detector-tripping equator.

And then again, there was still that unopened bottle of piss, too, so call me whatever you want.

Do things like that explode? I wondered, since I’d never actually kept a bottle of piss around for more than three days—tops—before.

And I was also fully aware of how incredibly stupid I can be at times like this, so I told myself (or, Ryan Dean West said it to the Wild Boy of Bainbridge Island) that I’d better just shut up, keep my eyes forward, and not cop any obvious feels.

Yeah, right. Okay, to be honest, I can abide by the limitation of obviousness, but the “feels” part was a done deal as far as the Wild Boy of Bainbridge Island was concerned. Oh . . . and eyes forward? Are you kidding me? So that meant shutting up. Hmm . . . That was probably out too.

We got all our stuff loaded into the SUV and piled in.

The back windows immediately fogged up. I felt myself beginning to sweat. I slipped my shoes off and kicked them under the seat, quietly contemplating the beauty of that hump in the floor, which allowed me to touch Annie’s foot with my left and Megan’s foot with my right.

Suddenly, I found myself in a battle of epic proportions, pitting good and pure Ryan Dean West against the crazed urges of the Humping Wild Boy of Bainbridge Island, who, undoubtedly, had been somehow infected from the saliva of that sex-starved gay pug dog and, as a result, felt a helpless compulsion to hump anything with a pulse.

I am such a loser.

I didn’t even make it out of the goddamned parking lot.

RYAN DEAN WEST: Stop trying to play footsie with two girls at the same time. You’re getting mud on my socks.

WILD BOY OF BAINBRIDGE ISLAND: I can take them off if you want. You know how I feel about wearing clothes, anyway.

RYAN DEAN WEST: Oh my God. You wouldn’t.

(Wild Boy of Bainbridge Island loosens his tie and begins unbuttoning his shirt.)

“It’s really hot in here,” I said.

Megan smiled at me. She’d slipped off her shoe and was playing with my foot right under Chas’s seat, where no one could see what was going on. I felt like I was melting. I had to do something to pull myself back away from the Wild Boy urges.

I fought.

I slipped my hand into Annie’s, interlocking our fingers. I squeezed tight, our hands resting on the soft fabric of her skirt where it draped over her thigh.

God! I think I actually began hyperventilating, creating my own microclimate in the backseat, where it was as humid as a rain forest in the Amazon. Worse. It actually started raining in the goddamned backseat.

Megan saw that I was holding hands with Annie. She didn’t look happy. She pulled her foot away and slipped it back inside her shoe. She turned her face toward the window and put her hand down on the seat between us. That’s when . . . she . . . touched . . . my butt.

That gave the Wild Boy renewed strength, and good, pure, and kind Ryan Dean deflated to a wasted and wimpy 152-pound sack of crap. So in a last-ditch effort, I squeaked “I had a really great weekend” to Annie, but I sounded like a third grader on helium.

I cleared my throat. I don’t know where this new Ryan Dean West came from, but I realized that everything Joey had been cussing me out about was totally true; and, worse, that Megan Renshaw was every bit as evil as Mrs. Singer.

“And, Annie, I never told you this, well, at least not the right way, but the things you make at your house—everything: the sculptures, and how your room is, your Wonder Horse, and the sounds and smells and everything—is so beautiful. It makes me feel lucky just to know you.”

Score.

I rallied my strength and pulled my right foot over the hump, away from Megan, so both of my feet could be tangled up around Annie’s. I leaned my head back and looked at her. Megan pinched my butt really hard, but I stifled my jerk reflex, and since it hurt so bad it made tears well in my eyes, it was a potential grand slam as far as Annie was concerned.

But the play in the outfield didn’t quite unfold the way I’d imagined.

Chas said, “I just threw up in my mouth, Pussboy.”

Pussboy.

Another new one.

Nice.

Megan said, “I think Ryan Dean is one of the sweetest, hottest boys I know.”

Okay, I’ll be honest. She actually did say that. And her hand was still under my butt.

Chas gave me an over-the-shoulder, “You’re fucking dead, Pussboy” look.

And Annie gave me the it-was-vacation-craziness-we-are-not-ever-ever-going-to-kiss-again look.

Crap.

I was hosed and I knew it.

I sneezed. I suddenly felt terrible. Not terrible because of how much of a loser I was, but terrible because it dawned on me exactly why I was so sweaty and my voice wasn’t working.

“Are you okay, Ryan Dean?” Annie asked. She was leaning forward in her seat, looking square at my face, so close.

“I feel like I’m getting sick,” I said.

Then, as happens in my reality, all these things occurred at once:

1. (Fight or Flight) Chas turned around and said, “If you fucking puke in my car, Pussboy, I’ll make you lick it up.” This made me feel a little queasier.

2. (Nice) Annie gave a sympathetic “aww.” She put her hand across my forehead (Bliss) to see if I had a fever and said, “Well, you shouldn’t have been running around naked in the woods in the rain this morning.”

3. (Hot) Megan’s hand warmed up considerably, her fingers played inside my back pocket, and she said, “You were running naked in the woods? That’s so incredibly sexy.”

4. (Kind of thing the Wild Boy of Bainbridge Island lives to hear) Annie said, “You are really hot, Ryan Dean.”

Okay, I’ll be honest. I know she was talking about my having a fever. But with Megan cupping her hand under my butt cheek and cooing on one side of me, and Annie touching my face and looking so compassionately Florence-Nightingale-hot on the other, a guy can hallucinate, can’t he?

Chapter Sixty-Four

BY THE TIME WE GOT back to pine Mountain, I had been sleeping with my head on Annie’s shoulder for over an hour. I woke up when the cold air rushed in on me from the open doors.

I felt Annie let go of my hand.

“We’re back,” she said.

I felt sick.

“Make it be yesterday again.”

Annie smiled.

The others were already around back, pulling their bags out of the SUV. Chas and Megan weren’t talking to each other. Megan didn’t seem to mind. She wheeled her bag away in the direction of the girls’ dorm and said, “I hope you feel better, Ryan Dean.”

Then I knew Chas was going to do something to get even with me.

Probably something painful, but at the very least humiliating.

Annie helped me out of the car. I put my feet down in a puddle of rainwater, then realized my shoes were still sitting on the floor beneath the backseat, where I’d left them.

I am such a loser.

“Oh my God! I’m so sorry, Ryan Dean,” Annie said. But she was laughing about it too.

Of course it was funny. I just felt like crap.

I slipped my soggy socks back into my shoes and wiped the sweat from my forehead.

“You need to take a hot shower and get into bed,” Annie said.

I wasn’t so sick I couldn’t say, “I might need some help doing that, Annie.”

“You are such a pervert.” She smiled, and those eyes almost made me feel better.

Joey put my bag over his shoulder and said, “Come on, I’ll take this back for you.”

We walked through the main gates to the campus together, and just as Annie was turning off toward her dorm, I saw Seanie and JP coming up from the lake path. I turned to Annie and grabbed her hand.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”

“Yeah.”

I moved a little closer. I really felt like we were supposed to kiss or something, but I didn’t know. I mean, isn’t that the normal thing to do after people go away for a weekend together?

“I really did have a great time, Annie. Sorry I got mad about things this morning. You know, I just feel like . . .” I looked down at my sloshing feet and said, “Whatever.” I didn’t want her to go.

“It’s okay, Ryan Dean. Get better, okay?”

Then she let go of my hand and turned away. I sighed. I really wanted to grab her and turn her around right there in front of everyone and just kiss her, the same way we kissed in the sawmill, but I knew Annie wasn’t like that, and that no matter how I felt, it wouldn’t be the right thing to do. So I slumped my shoulders and followed Joey toward O-Hall, my feet slosh-slosh-sloshing behind him as he carried both of our bags.

“Hey, Nutsack, welcome back.” Seanie jogged up to me. “How was the trip?”

Of course, JP stayed back on the path, away from me. And when I turned around to talk to Seanie, I saw that JP was saying something to Annie. And I saw her smile at him, and I wondered if we had that same kind of tired-of-each-other look that Chas and Megan did.

No. I knew we didn’t.

“Dude, did you even hear what I’ve been saying?” Seanie said.

I wasn’t really listening to him. I was watching Annie give JP a hug. And then JP looked right at me. It felt like getting kicked in the balls by both of them. I turned away. God, I hated him.

“Huh?” I said. “Oh. I had a great time, Seanie. It was great.”

He followed along as we walked to O-Hall, and we talked about things, but I wasn’t paying attention at all. I know I told him I’d gotten sick, and I know Seanie was laughing about something he’d done to someone on the Internet over the weekend, and it was probably me and probably had something to do with a Band-Aid, but it was all fogged through the filter of my sickness and how much I wanted to kill John-Paul Tureau at that moment.

Chapter Sixty-Five

AT MIDNIGHT, SOME ASSHOLE PULLED the sheets off my head and beamed a flashlight on my face.

“Get up, Pussboy, we’re playing poker.”

Ugh.

“Let me sleep, Chas. I’m sick. I don’t mind if you guys go ahead and play.”

My throat felt like I had swallowed a handful of sewing needles. Sideways.

Sheets.

Off.

On the floor.

Gravity.

Hands grabbing my legs. Being pulled over the edge.

My feet slapped down onto the cool of the floor, and someone held me up by my armpits to stop me from recracking my head open.

Crap.

I really hate Chas Becker.

I yawned, and when the fluid cleared from my eyes, I could see Joey, Casey Palmer (of all people—why’d Chas ask that dickhead to play?), and Kevin Cantrell, standing there in front of me with his right arm folded inside a black cloth sling.

“Kevin. Wow. Are you okay?” Awkwardly, I shook his left hand.

There is something really weird about being cornered into shaking a guy’s left hand. It felt creepy and dirty. Standing there in my boxers didn’t do anything special to make it feel closer to normal either.

I picked my sheet up from the floor where Chas had thrown it and wrapped it around me. I was shivering a little, and sweating, but I wasn’t going to get dressed. I refused to.

I fully planned on going back to bed.

Chas began setting up the game, and the guys sat in a circle on the floor. I stayed on my feet.

“I’ll be okay,” Kevin said. “They have to see if there’s going to be nerve damage. The season’s over for me, though.”

“That’s fucked up,” Chas said. “I don’t know who we’re going to get to lock with me now.”

In rugby, locks came in pairs, like training wheels. Like balls. Chas and Kevin were arguably the most important guys in the forward pack.

Chas began shuffling.

“Get your twenty dollars out and sit down, Pussboy.”

I guess he’d gotten used to my new name.

It did have a lyrical sound to it.

I said, “Pussboy’s going back to bed.” I looked at Casey and started to climb back up to the top bunk. I still couldn’t believe he was there in my room.

Then Chas said, “Sit the fuck down and get your fucking foot off my bed.”

And he sounded seriously dangerous. I knew he was pissed off about Megan. I knew we were going to have to settle it.

Joey said, “Leave him alone, Chas. He doesn’t want to play.”

Chas started to say something, and I could tell it was going to be horrible, too. You know how you just kind of get that oh-here-comes-Chas-Becker’s-fucked-up-comment-about-me-and-Joey-being-gay-together-when-he-knows-goddamn-well-his-smoking-hot-girlfriend-loves-to-make-out-with-me feeling? So before he even fully got the first word out of his mouth, I rasped, “No big deal, Joey. I’m in.”

At least, I figured, with five players instead of four, my odds were 5 percent better of not receiving the consequence. I grabbed a twenty from my desk and tossed it down to the Bank of Chas.

“Here,” I said. “And screw you, Chas.”

That’s not cussing, is it?

Then Casey tried to be funny and said, “Is it just me, or is someone here about to get his ass kicked?”

“Well, if you’re scared, Casey, you could go back to your room and get your pads on, you fucking human tampon,” Kevin said.

That was cool. I would have high-fived Kevin, but I felt sorry for his arm.

Casey glared at Kevin. I watched him. Joey was right about Casey Palmer. There was something cruel and cold in that kid’s eyes. Casey Palmer really did know what hate was.

“Hey, come on,” Joey said. Damn, Joey always stuck up for everyone. Even tools like Casey Palmer.

I sat, cross-legged, shirtless, and barefoot, with my sheet wrapped around my waist. I probably looked like Gandhi or something, so I put my hands together and said, “Namaste.”

But Joey was the only one who got it. He laughed, while Kevin looked politely confused, and Casey looked like he was still pissed off about being called a human tampon, and Chas said, “Whatever, you fucking puss. Let’s have a drink.”

God.

I looked at Joey’s feet. He and Kevin were wearing our rugby socks again. But this time, Kevin pulled his sweats up and showed he had a full bottle of whiskey tucked inside the top of one of his socks, and a Maxine’s House of Spirits in Atlanta shot glass in the other. I rolled my eyes, but I still had to wonder if Maxine was hot, and if she lived in a haunted house, or was that just made up, and if it was a haunted house, were there any girl ghosts, and can a ghost be hot?

Yeah . . . I just knew someone was going to die tonight.

Chapter Sixty-Six

I DECIDED THAT WHISKEY FROM A Maxine’s House of Spirits in Atlanta shot glass tasted a hell of a lot better than beer from a can, even if I did notice one of Kevin Cantrell’s leg hairs floating in it.

Oh, well, drinking another guy’s leg hair can’t kill you, can it? But it did make me feel kind of like a zombie. I mean the leg-hair thing—you know, consuming the flesh of the living—not the whiskey, because that made me feel like the Wild Boy of Bainbridge Island.

And then, too, I had to wonder what Gandhi would have thought about the whole leg-hair thing, him being a vegetarian and all.

So, yeah, I did have a drink of whiskey.

Well, to be honest, maybe two.

I know . . . I’m such a loser.

And I’m not going to feel sorry for myself or try to defend my stupidity, which had been elevated to a kind of Wild-Boy-Meets-Gandhi religion, but the whiskey did wash those sewing needles out of my throat, and I was so pissed off about JP and Annie hugging that I honestly believe I was trying to hurt myself.

I had a feeling I wouldn’t be going to my classes in the morning anyway.

Eventually, the Wild Boy had just about taken over my entire consciousness, and after two tips from Maxine’s shot glass, he was ready to fight Chas and Casey at the same time to settle anything left unfinished between us.

But then the Gandhi part of me said I should just let them both beat the living crap out of me until they got tired of it.

So it was a real ethical dilemma.

Kevin and Joey looked quiet and steady, like they always did. I don’t think they drank as much as the other two guys while we played. Casey and Chas were pretty drunk. I thought it was a miracle that they didn’t start yelling and breaking things and wake up Mr. Farrow.

After about half an hour, Chas and I were both losing badly, so it became a kind of race between us to see which of us would lose out first and get the consequence, even if the Wild Boy of Bainbridge Island kind of hoped it had something to do with running around in the woods naked in the rain and killing something with my bare hands and eating it raw.

That’s when Chas said to Casey, “So what’s up with all that shit on your MySite? Now you’ve got a picture of his nutsack . . .”

Chas hitchhiked his thumb at me.

Oh, great. Now everyone thinks they’re my balls.

“. . . with a Band-Aid on it . . .”

Of course.

Sean Russell Flaherty’s creative touch, no doubt.

“. . . and all this shit about how much you love Ryan Dean West, and there must be about fifty pictures of Pussboy on it too.”

It kind of choked me up that Chas actually knew my name, and also that Seanie had that many pictures of me.

I hoped they were good ones.

“I don’t know who the fuck has been doing that,” Casey said.

I looked at Joey.

“You don’t really love me, do you, Palmer?” I said.

“Do you want me to kill you now or later?” he answered.

Chas bumped Kevin’s good arm and said, “Give me another shot, Maxine.”

Chas downed the drink in one swallow and said, “Damn that stuff tastes terrible.”

Okay, that was the precise moment the Wild Boy took complete charge of my sensibilities as the pacifist was sleeping off a binge.

I said, “You should try it with a splash of Gatorade in it, Chas.”

Well, to be honest, I actually did say “Gatorade,” but I was thinking “warm-four-day-old-fermented-Pussboy-piss.”

He said, “You have Gatorade?”

“Only just a little.”

“I’ll try it. Thanks, Pusswing.”

Wow. It was just like Christmas. I got another new hate-name from Chas and I was about to watch him drink my pee. What could be better than that?

Dear Pussboy Ryan Dean:

Note to self: After I watch Chas drink my piss, it would be a good time to fully commit to NEVER kissing Megan Renshaw again.

Ever.

Kevin began pouring.

“Leave some room on the arrp,” I said.

“What?” Kevin asked.

I realized I had grunted.

Wild Boy had so taken control that I was losing the ability to express myself with the conventions of spoken language.

“Room. Leave some.”

I took the shot glass from Kevin and chimped up to my bunk. I dug around for my Ryan Dean West Emergency Gatorade Bottle Nighttime Urinal and carefully uncapped it.

In the name of all things holy that piss stunk! I could almost feel the fetid gas cloud escaping from the mouth of the bottle and wafting like a moist cadaver’s hand across my face. A quick splash, a speedy recapping, and I was back down on the floor, sweating in my loincloth, presenting Chas with his drink.

“Gunga Din to the rescue,” I said.

“Does anyone ever know what the fuck you’re talking about?” Chas said, and took the glass from me.

I watched.

My sheet came unraveled and fell to my feet.

I sat.

Chas drank.

Oh, yeah. Take that, Betch.

He squinted, cocked his head, smacked his lips, and said, “I think I like it better straight.”

I looked at Joey. His mouth hung open. He looked like he was witnessing a beheading, or something even grosser, like a beheading where the victim is forced to drink some other guy’s four-day-old fermented piss first. Because it dawned on me that I had told Joey about the Gatorade bottle when we were on the bus coming back to Pine Mountain from Salem.

“Fuck,” Joey said. And I know he would have high-fived me, but he was too deeply repulsed, and he was probably afraid I had some piss on my hand, besides.

“What?” Chas asked.

“Nothing.”

And then Christmas came twice in the same day, because Casey said, “Let me try some with Gatorade in it too.”

And that’s when Joey honestly looked at me like I was a depraved serial killer, or I was going to die or something, but I didn’t care because I was the grunting, piss-in-your-drink Wild Boy of Bainbridge Island.

I played it unintelligibly cool.

“I only have enough Grrrrade left for one shot. I was going to have it—me.”

I had become an ape.

Looking back, I am actually fairly surprised I didn’t begin wildly sprouting hair from the vast acreage of hairlessness on my skinny-bitch-ass body.

“Fuck you, then,” Casey said. “I’m going all-in.”

I hadn’t really been paying attention to the game, what with my jubilation over feeding Chas some piss, but I figured I had a pair of fives, which in my two-shots-in-a-152-pound-sack-of-crap perspective looked pretty good. I called. And I also said, “Well, okay, I’ll give it to you, Palmer.”

I monkeyed back up to my pissatorium and splashed a heavier dose for Casey.

I heard Chas say, “I call,” which meant that both of us had our entire stack in play and one of us was definitely going to lose out and get the consequence, but not before that dickhead who busted my nose got his.

I climbed down and handed Casey his drink.

“No more Gatorade. Sorry, guys,” I said. “Casey got the last.”

I was on top of the world as I watched Casey down that shot.

Then he said, “That’s pretty good.”

And as he finished his shot of piss-whiskey with a satisfied piss-glistening smirk on his lips, the final card was turned. Casey busted us; and both Chas and I lost out at exactly the same moment.