Winger

Chapter Sixty-Seven

THAT NIGHT BECAME THE STUFF of legends.

I didn’t mind losing, because I had already kicked ass on a monumental level.

It was just like T-ball: Everyone got a trophy that night.

The adrenaline surge that resulted from watching Chas and Casey both fall victim to my depravity was nearly enough to counteract the effects of the whiskey, and even though I could tell I was feverish and sick, I felt like I could take on the world.

I felt like hunting down JP Tureau and crushing him. Slowly and painfully.

And I was happy that the whiskey bottle was empty. Joey knew better than to take another drink from the Maxine’s House of Spirits in Atlanta shot glass-slash-bedpan, but Kevin had no idea what was going on, so it did present me with a kind of moral dilemma that I happily avoided, because even the Wild Boy of Bainbridge Island didn’t want to see an okay guy like Kevin Cantrell get piss in his mouth the same week he’d been stabbed by a punk in a street brawl.

By one in the morning, the game was over, and Casey won the hundred dollars in the bank. But in his victory, there was an understated loss that only Joey and I knew about (at least right at that moment), and history was made because it was the first time ever that two guys lost out at the same time, which meant Chas and I were going to suffer the crucible of the consequence together.

This was a sobering thought, too, because the Wild Boy part of me began imagining the most horrible and disgusting things that Casey would dream up involving me and a guy I hated as much as Chas.

But Casey was such an unskilled and unimaginative rookie at doling out consequences, and what he came up with hardly seemed that humiliating to me, although it did sound pretty risky.

The flashlight turned off. The only light in our room came from the gray squares cut by the moon on the floor through our windowpanes. Casey tossed the five twenties down on the cracked linoleum by my legs.

“Halloween costumes,” he said.

But I was already dressed up as Gandhi-slash-Wild Boy of Bainbridge Island, I thought. Well, I would be, once I found where my sheet had gone off to in the dark.

“What?” Chas said.

“I want you guys to go into town and get Halloween costumes for all of us. Before school starts in the morning,” Casey explained.

I gathered up the money. “Fun!” I said.

Yeah, I was pretty damned stupid. “But it’s twenty-five miles. That’s a long walk,” I said. “Can I at least put some clothes on first?”

“You’re an idiot,” Casey said.

Oh yeah? You drank my piss.

I laughed out loud, then Joey cupped his hand over my mouth and whispered, “Shut the fuck up, Ryan Dean.”

“Chas has a car. You have to sneak out and take his car. I don’t care where you get them from, but you have to come back with costumes for all of us before first class in the morning,” Casey said.

“You can’t make him do that,” Joey said. “Chas is too drunk to drive. They’ll get killed.”

Aww, Joey. Always sticking up for idiots like Chas and losers like me.

“I’m not too drunk,” Chas said. (Idiot.)

I knew I should have fought to stay in bed that night. I dug some sweatpants out from the closet and pulled them on. They had holes in them. (Loser.)

“I’m driving, then,” Joey said. He was sober. “There’s nothing that says I can’t go along to keep them out of trouble.”

“And they better be good ones, too,” Casey said.

I opened the window. There was no way I was going to try to sneak downstairs with Mrs. Singer on that floor. I sensed her Ryan-Dean-West radar was going strong.

I put one leg out over the windowsill, and Chas said, “Hey, Pussboy. Don’t you think you should get on some socks and shoes, and possibly a shirt?”

Wow. All Wild Boy had on were sweatpants with holes in the crotch. No wonder I was covered in goose bumps.

“Oh.”

“You are the most fucked-up useless drunk I’ve ever known,” Chas said.

Whatever, piss-breath.

Chapter Sixty-Eight

WE SCRAMBLED OUT INTO THE dark and cold.

Joey led the way along the trail by the lake to the mess hall, and then we turned up the path that cut between the dorms.

I wore a black hooded sweatshirt that covered my head against the cold, but my hole-pocked, ventilated sweatpants had become too short for me and rode up past my ankles, which made my socks look like bouncing, glow-in-the-dark . . . uh . . . socks. Or something.

When we passed the dorms, I looked up at the windows on the girls’ building.

“Aww,” I whispered, “Annie’s up there. And Megan. And Isabel. And . . .”

Yeah, I was going to list every girl I could possibly remember, hundreds of them, all so incredibly hot in their own ways. I pictured them all dressed differently in special sleeping outfits, at a big massive slumber party where the Wild Boy of Bainbridge Island was the only guest present equipped with a set of XYs, but then Chas said, “Shut up, dipshit.”

We made it to Chas’s car.

Luckily, nobody paid much attention to cars coming or leaving on a Sunday night, and technically, we wouldn’t be considered AWOL until tomorrow morning, anyway.

But when Joey clicked the doors unlocked, Chas looked across at me and said, “Leave the dipshit here, Joey. We can take care of this by ourselves.”

And I thought that was a pretty goddamned good idea, considering Chas thought it up.

But then Joey said, “I’m not going if Ryan Dean doesn’t go.”

Crap.

Chas said, “Crap.”

For the briefest of moments, Chas Becker and I were of like mind.

I opened the back door and crawled in. At least I could stretch my legs out across the seat. I kicked my shoes off. I wished Annie could come. That would be awesome.

Just when we were about five miles away from the lights of Bannock, which was the only town close to Pine Mountain, and I was almost falling asleep, reclining sideways across the seats with my back against the car door, Chas reached over from the front and grabbed my leg so hard, he tore the inseam on my pants open all the way from my crotch to my knee.

He said, “Now you’re going to tell me everything about what’s going on with you and Megan.”

He must have been stewing about it for days now.

And I can’t say I didn’t know this was coming.

I’d seen how Megan and Chas looked, getting off that plane. I witnessed firsthand Megan’s subtle teases about me in the backseat of that same car as we all drove back to school from our weekends. And, honestly, my back was still bruised from when Chas slammed me up against the soap dispenser the day he caught Megan rubbing her hand on my leg in the mess hall.

But knowing all that still didn’t lessen the adrenaline jolt of fear that shot through me.

No matter how smart I thought I could be at a moment like that, I couldn’t think of anything to tell him except the truth.

Joey joked, “Don’t make me pull this car over, boys.”

Chas wasn’t loosening his grip.

He wasn’t smiling, either.

I swallowed. The pins came back to my throat. My voice cracked as I said, “What do you want to know, Chas?”

Joey tried changing the subject. “I’m going to stop and get some coffee at the gas station here. You guys want some?”

“Yeah,” I said. “And I need to pee.”

“Me too,” Joey said.

Chas let go of my leg. Joey pulled the car in to a minimart gas station. It was really quiet when he turned off the engine.

Nobody moved.

Awkward.

“We’ve kind of been fooling around,” I said.

There. I said it. Finally.

I noticed that Joey had been just about to shoulder his door open, but he froze as soon as he heard my confession.

It echoed like an empty church in that car. I don’t think anyone so much as took a breath after I said it. And I know Joey was thinking about what he should do if Chas jumped into the backseat and began murdering me on the spot.

“We just kissed a few times. That’s all.”

Well, actually, it was exactly twenty-four times, but I felt justified in using the generic “few,” realizing that any number greater than “never” was as good as saying “twenty-four.”

I could see Joey’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

Then Chas did something that nobody would ever have expected. He turned away from me and sighed. He actually looked like it hurt him to hear what I’d said.

“That’s what she told me yesterday,” he said. “I didn’t believe her. I thought she was just screwing around with me. You know how Megan is. Why the fuck would you do something like that to a guy on your own team, Winger?”

“I don’t know.”

Okay, why do teenagers use that answer so often, especially when we really do know? Of course I knew why I did it, and so did Chas, and so would anyone else who ever looked one time at Megan Renshaw.

Then I said, “We’re not doing it anymore.”

I put my shoes on and opened my door.

“I’m going to pee,” I said.

I heard Joey get out of the car behind me. Chas stayed in the passenger seat. As I was rounding the corner to the men’s room, Joey caught up to me.

“Damn, Ryan Dean. I think Chas is crying,” he said.

“Why am I such a punk, Joe?”

“I tried telling you,” Joey said. “You want coffee?”

“Yeah. Black.”

Joey went inside the minimart, and I went around back and peed in the bushes. I can’t stand gas station men’s rooms. I met Joey around front again, and he handed me two cups in paper sleeves. He held an elastic keychain, wrapped around his wrist.

“You need a key for the toilets,” he said.

“I peed in the trees.”

Joey said, “Oh. I’ll be right back.”

He went around the corner, and when I got back to the car, Chas was gone.

Chapter Sixty-Nine

WE SPENT THE NEXT FIFTEEN minutes looking for Chas around the gas station, even walking both directions away from it along the road, but we couldn’t find any trace of him.

It started raining again, so Joey and I went back to the car and sat.

“I don’t know where he’d go,” Joey said.

I had a good idea Chas was probably running around in the woods naked, looking for something to kill. Probably something that weighed exactly 152 pounds.

I sighed.

“You really did make him drink pee tonight, on top of everything else, didn’t you?”

“Casey, too,” I said.

“Damn. Well, he’s probably not heading back to PM. It’s way too far.” Joey looked at his wristwatch. “It’s a little after two. We can finish this costume hunt, and maybe we’ll find him on the way back. I’m sure we will. He’s gotta be around here somewhere, just sitting alone, cooling off. We might get back in time to sleep a couple hours, at least, that way.”

I didn’t really feel bad about anything I’d done, but I did feel sorry that Chas was hurting over Megan, because I knew that feeling firsthand. But I tried to remind myself how stupid it was for me to feel sorry for a guy like Chas. Still, the whole thing made me think about how crazy I was for Annie, and how JP was trying to do the same thing to me that I’d been doing to Chas all along.

“Okay.” I yawned.

Joey started the car and we drove into Bannock.

“You don’t need to say it, Joey. I know this is all my fault.”

“It’s not totally your fault, Ryan Dean,” he said. “But you did let it go a little too far.”

“Yeah.” My eyes scanned ahead. I saw the lights of an all-night grocery store. What grocery store wouldn’t have costumes for sale just four days before Halloween?

“Hey, Joey,” I said. “Why don’t you have a boyfriend or anything?”

“What makes you think I don’t?”

“Well, no one ever sees you with anyone at school. I mean, not like that,” I said.

“I wouldn’t do that at school. It would be too much trouble for both of us.”

“Oh. So you do have a boyfriend?”

“Of course.”

“Well I’m glad for you, then. It sucks being alone. Believe me, I know. Let’s try this store,” I said, and pointed to the supermarket. I really didn’t want to find out too much about Joey’s boyfriend, because it made me feel really awkward. I just wanted to know if Joey was okay in his life, because, like I said, I really liked Joey. But I do mean that in a totally non-gay way.

Joey pulled in to the parking lot. It was nearly empty, dark, and rain slicked, with a few scattered shopping carts reflecting the headlights from Chas’s car.

“Are there even any other gay guys at Pine Mountain?” I asked.

Joey laughed. “Oh my God, Ryan Dean, why do you care? You’re not curious, are you? Did Chas completely scare you off girls or something? ’Cause I wouldn’t believe that could ever happen.”

I shrugged. “No. I was just wondering. ’Cause I can’t tell. I mean, I would have never even thought you were gay except you told me. But I do know exactly how many fourteen-year-old juniors there are at Pine Mountain. One. And he’s a skinny-ass-loser. But he’s not gay.”

“Well, there are a lot of gay kids at Pine Mountain.”

“Hopefully, JP Tureau?” I said.

That would be awesome. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about anything.

Joey laughed out loud. “You know? You and Kevin are, like, the only straight guys who’ve ever talked to me about me, about this stuff, who weren’t trying to play some kind of fucked-up game, Ryan Dean.”

“Well, why not? You’re my friend. You’re probably the best guy friend I have. But I don’t think I could ever be gay.”

“Everyone knows you’re not gay,” Joey said, and I thought, Phew! That’s a relief, just in case Joey was wondering if I was gay and trying to make, well, gay small talk, and then I thought, damn, that was a screwed-up thing to think about my best friend.

“But you want to know something crazy? And you can’t say anything to anyone about this, Ryan Dean. You know who’s been seriously trying to hit on me ever since school ended last year? Ever since I came out to everyone?” And then Joey paused to see if I would make a guess (which, I would have said Sean Russell Flaherty just because he’s so, well, not like other guys), but Joey said, “Casey Palmer. Can you believe it? Casey Fucking Palmer is gay. That’s why he begged Chas to get in the game with us tonight. He won’t leave me alone. He fucking scares me, he’s so hopped up about getting with me.”

Wow. That was a monumental secret, a career-builder for a guy like Seanie Flaherty. If Seanie kept such records, he would easily call that piece of info five out of five J. Edgar Hoovers in off the shoulder sundresses on the Sean Russell Flaherty Ruin Your Life Rating Scale.

“Casey Palmer is gay?”

“I’m pretty sure he wasn’t hitting on me because he thought I was a girl,” Joey said.

“Casey Palmer is gay?” I said again. Then I doubled over, laughing.

“Remember,” Joey said, “you are not going to say anything, okay? You know, football and everything. He’s a piece of shit, but leave him alone about it.”

“I pissed in his drink,” I said. “A lot. And the idiot thought it tasted good too.”

“Yeah. You’ve got balls, Ryan Dean. Except for when it comes to girls.”

“Well, he deserved it. He busted my nose.”

Then Joey stepped out of the car and said, “Come on. Let’s get some Halloween crap and get the fuck out of here.”

And as I followed Joey into the store, I kept asking him, “What do you mean, ‘except for when it comes to girls’?”

But he just said, “Never mind.”

Chapter Seventy

IN LESS THAN THIRTY MINUTES, we paid for five Halloween costumes, two tall cans of energy soda (I believed one of us was going to puke before we got back, and I hoped it would end up on Chas’s leather upholstery), and some cold medicine and throat lozenges for me.

I opened the box of cold pills before we were out of the store and popped three of them into my mouth. I washed them down with the energy drink.

So, yeah . . . between the whiskey, the cold pills, the energy drink, cherry-menthol (is there anything that tastes more unnaturally disgusting?) throat lozenges, and the pumped-up rushed feeling from completely ruining Chas Becker’s life, I was pretty much prepared to have some kind of seventies-Grateful-Dead-flashback-only-it-was-twenty-years-before-I-was-born experience.

We found some passable costumes for the five of us who played the game that night, too, even though I tried to convince Joey not to get one for Chas; and that way he could be the Invisible Man. But Joey said that wasn’t funny, because if we didn’t find Chas and he got into trouble or something, it would look like we’d stolen his car and ditched him.

Here’s what we ended up with (in alphabetical order):

Becker, Charles: Well, we found Chas a Superman cape, but there was nothing to go with it. Fortunately, the supermarket sold kids’ underwear and we bought him a three-pack of boys’ size XL briefs with Pokémon characters on them. Then we also got him some red women’s pantyhose to go underneath the briefs. So, basically, Chas’s most horrible night in his life had just gotten worse. Oh, well, that’s what he gets for leaving me and Joey alone and trusting us to be in charge of his future.

Cantrell, Kevin: Kevin would be the token pirate. We found him a hat, an eye patch, and a plastic hook we thought would look perfect sticking out from his black arm sling.

Cosentino, Joseph: Joey got the cool costume: prison stripes from Alcatraz, a fitting outfit for someone who was spending his senior year in O-Hall.

Palmer, Casey: Casey lucked out in a big way. We chose one of those plastic face masks of Wonder Woman and a golden lasso rope accessory for the guy with the serious case of the hots for Joey. We could have been much, much crueler, and even Joey admitted that he thought Casey would be jealous because Chas’s costume was so much gayer. Of course, I had to laugh about that.

West, Ryan Dean: A discovery of true Zen-like perfection, I got a leopard-spotted caveman-loincloth kind of thing that had one suspender strap that tied in a knot over the shoulder. The Wild Boy of Bainbridge Island would be in full effect on Thursday night in O-Hall.

Score.

The O-Hall boys were not allowed to go to the dance with Pine Mountain’s good boys and girls, but that would not stop us from dressing up and having our own Halloween.

We left the store with our bags of goods, determined to seek out Chas’s hiding place and get back to Pine Mountain in time to scrounge at least three hours of sleep before class, but it wasn’t going to turn out to be that easy.

Just as Joey opened his door, a voice came from the darkness in the lot behind the car.

“Can I talk to you boys a minute?”

And my juvenile-delinquent-from-Boston self instantly thought, great, it’s a cop. A man cop, no less, to make things even worse. But when I turned around, I realized that unless the Bannock Police Department hired hundred-year-old officers who got around with walkers, we were pretty safe. And even if they did, I thought, I knew it would be easy enough to talk Joey into making a run for it.

Or a brisk walk for that matter.

The old man came out of the rain at the speed of a newborn glacier, taking two steps, then lifting the walker, then setting it down, then two steps, lift, set. I rubbed my chin to see how much that one whisker had grown in the time it took for him to get to Joey’s side of the car.

And why does Joey always have to be so goddamned nice and understanding?

Joey said, “Leave us alone and go to hell, fucking crusty old man.”

Well, um . . . to be honest, Joey didn’t actually say that. I think I was wishing it so hard, I actually imagined it, which was the girliest thing I’ve probably ever done in my life. He actually just said, “Sure.”

Two steps. Lift. Set.

I needed a shave.

And the poor guy looked terrible. He had a dirty white beard and just kept his eyes fixed ahead, staring at me and Joey as he two-stepped-lifted-set inch by inch, wearing what looked like rain-soaked and food-stained pajamas.

“Can you boys please give me a ride home? I’ll pay you,” he said.

Please, for once in your life, don’t be nice, Joey.

“What are you doing out here?” Joey said.

“I just went for a walk,” he said.

And I thought, he either lives about twelve feet away from here or he started his walk during the Reagan Administration.

“And then I got caught in this damned rain.”

“Where do you live?” Joey asked.

No!

But it was too late. I knew Joey and I were both helplessly being sucked into a black hole of Joey Cosentino’s niceness.

“I live in a residential group home for child molesters who kill teenage boys with hatchets,” he said.

Okay, I’ll be honest. I think the whiskey-cold-medicine-energy-soda-disgusting-cherry-menthol-throat-lozenge-lack-of-sleep effect was taking its toll on me. What he really said was something like, “I live in Bannock on Battle Point Lane. It’s about two miles from here.”

“We could call you a cab,” I said. I held the remainder of the poker bank out in my hand. “We’ll even pay for it.”

“Naw,” Joey said. “Come on. We’ll take you home.”

Good old perfect Joey.

Goddamnit.

“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you boys so much.”

I just hoped he killed Joey first.

We loaded the old man’s walker and our bags into the back of Chas’s SUV, then helped him up into the passenger seat beside Joey. I sat in the back and hunted around for something that could be used as a weapon.

“Joey?” I said from the backseat as he started the car.

“What?”

“Why are my pants ripped all the way down and my underwear hanging out?”

“Remember? Chas?”

“Um. No.”

That cold medicine was the shit.

“Maybe you should go to sleep, Ryan Dean.”

“Why are we driving Chas’s car without him?”

“I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.”

“You’re the best, Joey.”

Joey shook his head. When we came to the entrance to the parking lot, the old man pointed him to turn right. Then he patted Joey on the shoulder and said, “Thanks again. You’re going to take a right up here at Haley Street. By the way, my name is Ned.”

And then Ned dug around in his pocket and said, “How much do you want for the cab ride, boys?”

“You don’t need to pay us,” Joey said.

I closed my eyes and lay down across the seat. Then I felt the car turn right and begin lurching forward along a bumpy, unpaved road.

“This is Battle Point,” Joey said. “How far up here do you live?”

Then I knew we were completely hosed.

Ned said, “Where?”

It began pouring.

Joey said, “Is this your street?”

And Ned said, “I live in Waterloo, Iowa.”

Oh, yeah. Me and Joey. Both total losers.

So I said, “Ned? Will you please kill Joey first? He really, really deserves it.”

Chapter Seventy-One

SO THERE WE WERE, IN the middle of the fucking night, in the rain, on an unlighted dirt—make that “mud”—road somewhere between Oregon and Bolgia Nine in the Eighth Circle of Hell with an ax-wielding sodomist in a walker who thought he was in Waterloo goddamned Iowa.

Good times.

Ned stared blankly out the windshield. “I don’t remember any of this in Waterloo.”

“Oh, that Waterloo,” I said. “So, Ned, was Napoleon really as short as everyone says?”

“What?” Ned said. Then he pointed out the window in front of Joey. “I think you took a wrong turn, son. Where’s the Cedar River from here?”

“We’re in the middle of it, Ned,” I said.

Joey stopped the car, right there in the middle of the river of mud that used to be a road. Not that we were running the risk of blocking any traffic, that is, unless salmon used this fucking road to spawn on.

Spawning salmon . . . awww . . . made me think of Annie. God! I’d never see her again! I felt like I would start crying, but I became determined that I had to live so I could stop JP from depositing his genetically inferior milt all over her.

“But you remembered this road and how to get here,” Joey said. “And how far it was. Are you sure you didn’t want to come to Battle Point Lane?”

“Is this Battle Point Lane?” Ned asked.

“Yes,” Joey said.

“Are we in Waterloo?” Ned asked. “My son lives there.”

“Catch and release, Joey,” I said. “Let’s put him back where we found him.”

“Maybe he’ll recognize his house if we find one up there.” Joey nodded his chin in the direction of the road-torrent.

I didn’t see any houses up there.

“Maybe he’ll remember the spot where he hid all the bodies of the other kids he tricked into taking him here,” I said.

“What?” Ned said.

“Ryan Dean”—Joey looked over his shoulder at me—“I really think you should try to go to sleep.”

He sounded a little stressed.

Joey started the car forward slowly.

I said, “Here, Joe. Do you want a cough drop?”

I dropped one of the paper-wrapped lozenges in his hand.

“Thanks,” he said.

“Don’t thank me. They taste like crap. But they keep you awake.”

“Then stop eating them.”

“I think it’s just up ahead,” Ned said.

That’s exactly when the driver’s side of the car lurched downward sharply and the axle struck against something hard, with a grating, metallic clang. We were in a hole up to the top of the car’s wheels. Joey tried backing the SUV out, but we were stuck.

Oh, yeah, and that’s when the water started coming in through the bottom of Joey’s door, too.

“Fuck!” Joey said.

“Don’t give him any ideas,” I warned.

“This isn’t the place,” Ned said. “I’m sure of it.”

And that’s probably about the time that Joey seriously considered throwing the old man out too. If it wasn’t precisely at that moment, I’m sure he felt like it when Ned started screaming insanely in wild terror.

You know, there is something especially frightening when you’re stuck in the darkest depths of hell, in the middle of a raging torrent of mud, and the insane old lost guy in the front seat starts screaming like he’s going to die. I mean, I figured Ned had probably stared Death in the face more than a few times in just the past four or five hours, let alone since the discovery of fire, so when you hear a guy who you know has gone through as much shit as Ned has—in a lifetime that was undoubtedly measured by geologic periods as opposed to calendars—screaming like that, well . . . you just know you’re going to die too.

“Fuck!” Joey said again.

“Aaaaaaahhhhhhh!!!!!!!!” Ned shrieked.

Oh, yeah.

Fun times.

Honestly, though, I have to admit to the selfish pleasure I took in the fact that the water was pouring in on the two fuckers in the front seat and not on the guy in the back who never would have come up to Ned’s abattoir for adolescent boys if Joey wasn’t so goddamned nice all the time.

Then Ned added something extra special to his scream. It kind of went like this: “BBBLLLLLAAAAARRRRRHHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAGG!!!!!!!”

Which, I think, was probably Mrs. Singer’s first name.

But, anyway, the bloodcurdling sound was so unnerving that I screamed too, and just like a girl, which didn’t make Joey very happy.

“Fuck!” Joey said.

And when I screamed, it made Ned scream even more insanely.

I began laughing so hard, I was actually crying, which probably had something to do with the fact that I knew we were going to die and now I decided I didn’t want Ned to kill Joey first, because watching him do it would scare the shit out of me.

Ned shrieked again. It was a good one, too. Probably a solid fifteen seconds. And it was so high pitched that I’m pretty sure a pod or two of migrating gray whales in the Pacific veered off course for a minute, paused and looked landward, and knew exactly where that hundred-and-fifty-year-old asshole was, even if Joey and I didn’t have a fucking clue.

I laughed so hard, I thought I was going to throw up.

“What’s so fucking funny?” Joey said.

I could hear the wheels spinning uselessly in the muddy water outside, and the splashy-soothing-fountain sounds of Joey’s and the insane guy’s feet up front.

Then all I could hear was another scream. If I wasn’t laughing so hard, I probably would have beat Ned with his walker.

“I’m sorry, Joey.” I laughed. “Now I can finally say I told you so.” I paused. “Bitch.”

That’s technically not cussing.

I laughed.

Ned shrieked and wailed.

Joey said, “Fuck!”

“Okay, Joe. I’ll get out and see if there’s anything I can put under the wheels to get some grip.”

“But you’re sick, Ryan Dean.”

“Dude, Joey,” I said (scream). “Believe me, there’s nothing I want more than to get out of this car right now.”

I opened my door and looked down. The water rushed past the car’s running boards so fast, it looked like we were in a motorboat or something. I could see how the back wheels were spinning uselessly, kicking back rooster tails of mud in the dark.

I knew I’d end up getting soaked, which wasn’t a good idea, so I slipped off my socks and shoes and left them on the car seat. Then I pulled up the legs of my sweatpants as high as I could and stepped out into the cold and muddy flow.

Ned screamed again.

Damn, he had quite a set of pipes for an old guy.

I waded around to the back of the SUV, already wet up to my waist.

I yelled up to Joey, “Stop gunning it. I’m going to look for something to wedge under the wheels.”

Ned gave me an approving “EEEEEYYYYAAAAAAAAAGGGGHHHH!!!”

I paused.

I slogged up to Joey’s window and knocked on it. The water was streaming into the rip in my sweats, pulling them away like a drift net. I hoped salmon didn’t bite.

I knocked on Joey’s window again.

He lowered it halfway.

“Joey,” I said.

Ned screamed, and Joey tensed and closed his eyes like it physically hurt him.

“Suppose I had a gun. With only one bullet in it. And I gave it to you. Would you shoot Ned, me, or yourself?” I laughed. Life doesn’t present a guy with too many the-lady-or-the-tiger kinds of lessons.

Joey flipped me off and raised his window.

Ned wailed.

Through the open back door, I heard Joey say, “Fuck!” It sounded kind of nice. It lifted my spirits.

I waded away. I actually considered, momentarily, just leaving Joey and Screaming Ned there, so I could become the Wild Boy of the Eighth Circle of Hell, but I did want to get back to Pine Mountain and Annie and a certain kid of French descent whose dreams still needed some serious crushing.

And, besides, we had another rugby game coming up that week, and the team would never be able to get by without Kevin, our winger, and our starting fly half.

When I got out of the creek we were stuck in, I found enough fallen tree bark and rocks to begin making sufficient braces all around the rear wheels. On the first trip back to the car, though, I fell down in the river, so I took my hoodie off and tossed it onto the backseat with my shoes and socks. No sense getting everything I owned soaked and muddy. I knew it was stupid, because I was sick, but I figured I’d be able to scrounge up something dry to wear among our new Halloween costumes.

Everything looked ready to go. I waded to the car and told Joey to try backing out, and that I’d stand away and watch. Before I closed my door, Ned screamed again, and then I said, “And, Joey? We are either going back to the store or I’m not getting in this car ever again. It’ll be you and Ned. Alone.”

Joey didn’t say anything.

I closed the back door and walked over to the side of the mud road.

The rain slowed to a drizzle, but the level of the creek didn’t change at all.

The SUV’s reverse lights came on.

Slowly, shakily, Joey got Chas’s car unstuck. He backed it up to the side of the road, where I was waiting for him. I got in the backseat, dripping and shivering.

It was three in the morning.

Chapter Seventy-Two

NED STOPPED SCREAMING WHEN WE got back to the store.

Joey didn’t say a word the whole way there. And I just sat in the backseat with my arms hugged across my bare chest, smiling all the time because of how stupid we were for trying to do a good deed for a lunatic like Ned.

The worst part of the whole experience—no, wait . . . it wasn’t the worst part, because being stuck in the car with Screaming Ned was worse, and something even worse than that, still, was going to happen to me before the night was over.

So, okay, a pretty screwed-up part of the whole experience happened when we took Ned back to the store. I guess I truly did look like the Wild Boy of the Eighth Circle of Hell, because I was soaked and covered in mud, barefoot and shirtless, with my boxers hanging out from a gaping hole in my torn sweatpants that were pulled up past my bony kneecaps; and the store manager laughed at us when we offered to pay for a cab for the old fucker. He asked us if “Screaming Ned” had played his old funny trick again where he’d take foolish do-gooders out to the middle of the forest and scare the living shit out of them.

And we said . . . uh . . . um . . . no?

Oh, yeah. He said Screaming Ned was a regular fucking celebrity in Bannock.

And the manager laughed at us and walked Ned (Two steps. Lift. Set. Two steps. Lift. Set.) next door, to the donut shop owned by Screaming Ned’s fucking alcoholic son, who had been sleeping behind the counter while Ned did his performance art on me and Joey.

Yeah, I don’t think Joey would have even batted an eye if I told him I was going to throw a shopping cart through the window of that goddamned donut shop.

When we left, I got into the backseat again.

Joey said, “The water’s all gone from up front, Ryan Dean. You can sit up here.”

“I need to get some dry clothes on, Joey. And there was no way I was about to get undressed in front of Screaming Ned. I’m going to break down and do it, Joey. I’m freezing, and I’m going to put on some of those Pokémon briefs.”

Now, that was the worst part of the whole Screaming Ned episode.

Anyway, it was a three-pack, and I was pretty sure Chas wouldn’t count to see if one was missing.

“Joey,” I said as he started the car (finally!) along on its way out of the parking lot. “Please turn up the heater. And, by the way, I’ve never been completely naked in a car alone with a gay guy before.”

There was this raw-meat sucking sound as I tore my sweats and boxers down over my feet.

Joey laughed. “Neither have I. But, Ryan Dean, don’t try on the pantyhose.”

“Uh. Joey? Wasn’t going to. Ass.”

Joey laughed.

I pulled on my dry socks.

It was really weird. Those Pokémon briefs were surprisingly comfortable, and I hadn’t worn briefs since I was in, like, third grade. I put on Joey’s convict pants, pulled on my hoodie, and climbed up into the front seat beside Joey, just as we came to the gas station where we’d lost Chas earlier.

“I feel a lot better,” I said. “I swear I won’t wreck your prison pants.”

“I swear to God I won’t pick up any more psychos.”

“Does that mean we aren’t going to look for Chas?”

We found Chas Becker walking back along the road toward Pine Mountain. He was wearing one of those big plastic yard-leaf bags. He must have gotten it from a sympathetic gas station clerk; and he kind of looked like a big, reflective, black ghost when we passed him.

Joey slammed on the brakes and backed the car up right on the highway until Chas lifted his down-turned head and saw it was us. I started to climb over to the backseat, but Joey grabbed my hood and pulled me back, saying, “No way. I do not want to sit by him, Ryan Dean. Let him sit there.”

The next thing I knew, Chas was tearing off his garbage-bag rain slicker and getting into the backseat.

“You guys are assholes,” Chas said. “I was almost going to call the cops and say you stole my fucking car. Pricks.”

“We tried to find you, Chas,” Joey said. “You took off; it wasn’t our fault.”

I was staying out of it entirely, but after a few seconds, Chas said, “Well, fuck you anyway, Winger. I still don’t think we’re settled about this.”

I just looked at Joey, but I didn’t say anything.

But at that moment, I knew I was going to stay away from Megan Renshaw, even if I also knew how difficult she could make keeping that commitment. And, hell, I knew how weak I was too, and I don’t mind admitting it.

I sighed.

I just had to think about Annie.

It had been such an incredibly long day that started way back when she came into my room while I was still in bed and we went running in the rain together on Bainbridge Island.

Then, all of a sudden, Chas threw my soggy sweatpants and boxers onto the dashboard in front of me, which kind of made Joey swerve the car because it startled him. It sounded like a rump roast being dropped onto a basketball court.

Chas leaned over from the backseat and looked at me.

“Are you naked? What the hell were you two homos doing in my car back here?”

Then we had to tell him the whole story. Well, to be honest, Joey told it to him, because I was shutting up for the rest of the night. And it wasn’t really the whole story, either. Joey told him about the costumes, and then how we picked up Screaming Ned, but he wisely left out the part about getting Chas’s car stuck in a fucking flash flood. He just said I fell in a creek when I was helping Ned get to his house.

So Chas said, “What a total do-gooder dipshit.”

And I left it at that.

But I made him drink pee.

And I made out with his smoking-hot girlfriend too.

Somehow, miraculously, we made it back to O-Hall, and I was finally in bed (although I was sharing my accommodations with a now-lighter bottle of urine—which made me think, as far as a bottle of piss is concerned, are you more of an optimist if you think it’s half-empty?—and a still-unopened FedEx mailer of condoms and porn from my mom).

I was completely, irreversibly, asleep by five o’clock.

Chapter Seventy-Three

YOU KNOW, THERE IS SOMETHING tragically disappointing in two hours’ sleep after an epic night like that.

So, when the alarm went off at seven, I dreamed I was back in that car, stuck in the river, sitting behind Screaming Ned as he sharpened his meat cleavers.

Chas wasn’t in too much of a hurry to get up and hit the snooze button either, and when I did finally stumble down from the top bunk, I couldn’t figure out how to turn the goddamned thing off, so I just yanked the plug from the wall.

But it was one of those clocks with a battery backup, since we lose power so much in that old dorm, and it kept Screaming-Nedding at me.

So I put it under my pillow.

Think about Annie.

Think about Annie.

I wanted to stay in bed so bad. I knew I was horribly sick from all the crap I’d been through in the past twenty-four hours, but I had to force myself to think about Annie Altman, because I knew I had to get in JP’s way as much as I possibly could for the next three days, before Halloween.

So I had to make myself go to school.

I left a groaning Chas Becker and the door open behind me and stumbled down the hallway toward the showers, dragging my towel along the floor at my feet, with my eyes crusted over and half-closed.

I saw Mr. Farrow standing at his doorway. He cocked his head toward me, kind of like a cat who’d been sprayed in the face with a squirt gun. Then I saw a couple guys coming out of the bathroom, and one of them pointed and started laughing at me.

I looked down.

Oh, yeah.

Pokémon.

Briefs.

Crap.

I am such a loser.

What could I do? I looked at the guys straight on. I kept walking toward the showers.

I said, “Oh yeah. Admit it. You know you want some of these bad boys.”

Chapter Seventy-Four

BUT I MISSED ANNIE AT breakfast, and I barely made it to Conditioning class on time, having to run and attempt to tie a necktie with shaking hands the whole way from O-Hall to the athletics complex.

I was a mess.

That day, getting through my world was like trying to swim in a pool of warm mayonnaise while carrying two bowling balls.

I just had to keep telling myself I could do it, but I had a hard time convincing the tired and sick Ryan Dean West.

I knew ahead of time that I wasn’t going to say anything to Seanie about what I’d done the night before. As great as the story was, I’d have to keep all those things bottled up—how I’d gotten drunk again and made Chas and Casey drink my piss, the drive into Bannock and how Chas started crying and ran away when he found out I’d been making out with his girlfriend, learning about how Casey was gay and had been hitting on Joey, getting our Halloween costumes, and, of course, the lunatic Screaming Ned—and hope I didn’t explode from not being able to tell. Because most of it just wasn’t the kind of stuff I’d want everyone in the whole world finding out about on some new perverted website designed by our demented scrum half.

I had to run in regular tennis shoes in Conditioning class because of what I’d done with my running flats on Bainbridge Island the day before. God! I could not believe that only twenty-four hours had passed since I tore my clothes off in the rain during that run with Annie. Hopefully, my mom would get those new shoes to me by the afternoon, even if she was probably still crying about my growing up, getting taller, having sex, and whatever else she imagined that wasn’t really happening to me.

We were sent out on the three-mile lake run, and this time I decided I was going to stay right there with Seanie and JP. No matter what, I wasn’t going to let JP try to get between me and Seanie, too. Even if they were roommates and we did hate each other, I was going to stay friends with Seanie Flaherty.

We ran three across, with Seanie in the middle of us, slowly, in the back of the pack. It stopped raining, and our legs were splattered with mud to our thighs. I thought if I talked to Seanie the whole way, even about stupid stuff, it would shut JP up and make him mad at the same time.

“Hey, Nutsack, did you guys play cards last night?” Seanie asked.

“Yeah.”

“Well, did you win? Did you lose? Did you get drunk? What happened?”

“I’m not saying, Seanie.”

“Dude, one of these days all you guys are going to get thrown out of school for that shit.”

“Oh. Tough break. Throwing me out of O-Hall,” I said. “Casey Palmer played with us.”

Have you ever noticed how, when you’re going into a conversation and you tell yourself ahead of time, do not say anything about X, your mouth will almost automatically start spilling its guts about X before you can do anything to stop it? So I kind of felt my stupid-hungover-cherry-menthol mouth beginning to say, “And Casey Palmer is gay and won’t stop chasing after Joey,” but just in the nick of time steered clear of it and said, “And Casey Palmer . . . won.”

“Why’d you play with that asshole?”

I shrugged.

Shut up, Ryan Dean.

“Hey, by the way,” Seanie said, “did I tell you? I’m taking Isabel to the dance.”

“Nice,” I said. Why the hell did he have to bring that up? “Isabel’s hot.”

(If you happen to have a thing for girls with faint moustaches.)

“You think every girl is hot. Didn’t you get any of that pent-up sexual frustration out of your system at Annie’s house over the weekend?”

(If anything, the weekend made it worse.)

I sighed, picturing Annie and me pressed up against that painted wall in the sawmill. Then I took a dig at JP.

“I sure did.”

Seanie high-fived me.

But that was all I was going to say, because if I said anything about fooling around with her in the hot tub, or making out at the sawmill and in the airport, or how she woke me up both mornings—God! Just thinking about it was making me crazy—I knew they’d both go straight to Annie and tell her what I’d said.

I coughed.

Seanie said, “I saw Annie this morning. She said you got sick from running in the woods naked in the rain. Did you really do that?”

(Well, I wasn’t completely naked, but I’d take another shot over JP’s bow.)

I laughed. “Yeah.”

“Damn.”

“I’m not going to be at practice today,” I said. “I’m going to get my stitches out this afternoon.”

I could feel JP peering around Seanie to look at me.

Seanie said, “Go in there extra muddy and maybe that hottie nurse will give you another sponge bath.”

“My luck, Doctor No-gloves will want to check out my nuts again.”

“Just tell him all he has to do is look at Casey Palmer’s website.” Seanie laughed.

“Yeah. Very funny, Seanie. I heard about that. Trouble is, he’s seen mine in real life, so he’d know that those baby ones in your picture are so small, they could only belong to Sean Russell Flaherty.” I shoved him, and he came within a hair’s breadth of crashing into JP.

“Ouch. Good one,” Seanie said.

“Watch it, fucker.” JP almost tripped avoiding Seanie. I had no doubt he was pissed off at me now.

I was pretty sure the whole class had passed us by that time; I saw them all running back from the turnaround in the opposite direction. I stopped at the turn and folded my hands together on top of my head, then gave JP a dirty look.

I’ll admit it. I felt like fighting him.

“Something wrong?” I said to him.

“You almost knocked Seanie into me,” JP said. “Fuck you, Ryan Dean. I know what you’re trying to do.”

I kept my hands on my head, but I stepped right up to him. I know that was stupid. JP could kill me. He was a good four inches taller. And, yeah, I did cuss. But there is nothing else a guy can do at a time like that.

“No. Fuck you, JP.” I know. Not a very good comeback. Then I said, “What the hell do you think you’re doing asking Annie out? Aren’t there enough girls here who’d go out with you so you wouldn’t have to fuck over one of your former best friends?”

I’d been saving that up for about a week, and it sure felt good to get it out. Just like it was going to feel to get those stitches out, I thought. If I lived until the afternoon.

Seanie said, “Hey, come on. Stop it. Let’s just run, guys.”

Too late. I let go of my hands and dropped them in front of my chest and shoved JP back toward the water’s edge.

He came right back at me and threw a hellacious punch with his right fist, but his foot slipped away in the mud beneath him, so what would probably have knocked me out cold ended up glancing off my left rib cage. It hurt bad enough, though. In fact, I was pretty sure it cracked a rib. But I turned with JP’s punch and cocked a straight right fist and fired it square into his nose.

JP’s head snapped back, and purple blood sprayed from beneath my knuckles as he lost his balance and fell backward—right into the muddy shallows of the lake.

On the Ryan Dean West Stimulus-Satisfaction scale of things, it was without a doubt one of the best physical sensations of my entire, pathetic life. In fact, as I thought about it, punching that bastard was right up there in the top three:

And hearing and seeing him splash down in all that cold black mud was almost as pleasing as punching him. Unfortunately, I knew, he was going to get right back up.

“What the fuck are you guys doing?” And the next thing I knew, Seanie, who was definitely not famous for his tackling ability, took me right down with a diving side tackle. He wrapped his hands around the collar of my sweatshirt, pinning my shoulders into the mud.

“What the fuck, Ryan Dean!”

I thought Seanie was going to hit me too. In the years I’d known him, I never saw Seanie so serious or mad about anything. From where I was pinned, I could look up and see JP stumbling out of the lake. He was soaked and filthy, and a mouth-wide streak of blood painted a line from his nose down across his shirt, to the top of his shorts. He came over to Seanie’s side and tried to kick me, but Seanie dove at JP’s foot and took the force of his kick in his own collarbone.

“Stop it, you fucking assholes!” Seanie yelled.

That kick had to hurt him, and I felt bad that he took it for me.

Seanie screamed at us, “You’re going to get thrown off the team. You’re going to get your asses thrown out of school!”

When JP realized he’d kicked Seanie, he backed away and turned around, pulling the bottom of his shirt up to stop the blood that streamed from his nose.

Seanie got off me, and I stood up, but he stayed between me and JP, who bent forward and kept his back to me.

“Okay, Seanie,” I said. “Okay. I’m sorry, Seanie. I didn’t mean to get you in the middle of this crap. I’m a fucking idiot.”

Yeah, I was mad.

Then I turned around and ran back to the locker room.

Chapter Seventy-Five

IT WAS SO AWKWARD SPENDING the next two hours in classes with Megan.

She and Joey tried talking to me, but I didn’t say anything. Joey looked tired too. He understood. In Calculus, I drew Joey a cartoon of Screaming Ned, and he started to laugh so hard, I thought he was going to pee his pants.

Then, during Econ, I started coughing pretty bad and excused myself so I could leave to get a drink.

That’s when Megan followed me out.

And I didn’t even know it until I was bent over the drinking fountain and I felt her cool hand rubbing the back of my neck.

I’m not going to lie. It felt pretty goddamned nice.

Think about Annie.

Think about Annie.

“Are you okay, Ryan Dean?”

I stood up and turned around. I wiped my mouth with my shirtsleeve.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Me and JP got in a pretty bad fight this morning. I think I’m going to get in big trouble. I busted his face. And to top it off, I’m pretty sick.”

She just looked at me with those half-scolding-half-sympathetic-totally-hot Megan Renshaw eyes and brushed my hair back with her hand. I knew she was going to kiss me, too.

Think about Annie.

Think about Annie.

I turned my face away.

“I can’t do this anymore, Megan. We have to quit doing this.”

I walked back to class. I felt even worse.

And then I felt like dying when Megan came in.

She was crying.

I put my head down on my desk. Joey knew what was going on.

I am such a loser.

Chapter Seventy-Six

OKAY. BEING IN CLASS WITH megan was pretty awkward.

But it was nothing like how I felt when I saw JP walk in to American Literature.

I’d practically run there so I could see Annie before anything happened. I was convinced that JP wouldn’t show up, that someone would come in to escort me to the headmaster’s office for what I’d done.

So I wanted to at least see Annie one more time before getting arrested or kicked out of Pine Mountain.

She was already sitting down when I got there. I dropped my bag onto the floor beside my desk and practically collapsed in the seat beside her.

“Hey,” she said. Her eyes looked so warm and happy. “I thought you’d stay home today. How are you, Ryan Dean?”

“I’ll be honest, Annie,” I said. “I am terrible. But I just needed to see you today.”

“I’m glad.” And she leaned over, just slightly, into the space between us, like we were playing that game that got us both so frustrated over the weekend. So I leaned a little closer too.

“You look amazing,” I said. “And this is the first morning since Friday I can look at you and not have to keep one eye out for a horny gay pug.”

She laughed.

We squeezed hands in the space between our desks. That’s when I knew everything was okay. And that’s when JP walked in and saw us.

He looked terrible. The bridge of his nose was swollen and red all the way across from eye to eye. His left eye had a big black bruise that slashed down toward his cheek, and his upper lip puffed out like he’d been stung by a bee.

I wanted to look away when he came in, because of the way he was glaring at me, but I thought that would seem too much like backing down, so I kept my eyes fixed right on his. I’ll admit that I was pretty scared. It really felt like we were going to fight again right then and there in front of Mr. Wellins. Then the old pervert would be even more convinced that everything just boils down to sex, I guess.

“JP, what happened to you?” Annie was surprised, but her voice still had that tone to it like nothing bad could ever happen.

I started coughing, and JP stared at me as he sat down on the other side of Annie.

“Nothing,” he said. “Rugby. Just playing too hard with the boys.”

He said it without blinking, looking past Annie. And I knew exactly what JP meant by the “boys” comment.

“Hey. Now you won’t need a mask for Halloween,” I said.

Annie gave me a scolding look. But those eyes, they were always smiling when she looked at me.

I knew I was going a little too far with JP, but I didn’t feel bad about it. I wanted him to know that I wasn’t going to give up—that he’d have to first. So then I really messed with him. I said, “Sorry about that, JP,” and I held my hand out to shake, right in front of Annie’s face, and I looked at JP like nothing in the world had ever happened out there at the turnaround by the lake.

I held my hand there, open.

JP wouldn’t take it.

I shrugged and pulled it back.

Score.

I just kicked your ass for the second time today, buddy.

Then Mr. Wellins began with his blah-blah-blah-Nick-Adams’s-father-brutalizes-the-Indian-woman-almost-like-he’s-having-sex-in-front-of-his-son-and-to-humiliate-and-castrate-the-woman’s-husband. So it was note-passing time.

Chapter Seventy-Seven

I COULD NOT BELIEVE IT: her name was Hickey.

She leaned over me, so close her breath tickled the hairs on my eyebrow as she looked at the stitches there. My eyes just kind of naturally fixed straight ahead to the points of her boobs, which is when I noticed her name tag: D. L. HICKEY, R.N.

And I thought, what an awesome name. Of course, I also tried to make up as many perverted words beginning with D and L that I could stick before a hickey:

Does Love

Delivers Luscious

Daringly Lewd

Delightfully Located

And I was on about the seventeenth set, sweating in my collar, when she said, “Are you hot, Ryan Dean?”

Which almost made me start hiccupping again.

“Just a little.”

“Here.” Nurse Hickey loosened my tie and unfastened my shirt’s top buttons. Any more of that treatment and those stitches would have popped out by themselves. “Why don’t you lie back here, and I’ll get those right out.”

I put my head down on the paper-covered pillow on the bed and stared up as she snipped and pulled those stitches from my head, one by one.

“There,” she said. “All perfectly handsome again.”

Then she brushed her fingertip across the line over my eyebrow.

Whew. It was official. I could have asked her to write a note for Annie: Ryan Dean West did not lose the sexy.

I couldn’t move. Something behind my zipper would definitely have broken if I did.

When she finished, she put her scissors and tweezers-things down on a metal tray beside the bed and began scribbling something on my patient chart.

Then she got this puzzled look and she turned toward me, half smiling.

“You were in here two days in a row last week?”

“Uh, I was?”

She said, “Your chart says you came in with a laceration on your . . . scrotum.”

Oh, God.

They actually write stuff like that down?

Scrotum?

What a ridiculous word. If I ever became a doctor, I swore to myself then and there, I would legitimize the use of the word “ballsack.”

“Oh.” I cleared my throat. I felt like I was going to pass out. “Um. Yes.”

“From rugby?”

“Uh.”

And then I realized . . . score! I was getting Nurse Hickey to talk about my balls. What could be better than that?

“Have you ever thought about going out for the tennis team instead?”

“I love rugby. Nurse Hic . . . Hickey.”

Goddamnit. Hiccups.

“And how’s that healing up?”

Whoa.

Opportunity of a pathetic lifetime.

So I said, “I think it’s kind of buh . . . bothering me.”

“Here.” She set my chart down on the tray. “Stand up and drop your pants.”

I love America. Dreams do come true here.

Okay. I’ll be honest. She actually did tell me to stand up and drop my pants, which made it a milestone in my life, being that Nurse Hickey was a smoking five-out-of-five-toothless-one-eyed-hillbillies on the Ryan Dean West Drop-Yer-Pants-Boy Tote Board. Better still, she was now the third female with such a rating to make that demand of me in the past few days (counting Annie and Doc Mom, when they were fixing my trousers).

Well, needless to say, standing was a bit . . . uh . . . problematic for a couple reasons, probably the least of which was the woozy head rush I got when my feet hit the floor. But I bravely did as Nurse Hickey asked. Unbuckled and unzipped, my pants went to my shoes, and then she laughed and said, “Are those Pokémon?”

Ooops. I forgot.

Well, they were comfy.

“How cute.”

I felt myself turning red.

What a loser.

I lifted up my shirttails, stuck my thumbs in my waistband, pulled, and . . .

“Hold on there, hotshot,” Nurse Hickey said. “Keep them up for just a minute. Doctor Norris will be right in.”

Then she turned around and walked out of the examination room.

NO!!!!!!!

I knew I deserved it, but come on!

I am such a pathetic loser.

Chapter Seventy-Eight

OKAY.

I need to vent.

So, after the lengthy and serious talk Doctor No-gloves gave me about how it’s perfectly normal for boys to get overly scared when they receive a catastrophic fucking penis injury, but that everything would be just fine and I should try to think of it in the same way I’d think about getting a cut on my elbow, which most boys normally don’t even think twice about (but my elbow isn’t my penis, you moron)—so just stop worrying, Ryan Dean, there is nothing wrong (except Doctor No-gloves got it ALL wrong about how the setup to the ballsack exam that Nurse D. L. Hickey was supposed to do happened in the first place); and, oh, I should probably start wearing boxer shorts instead of little-boy tighty Pokémon fucking briefs because my body was “changing,” and I would begin to appreciate the “growing space” and if I ever needed to talk to him about these kinds of things since my dad lived in fucking Boston, he’d be there for me, bare hands and all—I took my embarrassed, skinny (but now up to 157 pounds after Doctor No-gloves insisted on weighing me since I was fucking naked anyway) bitch-assed self out of that innermost circle of hell as fast as possible so I could take a quick shower to wash that bastard’s Old Spice smell off my scrotum and wait for Annie at Stonehenge.

Ugh.

Okay, I’m breathing again.

Chapter Seventy-Nine

IT WAS ACTUALLY NICE TO be in O-Hall when it was so quiet. All the guys were at either rugby or football practice.

I laughed to myself, thinking about Casey Palmer being gay. But, then, I didn’t think it was funny that Joey was gay. I guess it was because Casey was such a poser with his sexuality. But probably a lot of guys were. Who knew?

There was another FedEx package sitting on my bunk when I got to my room. My mom came through. I was a little worried about opening the box, though, because at this point, I didn’t know what to expect from her.

Nice.

She’d sent the size ten-and-a-half Nikes that I asked for, and in the box with them, she’d added a can of shaving cream, a razor, and some Chanel aftershave cologne. I guess she had a mother’s intuition about that one whisker on my chin. I found an index card in there too. On one side, my mother wrote:

And on the other side, in my dad’s writing:

Yeah, my dad talked like that.

So I showered, and I actually shaved, too, and put on some of that cologne. I gelled my hair. Oh, I also switched out of the Pokémon briefs, and I did realize there was a lot to be said for having that “growing room” down there, like Doctor No-gloves told me, but I still intended to wear them on Halloween under my Wild Boy of Bainbridge Island loincloth, growing room or not, just to keep things, uh . . . put away.

I put on those brand new Nikes and my nicest black and blue sideline warm-up suit from my rugby team gear, then headed downstairs before any of the other guys even made it back from practice.

But, in the stairwell, I ran right into something even worse than Doctor No-gloves’s nutsack exam and puberty pep talk, if there could be such a degree of miserableness.

Just as I opened the door from the boys’ floor, I stumbled onto Mr. Farrow and that freakishly unhot witch from downstairs, Mrs. Singer.

Together.

Standing at the landing on the tenantless girls’ floor. They were kissing, and it wasn’t one of those innocent oh-hello-you-frosty-and-cadaverous-old-hag-from-downstairs-so-nice-to-see-you-this-afternoon pecks on the cheek, either. It was all tonguing and moaning and noisy, and Mrs. Singer was wearing only a bathrobe, and it burns my eyes even now to admit that I noticed it, but she didn’t have anything on underneath it; and it sears the very depth of my soul to confess it, but I knew they must have just had sex.

Or something.

I think I screamed.

Like Ned.

Okay, I’ll be honest. I didn’t scream, but, for whatever reason, they both instantly radared in on me standing above them.

“Oh. Uh . . . Ryan Dean!” Mr. Farrow said, pushing himself away from the creature and nonchalantly combing a trembling hand through his wild, just-had-sex hair. I noticed the fresh shine of saliva in the corner of his mouth, and his glasses were crooked.

Apparently, they weren’t in on the doctor’s-appointment-early-return-day for Ryan Dean West, and I’m going to get a little sidetracked here, but I was always totally convinced that Mr. Farrow was completely gay.

Go figure.

I guess he was attracted to corpses and decay and not just to boys.

Then Mrs. Singer looked up at me, but I was too crafty for her. I kept my eyes fixed straight down on the floor until she left and I heard the door close behind her. So it was just me and Mr. Farrow.

Like, superawkward.

I kind of wanted to laugh. I wondered if he had a mom who’d sent him a “How to Have Sex the First Time with a Cadaverous Hag from Hell” leaflet.

Farrow began coming up the stairs toward me.

There was no way out.

“Did you skip practice today, Ryan Dean?” he asked. And he moved and talked all calm and slow, like a murderer. A murderer who had just had sex with a cadaverous hag from hell.

I pointed to my eye.

“I was at the doctor’s. Got my stitches out today.”

“Oh.” He leaned close. He didn’t need to—he could see perfectly fine from where he was. He smelled like sweat. “It looks good.”

“Thanks. Well. Uh. Bye.”

I started to slip past him.

“Ryan Dean.”

I froze.

“Please don’t say anything about this.”

What a creepy child-molester thing to say.

Then Mr. Farrow said, “I can transfer you back into the boys’ dorm at the ten-week grade report. In two weeks.”

I didn’t say anything. The door off the mudroom opened, and Joey and Kevin came in.

“Hey,” Joey said. He stopped and looked at me, then he high-fived me. Not a record breaker, but a solid one nevertheless. “Nice job on the stitches. And, damn, Ryan Dean. You look about two inches taller than yesterday.” And he laughed. “My ears are still ringing from Screaming Ned.”

“That was almost the worst thing I ever had to put up with,” I said.

But, I thought, not even close to what I just saw about a minute ago.

“Hey,” Kevin said. He had a rugby ball tucked inside his sling. “Nice hair, Winger. Let me guess . . . Annie?” And Kevin leaned close to my face and sniffed, then said, “Oooooh.”

I said, “Yeah,” and they kept going upstairs.

I lowered my voice. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Farrow. Say something about what?”

Then Mr. Farrow nodded like we were striking some kind of deal, but we weren’t. Because I thought about it right then. Yeah, I didn’t like Chas Becker. I hated him, in fact. And some of the other guys in O-Hall were real dipshits, and the communal bathroom was always nasty and crowded, and bunk beds are for prisons.

But I knew I couldn’t go back to the boys’ dorm.

“Please don’t transfer me out of O-Hall, Mr. Farrow,” I said. “I’d get in too much trouble. If I went back to my old room, I’d be kicked out of school the first day, and I’m not going to say why, but you just have to believe me. Please?”

And, yeah, I was doing the think-about-peeing face on him.

“Well, then,” he said.

The door opened. Casey and Chas came up the stairs toward us. Chas was saying something to Casey about how “she’s been crying all goddamn day long,” but I avoided looking at them.

I knew what he was talking about, anyway.

Still, I had to wonder what Chas would say if he knew he was pouring his lovesick heart out to a gay guy with the serious hots for the fly half on our rugby team.

I passed them on my way down. And when I glanced back over my shoulder, Mr. Farrow was gone and the stairwell was empty.

At the bottom, I saw Mrs. Singer watching me through the window on the door to the girls’ floor. Then she turned away and the window was empty. It actually made me shudder. I stopped just before going outside and pressed myself up against the girls’ door.

“My name is Ryan Dean West,” I said.

My voice cracked. Loser. “I’m the boy you caught down here in the bathroom that first night before school started. I just wanted to say I’m sorry and ask you to please stop doing all these horrible things to me.”

The door cracked open, and I could see just a bit of her so-unhot-she-looked-like-Screaming-Ned-after-a-close-shave face. Mrs. Singer said, “I’m going to cook you and eat you on Halloween, Ryan Dean West.”

Then I ran.

Okay. To be perfectly honest, she probably said, “Nice to meet you, Ryan Dean West,” but I did my duty by apologizing, and I wasn’t about to stick around and have my soul sucked, receive a cascade of ice shards pouring through the fly of my boxers, come down with diarrhea, suffer a spontaneous bloody nose, or have her lay another ungodly curse on my as-yet-untested reproductive appliances, either.

Chapter Eighty

ANNIE WAS ALREADY AT STONEHENGE when I got there.

She walked along the wishing-circle path, and I stood back at the edge of the trees and watched her.

“The nurse said for me to tell you that I did not lose the sexy. She said there’s way too much of it going on there.”

She looked at me and laughed.

“Let me see it,” she said.

Hmmm . . . another Ryan Dean West would have undoubtedly made a perverted comeback to that, but, somehow, I just felt different standing there.

She walked over to me, and I could see her eyeing me up and down, but I watched her face. I leaned close.

Game on, Annie.

She put her thumb on the small scar.

“Well?” I asked.

“Okay,” she said. “You look good dressed like that, and the way you fixed your hair, Ryan Dean. You look taller.”

That’s when I realized that Annie had completely stopped calling me West. I thought it meant something. And I liked it.

“You’re the second person to say that, Annie. I think I’m going to have to come over and have you and your mom fix my pants again.”

“Do you want to come back?”

“Oh my God, Annie, I’d leave right now if I could. I’d start walking.”

Annie said, “Maybe you can come for the four days over Thanksgiving.”

“That would be awesome,” I said, even though I knew it would make my mom and dad unhappy that I wasn’t going home. I held her hand, and we walked under the trees. It was beginning to rain again, but none of it fell through.

“What were you wishing for?” I said.

“Not going to tell you.”

“Okay.” I inhaled. On the walk out here, I’d thought about what I needed to tell her. It was important, and I knew I had to stop acting like such a . . . uh, Wild Boy.

“I need to tell you something, though, Annie. Me and JP got in another fight today. That’s why his eye was black. I punched him. I’m sorry. I’m not going to do it again. I don’t want you to get mad about it, so I told you before you heard it from Seanie or someone else. I don’t know why I’ve been acting so stupid.”

Annie sighed. “Ryan Dean.”

“I know. I’m sorry. And I decided I can’t be upset about you going to the dance with him either. I’m just going to have to forget about it. I’m really sorry, Annie. Will you forgive me for being such a jerk?”

She stood right in front of me, so close we were practically touching. We just looked at each other’s eyes, and I knew we were going to kiss, but she pulled back and said, “I can’t be in love with you, Ryan Dean.”

Yeah. I heard that before. And this time I wasn’t going to be a baby about it and run away. So I said, “Yes you can be.”

For the longest time, it seemed like there was no sound at all except the rain dripping through the trees above us.

I said it again. “Yes, you can be, Annie.”

And she said, “I know.”

“I know, too, because I’ve never said this to anyone, but I am so in love with you, Annie, that I almost can’t stand it, and it’s making me insane.”

Then I don’t know if she laughed or was going to cry, but she kind of shook and she put both of her hands on my shoulders and said, “I do love you, Ryan Dean,” and then we just about collapsed into each other’s arms.

I felt so relieved. I closed my eyes and inhaled, and we kissed like we did that other day in the sawmill, and neither of us would let go. It was better than every wish I ever made coming true all at the same time.

“You smell nice,” she said.

“I shaved.”

She laughed. “Why?”

“Hey, now.”

We walked through the forest, heading back toward O-Hall along the trail by the lake. It was getting late, and I needed to change back into my dress clothes or they wouldn’t let me have dinner.

I didn’t care, though. Everything was perfect, and I just wanted to sleep.

But it was so exciting to think about sitting down to dinner with Annie for the first time as a real, honest-to-God couple. I wanted so badly to be alone with her.

Annie said, “Oh my God. I am in love with a fourteen-year-old boy.”

“Get over it, old hag. When you’re ninety, I’ll be eighty-eight.”

Chapter Eighty-One

EVERYTHING IN MY UNIVERSE CHANGED that day.

Annie left me at O-Hall. We promised to meet for dinner in half an hour. I watched her walk away, and after every few steps, she’d turn around and see me following her with my eyes, and she’d say, “Go on, Ryan Dean. Get dressed.”

But I watched her until I couldn’t see her anymore.

I went inside. I could hear the guys upstairs noisily getting ready to storm the mess hall. I paused beside the girls’ door and looked through the window to see if Mrs. Singer was there. For some stupid reason, I wanted to say thanks to her, like she’d lifted the curse or cast some love spell over Annie.

I know. That was dumb.

I pushed the door open and stuck my head inside. The hallway was dark, but I saw Mrs. Singer standing at the far end, just staring at me. She looked like Mary Todd Lincoln . . . and not just because she had the big-black-dress thing going on; I mean, she really looked like someone dug up the corpse of Mary Todd Lincoln fifteen minutes ago and propped her up at the end of the O-Hall girls’ floor hallway.

I said, “Thanks,” and slipped back upstairs.

Chapter Eighty-Two

SEANIE AND JP DIDN’T SIT near us at dinner that night.

It didn’t matter to me.

Annie and I played “feet” under the table. We hardly ate anything at all because we just stared at each other, and I could tell it started to annoy Joey and Isabel that we were so focused in our own thing—it was like the rest of our friends didn’t exist.

The next couple of days were kind of like that: Mine and Annie’s universe got smaller and quieter.

Seanie didn’t say much to me.

I know he was mad about my starting that fight with JP at the lake, and how Seanie had to take some punches himself when he got between us. JP had long since stopped talking to me, and Megan just moped around like she was so depressed.

Yeah, she didn’t talk to me either.

Oh. And neither did Chas—ever since last Sunday night and the consequence and Screaming Ned, and me making Chas cry when I confessed that Megan and I had been fooling around.

He didn’t even put forth the effort to call me Pussboy or Asswing anymore.

Nothing.

Joey told me that Megan had broken up with Chas and it was all because of me. So, if I threw in the fact that I’d caught Mrs. Singer and Mr. Farrow practically copulating right there in the O-Hall stairwell, I figured all I’d need to do was publicly out Casey Palmer, then the entire state of Oregon, minus Annie Altman and Joey Cosentino, would want me dead.

I was on thin ice, but I didn’t care.

Chapter Eighty-Three

THE DAY BEFORE HALLOWEEN, WE had another rugby match.

We played at our own field, on Wednesday after classes, so Annie got to be there.

Our opposition was a club team from Southern California called the Pumas that had come up on tour to play against teams in the Pacific Northwest, where everyone knows we play a tougher game. None of us really liked playing against club teams; they were notorious cheaters as far as things like player eligibility were concerned, and most club coaches’ only priority was winning, so they’d do anything unethical to get there. Coach M knew it too, but it was preseason and we all wanted to play anyway.

Besides that, Southern California? Give me a break. Saying you play rugby in Southern California is like saying you surf in Colorado.

Dude.

But they were tough, and that’s probably because, to me, it looked like they had some players who had been out of high school for a couple years and were married and had mortgages and tattoos and children of their own.

We ended up beating them pretty badly, though, 42–12, and the coolest thing was that Coach M said he wasn’t going to let anyone wear Kevin’s number for the rest of the season.

Kevin stayed on the sidelines wearing the number four jersey with his arm in a sling. That’s probably what pumped us up the most for the game, even though I knew half the guys on the team didn’t want to talk to me, much less give me the ball.

Joey did, though, and I scored one time. But Joey was on fire that day and put in three tries by himself.

The boys on the other team got pretty hotheaded, and a couple times it looked like they were going to try to start fighting, but we kept it under control and had a good game of it. Their coach ended up in such a bad mood, though, that he made them leave the social early and get back on their bus to head up to Seattle. That was fine with me, because we all got out of there early enough to give me hope that I’d catch up to Annie in the mess hall before we had to check in at our dorms.

It was dark, and I was afraid she’d already gone home for the night, so as soon as I could, I took off running for the mess hall. And JP was right behind me.

“Hey, fucker,” JP said.

I knew he was there.

I stopped and turned around. It was so quiet and cold. There was no one else around, and I could just barely hear the sounds of the students who were still having dinner in the mess hall.

“I’m not going to fight about it anymore, JP,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Screw you, Ryan Dean.”

“Look. I didn’t mean it when I said I was sorry the other day. But I do now. I’m sorry, JP.”

JP didn’t answer.

“We might as well just find some other way to waste our time, because, trust me, it’s over,” I said.

“Fuck you.”

This would have been a perfect time and place for him to absolutely kill me, and I knew it.

Trouble is, I’m pretty sure he did, too.

Oh, well, I thought, I’d gotten my shots in on JP enough in the past week, and I was way ahead on the scorecard. Worst of all, I knew I deserved it.

“You want to punch me, JP?” I put my hands out. “Go ahead. I told you I’m not going to fight you anymore, and I meant it.”

Just then, Seanie came up from behind, totally out of the dark.

He was out of breath from running after us. “What are you guys doing?”

JP walked off without answering, straight for the boys’ dorm.

“What the fuck, Ryan Dean? We used to all be friends. What the fuck?” Seanie was pissed again. He turned away, following JP.

“Seanie,” I said. “I didn’t do anything this time. I swear to God.” I followed after him. “Seanie, listen to me. Just a second.”

But he wouldn’t stop, so I just let him go.

Chapter Eighty-Four

I COULDN’T SLEEP THAT NIGHT.

I just lay there on the top bunk and stared up at the emptiness between me and the ceiling, thinking about what Seanie had said, how we all used to be friends, and how his voice had a tone in it like he blamed me for doing something that I don’t think was entirely under my control.

This time.

I listened to Chas sleeping and wondered how I’d managed to live this long sharing a room with him. I wanted to ask him about Megan, but I knew those would likely be the final words spoken on this earth by Ryan Dean West.

For three days, Chas hadn’t said one word to me, but Megan looked so sad and it made me feel terrible, because deep down I didn’t see her as just some hot girl. I really did like her. I really did think she was a great person. I just knew better than to get too close to her again.

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: Did you actually just say that to yourself—that you don’t see Megan Renshaw as just some hot girl?

RYAN DEAN WEST 1: I can’t help it. Something’s changing in me.

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: Oh . . . so you finally did decide to join Team Joey.

RYAN DEAN WEST 1: That’s a shitty thing to say.

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: How about Isabel? Isn’t she fuzzy-hot?

RYAN DEAN WEST 1: Shut up.

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: Doc Mom? Mrs. Kurtz? Aren’t they my-best-friend’s-kinky-mom hot?

RYAN DEAN WEST 1: Ugh.

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: How about Annie?

RYAN DEAN WEST 1: If you weren’t me, I’d punch you in the face.

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: Nurse Hickey?

RYAN DEAN WEST 1: Okay. I’ll give you that. Nurse Hickey is a hissing five out of five leaky air-conditioning units on the Ryan Dean West Global Hotness Scale.

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: My man. There is hope for you after all.

(RYAN DEAN WEST 1 wipes the sweat from his forehead.)

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: Loser.

I couldn’t stand it anymore. I had to get my wimpy, feeling-sorry-for-myself ass out of bed.

I slipped on my warm-ups and carried my shoes in one hand so I wouldn’t squeak on the floor, and I left.

In the dark hallway, I ran into Joey as he was coming out of the bathroom.

He whispered, “Are you leaving or something?”

“I have to go outside. I can’t sleep.”

“Dude, I am so beat up from the game, I can’t even lie down. Let me get dressed, and I’ll meet you out there in a minute.”

“Okay.”

I didn’t feel awkward talking to Joey, or being in a situation where we were alone together, and I know that’s a crappy thing for me to even point out in the first place, like I have to defend myself to myself for being best friends with a guy who happens to be gay.

But most guys just got all tense around Joey in normal social situations, like any time when we weren’t out on the pitch and bashing each others’ brains in playing rugby.

You could just see it in the way guys’ shoulders would tighten up, and you could hear it in the way they’d talk—like they never really talked directly to Joey, even if they were asking him something, it always looked like they were talking past him, or to the ground or something, and in really short sentences.

It’s weird, but I noticed it, and I’m sure Joey did too.

I saw him come out from the mudroom, and he let the door close slowly behind him so it didn’t make the slightest sound. Then he sat down on the steps and slipped his shoes on.

“Where are you going?” he said.

I shrugged.

“That witch downstairs didn’t see you, did she?” I said.

“Why are you so scared of her?”

We talked low until we were far enough away from O-Hall.

“Dude, Joey, she does horrible things to me. Trust me. I know she’s a witch or something.”

Joey laughed. “Whatever.” Then he said, “I asked Kevin to come, but once he’s in bed, forget it. It hurts him too much to get in and out of bed, anyway.”

Joey walked slowly and carefully. He limped.

There really isn’t too much in the world that hurts worse than a guy’s body does the night after a rugby game, and the fly half almost always takes more shots than any other player on the field.

I threw a rock out into the lake.

“I caught Mr. Farrow having sex with Mrs. Singer on Monday, when I came back from having my stitches out. How nasty is that?”

Joey laughed. “No fucking way.”

“Dude, don’t tell anyone. At least, that’s what Mr. Farrow begged me. That’s why we were talking on the stairs when you and Kevin came in that day. He even said he’d get me out of O-Hall if I kept quiet about it.”

“Are you going to do it?”

“I asked him not to,” I said. “I wouldn’t last in the boys’ dorm. JP hates me. I think Seanie does now too. It sucks.”

“You push things too far, sometimes, Ryan Dean. Just your luck.”

“I know.”

“But, shit, everyone knows you’re a fighter. You’re not afraid to take on anyone,” Joey said.

“Oh, I’m afraid. But when you have to fight, you have to fight. There’s nothing else you can do.” I threw another rock. “Annie finally told me she’s in love with me.”

“Did you tell her first?”

“Yeah.”

“Damn. You’ve got some guts, Ryan Dean.”

“So, sorry if it seems like we’ve been ignoring everyone else.”

“Dude. It’s pretty obvious.”

Then Joey high-fived me, but it was weak, so we had to do it again.

Not a record breaker, but it was solid.

“At least there’s one thing I haven’t totally screwed up,” I said.

“Yeah.”

Damn, I thought. Joey didn’t have to agree with that. But then again, Joey wasn’t the kind of guy who’d ever lie about things just to make someone feel better.

I sighed. “Yeah. I feel terrible about JP and Seanie. We used to be such good friends. But I couldn’t handle him chasing after Annie like he’s been doing. I should have known she didn’t really care about him. Well, not like that, anyway. God! I am such an idiot. I wish I could just do it all over again. I wish I never got put in O-Hall in the first place, and now it’s like I can’t ever get out.”

Joey threw a rock too.

“Yep,” he said. “You know, nothing ever goes back exactly the way it was. Things just expand and contract. Like the universe, like breathing. But you’ll never fill your lungs up with the same air twice. Sometimes, it would be cool if you could pause and rewind and do over. But I think anyone would get tired of that after one or two times.”

“Sometimes, don’t you just ever feel like screaming, like Screaming Ned?” I asked.

Joey laughed out loud, “Sometimes I feel like driving back to Bannock and finding him at that donut shop just so I can kick the shit out of him.”

Then I laughed too. “That was one of the most amazing nights ever.”

“Yeah.”

I felt better.

We walked back to O-Hall and kicked off our shoes before opening the door and climbing upstairs. I was afraid we’d run into Mrs. Singer, but then I thought she just had this certain thing for zeroing in on me, so Joey was like a protective charm against her.

I said good night and thanks, and we hugged—a guy hug, okay? with the patting on the back and stuff—and Joey slipped into his room.

And as I was walking down the hallway to my room, I saw that Casey Palmer had been watching me, just standing in front of his door with his arms folded, like he was pissed off and wanted to fight.

He whispered, “That explains it. What were you guys out doing tonight, little fucking faggot?”

Man, I thought, you have some balls saying shit like that to anyone.

I walked past where Casey was standing.

Then I stopped and said, “Don’t be stupid, Palmer.”

“I fucking hate you queers. I’m sick of all the shit Joey pulls around here. Someone needs to straighten his shit out.”

Nick Matthews opened the door to their room and stepped out into the hallway, shirtless and wearing only his boxers. Nick was a fat offensive lineman with a tattoo of a skull on his hairy shoulder.

“We should fuck these little queers up, like you said, Case.”

I glanced back toward Joey’s door. I wished he’d been there to hear what Nick and Casey said, but I was also glad he wasn’t. It would have been a terrible fight, right then and there.

And I can’t even explain how much I wanted to rip into Casey about what I knew, and out him in front of his hairy, tattooed roommate, but I literally bit down on my tongue and went to bed without saying another word.

Chapter Eighty-Five

SEANIE AVOIDED ME THE WHOLE next day. He wouldn’t talk to me in Conditioning or even at our team meeting at the end of the day.

We didn’t have practice on Halloween. Coach let us out early. Most of the guys on the team didn’t live in O-Hall. That meant they were all going to the dinner party, while the O-Hall boys would be the only twelve kids eating in the mess hall and then going home.

Alone.

At least some of us had costumes. And I knew that Joey and Kevin were going to do whatever they could to make sure we all had something to laugh about that night. So I just tried to not think about what Annie was going to be doing without me.

But, of course, that was like trying to not think about getting kicked in the balls right as you’re watching that foot make contact.

Things like this were really the worst part of being assigned to O-Hall, because as Joey, Kevin, and I left the mess hall after our quiet dinner, we could all hear the sound of the music coming from the activities center.

And I’m not going to lie about it, but even though Annie and I had made our commitment to each other, the sound of that music was eating me up on the walk back to my room.

I didn’t say anything to Joey about running into Casey the night before.

I probably should have, now that I think about it, but at the time, I just thought it would make Joey want to fight him. But when we got back to O-Hall and we saw the painfully unhot Mary-Todd-Mrs.-Singer standing on the stairs (which was the first time I’d ever seen Mrs. Singer in the presence of any of the other guys, so I was a little relieved to finally know she was real), I found out something that was almost unbelievable.

“Mr. Farrow is not here this evening,” she said. “He’s left me in charge.”

Which, I thought, meant she actually was going to cook me and eat me.

“I don’t care what you boys do. Just stay off my floor and keep the noise down, and none of us will get into trouble. Correct?”

I looked at Kevin and Joey.

They heard it too.

So, to me, the “I don’t care what you boys do” part was as good as a permission slip for us to go to the dance.

The Wild Boy of Bainbridge Island was ready to break free.

We ran upstairs to dig out the costumes.

“I think she killed Mr. Farrow,” I said. “Or she’s got him chained to her bed.”

Then Kevin said, “Maybe we should have stalled her a little longer to give him a chance to finish chewing off his arm, then.”

Chapter Eighty-Six

SO THERE I WAS, STANDING in the middle of the floor, wearing absolutely nothing but those Pokémon briefs, when the door pushed opened and Chas and Casey walked in.

Chas just stared at me and shook his head.

“What?” I said.

But it really did creep me out the way that Casey looked at me, especially considering what I knew about him, and what he obviously thought about me and Joey, too.

God! That was all I needed after the crap I’d been through that week, to have some angry, horny, gay football player chasing after me, or jealously thinking I’d been having sex with the guy he was attracted to.

Casey Palmer was a dangerous psychopath.

“Your costumes are there in the cubby,” I said. “Have fun. You’re going to like what we got.”

Joey and I had left a bag marked CHAS, and one marked PALMER, inside my closet after we separated out the goods.

I didn’t really want to be alone with them when they opened the bags and saw what we got for them to wear, so I was glad when the convict-striped Joey appeared down the hallway, walking toward my open door.

“Joey!” I called, and he came over.

“You’re not going like that, are you, Ryan Dean?” he said.

I just gave Joey a dirty look, but I noticed as Casey eyed him, then looked back at me, back and forth, like he was watching a tennis match or something. And I wanted to say, Dude, you have it so fucking wrong about me and Joey, you stupid moron, but it was so obvious what he was thinking.

He was burning up. I could see him turning red, how his hands shook.

Like he was actually jealous of me, and in a totally, obviously gay way, too. I couldn’t decide whether it was funny, scary, or what.

I pulled the Wild Boy leopard skin up over my legs and tied the single strap on my shoulder. I had to tie it pretty loose, because the fake-jagged-cut bottom barely covered my nuts.

I thought it was perfect.

“Oh, yeah, Annie will dig this,” I said, hoping that Casey was paying attention to the fact that I wasn’t talking about a guy.

I slipped my bare feet into my running shoes and walked past Joey. “I’m going to go get some hair gel from Kevin.”

And, as I left, I heard Chas saying, “I’m not putting that shit on,” and Casey complaining, “Is that all you fucking got me?”

So I guess they weren’t totally satisfied with their outfits.

But they put them on anyway. And I don’t know why Casey Palmer had to tag along with us, either. He could have gone out with Nick or any of the other assholes from O-Hall, but he was making it so obvious—to Joey and me, at least—that he had some kind of perverted interest in hanging around us.

Casey Palmer was after something.

What a fucking dolt.

Chas looked especially ridiculous.

We didn’t really think about it that night in Bannock, but not too many women come in size six foot four, so he had to cut the feet out of the pantyhose just to get the crotch past his knees.

Then he had his own pair of Pokémon briefs on top of the red nylons.

I said, “Oh! Twinsies!” And I lifted up my loincloth.

Chas flipped me off.

He wore our blue rugby socks to cover the holes at his feet, then a white T-shirt we had marked up with a big blue C, and, finally, the cape, which, since it was for a kid, went down to just the top of his ass.

Yeah, Joey confirmed what I sensed all along: You couldn’t get much gayer looking than that.

Kevin looked great. He was all in black, with that hook-hand sticking out from his sling. Of course, he had an eye patch, and he’d tied his hair down under a doo rag made from an old black T-shirt.

It was a big deal for Kevin to do that, because his perfect blond hair was always, well . . . perfect. Kevin Cantrell had magic hair. It never even got messed up playing rugby, and he hated wearing anything that would put one strand out of place. Then he had a three-pointed pirate hat on top of the doo rag, and he’d even taken a black Sharpie and drawn a moustache (that was about half as thick as Isabel’s) across his lip.

Kevin was a great sport. He would do anything, even if it meant permanent marker to the face.

He even offered to draw chest and leg hairs on the Wild Boy of Bainbridge Island, but the whole permanent-ink thing was a deal breaker as far as I was concerned.

Casey Palmer just moped along with us, stung and angry, wearing that cheesy elastic-band-highly-flammable-carcinogenic-plastic Wonder Woman mask and dangling about a yard-and-a-half-long cord of gold lamé from his right hand.

And on that long walk across campus from O-Hall to the dance, I kept wondering the same few things over and over.

First, why the hell is Casey tagging along with us, and who is going to be the one to orchestrate the ditching of his ass? Second, it is really, really cold walking around practically naked. And, oh, by the way, third, it feels like my balls have turned into frozen raisins and the skin on my one exposed nipple has shriveled to the size of . . . uh . . . something . . . that’s really small and round. And hard.

Or something.

Brrrrrr.

And I didn’t even think, the whole way over there, that they weren’t going to let the O-Hall boys into the dance once we got there, but that’s exactly what was going to happen.

“Ryan Dean West? What are you doing out?”

The old pervert, Mr. Wellins, was working the door.

He added, “Fantastic costume, by the way.”

Yeah. Whatever. Stop staring at my shrunken nipple.

But I knew Mr. Wellins liked me. I could lay it on so thick when I wrote essays for him, and, of course, I had the highest grade in his Lit class. I knew exactly what he wanted to hear: duh, sex.

Why don’t other kids get that?

It’s never about what you think, it’s about what the professor wants you to think.

No-brainer.

“But you boys are going to get into trouble for being out of Opportunity Hall.”

I knew I had to work my magic.

Anyway, my eyes were watering already. I really did need to pee, even though I thought it would probably come out in sharp yellow ice cubes.

Ouch. Thinking about that made my eyes water even more.

“They gave us permission at O-Hall to come out tonight,” I said. “Because we’ve been very good, Mr. Wellins. You could call over and ask Mrs. Singer, and she’ll confirm it.”

Mr. Wellins looked like a judge weighing character-reference testimony.

I was shivering.

I said, “Oh. And I have my final essay for you on In Our Time.”

And I knew this was a kill shot: “I wrote it on the sexual tension between Nick and Bill in ‘The Three-Day Blow.’ ”

Yeah, I know. Too easy with a title like that, but I wasn’t going to go there.

I continued, “I mean, how they get drunk together, alone in the cabin, and Nick puts on a pair of Bill’s socks, and Bill tells Nick how he’s glad Nick didn’t get married. Very thick with the taboo of forbidden, unacted upon, and unrequited homosexual curiosity, I think.”

I swear to God, Mr. Wellins looked so emotionally moved, I thought he was going to start sobbing. “You are brilliant, Ryan Dean.”

I just made that shit up on the spot because of how much I had to pee, and how much I wanted in to the dance.

Ugh. Now I knew I’d have to go hammer out that crappy essay before Lit class.

Sorry, Hemingway, but this old guy murdered some of your best chops for a generation of students.

Mr. Wellins said, “Well, it does sound to me as though you boys have been applying yourselves. Have a good time at the dance, Ryan Dean, and I’ll look forward to seeing that essay tomorrow.”

Crap.

Forbidden and unacted upon.

Sometimes, I surprise myself by how much of an idiot I am.

Chapter Eighty-Seven

IN THE DOOR, HIGH FIVES from joey and Kevin for playing Mr. Wellins like one of those balsa-wood-paddle-and-a-red-bouncy-ball-attached-on-a-long-rubber-band-with-a-staple-in-it-that-I-don’t-know-what-the-hell-they’re-called-things, and . . .

First stop: urinals.

So, I’m standing there, thinking, Hey, wearing a miniskirt really does save a lot of time and trouble when a guy needs to pee. Convenient.

When I came out into the dance hall, I found Joey and Kevin, but Casey and Chas were gone, thankfully.

It was hard to recognize anyone else, because I didn’t know what kids were wearing what costumes, and the place was so dark and crowded. I decided I’d have to do my duty and fully check out every single girl there—and, potentially, every cross-dresser—until I found Annie.

I swung past Joey and Kevin and said, “I’m going to look for Annie. I’ll see you guys later. Whatever you do, try to ditch Palmer for good.”

Joey smiled and nodded.

Kevin leaned to my ear and said, “Oh, I don’t think Palmer’s going to be around us after what Joey just said to him.”

I looked at Joey. “What did you say to him?”

“Nothing,” Joey said. “Don’t worry about it. Go find your girlfriend.”

Later, I found out from Kevin that Joey told Casey Palmer straight out that there were plenty of gay kids at Pine Mountain and that Casey needed to stop hitting on him, and that Joey would be happy to introduce him to some of the other gay boys around school.

He said it loud enough that people heard it. Chas Becker, in his permanent state of cluelessness, didn’t realize that Joey Cosentino was not joking.

A girl from the soccer team, wearing a grass skirt, glided up to Kevin and started cooing over his stab wound. Yeah—it was the whole stitches thing with some of these girls. Next thing I saw, Kevin had his hook looped into the top of her skirt and she was leading him out to dance.

The dance floor was crowded with kids dressed in every imaginable disguise. A few of them wore school clothes, which, I guess, was a kind of costume in itself, because there wasn’t much sense in bothering to pack a Halloween costume for incarceration at Pine Mountain. Still, I was glad for mine, especially when I’d get the incidental brush-up from a girl. It was by far the best costume there.

The air in the room was thick and humid.

I waded out through the pulsing, vibrating crowd.

I saw Seanie sitting down on a giant L-shaped sofa next to Isabel. They were drinking sodas. I knew I’d never find him dancing, he was so uptight about stuff like that. And, of course, Seanie was dressed like a flasher, wearing a long yellow raincoat with what looked like nothing on underneath it. Isabel seemed more than a little uncomfortable next to him and kept an obvious gap between them open on the couch. I figured Seanie had already played the want-to-see-what-I-have-on-underneath-my-raincoat game with her.

Isabel was dressed like an octopus or something. I didn’t really get it, but she had a lot of arms. Oh, and a moustache, which I still found kind of hot.

“Hey, Seanie.”

Seanie practically jumped when he saw me.

“Hi, Ryan Dean,” Isabel said. “Awesome costume.”

“Thanks.” I gave her a little flex and showed some thigh.

“How’d you get in?” Seanie asked.

“They let us out of O-Hall. Hey, can I sit down for a second?”

Seanie, always uncoordinated with things like that, scooted over to give me space between him and his date.

Whatever.

I sat.

One of Isabel’s stuffed arms brushed up along my bare leg.

I looked at her, then at Seanie.

“I came to apologize to you again, Seanie. And I’m going to apologize to JP, too. I know we’re probably never going to be friends again, not like we were, but I’m sorry for starting a fight and then getting you caught in the middle of it.”

I held out my hand, and Seanie shook it. I could tell by the way he squeezed that everything was okay with him. Guys can just tell things about other guys with the pressure of a handshake. Too tight, and you’re a competitive asshole. Not tight enough, or cold and moist, you probably spend a lot of time looking at porn sites.

It’s a science.

“We’ll always be friends, Ryan Dean.”

“Thanks.”

Then Seanie said, “Why do I suddenly feel like we should go back to your place and make out or something?”

Isabel coughed.

She didn’t get Seanie at all. I don’t even know why she came out with him in the first place.

Seanie said, “JP isn’t here. He didn’t come. He stayed at home, pouting.”

“That sucks,” I said. “ ’Cause of me. Is Annie here?”

Seanie looked around. “She’s here somewhere. She’s kind of pouty too.”

“What’s she dressed like?”

“A doctor.”

Oh. Score.

“Hi, Ryan Dean!” Mrs. Kurtz appeared before us, obviously surprised to see an O-Hall boy at the dance.

Then she leaned over to Seanie and whispered something to him, which I thought was pretty weird, and he laughed.

Mrs. Kurtz straightened up and gave me a wink, then disappeared into the crowd of dancers.

“What was that all about?” I said.

Seanie said, “She told me to tell you, Pokémon, if you’re going to sit on the couch, maybe you should cross your legs or something.” Then Seanie leaned forward, looked up my loincloth, and said, “Yep. You want to know how come I know you’re gay?”

“Because guys who check out other guys’ balls just kind of do know that stuff?” I guessed.

Yeah, it was back to normal with Seanie, but I still didn’t cross my legs.

Whatever.

What guy crosses his legs?

I saw Megan in the crowd, dancing by herself, or, at least it looked like she was dancing by herself. She could have been dancing with a hundred people, for all I knew.

And, damn, she looked good. She was dressed like a stewardess, complete with that little angel-food-cake-shaped hat, pinned at a tilt in her fluttering hair. She had been watching me.

I stood up.

“We’ll have to make out later, Seanie,” I said. “I’m going to cruise around and try to find Annie.”

Of course, that wasn’t completely a lie. Well . . . the making-out part was.

Seanie said, “It’s a date.”

So I moved out into the dancers, watching Megan, who was looking right at me.

I reasoned that Halloween was going to turn out to be some kind of a Ryan Dean West twelve-step-and-apologize-to-everyone-whose-feelings-I’ve-hurt night.

Seanie made one down.

Now I had the rest of the fucking planet to go.

Then Mrs. Kurtz hip-bumped me, the way people did when they danced at discos in the seventies.

Two things: (1) Are you kidding me? And (2) That was incredibly hot. Plus, she had just been looking at my underwear, which made me feel warm and . . . um . . . kind of springy.

So I leaned closer to her ear, since the music was blaring, and I said, “I apologize for how I was sitting over there, Mrs. Kurtz. It was rude. I’ve never worn a skirt before.”

And she high-fived me and said, “Ryan Dean, you are adorable.”

Eh . . . the jury’s still out on that word.

I really don’t think I like it much.

Mrs. Kurtz danced off, and I snaked through the flailing bodies.

But, there. I had apologized to two people now, and I hadn’t even been out of the urinal for ten minutes.

Megan wasn’t going to be as easy as those first two, though, because, deep down, I still knew she could get anything she wanted from me.

Anything.

And that was pretty scary.

I got right next to her. It was so hot there in the middle of all those people. And I mean hot, not necessarily “hot,” even though Megan, the naughty stewardess, scored an unarguable five out of five depressurization-air-masks-plus-a-bonus-chicken-potpie on the Ryan Dean West Frequent-Flyer-in-Flight emergency survey.

That’s, like, off-the-scale hot.

“Hey,” I said.

“Dance,” she said.

I’ve never been shy about dancing.

Boys who are shy about dancing look like uncoordinated morons, and girls definitely get turned off by that. So I danced. We got real close, and I held on to Megan’s hips, which, now that I think about it, was a huge mistake, because I suddenly forgot everything in the world except for how incredibly hot (and I don’t mean thermally hot) she was.

“Megan?”

“What, Ryan Dean?”

“Huh?”

She rubbed her hips square into mine. She began hiking up my little leopard-skin loincloth with the curve of her butt. God! Good thing we were out in the middle of the crowd, ’cause this was the kind of dancing you read about in the papers where schools get burned down by angry crowds of torch-carrying, moonshine-cooking, toothless, one-eyed hillbillies.

“I said, ‘What, Ryan Dean?’ ”

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: Think about baseball.

RYAN DEAN WEST 1: Crap. I don’t know a goddamned thing about baseball.

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: It’s just a figure of speech. Think about a place in the universe where there is no such thing as sex.

RYAN DEAN WEST 1: Okay, you’re going to have to give me a hint. Is it Bannock?

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: You’re a fucking idiot. Think about your middle name.

RYAN DEAN WEST 1: Okay. I hate my middle name.

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: So do I.

RYAN DEAN WEST 1: What’s my middle name, anyway?

I couldn’t even remember my middle name.

“Do you know what my middle name is, Megan?”

“No. What is it?”

Then I said it. “Mario.”

I’ll be honest. That actually is my middle name. And saying it helped snap me out of the fact that I was beginning to act like Pedro-the-humping-pug-dog right there in front of half the goddamned school.

And she said, “That is the hottest middle name ever!”

Which didn’t do anything to help slow the boy-to-dog transformation.

“I needed to tell you something,” I said. “Stop dancing for a second.”

Then she looked serious.

We stopped.

I pulled my loincloth, which was up over my belly, down. Nobody even noticed. That’s how high school dances are these days, in case you didn’t know.

“I wanted to say I’m sorry, Megan.”

“Okay, Ryan Dean.”

“I really like you, Megan. You’re honestly the first girl I ever kissed. I really like you. But I’m in love with Annie. You know that, don’t you?”

“I broke up with Chas.”

“I know,” I said. “And if it’s my fault, I’m sorry for that, too.”

“Don’t be.”

“You are a better person for it, Megan. You are beautiful and brilliant, and nobody who sees that in you ever stopped for a minute to consider how you had beaten all the other girls at Pine Mountain to win the dubious prize of Chas Becker.”

I sounded like William Jennings Bryan giving a speech about crosses and gold and shit.

Megan said, “You should be a lawyer, Ryan Dean.”

“Are we okay, then? Or do you hate me?” I asked.

“We’re okay,” she said. But she looked sad. Then she said, “I’m in love with you anyway, Ryan Dean.”

Ugh. I did not see that coming. I swear I almost fell down.

“Start dancing,” I said. My voice cracked, but she couldn’t hear over the music anyway, so I just felt like a loser, I didn’t actually sound like one.

“I’m going to take a little walk. I need to think about things before I screw them up worse than they are.”

Megan started dancing.

“Ryan Dean?”

“What?”

“Annie sure is lucky,” she said. “You’re the best person I know.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. It felt terrible and amazingly wonderful all at the same time.

It sure sounded nicer than “adorable.”

She kept her eyes on me. I felt embarrassed and stupid as I backed away through all the dressed-up dancers.

Someone tugged at me from behind. Kevin had switched his hook into his good hand and caught my shoulder strap with it. He was dancing with about six girls, and he pulled me into the middle of the circle.

“Isn’t this awesome?” he said.

“Have you seen Annie?”

He shrugged.

I was dripping with sweat.

“I need to find her,” I said.

Chapter Eighty-Eight

IT TOOK ME A WHILE to break out from Kevin’s girl-circle.

It was kind of like playing Red Rover, only against six hot girls who I didn’t mind bumping into over and over until I finally made my way through.

As soon as I cleared a path, I ran face-first directly into a big blue C.

“Watch it, Pussboy.”

For just a second, I was almost touched that Chas Becker was speaking to me again.

I gulped.

I had to do it. I was on a mission.

I put my hand on his shoulder and pulled his Tyrannosaurus Rex head down to my skinny-bitch-ass-size-snack-morsel face.

“Chas, can I talk to you for a second?”

Before you finally kill me.

God! He looked so ridiculous in that outfit.

“What about?”

“I . . . uh . . .”

Yeah, Pussboy forgot what he was doing.

Okay, snap out of it.

“I’m sorry for what I did, Chas. I apologize. A guy should never do the kind of crap I did to you.”

I figured this could officially count as an apology for making him drink my pee, too, if I worded it vaguely enough.

“I guess I let things get out of control, and so I apologize. I also said I’m sorry to Megan, and I promise you both it won’t happen again. So, sorry, Chas. I know you’re probably still going to kill me, but at least I got it off my chest.”

Then I put out my hand for him, and he shook it.

“You have balls, Winger. But I still fucking hate you.”

Fair enough.

“I hate you, too, Chas,” I said, and smiled.

Then, beyond Chas’s shoulder, at the edge of the dance floor, I caught a glimpse of green surgical scrubs and soft black hair draping over the glint of a stethoscope.

It was Annie. She hadn’t seen me yet.

I moved behind her, stalking her. I put my chin right over her shoulder and whispered, “I know you’re probably booked up, but do you think you could squeeze me in for a quick physical?”

She turned around suddenly.

At first, I thought she was going to slap me, but then she looked shocked and surprised at seeing me, and she gave me that awesome smile where her eyes tear up, and I hate to say it, but just looking at her there kind of made my eyes tear up too.

“Oh my God!” she said.

Then she threw her arms around me, and we hugged like we hadn’t seen each other in years. That felt so good, because I was practically naked anyway, and all sweaty, and here I was hugging an out-of-control physician.

What could be better than that? Well, except for the quick kiss we stole. Kids get in trouble for kissing at Pine Mountain, so you have to be discreet. And the best place to be discreet was out there in the middle of the dance floor, so the Wild Boy of Bainbridge Island took a tight squeeze on Annie’s hand, so we wouldn’t get separated, and I pulled her out through the crowd and into the deepest, darkest, wildest kiss we ever had.

“How did you get in?” she said.

“They let us out of O-Hall, and I dirty-talked Mr. Wellins into letting us come in.”

Annie laughed.

She put her hands in my hair, and we danced.

“I love what you’re wearing,” she said.

“I am the Wild Boy of Bainbridge Island,” I said. I lifted up my loincloth. “With Pokémon undies.”

She laughed and pretended to cover her eyes (but not very convincingly, I noticed), and I said, “Okay. I showed you mine, now you have to show me yours.”

“You are such a pervert, Ryan Dean.”

“I think your pug infected me.”

We danced until we were both exhausted.

When I led her off the floor to get something to drink, I finally remembered that there was one more important thing I had to do, and it wasn’t apologizing to Casey Palmer. I would never do that, no matter how many times I made him drink pee.

“I bet Seanie and Isabel haven’t moved from that couch all night,” I said. “Let’s go see.”

Annie’s cheeks were red from dancing.

I watched her as she drank lemonade tea.

“Wait a second,” I said.

I pulled her back so we were face to face. She looked at my eyes, and I knew she was playing that game we have between us. She knew I was doing it, too.

I whispered, “You can be in love with me.”

She hugged me and put her mouth to my ear and said, “I know.”

And I looked at her and said, “Oh. Now, about that physical, doctor . . . .”

She pushed my shoulder back. “Shut up.”

We held hands, and I led her over to the sofa, where I found the Seanie-gap-Isabel arrangement had not changed since I left. Annie and I sat down on the small side of the L, so I could sit facing Seanie with my legs uncrossed.

Seanie nonchalantly flipped me off.

“Annie, can you wait here for a few minutes? There’s one last thing I have to take care of,” I said.

“What?”

“I want to go get JP and make him come to the dance before it’s over.”

“I don’t know if you should. He’s pretty pissed, Ryan Dean,” Seanie said.

“It’s okay,” I said. “One more try.”

I rubbed Annie’s knee and kissed her cheek, quick, so no one would notice. “And don’t let Seanie try to get you to play the want-to-see-what’s-under-the-raincoat game.”

“Oh. He already did that,” she said, and rolled her eyes.

Chapter Eighty-Nine

THE COLD AIR FELT GOOD on my sweating skin, but only for about half a minute.

That’s when I started shivering.

Then I decided I should run to the boys’ dorm.

In the dark, I saw the black and white stripes of what could only have been Joey, walking down the trail ahead of me, like he was going home to O-Hall. And I could just tell by the way he was moving that he was pissed off about something.

I called out, “Hey Joe.”

He stopped and turned. I could see his shoulders relax a bit.

“What’s up?” I said.

“I’m going home.”

I walked over to where he stood.

“I found Annie in there,” I said.

“I saw you dancing. You guys look great together, and it’s about fucking time, Ryan Dean.”

“Is everything okay?”

Joey said, “I’ll tell you about it later.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Yeah. Something happened.

I knew Joey would tell me about it later and that it was probably something ridiculous, too. Casey Palmer was on a tirade, no doubt. The asshole just wasn’t going to let things go.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“I’m going to try to get JP to come out to the dance before they send us home,” I said. “He’s in his room, pouting. I can try, at least.”

“Well, I’ll see you later, then,” Joey said.

“You sure everything’s okay?”

He sighed.

Something was wrong.

“Ryan Dean? I figure that between you, Kevin, and Annie, I have about three real friends here. So, thanks for that.”

“You’re my best friend, Joe,” I said, and he smiled. “Hey. Do you ever listen to the Who?”

“Um, do I look like I’m fifty?”

“My dad loves them. Sometimes he walks around with his shirt off, singing, acting like he’s Roger Daltrey, but he’s so my dad, and he looks like a scrawny lawyer from Boston,” I said. “Anyway, they have this song he always sings, ‘How Many Friends.’ Ever hear it?”

“No.”

“I have an iPod. Want to listen to it?”

“You have an iPod?” Joey said. He looked intrigued, but at the same time he kind of knew I was playing a joke on him.

“Yep.”

“Okay.”

I put my hand inside my loincloth. Man! It felt like a frozen leg of lamb going down there against my skin. I dug around, then pulled my hand up and held my closed fist out for Joey.

“Here,” I said.

He held out his hand and I put (of course) nothing in it. Then I said, “Here, you need the earbuds,” and I proceeded to put nothing into each one of his ears with the tips of my freezing thumbs.

“Is it loud enough?” I said.

“Um. No?”

“Retard. You didn’t even touch play. Don’t you even know how to use a fucking iPod?”

And, yes, I apologize. I really did say that. Joey looked kind of shocked, too, but I knew he needed a little magic.

Joey pressed his index finger down into his empty palm. I windmilled my arm like I was Pete Townshend slashing a guitar. And, yeah, I’m a rugby player. We sing and we’re not uptight about it. So I jumped up in the air and gave my best howling impersonation of my scrawny-Boston-lawyer dad imitating Roger Daltrey.

Joey squinted a cautious look at me and shrugged.

And I sang, “ ‘How many friends have I really got? That love me, that want me, that’ll take me as I am?’ ”

I heard someone, out in the dark, scream, “Shut the fuck up, Ryan Dean!”

“Okay, that’s it. I’m not singing anymore,” I said. “Now give me back my iPod before we get in trouble.”

Joey smiled and shook his head.

I said, “Dude. High five.”

We slapped hands. Truly our all-time gay-straight high five record setter.

“Oh. One more thing.” I said, “Chest bumps.”

Then we jumped up and bumped chests, and I started laughing so hard.

“Joey, that was the gayest thing I ever did. Well, except for the time I wrote a poem to Seanie.”

That made Joey laugh.

Just a little, though.

“Damn,” I said. “I’m freezing my nuts off. I better go get JP before they shut it down.”

“I’ll see you later,” Joey said. We shook hands, and Joey put his hand on my shoulder. “Thanks, Ryan Dean.”

“I mean this in such a completely and totally non-gay way, Joey, but I love you,” I said.

“Shut the fuck up, Ryan Dean.”

I laughed.

Joey went off to O-Hall, and I ran on frozen bare legs for the boys’ dorm, where I used to live.

Chapter Ninety

IT WAS WEIRD BEING BACK in the boys’ dorm after so long.

It all looked so nice and normal, like a resort hotel compared with the linoleum-cement-rough-wood-lack-of-heating of O-Hall. But it was kind of the same way I felt that night when I sat down with the freshmen having dinner—I could make a case that I belonged here, but I knew I really didn’t.

Not much of an overlap anymore, I guess.

Seanie and JP’s room was on the second floor. There was an elevator, too. Weird.

I knocked.

“JP?”

I knocked again.

I heard his voice through the door. “Come in.”

I opened the door.

He knew it was me. I guess he recognized my voice. He didn’t even move his eyes when I came in.

JP was lying down on the couch, watching television. That’s how these dorm rooms were: Everyone had his own—private—bedroom, and two or three of them would connect to a common living room and a bathroom, so it was a lot more private and a lot more like living at home than the prisonlike atmosphere of O-Hall’s barracks.

He was alone, but he had taken the time to put a costume on, which meant he was at least thinking about going out.

Typical JP: His face was blacked, which was a good cover for the massive purple bruise around his eye, and he was dressed in combat fatigues with a camouflaged bucket hat that shaded his eyes.

“Hey.” I sat down on a red chair across from him. “They let O-Hall go to the dance.”

“You look like a gay caveman,” JP said.

“Well, that wasn’t quite the effect I was going for.”

“Dude. You have Pokémon underwear on.”

Damn that crossing-the-legs requirement!

“Cool, huh?”

JP inhaled and raised his eyebrows, a silent “whatever.”

“JP, I’m going to say it one more time, and then I’m going to shut up,” I said.

“Or you could shut up now,” he said.

I swallowed. “No. I’m sorry for being such a dick. I’m sorry I started those fights with you. You should have kicked my ass, and I can’t blame you if you’re still planning on doing it. But I came to take you to the dance.”

“You really are a gay caveman.”

I laughed.

“We’re having a lot of fun there.”

“Even Seanie and Isabel?”

“Well, okay. I’ll be honest. Not them. They’re total losers. But everyone else is.”

He sort of smiled.

“So, put your shoes on.” I stood up and held my hand out to him. He grabbed it, and I pulled him up so he was sitting with his feet on the floor.

“Sorry,” I said again.

“Okay,” he said. He put his feet into his army boots and began lacing them up. “I’m sorry too, Ryan Dean. I really was going for her, you know? I never thought she’d be interested in you.”

Maybe I was still a little sensitive about the whole JP thing, but hearing him say that really did sting a little.

“Why’d you think that?”

JP shrugged. “ ’Cause you’re just a kid.”

“Screw that, JP.”

I know. I’m such a loser, but I was so sick of that crap, I almost felt myself getting ready to fight him again.

“Hey. You won. It doesn’t matter,” JP said. “Does it?”

He tied his bootlaces and stood.

I took a deep breath and tried to make myself believe that it didn’t really matter.

“I guess not. Come on. Let’s go. There’s still an hour until ten. Maybe you can at least get Isabel to dance with you.”

“Dude, she has more facial hair than Seanie.”

“I think she’s kind of hot,” I said. “And anyway, Seanie never dances, so you’ll have to settle for fuzzy Isabel.”

We shook hands again before we left, but it was an uneasy kind of peace between JP and me.

He was an intense guy, and I couldn’t expect him to just forget about everything. And I even asked him straight out, when we stepped outside into the cold on our walk over to the dance, “JP, do you think we’ll be friends again?”

And he said, without even thinking about it, “No.”

At least he was honest.

At least I could hope we’d stop fighting.

Mr. Wellins looked drunk, and he waved JP toward the door with an emotional “John-Paul, where have you been?”

JP just shrugged and said, “Homework.”

But before we went inside, JP stopped me and said, “Ryan Dean, I’m going to tell you something that I don’t really care if you know or not. And it’s probably the nicest thing I’ll ever do for you. You know the other day when you and Annie came back from Seattle? On Sunday?”

“Yeah.”

“You remember how you saw Annie give me a hug?”

I remembered that.

And I thought, What’s he trying to do? Start a fight, right here in front of everyone?

“Yeah.”

“Well, right before that, she’d just told me that she couldn’t come to the dance with me. That’s why I didn’t come tonight. She backed out on me. She felt bad, so she hugged me while you were over there talking to Seanie. She told me that she couldn’t come to the dance with me because she was so fucking in love with Ryan Dean West.”

“She told you that?” I asked. “On Sunday?”

“She started crying about it.”

Then I really felt confused.

That was the same day when she’d told me not to kiss her, when I went crazy on our run.

And then she admitted it to JP before she ever got close to telling me. Maybe she wanted to see if she could fight it. Maybe she wanted to wait for me to break down and say it first, like it wasn’t so goddamned obvious anyway. And then, the next day, I got in that fight with JP and busted his face and it was all over nothing, really, now that I heard what Annie had said.

I felt like dog shit.

“Why didn’t you tell me? When we were running at the lake, you could have said something,” I said.

“You wouldn’t shut up,” JP said. “All that crap about you and Annie running around naked or whatever the hell you were talking about. It was sickening, and then, when you pushed Seanie, I was ready to go. And I would have fucked you up if my foot didn’t slip and Seanie didn’t get his dumb ass in between us like that. I would have fucked you up.”

I didn’t say anything after that.

I felt like such an idiot.

We went into the dance, and I knew John-Paul Tureau and I really weren’t ever going to be friends again.

Chapter Ninety-One

I MAY NOT HAVE SUCCEEDED, but I did what I needed to do.

At least I tried to make things right with the victims of the Wild Boy.

JP came to the dance, and, yeah, it was awkward. He didn’t say anything or dance or anything. He just sat on the sofa between Seanie and Isabel while Annie and I danced until the lights came on and they told us all to go home.

I didn’t see anyone from O-Hall then, but I volunteered to walk Annie and Isabel back to the girls’ dorm, so I let Seanie off a serious hook, because I knew he was dreading how, exactly, to go about saying good night to his “date.”

And he had the guts to call me “permavirgin.”

I was pretty sure the only female lips Sean Russell Flaherty had ever touched besides his mom’s were flickering images on a computer monitor.

Isabel walked about ten feet in front of us, but she’d turn around every few paces to make sure we were still there. Annie had her arm around my shoulders, because I was so cold. But I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the only reason.

I put my mouth next to her ear and whispered, “You told JP you were in love with me before I said it to you.”

“It doesn’t count if you tell someone else.” She smiled.

“Yes it does.”

“Okay, then, in that case, you told Joey you were in love with me wayyyy before I said anything to JP.” Then she laughed.

Wow. She just totally kicked my ass.

“Joey told you that?” I said.

She just smiled.

Of course he did.

“Okay. You got me,” I said. I kissed her. “I love you, Annie.”

“I love you, Ryan Dean.”

“Hey, Isabel?” Isabel stopped and turned around, and I said, “When was the very first time Annie told you that she . . .”

But Annie covered my mouth with her hand before I could ask the whole question, so I stuck my tongue out and licked her fingers all over, and she squealed and laughed and ran up to Isabel, whispering something urgent to her roommate.

Chapter Ninety-Two

WHEN I GOT BACK TO O-Hall, everything seemed weird, like I was walking into the last five minutes of a horror movie.

That’s about the only way to describe it.

It was totally dark and quiet, no lights in any of the windows. I thought that either everyone had come back and they were all asleep, or nobody had come back yet and I was there entirely alone.

I walked up the three steps to the landing and slipped my shoes off. I guess I didn’t need to go barefoot, because it wasn’t like I was technically sneaking in, but it was just so eerily quiet that I didn’t want to make any noise on my way upstairs.

Things got stranger inside the mudroom.

The door onto the lower floor was standing wide open, and there were all kinds of muddy shoeprints going in and out, like the place had been raided by an army of guys wearing athletic shoes. I could tell they weren’t the kinds of shoes that Mr. Farrow would wear, and definitely not Mrs. Singer, so I knew the tracks had to have been made by some of the guys from upstairs.

So I was kind of relieved that I was carrying my shoes, because I could just imagine the morning’s shoe investigation from a very pissed-off pair of resident counselors.

I took a step inside the girls’ floor.

My feet sloshed in a puddle of cold water on the linoleum. I was pretty creeped out by this point, and I kept wondering where the hell Mrs. Singer was.

She was gone.

I could tell the bathroom door was open too, and I could just faintly hear the sound of water splashing, like the guys had been in the girls’ floor showers and not turned them off all the way.

I decided right then that I was not going to take another step further into the hallway, and just then I heard a couple screams like wildcats out in the woods, very distant, but the kind of sound that you just hate to hear in the middle of a quiet and spooky night.

When you’re all alone.

That was enough for me. I turned around and went upstairs, without shutting the door and without so much as glancing behind me even one time.

Upstairs was like a tomb.

I walked the length of the hallway, quietly wishing someone would pop out from a room to go to the bathroom or something, even if it was that asshole Casey Palmer.

But there were no sounds at all.

I kicked an empty whiskey bottle, and it clinked along the floor. It sounded like a hundred xylophones inside a stone tomb.

Someone fucked up.

There were footsteps on the staircase. This was it, I thought, I was about to be murdered.

Casey Palmer appeared at the top of the stairwell. He had abandoned the Wonder Woman outfit and was dressed in sweats. His skin was slick with sweat, and his eyes were drunken and glazed.

“What happened, Casey?” I said. I tried to sound as nice as I could, because, I’ll be honest, I was afraid of the way Casey Palmer was looking at me.

Casey ignored me. He walked past me, kind of floating like a ghost in the dark. He smelled like sweat and whiskey and puke, all at the same time.

He stopped and swiped his hand at me to grab me, but I slipped away from him. Casey stumbled and nearly fell down.

He said, “I’ll fucking kill you if you ever say anything to me again, kid.”

Then Casey slipped inside his room and shut the door.

When I got to my room, I actually began wishing that Chas would be in there.

I opened the door. At first, all I could see were the red numbers on our alarm clock. I bent forward and looked into the lower bunk. Chas was there, asleep. I actually breathed a relieved gasp at seeing him. I leaned over him, just to make sure he was really there.

“What the fuck are you doing, homo?” he said.

Yeah. Good night to you, too, Betch.

“I’m sorry. I was creeped out. It’s like nobody’s here, and it looks like someone trashed the girls’ floor, or something.”

I was shivering, mostly from the cold.

I took off my costume and slipped on some boxer shorts and a sweatshirt. I debated whether or not to go to the bathroom to brush my teeth. I grabbed my toothbrush and stuff, but I was still spooked about the way things felt out there.

“I don’t know what the fuck’s going on,” Chas said. “I’ve been trying to sleep for a while, and I don’t think Farrow or that bitch downstairs is even here, because about an hour ago there was all this running around and slamming shit around until I stuck my head out in the hall and told them to quiet the fuck down.”

I decided to skip the dental hygiene.

Something was definitely not right out there, and I wasn’t going to get caught up in it.

I climbed up in my bunk and lay there, trying to stay awake and see if I would hear that howling again.

But I fell asleep.