Winger Read online

  This is for my son, Trevin Smith,

  who played rugby for me.

  Until I broke his collarbone.

  Now he writes.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  TO PLAY RUGBY AND TO be a rugby player are inextricably enmeshed. There is something about the sport that attaches to character. Some of the greatest people I will ever know are ruggers. This book would never have worked its way out of me and onto the page without them. Davis Russ, a fly half, and Kyle Alvarez, a lock, had the bravest and most honorable makeup of anyone I’ve ever known, on and off the pitch. They were the models for all the good, selfless things the kids in Winger do. Landon Drake Alexsander Veis, a center, and Beau Mitchell Donohoe, a scrum half, made me laugh so many times, and I apologize if any of the funny things in Winger are an embarrassment to them. My friend and fellow author Joe Lunievicz, a fullback, was the first “real” person who got to read this manuscript. He is, after all, a rugger, and I had to be certain that I did the sport justice. And to Amy—the author A. S. King—thanks for keeping me from going as crazy as I likely would have gone.

  And what a great team Winger has. Many thanks to my editor, David Gale, and Navah Wolfe, for their faith and persistence in making this story come to life; and to Sam Bosma for his amazing and spot-on artwork.

  I have endless appreciation and love for my wife and kids who put up with me. Writing is every bit as hard on them as it is on me, and it’s just as tough as rugby.

  crede quod habes, et habes

  THE TOILET WORLD

  I SAID A SILENT PRAYER.

  Actually, silent is probably the only type of prayer a guy should attempt when his head’s in a toilet.

  And, in my prayer, I made sure to include specific thanks for the fact that the school year hadn’t started yet, so the porcelain was impeccably white—as soothing to the eye as freshly fallen snow—and the water smelled like lemons and a heated swimming pool in summertime, all rolled into one.

  Except it was a fucking toilet.

  And my head was in it.

  My feet, elevated in Nick Matthews’s apelike paws while Casey Palmer tried to drive my face down past the surface of the pleasant-smelling water, were somewhere between my skinny ass and Saturn, pointing toward the plane my parents were currently heading back to Boston in, and whatever else is up there.

  I hate football players.

  And I gave thanks, too, or I thought about it while grunting and grimacing, for the weights I’d lifted over the summer, because even though they were about to snap like pencils, my locked elbows kept my actual face about three inches away from actual toilet fucking water.

  But then I felt bad, because I was convinced that cussing during a prayer—even a silent one—meant that I would make my rookie debut in hell as soon as Casey and Nick succeeded at drowning me in a goddamned school-issue community toilet.

  And I realized that all those movies and stories about how clearly a guy’s thoughts and perceptions materialize in the expanding moments just before death were actually true, because I couldn’t help but notice the nearly transparent and unperforated one-ply toilet paper that curled downward from the shiny chrome toilet-paper-cover-thing-that-looks-like-an-eighteen-wheeler’s-mudflap-but-I-don’t-know-what-the-hell-those-devices-are-called, and I thought to myself, God! They make us use THAT kind of toilet paper here?

  And all this happened in the span of maybe three seconds, now that I think about it.

  Oh, yeah. And I had spent the previous five weeks or so chanting a near-constant antiwimp, inner tantric mantra as an attempt to convince my brain that I was going to reinvent myself this year, that I wasn’t going to be the little kid everyone ignored or, worse, paid attention to for the purpose of constructing cruel survival experiments involving toilets and the tensile strength of my skinny-bitch arms.

  My mom and dad—Dad especially—were always getting on me about paying better attention to stuff. It kind of choked me up to think how proud he’d be of his boy at that moment for all the minute details I was taking in about my new, upside-down toilet world.

  But I guess I should have paid more attention earlier to the fact that room two, which was my dorm room, wasn’t the second fucking door down from the stairwell.

  So when I walked in on Casey and Nick’s room—room six, whose location made absolutely no mathematical sense to me at all—carrying my suitcase and duffel bag, and they were somewhere near what I could only guess were the completion stages of rolling a joint (some kids, especially kids like Casey and Nick, do that here because the woods are like one big, giant pot party to them), they not only warned me, in a very creepy Greek-chorus-in-a-tragedy-that-you-know-is-not-going-to-end-well-for-our-hero kind of way, to not ever step foot in their fucking room again, they came up with this spontaneous welcoming ritual that involved a toilet, the elevation of my feet (one of which had detached itself from a shoe, the same way a lizard loses its tail to distract potential predators) . . . and me.

  That was a really long sentence, wasn’t it?

  I should probably stick to drawing pictures, which I do sometimes.

  Okay. So there I was, in Upside-Down Toilet Land, about to collapse, wondering how bad toilet water could possibly taste, and I gritted my teeth and recited the convince-yourself mantra I’d been using: “Crede quod habes, et habes,” which means something like, if you believe in what you have, you’ll have it.

  At that moment, I believed I’d have the ability to hold my breath for a really long time.

  Grunt.

  Big inhale.

  And maybe some cosmic forces happened to perfectly converge in the Universe of the Upside-Down Toilet. Maybe O-Hall had some kind of spell on it; or maybe things really were going to be different for me this year, because just at the precise limit of my endurance, a voice called out from the hallway.

  “Mr. Palmer! Mr. Matthews!”

  And they let me go.

  Feet and head reoriented themselves.

  The universe, which smelled pretty nice and lemony, was right again.

  Nick Matthews started giggling like an idiot. Come to think of it, he did just about everything that way.

  And Casey said, “Fuck. It’s Farrow.”

  The boys ran out of the bathroom and left me there, alone, kind of like the last clueless guy at a party who just doesn’t know when to go home.

  But I wasn’t going home.

  I had stuff to do.

  PART ONE:

  the overlap of everyone

  prologue

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

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

  CHAPTER ONE

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

  Didn’t it?

  My name is Ryan Dean West.

  Ryan Dean is my first name.

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

  I also never cuss, except in writing, and occasionally during silent prayer, so excuse me up front, because I can already tell I’m going to use the entire dictionary of cusswords when I tell the story of what happened to me and my friends during my eleventh-grade year at Pine Mountain.
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br />   PM is a rich kids’ school. But it’s not only a prestigious rich kids’ school; it’s also for rich kids who get in too much trouble because they’re alone and ignored while their parents are off being congressmen or investment bankers or professional athletes. And I know I wasn’t actually out of control, but somehow Pine Mountain decided to move me into Opportunity Hall, the dorm where they stuck the really bad kids, after they caught me hacking a cell phone account so I could make undetected, untraceable free calls.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  CHAPTER TWO

  NO ONE HAD TO KNOCK in O-Hall.

  The knobless doors couldn’t be locked, anyway.

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

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

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

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

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

  I was still missing one shoe.

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

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

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

  A shadow moved behind him.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Farrow.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Okay.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  I fucking hated Chas Becker.

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

  So it was me and Chas.

  Pure joy.

  Bonding time.

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

  Well, to be honest, it’s 142.

  Yeah . . . I am a skinny-ass loser.

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

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