Stand-Off Read online

  Ryan Dean West could show little Sam the ropes, Headmaster Lavoie promised!

  Ugh.

  I felt like I’d been signed up against my will on one of those creepy online dating sites and I had no power to refuse my suitor.

  And, by the way, did I look that small when I was a twelve-year-old freshman here?

  Sam Abernathy could have fit in my pocket.

  No wonder Annie felt sorry for me back then. They might just as well have left Sam Abernathy in a diaper inside a wicker basket on my doorstep. Or a cigar box.

  I did not want to do this.

  My quiet pouting turned to silent rage after all the Abernathys crowded into our tiny princessdom and began setting up Sam’s closet and desk and making his bed and folding his little outfits. I decided I wasn’t going to say a word to them, not even when Sam Abernathy’s four-year-old brother, Dylan (which, by the way, is an annoyingly perfect name for a little kid who looks like one of the babies—take your pick—in Raphael’s The Madonna of the Goldfinch) climbed up on my bed—my bed!—and sat down beside me and asked me if I wanted to make a fort with my blanket.

  Ignoring a four-year-old is as good as granting full consent.

  “Princess Snugglewarm!” Dylan gurgled as he tugged away the top layer of my fucking bed.

  Everything in the room went deathly silent.

  All ten Abernathy eyes fixed on me with congruent expressions of wonder and acceptance.

  I was one with all things Abernathy.

  “Oh, you boys are going to be such good friends!” Mrs. Abernathy cooed as she unfolded and spread out Sam Abernathy’s Super Mario Bros. sheets.

  I made a mental note to myself that as soon as I got back from Headmaster Lavoie’s office to petition for an impossible-to-get dorm assignment change, I was going to hunt down Seanie Flaherty and ask him if he knew how to make a microwave oven explode.

  So I left without saying anything, certain that when I came back I’d find an elaborate live-action camping diorama set up on the floor between our beds, complete with campfire-singing Abernathys, toasted s’mores, and swarms of lightning bugs and mosquitos.

  Okay. Well, you know how when you’re storming over to some important person’s office in order to voice an outraged yet well-deserved complaint peppered with the adverb-adjective double combo of “completely unacceptable” and then as you get closer and closer to that important person’s office you begin to realize that (1) you’re actually afraid of that important person—in this case, Headmaster Lavoie—and (2) you don’t really know how to pronounce his last name because you’ve only ever seen it written on official letters from his office of importance, and nobody ever says his name out loud, which makes you think he could quite possibly be some unearthly manifestation of the Dark Lord, and (3) your armpits are sweating a lot (hello, being fifteen years old!) and you have really bad B.O., so you start walking slower and slower and then just about the time the administration offices come into view and you’re halfway around the goddamned lake you suddenly realize there could be nothing in the world worse than starting off the year—no, negative year, since the year hadn’t officially begun—by getting into a complaint match with someone who frightens you and whose name you can’t pronounce, so you decide to give up and turn your stinky sweaty self back in the direction you came from?

  Yeah.

  That.

  So I stopped and I thought about all the terrible things that had happened to me last year, and tried to erase the nagging premonition that I was fooling myself if I didn’t think this year was going to be even worse. I took a deep breath.

  I sat down on a bench and faced out across the lake to the spot in the woods where O-Hall, the “bad kids” dorm they put me in last year, sat abandoned and shut down.

  Why did I come back?

  I put my face in my hands.

  I decided a long time ago that I was never going to cry again. Never. So I just sat there, trying to zone out, seeing if I couldn’t just fall asleep, so maybe I would wake up and find out that everything had been a dream and I was fourteen still, or even thirteen again, so things wouldn’t be as bleak as they were now in Ryan Dean West’s fifteen-year-old nightmare.

  “Dude. Winger? Ryan Dean?”

  I snapped my head up and turned around. Sean Russell Flaherty and Jean-Paul Tureau had been standing there on the walk, watching me. They must have just come out of the registration lines in the admin building.

  I got up. I really didn’t want Seanie and JP to think I was still feeling sorry for myself.

  “Holy crap!” Seanie said. “Dude. You’re, like, taller than me.”

  He was right. Growing is something about which you don’t have any say-so when you’re a teenage boy, and my body had stretched out another three inches of vertical over the summer.

  “Maybe he’ll go out for basketball this year,” JP, always glum, always digging at me, added.

  That’s all right, JP, I thought.

  “Actually, I’m considering going out for number fifteen,” I said, and smiled.

  Fifteen in rugby is fullback, which was JP’s position. I wasn’t crazy enough to want to ever be fullback, which is the worst position on the field besides hooker, which isn’t what you think, okay? But if JP wanted to start the year off hurling shitballs at me, he was going to get them right back.

  JP extracted an insincere laugh and stuck out his hand. It’s a rugby thing—we all shook hands. We had to. Rules persist on and off the field when you play rugby at PM. That was all there was to it.

  So maybe I’d misjudged JP’s intent. Maybe we actually could be friends again.

  Seanie grabbed my biceps and rubbed.

  “Damn, Ryan Dean, you’re hot. If JP wasn’t the jealous type, I’d put my tongue in your mouth right now.”

  That was Seanie Flaherty, in all his creepy deadpan weirdness. He never changed.

  “You two still rooming together?” I asked.

  We started walking back along the lake in the direction of the boys’ dorm, Seanie, as always, between me and JP.

  Seanie said, “Yeah. Who are you with this year?”

  “You wouldn’t believe it. I’m in a ground-floor double single. With a freshman named Sam Abernathy.”

  “You’re fucking kidding me,” Seanie said.

  I shook my head. “And the kid’s twelve years old.”

  “No shit?”

  JP chuckled. “Ryan Dean West the Second. That’s a roommate match made in heaven. I hope you’re prepared to deal with all the Calculus homework, the kid’s separation-anxiety nightmares, and him pissing the bed.”

  To be honest, it wasn’t Sam Abernathy’s nightmares I was worried about.

  And where did dumbass JP ever learn a concept like separation anxiety?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I SAID A QUICK GOOD-BYE to Seanie and JP in front of the registration office and let them go back to their two-room suite on the top floor of the boys’ dorm.

  Telling them that I wanted to wait around for Annie to come through was an opportunity for me to get one last nothing-he-could-do-about-it dig at JP, who’d tried to hook up with Annie last year. But he lost. To me. And losing out in a competition for the most amazing girl at Pine Mountain Academy to another boy who’s two years younger was something JP Tureau’s ego still could not accept.

  In fact, I’m sure JP had somehow convinced himself that Annie had a deep-rooted psychiatric illness that made her unable to accurately process reality, or maybe he attributed it to her having some bullshit issues with separation anxiety.

  Whatever it was, JP Tureau was going to have an awfully long year of being forced to put up with seeing me and Annie Altman together.

  I felt like this tremendous weight had been lifted from my chest—although my armpits were still dripping like twin condenser coils on a moonshine still—when Annie Altman, gleaming her perfect eyes and that beautiful smile, came out of the registration office, waving her papers at me like she was maybe afraid I wo
uldn’t notice her.

  But it was Annie, and I couldn’t possibly notice anything else.

  Well, except I noticed how goddamned sweaty I was in every spot on my body that had hair on it and that was also located south of my hairless chin.

  We have this thing—Annie and I—where we’ll just look at each other for a while before either of us says anything. We never planned this routine, but I think we both understood that we didn’t need to nervously rush into saying just anything, like so many other uptight couples do. Because sometimes words can wreck all the other things that actually go on between us in those beautiful, rich, and silent moments.

  It didn’t matter that Annie was probably thinking about what she was going to wear to the Pine Mountain homecoming dance, focusing on some messed-up or crooked patch of hair on my head, or silently extending a conversation we had four months ago because there was some point she still needed to make (and why do girls do this?) that would probably result in a random outburst of a contextually anchorless exclamation like “because you’d never have enough electricity to do that, Ryan Dean,” and I’d be all, like, what the fuck are you even talking about? Except I wouldn’t actually say “fuck”; and I was probably—okay, I’ll admit it, not probably, I was—thinking about how fun it would be to talk Annie Altman into swimming naked with me in the creek below Buzzard’s Roost, the place up the mountain we run to every year on the day before school starts, which meant we could be there and out of our clothes and in the icy water naked together within an hour if we hurried. But, yeah, none of that mattered, because I was here, and so was Annie.

  I inhaled through my nose and tried to catch a hint of Annie’s perfume, but I only smelled fifteen-year-old boy, which made me gag just a little bit.

  “I missed you so much when you left Boston,” I said.

  Annie knitted her fingers through mine and we walked along the lake.

  “Sorry if I smell like an airplane toilet mixed with B.O., Annie. It’s really hot today.” (And I had been on a plane pretty much all day. Also, thinking about swimming naked in the creek with Annie definitely kicked up the moisture output.)

  Annie laughed. She looked around quickly. I knew what that meant. We got a one-second kiss in. Kids at Pine Mountain are not allowed to kiss each other in broad daylight. Well, actually, kids at Pine Mountain are not allowed to kiss at all.

  It’s a pretty uptight school, considering all those no-kissing, no-girls-in-boys’-dorm-rooms, and no-cellphone rules and such.

  “I think you smell like home,” Annie said.

  Sweat. Sweat. Sweat.

  I licked my lips. “In that case, I’m sorry your house smells like gross boy smell.”

  “Maybe we have time to tear off each other’s clothes and have sex before dinner,” Annie said.

  Okay. I’ll be honest. Annie actually said “go for a run” in the part where my brain wanted to hear her say “tear off each other’s clothes and have sex.”

  I wish my brain would stop doing that. One of these days, Annie was going to actually ask if I wanted to “tear off each other’s clothes and have sex” and then I’d dash away and grab my running shoes, because that’s pretty much exactly how much of a loser I have always been.

  But settling for just the go-for-a-run part of Annie’s proposition was exactly what smelly, sweaty, mopey, jet-lagged kid who wanted to go skinny-dipping needed before dinner. Besides, I couldn’t wait to see if everything was still the same—all our running trails, the meeting place we called Stonehenge that we’d made in the woods, and, well, how much water was in the creek, and if it was warm enough for swimming.

  I guess it’s an unreasonable expectation, isn’t it? Everything changes, constantly. I learned that lesson the hard way.

  “I met my roommate,” I said.

  Annie asked, “Is he a rugby guy?”

  That was funny. I had to laugh.

  Sam Abernathy wasn’t big enough to be the ball.

  “Actually, I came down here intending to petition the headmaster—how do you say his name?—to switch my dorm assignment, but then I chickened out.”

  “Yeah. How do you say his name?” Annie asked.

  “Sam Abernathy,” I answered.

  “Your roommate?”

  I nodded.

  “I never heard of him. Is he a new kid?”

  “Brand new,” I said. “Newer than new. He’s a freshman.”

  “Why would they put you with a freshman?”

  “It’s worse than that. He’s not just a freshman. He’s a freshman who’s twelve years old.”

  Annie got this wide-eyed look of understanding. She nodded and said, “Oh . . .”

  “Yeah. Oh. Right? It’s not fair. They can’t expect me to help the kid out. He can survive on his own, just like I did.”

  “You survived on your own?” Annie said.

  I never would have made it through ninth grade if it hadn’t been for Annie’s friendship. Not tenth or eleventh, either, for that matter.

  We stopped at the T in the path, where it branched off into “boy” direction and “girl” direction to safely segregate the dorms with wide banks of shrubs we called the DGZ, the De-Genderized Zone.

  “Well, it’s my senior year. I don’t want a little-kid roommate. I want to have fun. It’s not fair.”

  “Wow. Just listen to you, Ryan Dean.”

  I felt my naked ears turn red.

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “It will be good for both of you, Ryan Dean,” Annie said. “You remember what it was like when you first started here, don’t you? You were so scared.”

  “I’ve blanked it from my memory,” I said.

  “Well, that poor boy. I can’t wait to meet him. I bet he’s adorable.”

  Ugh.

  Annie Altman had a powerful mommy drive, I thought.

  “I’ll draw you a Sam Abernathy comic,” I offered.

  “Good. It’s about time you showed me something again.”

  “That’s a very perverted thing for you to say, Annie. Maybe you should wait till we get up to the creek.”

  Annie laughed and pushed me away from her and said, “Meet me back here in ten minutes, okay, West?”

  • • •

  So.

  I almost felt the urge to knock on my own door when I got back to our dorm room, but Sam Abernathy was definitely not going to make knocking on doors become a thing that would define our relationship from day one forward.

  I took a deep breath and braced myself for the ungodly things I might see on the other side of my door: a congregation of Abernathys singing hymns over an autoharp, or maybe they’d finally gone home to wherever their gene pool had settled and I was about to walk in on a twelve-year-old boy doing something really awkward and embarrassing like twelve-year-old boys tend to do if you leave them alone for long enough, which is probably about forty-five seconds, but I wouldn’t know anything about that, considering I’d already erased all twelve-year-old memories from my head.

  The Abernathy population inside my dorm room had been reduced to one.

  At least someone had bothered to make my bed after the four-year-old exposed my unicorns.

  Sam Abernathy, all properly angelic in his Pine Mountain Academy tie and blazer, sat on the edge of his bed and stared across the floor to what I could only estimate was the little black gap beneath my bed. Maybe he was afraid of monsters hiding under there, or the other things you get scared of when you should still be in elementary school.

  “Hi,” Sam Abernathy said.

  “Hello.”

  I unknotted my tie and pulled off my sweaty shirt and tossed them onto my bed.

  Unlike O-Hall, where boys had to keep things perfectly neat at all times, here in the regular dorms guys were allowed to be as sloppy as their roommates could stand. And since it was clear to me from the moment I set eyes on Sam Abernathy that he was not going to have a say in the matter, I’d already pretty much decided to mess this place up beyond recognition as quickly as
possible.

  While I was gone, Sam Abernathy had also taken it upon himself to raise the blinds and open our window, which made living on the ground floor like some kind of ongoing performance art for all the kids walking around the campus. I glared at the Abernathy and pulled down the blinds.

  I kicked my shoes into the monster gap beneath my bed and slipped off my Pine Mountain boy’s uniform trousers.

  “Are you just going to take off your clothes right here? Right in front of me, Ryan?” Sam asked. The kid’s cheeks looked like strawberry ice cream.

  I balled up my pants and tossed them on the floor at the foot of my pink bed. So far, the mess was looking pretty . . . um . . . messy, or something. I let out a dramatic sigh and faced the kid, putting my hands on my hips and sticking out my chest, so I’d look authoritarian, which is kind of hard to pull off when you’re just standing there in nothing but socks and briefs.

  “Look,” I said. “Two things: First, my name is not Ryan. My name is Ryan Dean. Not Ryan. I hate it when people call me Ryan, so don’t do it.”

  “Oh. Sorry. Ryan Dean.”

  Sam Abernathy squirmed a little. His bed squeaked. Maybe Sam farted. It sounded like a chew toy for a puppy, which is exactly how I would imagine a little kid like Sam Abernathy’s farts would sound.

  “And second,” I said, “this is a dorm room. It did not come equipped with separate changing facilities. If you haven’t noticed yet, the doorknob inside our bathroom pokes you in the back when you stand up to pee. Get used to it. I’m gross. You’re gross. And there’s no room here. Living in a dorm room the size of my closet back home with another guy is goddamned disgustingly gross.”

  Okay, I’ll admit I did not say “goddamned” to Sam Abernathy. A word like that from an angry naked guy could break a kid as innocent as Sam Abernathy.

  Sam Abernathy didn’t say anything. He just sat on his bed in front of a pile of textbooks and school papers, staring at me.

  God! He had actually already started reading the textbooks for his classes.

  I hopped from foot to foot and dropped my socks and then my underwear onto the floor. I got into my running shorts and tank top, then slipped my bare feet into my trail-runner shoes and headed for the door. As I shut it behind me, Sam Abernathy said something, but I wasn’t paying attention to him.