Winger Page 2

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

  Even if Annie knew everything in the world about me.

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

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

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

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

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

  Or something.

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

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

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

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

  “You got any money?” he asked.

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

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

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

  “Count me in.”

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

  CHAPTER THREE

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

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

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

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

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

  Forever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  I almost said, The toilets smell real nice!

  But I didn’t.

  “I’m sharing bunk beds with Betch.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Annie came running up on the path behind me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Megan Renshaw was Chas’s girlfriend.

  Smoking hot, too.

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

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

  We began walking toward O-Hall.

  “Yeah. I know.”

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

  Annie did that to me.

  Especially when she used the scolding tone.

  I looked at my feet as we walked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Oh. Sorry. Nice picture, Annie.”

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

  “Aww,” she said. “What a cute boy.”

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

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

  I am such a loser.

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

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

  I stood up abruptly and handed Annie her stuff.

  “Are you mad or something, West?”

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

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

  “Yeah.”

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

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

  “I can’t,” I said.

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

  Little boy.

  What a bunch of crap.

  CHAPTER FOUR

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

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

  I was twelve.

  Boys like trains.

  Back to unpacking.

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

  I sighed.

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

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

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

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

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

  I stopped there to shake the twigs from my shoes.

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

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

  Yeah, right.

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

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

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

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

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

  “See ya, West.”

  “Hey, wait!”

  She stopped about twenty feet down the trail.