Winger Read online

  I made certain this time that our room was entirely clean and the beds were made before I grabbed my schedule and backpack. It was seven forty-five. I wondered what Chas had done with those beers, and then, just thinking about it made me realize another stop at the bathroom was required.

  And as I went downstairs and pushed through the double doors that opened on O-Hall’s large mudroom, I saw the so-not-hot-you-should-never-look-at-her-when-you-have-a-hangover Mrs. Singer, just standing on the other side of the window in the door that opened onto the hallway of the girl-less girls’ floor, with her arms folded across her withered breasts, breathing on the glass, watching me as I left for school.

  Nothing in the world could convince me at that moment that she didn’t know I was the sick and guilty sonofabitch who woke her up five hours earlier.

  How could she not know?

  I practically ran out of O-Hall, which was a mistake, because the speed at which I was moving made me feel sick again.

  I kept my head down as I walked through the crowds of uniformed kids clustered around the main campus, smelling all the nauseating smells of brand new clothes, brand new backpacks, brand new shoes, and hair gel. It was like I was a bug trapped inside a Macy’s bag. I felt like every one of the eight hundred students at PM knew about what I’d done the night before, and what a loser I was, so I just concentrated on the path that would lead me to the locker room at the sports complex.

  I ran through my schedule in my mind as I staggered to first period:

  1. Conditioning 11M. Seanie and JP would be in that class with me.

  2. Advanced Calculus. Scary-hot Megan Renshaw and Joey Cosentino, who knew what an “asswing” I was, were both in that class.

  3. AP Macroeconomics. Megan and Joey, hour two of two.

  4. American Lit. Ultrahot Annie. Oh, and JP, too.

  5. Lunch. I could find a shady spot away from my friends to die.

  6. Team Athletics. The first day of rugby, a possible reason for rising from the grave of lunch.

  “Hey! West! Wait up!”

  It was too late to just put my head down and pretend I didn’t notice her. Annie came running up behind me, fantastically perfect in her school skirt. I knew I looked so guilty, too, like I had done something wrong to her. I felt sick. And I almost wanted to cry when I saw her, but I didn’t have any idea exactly why.

  “Where were you? I was looking for you this morning,” she said. Then I noticed her expression change when she got close enough to see my eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Annie. I am really sick.”

  “Oh my God, Ryan Dean, you look terrible!”

  And it was so wonderful to hear her actually say my first name like that.

  I sighed. “Gee, thanks.”

  I looked at my watch. There were no bells at PM. You just had to be where you had to be, when you had to be there. It was 7:55.

  “Maybe you should go see the doctor,” she said. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I’ll be okay,” I said. “I didn’t want to miss first day. I’m going to be late for PE. I’ll see you in Lit, okay?”

  I turned away, and she brushed my hair with her hand and said, “I hope you feel better.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ON THE FIRST DAY OF conditioning, we had to go out on a three-mile run to the north shore of the lake and back. I knew Seanie and JP could tell something was wrong with me. We all stayed in the back of the pack, jogging slow so we could talk.

  “What happened last night?” JP asked it first.

  “The game got started at midnight,” I said.

  “That’s when it started?” Seanie said.

  “A little bit after midnight,” I said. “Kevin Cantrell, Joey Cosentino, me, and Chas. And they brought beer with them.”

  Just saying it made me feel sick again.

  “God, Ryan Dean, you could get so thrown out of school for that,” JP said.

  “Did you drink?” Seanie asked.

  “They kind of made me.” We ran a few steps in silence. I thought I could tell what they were thinking, and I said, “I got drunk. And I lost out first, too.”

  “Oh, God,” JP said.

  And Seanie, always the cheerful one, added, “So . . . what’s it feel like to be a fucking alcoholic?” Then he pushed me, and I almost fell into the lake. I knew he was just joking around, but Seanie was always so creepy about how he said things.

  “Man, Seanie, I am so fucking sick.”

  Well, I didn’t actually say “fucking,” because I really never do cuss, but I was fucking sick. I sure thought the word, even if I didn’t say it. And then I wondered, does cussing count in the general scheme of things if you only cuss in your head and not out loud? And I added, “I am never going to do that again.”

  “That’s what all fucking alcoholics say,” Seanie deadpanned. “Then they go home, get shitfaced, and shoot their wife in the fucking forehead while she’s cooking a meatloaf and green beans.”

  I had to laugh. I also had to get back to the toilets in the locker room.

  “What did they do to you when you lost?” JP asked.

  I tried to remember, but it seemed so grainy and unclear, like those films of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon.

  “Wait,” Seanie said. “If Joey was there, maybe it’s something you should talk about, like, with your dad.”

  “You’re a freak, Seanie,” I said. “They made me go downstairs and pee in the girls’ floor bathroom. And sing. And there’s no girls there, except for that—eew—Mrs. Singer.”

  “She is so freakin’ hot,” Seanie said. “Did she look at your wiener?”

  I had to stop. I doubled over laughing. And Seanie still didn’t even crack a smile.

  “I locked her out. She was pissed off. The guys pulled me out the window.”

  “So then,” Seanie said, emotionless, “did Joey look at your wiener?”

  “That’s messed up,” I said. “I like Joey. And he’s a hell of a fly half.”

  “Joey’s cool,” JP added.

  And Seanie yelled up to the sky, “Universal takeback! I am sorry, Joey! I will never, ever make fun of your gayness again!”

  Of course Joey, who was a senior, wouldn’t have been anywhere near the class, anyway.

  We had reached the turnaround spot and were heading back to the gym.

  JP asked, “What song did you sing?”

  “Proper Ranger.”

  “Oh. Nice.”

  Then Seanie and JP started singing it, and I had to join in, and some of the guys ahead of us heard it too, and the ones on the rugby team were singing up there right with us. But I didn’t tell Seanie and JP about the diarrhea spell, because I didn’t believe it was anything more than a sick coincidence—karma, kind of. It served me right for being stupid enough to get drunk in the first place.

  And I didn’t tell them about seeing Mrs. Singer staring at me from behind the door when I left for school, either.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  BY THE TIME I MADE it to calculus, I felt like the hangover/diarrhea spell was losing strength, but now I realized that I desperately needed to go back to sleep too. The only real sleep I had gotten the night before was when I dozed off before the game even started.

  I have never slept during a class, though, and I was honestly afraid that if I did, two horrible things would happen. First, I would have a dream about that witch downstairs (I had now convinced myself, after two more stops at the toilet—I must be caving in! I must have lost 30 percent of my skinny-bitch-ass body weight—that Mrs. Singer was an honest-to-God witch); and, second, I would get an extension on my sentence in O-Hall. After the night before, I realized that I needed to get out of there before Chas succeeded, as my friends warned me, at turning me into an asshole.

  When I thought about it, as inevitably I did, stumbling down the corridor toward the mind-numbing experience of Calculus, I figured out that most of the guys in O-Hall except for me (the cell-phone hacker), and three compulsive class ditchers,
were in Opportunity Hall for fighting. Eight of twelve of us were fighters: five football players, and Kevin, Chas, and Joey.

  Of all the guys you’d think would never get into a fight, you’d have to pick Joey. I never asked him about it, but I figured it had to have something to do with him sticking up for himself when another guy was trying to start some shit. Probably.

  And, because Advanced Calculus was pretty much the end of the math highway (unless you took Statistics, which I planned to take in twelfth grade), the class had only eight students in it. I was the last one through the door.

  There were so many empty desks. I was overwhelmed by the pressure of choosing where to sit. And every single person in the goddamned room, even Mrs. Kurtz, the teacher, who was actually kind of hot in a bespectacled-Lois-Lane kind of way, seemed to be watching the Ryan Dean West Show, aware of the internal dialogue taking place in my headachey-hangovery-diarrhea-dehydrated head:

  RYAN DEAN WEST 1: Sit in the very back of the room. Close to the door.

  (Ryan Dean West glances at the solitary desk beside the door.)

  RYAN DEAN WEST 2: Dude, that is entirely . . . three . . . four . . . five empty desks away from the closest other person. They will think we’re a pathetic fourteen-year-old loser with no social skills.

  RYAN DEAN WEST 1: Uh. So? We are.

  (Ryan Dean West drops his Calculus book. It weighs almost as much as he does. Suppressed laughter among the students in the room. He turns red.)

  RYAN DEAN WEST 2: Are you turning red? You are such a fucking loser.

  (Ryan Dean West picks up the book.)

  MRS. KURTZ: Why don’t you come up front and sit close to everyone else?

  RYAN DEAN WEST 1: How the fuck did she get in the play?

  RYAN DEAN WEST 2: I don’t know, but she’s kind of hot.

  (Ryan Dean West looks at the seats in the front of the room.)

  RYAN DEAN WEST 2 (cont.): If you sit next to Joey, the other kids might think you’re gay.

  RYAN DEAN WEST 1: They might just think I’m confident, and comfortable with my own sexuality.

  RYAN DEAN WEST 2: Dude, “Ryan Dean West,” “Confident,” and “Sexuality” are entirely distinct concepts which cannot exist simultaneously in the same universe. It could cause a black hole or something.

  RYAN DEAN WEST 1: Fuck you. I’m sitting next to Joey.

  RYAN DEAN WEST 2: Is it because you feel guilty ’cause Seanie the Stalker made fun of him being gay?

  RYAN DEAN WEST 1: I don’t feel guilty. And I’m going to sit next to him. And I don’t care what you or anyone else thinks, ’cause you know I’m not gay.

  RYAN DEAN WEST 2: Score! That’s right behind Megan Renshaw (five out of five chicken potpies on the Ryan Dean West Heat Index). Maybe her hair will accidentally brush against your hand.

  RYAN DEAN WEST 1: Chicken potpies?

  RYAN DEAN WEST 2: Whatever.

  (Ryan Dean West takes seat next to Joey.)

  “Hey, Ryan Dean.”

  “Hey, Joey.” I cleared my throat. “Hi, Megan.”

  “Hi, Ryan Dean!” She smiled and turned around in her desk. Her soft blond hair swept across my desktop and over my hand. It felt so cool.

  Score.

  Then she even put her hand on top of mine and said, “Look at you! You must have grown a foot. You look totally hot! How was your summer?”

  I almost lost consciousness; I could feel all the blood in my dehydrated skinny-bitch-ass body surging downward to some useless region below my belt.

  “Amazing.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “I heard about you last night.” Megan patted my hand. “Sounds like you had a little fun.”

  I looked at Joey.

  “I didn’t tell her,” he said. “Are you okay?”

  “God. I am so sick. Don’t ever let me do that again.”

  “I tried to stop you. You know. Chas wouldn’t let me.”

  “I know.”

  We all sat in the same arrangement in Macroeconomics, too: Megan in front of me, Joey on my right. I wondered why teenagers do that sort of thing, but I’ve seen it happening in classes ever since I can remember. I guess it’s like an unconscious way of making the universe consistent and uniform, even if your anchors to reality happen to be (1) extremely hot and unattainable, and (2) gay.

  After Econ, we had a twenty-minute break. I just looked around for a bench in the shade and stretched out on it. I put my backpack over my face so I wouldn’t have to see anyone and, maybe, no one would see me either. I could have stayed that way forever, but I heard Seanie and JP standing over me, laughing about something.

  “Hey, hangoverboy, we’ve been looking all over for you,” JP said. “Come on. Get up. It’s time for Lit class. We’re almost through to lunch.”

  Oh, yeah—another thing about the charms of PM. Since nobody can have cell phones and stuff, the kids here actually talk to each other. And they write notes, too. I know these are both ridiculously primitive human behaviors, but what else can you do when your school forces you to live like the fucking Donner Party?

  The reason I mention this is that as I lifted the backpack away from my sweaty face, Seanie slipped me a folded square of paper with flowers and hearts drawn on it, and said, “Here. Read this. I wrote you a haiku about how gay you are for sitting next to Joey for two classes in a row.”

  “I also sat right behind Megan Renshaw.”

  “That’s called compensation.”

  I slipped my hand inside my vest and put Seanie’s note in my front pocket.

  “Nice,” I said. “In Lit class I’m going to write you a sonnet about how nothing could possibly be gayer than writing your friend a haiku.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  IT JUST PROVED THAT EVERYONE was right about Seanie being a stalker.

  Why would he be so obsessed as to find out exactly where I sat in my classes? He probably kept little stalker charts and notebooks on everyone he knew.

  I had been feeling so sick that day that I wasn’t even thinking about Annie until I saw her in our American Literature class.

  Just seeing her made me feel momentarily healed.

  I walked down the aisle beside her desk and sat in the empty seat next to hers. She just glanced at me and then refocused on a paperback she was reading.

  “Hi. Can I sit next to you?”

  “I don’t care.”

  Whoa. The very last time I had seen her, she actually touched me; she rubbed her hand through my hair, she called me Ryan Dean, and she said she hoped I’d feel better.

  And now?

  All of a sudden she was so obviously pissed off at me. JP sat down on the other side of her. I saw him look at me. He had watched our little exchange. I could tell he saw something was up too. But, before I could ask her about it, Mr. Wellins began blathering away about American Literature and Nathaniel Hawthorne (an author I honestly do like, but how was I supposed to pay attention to him when I felt like crap and Annie Altman had just about slapped me across my face with her “I don’t care”?).

  Note to self: Now, that last paragraph ended with a cluster of punctuation marks I have never seen together—in that order—in my life.

  I took Seanie’s note out and unfolded it. He actually did write me a haiku (and there was no way I was going to waste my time responding with a sonnet). The top of the page had been decorated with a rainbow. Beneath it were two crudely drawn stick figures holding hands. Arrows pointed to each of them from identifying names: “Winger” on one side and “Joey” on the other.

  Winger and Joey

  Beside each other in class

  “Let’s be study buddies.”

  And I wrote underneath it:

  YOUAREAFUCKINGMORONWHOCAN’TEVENCOUNTSYLLABLESSEANIE!!!

  Is something wrong, Annie?

  I wrote it on the edge of Seanie’s note. I put a smiley face next to the question mark.

  She leaned over and scrawled:r />
  I heard you got drunk last night.

  You’re an ASSHOLE!

  I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.

  You’re an asshole just like Chas.

  Don’t even talk to me.

  See ya.

  And that was that. She ignored me for the rest of that endless lecture on Hawthorne, which I couldn’t listen to. My ears were ringing.

  I sat there, wishing I could just die.

  And, underneath the note I had left for Seanie, I wrote one more line:

  ANDFUCKYOUFORTELLINGANNIEIGOTDRUNK LASTNIGHTTOO!!! GOODFRIEND.

  When Mr. Wellins dismissed us for lunch, Annie sprang out of her chair and rushed out the door.

  “Annie, wait.”

  But I knew I wouldn’t catch her.

  “What’s going on?” JP asked.

  “Nothing. She’s pissed off at me.”

  “You think?” JP tried to smile. “Let’s go get lunch.”

  “I’m not feeling good,” I said. “I’ll see you at rugby.”

  JP just shrugged and packed up his stuff.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  NOW I REALLY FELT TERRIBLE. I wanted to give up, and I wanted to kick Chas Becker in the teeth too.

  Just about everyone was crowding into the mess hall, all buzzing with first-day-back stories. Those who didn’t hang out inside sat in segregated groups on the grass between the mess hall and the stadium.

  I followed the path along the lake, alone, and found a bench near O-Hall. I put my pack down as a pillow and kicked off my hot, brand new shoes that turned my socks black in spots. I lay down, staring up into the branches on the pines that towered over me.

  This was the worst day of my life.

  Scarcely twenty-four hours had passed since my parents had abandoned me here, and already my life was spiraling out of control. I got drunk with Chas Becker, the ultra-unhot Mrs. Singer downstairs did something weird to me, my best friend hated me, which made me realize that I would never have any chance with her or any other girl for that matter because I was a fourteen-year-old-skinny-ass-loser-bitch, and I felt like steaming hot dog crap.