Winger (16 page)

“Are you okay?”

“You shouldn’t be doing this, Megan,” I whispered.

“What? Making sure my friend’s okay?”

“Come on, Megan. No girl here at Pine Mountain cares about me. I’m not a prize like Chas Becker. You can stop being nice now.”

“Is that what you think, Ryan Dean?”

She dropped her hand down onto my knee and rubbed my leg.

Stop looking at me, Joey!

“Hey, Meg. Where you been?”

Chas appeared out of nowhere, standing right next to me like the
tree I was about to be lynched from. And Megan just left her hand on my leg, and I know Chas saw it, but she innocently said, “Did you see Ryan Dean’s eye?”

Chas lowered his face so that it was mere inches from my nose. He looked real serious. He looked like he could kill me and not even think twice about it.

“How many stitches, Winger?” he asked.

“Eighteen.”

“Looks like you won’t be playing.” He said it like he wasn’t just talking about the game.

“I can still play.” My voice cracked. Loser. What was I doing? I felt like I was facing off in a gunfight.

Chas didn’t move. He stayed there, staring at me.

“Everyone says you’re in a fight with Sartre.”

“I am.”

“You really do got big balls, kid. You better watch it.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Chas straightened. “C’mon, Meg. Let’s go sit at the big kids’ table.”

Megan patted my leg and stood. “Don’t forget, Ryan Dean. Tomorrow. Calculus in the library. You and Joey. Okay?”

I tried to say “okay,” but nothing would come out. I squeaked like a doggie chew toy in Megan Renshaw’s unyielding pit bull teeth.

And Chas practically pulled Megan away, leading her off to where the seniors were sitting. But I saw him turn his face over his shoulder
and look at me once, and I’ll be honest, it scared me. I considered scrawling a makeshift will on the back of a napkin, but as I took mental inventory of my life’s possessions, I realized no one would want them anyway.

I was as good as dead now.

Images of my funeral again: both Annie
and
Megan looking so hot in black; Joey shaking his head woefully and thinking how he told me so; JP and Chas high-fiving each other in the back pew; Seanie installing a live-feed webcam in my undersize casket; and Mom and Dad disappointed, as always, that I left this world a loser alcoholic virgin with eighteen stitches over my left eye.

“What the fuck are you doing all alone over here in loserland, Ryan Dean? How hard did you hit your head?”

Seanie pulled the chair out across from me and sat down. Annie stood behind him. No one else.

“I didn’t want to talk to anyone.”

I could see by the way Annie tilted her head that she was trying to look at the cut or trying to look at my eyes, but I didn’t really want her to. As much as I wanted to just see her and nothing else on this whole weird planet, I felt so terrible about everything that had happened to me and the shitty things I had done to myself that I just couldn’t bring myself to face her.

Seanie tapped the shoulder of the freshman boy who was sitting beside him. “Hey. Kid. Move so she can sit down.”

The boy picked up his tray and moved farther down the length of the table.

“By the way,” Seanie said as Annie took the vacated seat, “I forgot to tell you, I liked the ‘Trick or treat, assbreath’ comment at practice.”

I sighed.

Sometimes I just wanted to grab Seanie by the neck and shake him.

I was finished eating. I really wanted to leave. Then Annie reached across the table and lifted my chin with her soft hand. I know that Annie had touched me before—how could it be avoided? Friends touch. But it never felt like that. And she held my head there and looked at the cut above my eye, then she just looked right into my eyes and we didn’t blink or anything. I don’t know what I looked like to her, because I don’t think there was any expression on my face at all, and it didn’t matter. All we could see were each other’s eyes.

“Wow,” Seanie said. “This is one heavy moment. Are you two getting ready to make out or something? ’Cause if you are, it’s about time.”

Annie pulled her hand away, and I looked down.

“Are you okay, West?” she asked.

“Yeah. I’m fine.”

“You still planning on coming to my house this weekend?”

Nothing, especially not John-Paul Tureau, could stop me.

“Is it okay if I do?”

I was scared she’d say no.

“Best friends,” she said. “It’s going to be fun.”

“Best friends.”

Then she stood and left us there. It was getting late, and most of the students were making their way back to the dorms. I was so glad she didn’t say anything else, anything about JP.

She didn’t have to.

“Damn,” Seanie said. “Why don’t you just get it over with and fucking kiss her, Ryan Dean?”

“Shut up, Seanie. Annie knows what’s going on.”

“Everyone on the planet knows what’s going on. Except you.”

“Seanie?”

“What?”

“Thanks for not saying nothing about JP and me.”

“There’s nothing to say.”

I WAS AFRAID THAT JOEY
would be waiting outside when I headed back to O-Hall. I didn’t want to hear him lecture me about Megan again. But there wasn’t anyone there, and I walked along the trail by the lake in the dark alone.

I got lectured anyway.

I stopped by the shore so I could just stare out at the blackness of the lake, and that’s where I got that arguing and taunting voice in my head that went something like this:

RYAN DEAN WEST 2
:
Now
what are you going to do about Megan?

RYAN DEAN WEST 1
: What are
you
going to do about Megan—times infinity?

RYAN DEAN WEST 2
: You are such a loser.

RYAN DEAN WEST 1
: And she’s so five out of five Space Needles on the Ryan Dean West Reasons-Why-Male-Architects-Design-Structures-Shaped-Like-That-in-the-First-Place Hall of Fame.

RYAN DEAN WEST 2
: You must spend a lot of time thinking up perverted stuff.

MR. WELLINS
: Proof that sex actually does motivate everything.

RYAN DEAN WEST
2: Sex doesn’t even exist in Ryan Dean West’s universe. Not even in the architecture. Everything is skinny-ass-bitch flat and flabby.

MR. WELLINS
: Good point. Maybe I need to go fine-tune my theory.

RYAN DEAN WEST 1
: Hey! How did an old pervert end up in my play?

RYAN DEAN WEST 2
: Your head is a freaking watering hole in the desert of purity for all things perverted. So . . . back to the issue at hand: You know what you got to do about Megan. So do it.

MRS. KURTZ
: Don’t forget your study group tomorrow night, Ryan Dean!

RYAN DEAN WEST 1
: Ugh.

(
Ryan Dean West throws a rock out into the lake.
)

ANNIE
: What are you doing, Ryan Dean?

Oh, wait . . . that was real.

“What are you doing, Ryan Dean?”

And she called me Ryan Dean.

“Nothing. I was just thinking.”

I turned around and looked at her.

She was so beautiful, standing there in the dark. I kept thinking about what Seanie had said—about why I didn’t just get it over with and kiss her. I mean, what’s the worst that could happen, right? We’ve known each other for more than two years, and I’ve only held her hand a couple times. God! I wanted to kiss her so bad, but I didn’t have the guts.

I am such a loser.

“What are you thinking about?”

I smiled. “God, Annie. Don’t you know me by now?”

She laughed. “Oh, yeah. You are so perverted, Ryan Dean.”

Wow. She called me that twice.

And I could see the real smile in her eyes. I loved that about her.

She touched her fingers to her eyebrow, like I was a mirror or something. “Does that hurt?”

“Not really.”

“You’re mad at me, aren’t you?”

“Kind of.” I sighed. “It’s stupid. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

“Seanie said you and JP were really in a fight.”

I looked out at the lake. I didn’t want to talk about this with Annie.

“I’m going to be in trouble if I don’t check in at O-Hall in, like, two minutes, Annie.”

“Come on,” she said. Then she held my hand and walked me to my dorm.

We stopped in the dark outside the mudroom door.

“Good night, Annie.”

She didn’t let go of my hand.

“Wait,” she said. “Don’t be mad at me, Ryan Dean. I’m so looking forward to this weekend. Please don’t be mad at me.”

And I thought,
Crafty girl almost sounds like I did when I fake-cried for Mr. Farrow.

“Okay, Annie.”

Then she got real close to me. Her unbuttoned jacket even tickled, brushing against the zipper on my pants, and I suddenly forgot everything in the world about JP and stitches, or anything else that existed at an altitude higher than my waist besides Annie Altman. Our lips were
just inches apart, and I could feel her heat and smell that awesome stuff she uses on her hair, and I thought,
Oh my God, she is finally going to kiss me. We are finally going to kiss, and this is going to be the best thing I’ve ever felt and tasted in my entire pathetic life
, and I
knew
we were going to kiss; and just then the door opened and the glacially unhot Mrs. Singer stuck her head out and said, “Young man, you are going to be late if you do not check in with your resident counselor immediately!”

And that was like a Niagara Falls of razor-sharp ice cubes pouring right through the fly on my pants. Oh . . . and some of those ice cubes were shaped like rusty bear traps and triple fishhooks, too.

She had to be a witch.

Annie released my hand and turned away.

“See you, West,” she said.

I sighed. The biggest part of me wanted to go after her and just get it over with, like Seanie told me, but my only chance was gone, and Mrs. Singer stood there watching me, unblinking, holding the door propped open against the cold and dark.

Do not look into her eyes.

As I passed Mrs. Singer, I kept my eyes on the floor, unwilling to battle the soul-sucking-diarrhea-spell-casting witch that she was. Then I felt her arctic fingers on my shoulder, and she said, “Your head would happen to look nice on a serving platter.”

And I squeaked like a frightened baby mouse and hurried for the stairs.

Well, to be perfectly honest, I am pretty sure she said, “What
happened to your head? Is something the matter?” But that could just have been part of the spell-thing-whatever-it-is she’d been working on me ever since she caught me peeing in the girls’ bathroom. And as I made my way up the darkened stairway, she said either “You better be afraid” or “Why are you afraid?” But, again, I can’t be sure which it was, to be totally honest. But I swear,
I swear
, I really do think I heard her say something about “a catastrophic injury to your penis” just as I slammed shut the door to the boys’ floor behind me.

Diarrhea I can handle, but the catastrophic-penis-injury thing strikes the deepest imaginable chord of fear in any boy’s mind.

I was sweating, stitched-up, panting, and terrified. But at least I wasn’t late.

I am. You know.

Such a loser.

I made it to the common room just in time to sign off on our check-in sheet with Mr. Farrow. The TV had just gone dark, and most of the guys from O-Hall were sluggishly making their way to their rooms. After I signed in, I went down the hall to the bathroom.

I stood in front of the mirror for a few minutes, looking at the stitches closing the cut over my eye. As I stared, the cut seemed to get bigger, blacker, worse than it was. I was tired and wanted to go to bed. I ran the water and washed my hands and face.