Stand-Off

  It was almost too much to take in, but at the same time I couldn’t look away from all the rule breaking going on in front of me. It felt like the time I’d visited Seanie Flaherty’s house in Beaverton and he showed me my first porn film, which I also felt extremely guilty about not looking away from.

  I never knew anyone who so flagrantly violated our no-tech contract at Pine Mountain, but, still, with his entire family on the other side of the world, I couldn’t really blame Spotted John for smuggling in outlawed communication devices.

  Spotted John popped off a beer cap and took a long drink.

  “What brings Snack-Pack Senior up to the high-rent district?” Spotted John asked in his clipped and creepy Arnold Schwarzenegger drone.

  “I have a broken rib. I don’t want Coach to know. I thought you might have some painkillers or something.”

  Spotted John nodded. “Broken ribs are fuckers.”

  Cotton Balls said good night to the inflatable girl (her name, apparently, was Mabel) and lumbered into one of the actual bedrooms.

  “See you tomorrow, Cotton,” I said.

  Cotton Balls stopped at his bedroom door and said, “Don’t touch Mabel. If I come out and find her popped and slimy in the morning, you’re dead, Snack-Pack Senior.”

  “I never thought anything could be grosser than playing the front row. Until now,” I said.

  “Yeah. Whatever. Good night.”

  Cotton shut the door. I noticed the light click off in the bottom gap.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off the iPad and the cell phones that were just sitting there. It was almost too much for me to resist touching them.

  Spotted John looked at me. “Do you want a beer?”

  I shrugged. It hurt. But there’s an unwritten code when dealing with Mafia dons and forwards, especially if you’re the stand-off and the team captain.

  “Uh, sure. Thanks.”

  Spotted John handed me a bottle of beer and an opener that looked like a shark.

  I grunted when I tried to pry the cap off the beer. Everything I did hurt like hell.

  “What rib?” Spotted John asked.

  I pulled my shirt back and showed Spotted John the chrysanthemum-shaped purple blotch JP Tureau had stamped on my bottom right rib cage at practice.

  Spotted John nodded. I flinched when he pressed his fingertips against my side. “Yeah. I don’t think they’re broken. Just a fucker of a bruise. Sit down.”

  I sat on the couch beside Spotted John Nygaard. It was awkward, because the couch was actually a love seat, which meant our personal space melted us into conjoined twins, and Spotted John was in his underwear, but I kind of wanted to spy over his shoulder to see what he was doing online.

  “How’s the beer?” Spotted John asked.

  “Huh? Oh.”

  I hadn’t tasted it yet. I hated beer. So when I took my first swig, it confirmed what I had already anticipated: The beer tasted exactly like fizzy armpit sweat. Well, to be honest, I haven’t actually tasted armpit sweat that I know of, but if I did, I’m sure it would taste like beer. Or something.

  “Uh . . . it’s great.” I coughed. It felt like I had stabbed myself in the spleen with a broken pencil.

  “It’s from Denmark,” Spotted John said.

  The beer came in a green bottle, and it had an elephant on it. It was terrible, but I drank it, and I wondered how long I’d have to woo Spotted John Nygaard in his museum of illegal shit until he caved in and gave me a knockout pill or two.

  I have to admit that I felt guilty about being there in the first place, about drinking beer and begging for narcotics from a Danish guy in his underwear. Annie and my parents would be so disappointed in me, but their potential letdown and my guilt didn’t occupy one one-hundredth of the attention I was paying to the pain in my rib cage.

  I took another drink. It made me hiccup—a real hiccup—and one of my ribs corkscrewed into my trachea.

  “What are you looking at?” I pointed at Spotted John’s iPad.

  “Shopping,” Spotted John said.

  I was relieved it wasn’t what I thought Spotted John would be looking at.

  And in the internationally accepted language of don’t-look-over-my-shoulder-when-I’m-online, his answer was as good as permission for me to lean uncomfortably close to Spotted John so I could have a better look. I might just as well have been a four-year-old asking him to make a blanket fort with me. Except that would be gross, considering Spotted John was in his underwear.

  “Shopping for what?”

  “Ninja stuff.”

  “Ninja stuff?”

  “Yeah. Swords and blowguns and shit like that,” Spotted John answered.

  “Oh.”

  Swords? Blowguns?

  Spotted John was a psycho. I always knew it anyway. I imagined the beast inside a blanket fort, all dressed in black, dipping blowgun darts into curare1 poison.

  “Are they real?” I asked.

  “Who the fuck would buy a fake blowgun?”

  To be honest, I didn’t have an answer to that, so I drank some more stinky beer. It seemed to taste better after the third or fourth swallow. Also, it made my ribs not hurt so much and made me really enjoy hanging out with Spotted John Nygaard while he shopped for ninja equipment, even if he was a psycho in his underwear sitting next to me on a love seat.

  At some point, I made the mistake of accepting Spotted John Nygaard’s offer of another beer. It was all getting distorted and hazy, but my ribs sure felt better, and I liked Spotted John Nygaard just about as much as I’d ever liked anybody in my entire life. In fact, I was already at that Ryan-Dean-West-is-incapable-of-controlling-himself-after-a-beer-and-a-half point where I wouldn’t hesitate at all if he suggested we go out and get buddy tattoos together, except Pine Mountain and Bannock, Oregon, weren’t exactly meccas for body art, and that would be gross, anyway.

  That’s perfectly normal, right?

  At some point—I can’t recall if it was before or after Spotted John gave me a painkiller—I also ended up with his iPad in my hands and found myself having a fantastic experience poking around in every teenager social networking app to see if I could find out anything at all about a kid named Dominic—Nico—Cosentino.

  “See? I told you he’d be easy to find,” Spotted John said.

  We found his picture, his address, everything. And the Cosentinos had moved—to Oregon.

  “You’re the best guy ever, Spotted John,” I said as I floated out over the waters of Idiot Bay. “And you’re a ninja on top of everything.”

  “Will you guys shut up out there?” Cotton Balls’s voice seeped through his closed bedroom door.

  We laughed.

  My ribs felt wonderful. In fact, my entire body felt like I was that superhero who could stretch in any direction, like Silly Putty or something.

  Yeah, the S.S. Idiot Ship had steamed out of port, and Ryan Dean West stood at the rail, waving good-bye to everything I ever knew. For a moment, I could almost imagine the Abernathy waving back to me from the dock. But then he was standing next to Annie, who was also waving to me, and she had her arm around the Abernathy’s shoulders while they both giggled and blushed and talked about making gnocchi in Mrs. O’Hare’s class.

  And at some point, Spotted John Nygaard handed me one of his cell phones and told me I should call Nico Cosentino, which I did, but I can’t really remember much of the conversation beyond Nico’s getting pissed off at me for calling him at midnight, and then how I asked him what time it was where he lived in Oregon.

  Yeah, I was pretty stupid.

  And that was about the point at which I realized I did not remember why I’d come to Spotted John’s place to begin with, or how to get back to Princess Snugglewarm and Abernathy Land. But thankfully—because he was such a great guy, as well as a ninja—Spotted John Nygaard offered his pullout love seat bed for me, so thank all things Denmark I was going to sleep in a place with closed windows and no twelve-year-old kids.

  Unfortunatel
y for me, at some point, Spotted John Nygaard and Cotton Balls thought it would be really hilarious if they put Mabel, their inflatable doll, in bed with Snack-Pack Senior, their team captain, while I slept. They also thought it would be hilarious if they took lots of pictures of us, which they uploaded to every goddamned website imaginable from Spotted John’s iPad.

  Hilarious.

  I dreamed about being on a boat, sailing farther and farther away from Annie Altman.

  At some point—it was just about sunrise—I woke up.

  And I didn’t wake up due to the rotation of the earth and the subsequent waves of light that streamed down on Pine Mountain from a yellow dwarf star (the sun is a yellow dwarf, right?). I woke up because Spotted John and Cotton Balls were laughing so hard, it sounded like someone was going to need a Heimlich buddy and a defibrillator in about three seconds.

  And then I had one of the most intense what-the-fuck moments, because I had no idea where I was (although the bed was much bigger and more comfortable than the puppy pad I slept on in Unit 113), and I was snuggled up to something cold and human-shaped, which I immediately believed was the corpse of some girl I couldn’t remember meeting.

  Awkward.

  Also, I had no canned apology prepared for her in case this all turned out to be real.

  The other discomforting element was that the only thing I had on was a pair of briefs. And for some reason, I couldn’t help but run through the Five-Point Checklist for Consent Mrs. Blyleven had us senior boys memorize in Health class.

  Checkpoint one: You and your partner must both enthusiastically agree to engage in mutual contact or petting.

  Who says “petting”? Nobody says “petting” unless they were born in the Midwest at a time when a rotary-dial phone was a rich-man’s toy.

  “Ha ha ha ha ha!” came the lunatic cackles from the people in the room with me (I still couldn’t remember coming up to the sixth floor).

  Click click click! went the fake sound-effect shutter on Spotted John Nygaard’s iPad camera.

  “I got it on video!” came the voice of Cotton Balls, our hooker.

  Knock knock knock! went a set of beefy knuckles on a presumably shut door somewhere.

  “John? Jeffrey? Are you boys awake? It’s Mr. Bream. Can you let me in, please? We’re looking for a student who didn’t come home last night.”

  Oh shit.

  “Oh shit!” Cotton Balls said. “I better hide Mabel.”

  Empty bottles clinked in the wild cleanup frenzy going on around me. Cotton Balls wrapped up Mabel in the sofa bed’s blanket, which was the only thing covering me—us—and Spotted John stashed his cell phones and iPad beneath the pillow that was under my very groggy head.

  Then a door opened, and there were people.

  Lots of people.

  * * *

  1. Look it up! It’s what people dip blowgun darts into, but I’m pretty sure you can’t buy it off an iPad.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  OKAY. SO, YOU KNOW HOW in those first ten seconds after you wake up from a particularly deep sleep, and you’re next to some air-filled plastic stranger in someone else’s room and you have absolutely nothing on except your underwear and there are two—no, two and a half—guys in full school uniforms with ties and shit, laughing at you because you’re on display for the entire fucking planet like some kind of living motivational poster about things you should never be photographed doing, and the door is wide open and all you want to do is go back to sleep, especially now that the balloon woman has abandoned ship, but the one-half boy in the school tie, who happens to be twelve years old and is named Sam Fucking Abernathy, is shrieking in what could either be joy or horror, “We found him! There he is!” and the adult figure hovering over you is actually touching your naked fucking shoulder (gross!) and saying, “Ryan Dean? Ryan Dean? What are you doing here, son?” and you’re thinking, This all has to be a dream, right? but it obviously isn’t, and you have no way of formulating an answer to Mr. Bream’s question about what you are doing here, son, that doesn’t begin with the word “I’m” and end with the words “fucking sleeping, what does it look like I’m doing, asshole?” but you would never say something like that to anyone, much less Mr. Bream, so all you can do is moan and put your hands over your face?

  Yeah. That.

  “I was asleep,” I said.

  “Why?” the Abernathy, who was definitely not allowed to say anything to me but went ahead and said something anyway, said.

  “Because I was tired, and Spotted John keeps his fucking windows shut.”

  Okay. I didn’t actually say “fucking,” but I wanted to.

  Say it, I mean.

  Gross.

  I found myself wondering if Inflatable Mabel had been a dream, and, if so, maybe there weren’t actually photographs that had actually been taken of me. And her. Together.

  But no.

  Shit.

  What I actually told the Abernathy was this: “Shut up, Sam.”

  “There are rules about this, Ryan Dean. You can’t just sleep anywhere,” Mr. Bream scolded.

  “That’s what Mrs. Blyleven keeps telling us boys in Health class,” I said.

  “Sam was scared out of his mind. You should never do things like this to your roommate. I’m going to have to give you a violation ticket.”

  “It’s okay, Mr. Bream,” Spotted John, whose eyes were still dripping with laughter, said. “We were up late studying, and Ryan Dean sort of dozed off. We didn’t mind letting him crash here.”

  And for some unexplainable Scandinavian reason, everyone—EVERYONE—over the age of eighteen at Pine Mountain Academy believed every word that came out of Spotted John Nygaard’s mouth, which was just another factor in his whole pot-smoking-slash-cell-phone-and-iPad-smuggling magic.

  And as I lay there practically naked on a gross, bare, foam folding mattress, wishing I could blink my eyes and then have some clothes instantly wrap themselves around me so I might pocket one of Spotted John’s cell phones or his iPad—because there was no way I’d get away with smuggling one out in my briefs—gross!—Mr. Bream nodded thoughtfully and then said, “Well, then. You’re going to need to find some suitable attire, young man. First-hour class starts in fifteen minutes.”

  I sat up. It kind of hurt, but it woke me up.

  “What?”

  “Where are your clothes, Ryan Dean?” the Abernathy asked.

  “Don’t talk to me,” I said. Then I looked from Spotted John to Cotton Balls. “Yeah. Where are my clothes?”

  “Fifteen minutes, Ryan Dean,” Mr. Bream reminded me. Then he turned around with a disgusted pirouette and slipped outside, into the hallway.

  As soon as Mr. Bream left, Spotted John thrust a finger at the Abernathy and said, “Get out, Snack-Pack, or I’ll stuff you inside my underwear drawer.”

  Spotted John had no idea the degree of terror the prospect of being crammed inside a dresser drawer inflicted on the claustrophobic little maggot, who instantly turned as pale as a . . . well, maggot. The Abernathy momentarily froze. I detected pinpoint beads of sweat on his minnow-size forehead.

  “He doesn’t mean it, Abernathy,” I said. “Just go to class. I’ll see you in Foods.”

  Then two things struck me: First, was I being nice to the Abernathy? No. I couldn’t do something like actually feel sorry for him. And second, the little grub got this look on his face like he was going to tattle on me to Mrs. O’Hare for calling Culinary Arts “Foods.”

  “You mean you’ll see me in Creative Writing, Ryan Dean,” the Abernathy pointed out.

  “Whatever. Stop talking to me.”

  “Did you do your homework? You know—the descriptive poem about your body?”

  Crap. I forgot all about Dr. Wellins’s perv-poetry assignment. Maybe I should just walk to Dr. Wellins’s class in my underwear and call it an unspoken poem. He did, after all, tell us to embrace the idea of writing our body-exploration poems while completely naked, him being the unwaveringly creepy old
pervert that he was.

  “Time to go, Snackers,” Cotton Balls said.

  And on his way out, the Abernathy reminded me, “You only have about ten minutes, Ryan Dean. Don’t get in trouble.”

  After Sam Abernathy left, Cotton Balls dead-bolted the door behind him.

  “That was close,” Spotted John said. “You almost got us in a shit-load of trouble.”

  “Where are my clothes?”

  “They’re in the spruce tree.” Spotted John hitchhiked a thumb toward the window through Cotton Balls’s bedroom doorway.

  “Why are they in a tree?”

  “We threw them out the window because you admitted that you buried our sock,” Cotton Balls said. “It was only fair.”

  “After you crashed, Cotton Balls woke up and we thought we should throw your only sock in the tree, but then we thought justice would require more than that. You’re lucky we left you in your little boy undies. Balls was going to toss those, too,” Spotted John added.

  On the one hand, I was proud of myself for confessing that I was the one who had buried Spotted John’s door sock. It made me feel saintly and absolved. On the other hand, I suppose I couldn’t really blame them for getting even, so I was grateful Cotton Balls didn’t take my underwear, too. But still, it made me sad to think that my clothes were about fifty feet above the ground, dangling from the limbs of a spruce tree in a cold Oregon drizzle.

  “They’re not little boy undies,” I said.

  Spotted John countered, “Whatever.”

  “I don’t have any pants,” I said.

  Cotton Balls shrugged. “Well, duh. Pretty much everyone who has Internet access is currently aware of that, dude.”

  “Did you really—”

  Spotted John’s laughter was enough to cut my question short.

  “You guys are dicks.”

  I really did say that. That’s not swearing, right? I mean, the word “dick” could mean a lot of things, right? Probably not when a teenage boy says it. Well, probably never. I wondered if I should maybe go to the chapel and pray or something.