Stand-Off

  And the television said, “The worst crime you could possibly commit with a scallop is overcooking it.”

  Great.

  Just fucking great.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I’LL ADMIT IT: I DO not like to get out of bed once I’m in it.

  But I didn’t need an alarm clock on that first day of twelfth grade. Who needs an alarm clock when you’re stuck in a refrigerator-size room with Sam Abernathy, and all night long you’ve had to try to sleep with your front door wide open while people—guys—pass by in the hallway and offer commentary like “Why are these assholes sleeping with their door open?” and “Hey, do you smell popcorn?”

  So I got up before sunrise. And I shut our door so I could undress and take a shower. I even shaved. I didn’t need to shave, there was just some keen sense of satisfaction I got from leaving my razor and shaving cream sitting out in the same bath—no, shower—shower room Sam Abernathy was going to use. And you couldn’t bring a change of clothes inside the shower room either, unless you wanted your school things to get soaked, not that there was enough space to actually get dressed in there to begin with.

  When I came out, naked and wrapped in a towel, Sam Abernathy had reopened our window.

  We were ultimately going to have to negotiate a claustrophobia treaty, but I wasn’t in the mood for talking to Sam Abernathy while I was freezing and naked and trying to get ready for school with an open ground-floor window through which any passerby could watch the naked-Ryan-Dean-West-and-his-unstable-roommate show.

  Also, the Abernathy had straightened out our desks and picked up and folded my clothes again too. I concluded he was likely a claustrophobe with a neatness obsession. Ryan Dean West, child fucking psychologist. With just a sprinkle of pyromania and perhaps a shoe perversion, Sam Abernathy could potentially be the most insane twelve-year-old on the planet.

  I closed our window and lowered the blinds.

  “I need to get dressed,” I explained. “And it’s cold. And that’s exactly eight words more than I intended to say to you this month.”

  Sam Abernathy sat on his Mario Bros. bed in his soccer pajamas. He’d laid out his perfect little Pine Mountain first-day-of-school boy outfit neatly beside him.

  “I need to pee,” Sam Abernathy said.

  “So?”

  I put on my socks and underwear.

  “I also need to take a shower.”

  “Again. So?”

  And I realized my shirt and school pants looked pretty nice the way Sam had folded them.

  “Well, I can’t be inside the bathroom with the door closed. I would stop breathing, and nobody here would know they need to call an ambulance or start CPR. But if I leave the bathroom door open, then I won’t be able to pee or take a shower because you’ll be in here watching me.”

  I thought about doing CPR on the Abernathy.

  No.

  The kid was squirming and his eyes were watering.

  What boy doesn’t know that look painfully well?

  “It’s not a bathroom,” I pointed out.

  I tried to calculate how long I could take getting dressed so that the Abernathy’s bladder would explode, and if all this could happen in time for me to meet Annie and my friends for breakfast and still make it to my first class on time.

  “Dude. Trust me. I am not going to watch you pee or take a shower.”

  Sam Abernathy rocked back and forth slightly, his knees clenched tightly together.

  And I kept telling myself, I am not going to be nice to him, I am not going to be nice to him.

  Then the Abernathy looked at me with his gigantic Internet-meme, basket-full-of-puppies eyes and said, “Please?” Which, when you think about it, could be a perfect meme.

  At which time, my inner mantra evolved to I am not going to strangle him, I am not going to strangle him.

  I grabbed my backpack and schedule, and, shirt unbuttoned and hanging out, I threw my untied tie over one shoulder and my Pine Mountain sweater over the other and stormed—without tripping once!—out of our (my) fucking dorm room.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “IT HASN’T BEEN TWENTY-FOUR hours, and I just can’t take him anymore.”

  I was sitting in the dining hall before class with Annie, JP, Seanie, and Annie’s roommate, Isabel, whom I still found to be wildly hot. Also, there was something dramatically different about Isabel, but I couldn’t exactly put my finger on it. So I concluded it had to be one thing: Isabel had lost her virginity over the summer.

  What else could it possibly be?

  She had this all-knowing, goddesslike, and voluptuous look in her simmering black eyes. I had to find out. She would tell Annie, right? Because girls do that, right? Just like guys, right? I need to know these things. I had to get Annie to find out for me if Isabel had lost her virginity, and who it was with, and if she wanted to sit around a campfire or something and tell me about it. Tonight, if possible.

  “Have you even heard one thing I’ve said to you, Ryan Dean?”

  Annie was so hot when she got that scolding voice.

  “Huh?” I said, suddenly aware that I’d been sitting there for at least five minutes at breakfast with my friends, thinking about Isabel having sex, and then thinking about Isabel talking to me about having sex. And a campfire, which, like having sex, is also specifically against the rules at Pine Mountain.

  “Well, clearly you’re misleading yourself if you think you’re not going to at least be kind to him. Leaving him alone this morning was a very thoughtful thing for you to do,” Annie said.

  “Huh?” I was still thinking about Isabel and sex, as opposed to Sam Abernathy taking a shower, and my compassion toward him.

  “It stands to reason that Winger and the little guy would bond,” JP added. “After all, they have so much in common. And besides, you’ve got to feel sorry for a kid with irrational fears, right, Ryan Dean? You’re not afraid of anything, are you?”

  For just a second, I thought I saw a flash of that dude in the black cloak—Nate—looking at me from over JP’s shoulder.

  I hated JP Tureau.

  Annie shifted in her seat and cleared her throat, which was her way of letting us know she didn’t appreciate it when JP and I picked on each other around her.

  Then Isabel looked at me with her liquid black eyes and said, “You should ask him to hang out with us at dinner tonight. That would be so cool of you to introduce him to some older friends, Ryan Dean.”

  “What?!!” I was shocked. Also, to be honest, I was imagining Isabel naked.

  I just can’t help these things. Nobody can, right?

  Seanie slapped the table and shook his head decisively. “There are certain social barriers that cannot be broken. Inviting a freshman to sit at a senior table could only end up in total anarchy.”

  Seanie Flaherty was rarely the voice of reason, but when he rose to the occasion, it was like drifting into a life raft when you’re treading water in the middle of the Pacific.

  “Nobody wants total anarchy,” I said.

  • • •

  Everyone knew the game plan for senior year.

  It was supposed to be easy, right? I’d taken my SAT in June (I aced it, thank you very much), had been working on my college apps (as a gesture to my parents, I sent one to Harvard and one to MIT, even though I already knew I wanted to go to school in California, dude), and had completed all the core requirements for graduating from Pine Mountain. To top it off, pretty much all I had to do this year was play rugby and take fluff and breadth classes. Easy report card full of vowels. It was all lined up perfectly.

  But Sam Abernathy equaled total anarchy, treading water for the next nine months.

  To make matters worse, Sam Abernathy would end up being in two of my classes: Creative Writing, followed by the worst-imaginable scenario, Culinary Arts, which was also the only class I had with Annie Altman. But I didn’t find out about this wonderful arrangement until later.

  I could not get away from the guy. At lea
st I was safe for first period, Body Conditioning (which was only for twelfth-grade boys) and for Health (also, a new thing at Pine Mountain—a class for only senior boys that was a ninety-minute endurance test in discomfort because it was (1) taught by a woman, Mrs. Blyleven, and (2) all about “issues” like sex and consent and being a good young man); and then I could always count on the sanctuary of rugby practice and Coach McAuliffe to make me forget everything Abernathy and Blyleven.

  Or so I thought.

  So, yeah, it was a shock for me to see Sam Abernathy timidly enter my Creative Writing class, and it was entirely natural for me to assume the little crouton was simply lost in a forest of gigantic lettuce leaves. Or something.

  But no. And of course, I had no way of knowing anything about the Abernathy, because I refused to converse with him.

  Sam Abernathy was an open book as far as I was concerned. I didn’t need to ask about any details in the kid’s two-sentence biography. I decided then and there to make a chart (that’s not creepy of me, is it?) in which I would predict everything about the Abernathy, and then I could check it off during the course of whatever period of endurance I’d have to endure with my unendurable roommate, just to see how very right I could be:

  “Oh. Hi, Ryan Dean.”

  “Hello.”

  “Is it okay if I sit next to you?”

  “No. Because you’re not in this class.”

  The Abernathy unzipped his notebook. He had one of those really big, zipper-shut notebook organizers that nobody would ever willingly be seen with in public. He took out his class schedule.

  “Is this Creative Writing, with Dr. Wellins?”

  Mr.—Dr.—Wellins, a monumentally renowned pervert, had been my American Lit teacher in eleventh grade. Apparently, over the summer, he had earned a PhD in misidentifying sexual subtext in classic literature. I liked Mr.—uh, Dr.—Wellins, despite the fact that he was really creepy.

  I sighed and waved my hand at the empty seat beside me.

  Annie would be pleased at how nice I just was, I thought.

  Sam Abernathy sat down, all smiles.

  “I’m so glad I actually know somebody in one of my classes,” he said. “This is going to be fun!”

  Fun.

  Dr. Wellins came in, wrote his name and the date on the board at the front of the class, then launched into a dramatic speech with lots of hand gestures about how we were only to refer to him as Dr. Wellins, and that we were all going to find this the most uncomfortable (he was already right about that) and difficult class of our career—so we might rethink committing to the course right now.

  I was used to this type of opener. A lot of the teachers at PM were so full of their own credentials, they tried to scare down the number of papers they’d have to grade right at the start of each term by proclaiming their impermeable magnificence. I looked around at the sets of terrified eyeballs staring at the master of all things creative and wordlike.

  There were sixteen kids in the class, and ten of them were girls. Score on that one. Also, I was pretty sure I was the only senior. Everyone else looked really young (Sam Abernathy looked like a fetus with a necktie). But the other kids probably thought I was a tenth grader or something, anyway.

  Then Dr. Wellins fired off a machine-gun barrage of requirements for his course, which included specifics on font size and page layout of our work, our responsibilities regarding deadlines, our openness to criticism, and his general prohibition against a list of verbs (he gave the ones he never wanted to see, which included any form of “to be”), all adverbs, and anything ever written in first-person point of view.

  “And, if you are not aware of what an adverb is, or one-P-P-O-V, then I would suggest you consider transferring into beginning finger-painting class immediately,” Dr. Wellins said.

  I was thinking if he only banned a few more language devices, we could all hand in blank pages and ace this shitty class.

  Here’s another thing: I hate alphabetical order.

  Opportunities are supposed to be randomly distributed, right? There are only three possible terminal initials worse than W when it comes to the unfair allocation of choice or turn taking, and nobody has a last name that starts with X. I mention this because as Dr. Wellins called off the names on his roster he asked each student to name the person in the class with whom they would like to be wed for the term as a crit partner.

  “ ‘Crit partner’ is what WRITERS”—whenever Dr. Wellins said “writers,” it always sounded like it was in all capitals, like he was attempting to describe celestial angels to the tongueless half-beast spawns of hell—“call their critique partner. It is a significant relationship, one based on trust, openness, integrity, and support. The commitment is akin to the faithfulness and dedication of a husband or wife. Do I make myself clear?”

  I mentally counted the number of “to be” verbs in his proclamation.

  Don’t look back. There were three.

  Nobody said anything.

  To be honest, I think most of the kids in the class stopped listening to Dr. Wellins when he told us all about his doctoral dissertation, which was an analysis of the underlying themes of homosexuality and narcissism in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.

  Besides that, husband or wife?

  Was Dr. Wellins already concocting some bizarre fantasies about the kids in his Creative Writing course? Also, who ever says “akin”? Look, I knew how much I’d changed over the summer, and I was certain that Isabel had lost her virginity, but Dr. Wellins, since earning his PhD, had transformed into an even bigger self-absorbed douche than he was in eleventh-grade American Literature, and the scale of that was almost impossible to imagine.

  But, to return to the egregious miscarriage of justice known as alphabetical order, the first kid on Dr. Wellins’ roster happened to be the Abernathy.

  “Samuel Abernathy?” Dr. Wellins said.

  The Abernathy raised his little pink baby hand. “Here, sir.”

  “Do you know anyone here in this desiccated wasteland of imbecility with whom you would like to bond as a crit partner?”

  Dr. Wellins swept his arm across the breadth of the room like he was scattering chicken feed in slow motion.

  Please don’t bond with me, Sam Abernathy. Please don’t bond with me, Sam Abernathy. Please don’t bond—

  Then the Abernathy pointed at me and said, “Yes, sir. I would like to partner with Ryan Dean.”

  Unfortunately for me, Dr. Wellins’s factory of creativity—like our (my!) dorm room—was on the ground floor, which eliminated the possibility of a desperate leap from the window.

  And Dr. Wellins’s pervert-tumbleweed eyebrows rose like the spines of twin cats about to fight when he realized the target Sam Abernathy pointed at was the same Ryan Dean who was also in his American Lit class the preceding year.

  “Ryan Dean West?” Dr. Wellins was practically salivating.

  I apologize for using a “be” verb and an adverb.

  I also apologize for not being able to deny my existence.

  “Hello, Dr. Wellins.” I gave him a half-elevated pope wave. “Congratulations on the sheepskin.”

  “I didn’t recognize you! You must have grown a foot!”

  “Hyperbole,” I pointed out, avoiding first person, be, and adverbial modifiers.

  I totally owned that old pervert.

  “Well, I expect nothing but the best from you, young man! Nothing but the best!”

  You see, here’s the thing: I had creepy old Dr. Wellins figured out from day one. I knew exactly what he wanted to see from us half-wits. He was an incredibly shallow audience who was so easy to satisfy.

  Instant A.

  If only I could get away from the Abernathy. But I realized it was beyond hope when Dr. Wellins, beaming, wrote down the first official crit partnership on his whiteboard:

  Abernathy/West

  I glared at the Abernathy, who smiled at me and bounced up and down in his little Creative Writing desk like he was fi
ve years old and waiting to open all his Christmas presents.

  CHAPTER TEN

  OKAY. EVEN THOUGH I KNEW in chapter nine that I’d end up reencountering my crit partner, the Abernathy, in Culinary Arts, I didn’t really know it until just before the class began, which is going to happen in a few paragraphs.

  So hang in there.

  The Culinary Arts room was as big as a grocery store. Instead of desks, there were prep tables with built-in sinks. There was an entire wall of gleaming steel ovens and cooktops, and even a walk-in refrigerator and freezer. There were microwave ovens, too, which made me flash back unpleasantly to the sleep-deprived night before.

  This was all new to me, though, especially the teacher, Mrs. O’Hare, whom I had never seen around Pine Mountain before. Mrs. O’Hare was the exact opposite of what I’d imagine a cooking teacher to look like. She was young, with billowing blond hair, and long slender legs that you couldn’t help but notice in her tapered chef’s pants. She also wore one of those perfectly white, double-breasted chef’s tunics with just one button seductively undone. No boy in his right mind would have to break out the candy thermometer to know that Mrs. O’Hare was the hottest thing in the kitchen.

  I wondered if she was a widow.

  Something cool and soft touched my hand, and I snapped out of my stare-down contest with that one button.

  “I’ve been waiting for this all day. Well, since breakfast, at least.”

  Annie.

  We held hands beneath our prep table and leaned close enough that our shoulders and legs touched—just innocent enough that Mrs. O’Hare (my new favorite, hopefully widowed teacher) wouldn’t think anything rule-breaky was going on.

  “Oh man, Annie! I am so happy to see you. Do you realize I had to endure an all-boys Health class, where we were forced to take a pledge and promise that we’d learn stuff like healthy attitudes and behaviors toward our penises, and then I just had the worst experience ever in Creative Writing class,” I said.

  “What now, Ryan Dean?” (hot scolding tone).

  “Well, first off, it’s taught by Mr. Wellins, who is now Dr. Wellins, which means his obsession with sex is going to be even more creepy and condescending, and then Sam Abernathy turned up in the class—and Dr. Wellins had us pair up as permanent writing buddies—and he even made us write something together called a tandem dialogue. It was a nightmare. We had to take turns, where the setup was assigned by Dr. Wellins, then we alternated writing dialogue between two supposedly fictional characters. Here. You should read this.”