Stand-Off

Really? Really?

  “What?”

  “Will you do me a favor?”

  I had already saved his life. What could he possibly want from me now?

  “What?”

  “Will you go outside so I can pee and change into my pajamas?”

  “No. Shut up.”

  “Please?”

  “Dude. Abernathy. Don’t you play a sport? Everyone here plays a sport. Don’t tell me you have your own private locker room and urinal. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  Okay. You know. I didn’t really say “fuck.” But I really wanted to. I also really wanted someone in our room—and I’ll be honest, I didn’t care who it was—to be abducted by aliens or something.

  “They gave me a one-year exemption on account of how I only weigh seventy-two pounds. I’m the smallest person at Pine Mountain. Girls included.”

  Bullshit.

  Exemption? Pine Mountain never did anything like that for me. And I thought, I wonder how far I could throw seventy-two pounds?

  Try to ignore him. Try to ignore him. Try to ignore him.

  “Ryan Dean?”

  “Look. I saved your life. I actually held a bag over your face for you. I gave you the window. I gave you forty degrees inside our bedroom. That’s the extent of my saintliness. You can sleep in your school tie and hold your pee till your bladder explodes, but that’s it. I am not leaving my room.”

  “Oh.”

  I had a sudden realization that the world was turning, that I’d undoubtedly be talking to the Abernathy until sunrise if something didn’t give.

  The something that gave was a fifteen-year-old loser named Ryan Dean West.

  And while I stood out in the hallway in my underwear and wrapped up in a Princess Snugglewarm blanket, waiting for Sam Abernathy to manage his affairs in private, just about every guy I did not want to see (because they all lived at more desirable elevations and had to pass me on the way to the elevators), walked past me. And mocked.

  SEANIE FLAHERTY: Dude. Ryan Dean. You know my birthday’s coming up, right? Well, the only thing I want for a present is for you to finally be honest with everyone and come out of the closet. And preferably dressed just like you are right now. Is that too much to ask of you?

  And then—

  SPOTTED JOHN NYGAARD: Dude. Ryan Dean. Um, why are you standing in the hallway in your underwear?

  RYAN DEAN WEST: My roommate needs some alone time.

  SPOTTED JOHN NYGAARD: You should just teach him the hang-a-sock-on-the-doorknob signal. That’s what I do. Everyone knows that.

  RYAN DEAN WEST: That’s totally gross, Spotted John. I did not need to know that.

  And of course—

  MR. BREAM: Well, well! Ryan Dean! Is it too hot in your room for you? I could adjust the heat down for you!

  That was more than enough humiliation for one night. Unfortunately, dorm room doors are always locked, a fact that I overlooked before going out into the hallway in my goddamned underwear. So I had to knock.

  And while I was knocking on my own door in my underwear and clutching a blanket with unicorns around my waist, asking Sam Abernathy nicely if he would please let me back in, JP Tureau came through the hall. He stood there, staring at me, shaking his head.

  JP TUREAU: Dude. That Annie Altman is the luckiest girl at Pine Mountain Academy.

  Finally, it was over. Little Sam Abernathy, all pajamaed up and smelling like seventy-two pounds of Colgate, let me back inside our refrigerator.

  “Thank you, Ryan Dean,” he blubbered.

  I threw myself onto my bed, mumbling something about how this was never going to happen again and the Abernathy had better come to terms with how things worked in the real world.

  Then, out of the dark, drifting across the arctic expanse of a 130-square-fucking-foot room like the damp finger of a ghost, came the voice of a claustrophobic, toothpaste-smelling, soccer-ball-pajama-wearing, cooking-savant angel.

  “I like Annie.”

  Blood pressure = off the chart.

  “Please. Never talk to me about my girlfriend again.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  Why did he have to do it? I was suddenly so angry, the rising waves of heat coming from my forehead were likely going to collide with the cold front coming through the window and produce thunder and hail.

  There was only one reasonable conclusion: Sam Abernathy was trying to kill me. I made up my mind: One of us was going to have to go.

  Calm down, Ryan Dean. Calm down.

  “What sport do you play, Ryan Dean?”

  “Rugby. Shut up.”

  Maybe three seconds of shutting up ensued.

  “Is it fun?”

  “No. Shut up.”

  One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand . . .

  “Did you remember to brush your teeth, Ryan Dean?”

  “Shut. Up. Now.”

  Five seconds passed.

  “Would it bother you if I watched TV, Ryan Dean?”

  I’m pretty sure I cried myself to sleep after that.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  AS TERRIBLE AS THE RUN-UP to bedtime was, what happened to me that night was worse than anything I’d ever been through. And I had no idea where it came from.

  No idea at all.

  I know this: I was lying on my back when my eyes opened. And even though all the covers had been kicked off my bed, I wasn’t cold or anything. I knew the television was still on—someone was saying something about blanching fava beans—and across the room the Abernathy had clearly fallen asleep.

  But something was terribly wrong with me, with getting air into my lungs, with the tilt of the earth, with pretty much everything. I couldn’t move. I felt dizzy, like I was disconnecting from my body, and everything looked fuzzy and swirling. I was simultaneously sicker than I’d ever been in my life, and so terrified of everything that I felt absolutely certain I was going to die—I was having some kind of heart attack, and if I said anything, or made any sound at all, I was sure it would kill me.

  Then I started shaking, and I couldn’t do anything to control it. And although it was undoubtedly cold in the room, the shaking wasn’t from the temperature, it was from fear. I had never shaken in fright before in my life, and this made me even more convinced that I was about to die, and I’d be lying there dead in the room, and Sam Abernathy wasn’t even going to know it until he woke up. Outside, the wind screamed through the trees.

  And the fear got worse and worse and worse.

  Oh, God, I need to get out of here.

  I can’t say I remember trying to get up. The next thing I knew, I was sitting down on the carpet in the hallway in nothing but my underwear and Mr. Bream was standing over me, saying something that I couldn’t understand at all.

  “Ryan Dean? Ryan Dean? Hey. Can you hear me?”

  Mr. Bream shook my shoulder. When he did that, it made me even more terrified, and I thought I was going to throw up, so I slid along the wall and lay on my side.

  “Ryan Dean!”

  I waved him away from me.

  “I’ll be okay. Just let me lie here for a minute.”

  I did not think I was going to be okay. I just needed Mr. Bream to shut up and leave me alone. Then he was knocking on my door, jiggling the knob, telling Sam to let him inside. Finally, Mr. Bream just let himself in with his pass key, then he came back out and covered me with my blanket and top sheet.

  It was the worst thing I’d ever been through.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I LEFT THE NEXT MORNING before the Abernathy woke up. There was no way I would even for a moment consider chatting with the kid about what had happened to me.

  I went to the Student Health Center. They had an open policy there that allowed students to call home if something was wrong, and something was definitely wrong. I needed to talk to my father. But to get to the phone required filling out a patient admission form and answering questions from Doctor No-gloves’s receptionist, Nurse Hickey, whom I’d had countless fantasies about du
ring my less-mature eleventh-grade year.

  Now, highlighting that there was something seriously the matter with Ryan Dean West, I hardly looked at her, and when I finally did I saw that she was quite pregnant, which made me feel like I’d been cheated on or something.

  “Ryan Dean West?” Nurse Hickey said. “I remember you from last year!”

  That’s because most people wouldn’t forget the only patient they’d ever had who came in with an injury to his ballsack.

  “Oh. Hi.”

  I know I must have looked terrible. I hadn’t taken a shower or washed up that morning, my hair was a mess, and I had raccoon eyes.

  “Is something the matter, sweetie?”

  “Uh. Something happened to me last night while I was sleeping. I think something’s wrong with me.”

  Nurse Hickey looked at the information on my health record printout. “Oh? Let’s see . . . you’re fifteen?”

  “Yes.”

  Then Nurse Hickey got these really big, compassionate eyes and stared directly at me and patted my hand knowingly.

  “Oh, honey. That’s just a normal thing that happens to boys your age.”

  Then I felt really sick. What was she thinking I’d checked myself in for?

  “Do you want to talk to Doctor Norris about it? He can explain why these things happen when you sleep. You shouldn’t feel scared or embarrassed about it, sweetie. It happens to all boys.”

  No.

  Gross.

  No.

  I was completely mortified. Once again, Nurse Hickey had it all wrong about Ryan Dean West.

  • • •

  Okay. Well. I ended up not calling my dad that morning. But I did talk to Doctor No-gloves, who insisted that I take off my fucking shirt so he could listen to my chest and measure my blood pressure, which he said was a little high for a fifteen-year-old boy, but it stood to reason if I had been experiencing insomnia, which was not what I had experienced, because I’ve been unable to sleep plenty of times and it never scared the living crap out of me, but this was all a normal thing that he dealt with at Pine Mountain at least four or five times per week during the start of the school year, especially among “younger boys” (and what the fuck did he mean by that?) who tended to have these “episodes” more commonly than girls (and what did he mean by that, too?), so I shouldn’t worry, because once I got back into my routine and began working out regularly with the rugby team, Doctor No-gloves was absolutely confident I’d feel like my old self again, but if I felt uncomfortable, he said, I could talk to him about anything, or maybe set an appointment with Mrs. Dvorak, and, by the way, Ryan Dean, do you have any concerns about any other issues going on with your changing body?

  Why do I even bother?

  I put my shirt back on and borrowed a loaner tie from Doctor No-gloves and managed to make it to my Body Conditioning class before the trainers even realized I was late.

  PART TWO:

  the code

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  DESPITE GETTING BACK INTO WHAT Doctor No-gloves called “my routine,” after two weeks I did not feel like my old self again.

  I had been working out—the team was in full-contact mode, and the first fifteen (that’s first string in rugby) had been established, with me at number ten, stand-off, even though I felt like I wasn’t going to be able to handle the pressure of all the guys and Coach M counting on me to be some kind of leader. Luckily for me, I kind of lost myself when I was on the pitch and in the game—like I almost could blank out and forget everything else in the world when I had that ball in my hand, or when I was getting hit or putting the hit on another guy. But I was losing weight too, because I’d skip out on meals just about every day. Annie noticed it. How could she not? So I drew her a comic that kind of skirted around the issue of what I’d been going through since the start of the school year, and I tried to make it not so dark, but it only ended up making Annie sad and concerned about my health. I told her everything was going to be fine.

  But there was nothing I could do if things were going to just stay the same. Time marches on and all that, right?

  I’ll admit that the more mature part of Ryan Dean West knew that I’d be better off talking to someone about what I’d been going through, but that other, bigger part of Ryan Dean West didn’t want to seem weak or needy or broken to Annie, because outside of Annie Altman I felt like I didn’t have a single true friend in the world, which made me miss Joey even more and made things worse at the same time too.

  So I sat down one afternoon, when, for whatever reasons, the Abernathy was not haunting our dorm room, and I made a little side-by-side comparison chart, adding up the positives and negatives of the first three weeks into my senior year.

  It didn’t balance out so good.

  And the worst thing of all—the thing I could not even bring myself to commit in writing to the Ryan Dean West Side-by-Side Positive versus Negative Comparison Chart is the one item that tipped the scale and practically caused my little half sheet of composition paper to spin endlessly counterclockwise. It was this: Sam Abernathy volunteered to be manager of the rugby team at Pine Mountain Academy.

  Oh yeah.

  So maybe all the calculations, the weighing of good and bad, had some kind of influence on fate—if there is such a thing—because on the Thursday of my third week at Pine Mountain (the day before most students got to leave for the weekend and go home to their families and bedrooms with windows they could actually shut), I had come to a decision about making a change for the better. I set an appointment to see Headmaster Lavoie, whose name nobody could pronounce, in order to submit a petition for a reassignment of my housing.

  I went to see Headmaster Lavoie at lunch. Another missed meal for our withering stand-off.

  By the way, I had to check one box in the error column about the Abernathy. His pedigree did not, as I had theorized, originate in Boise. The Abernathy clan lived in Plano, Texas, which was a slight right turn and about 1,600 miles from Boise.

  Close. Well, same planet as Boise, at least.

  It may seem mean of me to want to get out of my living situation, but it was not my responsibility to look out for, bond with, share midnight popcorn chats with, or otherwise fraternize with the Abernathy. It was unfair of anyone to put that expectation on me. This was my senior year, after all, and there were so many other things that I should have been enjoying besides all that icy fresh air from sleeping with our goddamned window open (and no screen, either, by the way), as well as my frequent exiles out into the hallway so that the Abernathy could change, shower, or poop—if he even had a functioning digestive tract.

  And I struggled—but only a little bit—with formulating my “It’s not your fault; it’s mine” speech that I’d inevitably have to deliver to the heartbroken Abernathy, because there was no way to do this and not hurt his feelings. But in the end, Sam Abernathy’s feelings were not my concern. I had to look out for number one, or number ten, if that matters. If anything, I had to feel a twinge of empathy for the next cellmate in Unit 113. Maybe I’d leave him a list of pointers on how to successfully navigate the inhospitably storm-tossed and claustrophobic seas of Sam Abernathy.

  “Please take a seat. The headmaster will be with you as soon as he’s available.”

  Apparently, even Mrs. Knudson, the administrative secretary at Pine Mountain, didn’t know how to say his name.

  I’ll admit I was nervous. Nobody likes dealing with grown-ups with unpronounceable names who also happen to be in positions of high authority.

  Mrs. Knudson handed me a clipboard that had a ballpoint pen leg-ironed to it by a length of chain, so I could complete a Request for Change of Housing form for Headmaster Lavoie. Unfortunately, as I sat there sweating over my penmanship, I was confronted by something I hadn’t fully considered: box number seven.

  7. State specific reason(s) for requesting housing reassignment:

  What could I say?

  I hate don’t like Sam Abernathy.

  My
roommate is insane twelve.

  My roommate leaves the window open and kicks me out so he can poop put on his pajamas.

  My roommate has a crush on my girlfriend. Just. No.

  I AM A SENIOR AND DESERVE TO GET WHAT I WANT MORE THAN THIS.

  Why did all this have to be so difficult?

  “Um. Can I have another form, please, Mrs. Knudson?”

  I crumpled up attempt number one at box number seven and sat down again with a fresh start, a tabula rasa, or a box number seven rasa, as it were. I had absolutely no idea what I should argue to win my case.

  And as I sat there staring at empty box number seven, which is what teenagers do so frequently on exam days (like when I had to know how many fucking tablespoons make one fluid ounce), hoping that words would magically Etch A Sketch themselves into coherency, Headmaster Lavoie’s door opened and a small exodus of humanity spilled out into Mrs. Knudson’s reception area.

  To be honest, the exodus wasn’t so much along the scale of the “children of Israel” type of numbers; there were exactly three people with Headmaster Lavoie: a man, a woman, and a teenage boy. It was a typical we-are-bringing-our-child-to-abandon-him-on-your-doorstep scene at Pine Mountain Academy. What else could it be? They were all the picture of American privilege: tailored clothes, unscuffed shoes, the man in a tie and the woman in an actual skirt. The boy, their son, was maybe a freshman, I thought. He looked nervous and eager to get the hell out of Headmaster Unpronounceable-name’s office, which was a good sign that he was psychologically stable.

  It turned out I was wrong about the dumping-the-kid off assumption, but I’ll stand by the rest of it. But for just a moment when the quiet little family came out of Headmaster Lavoie’s office, I made eye contact with the boy and something happened.

  No, it wasn’t a magical moment.

  Somehow, I felt certain that I knew the kid from somewhere.

  Okay. You know how when you’re wandering around in public and you make eye contact with someone and you know that you know them, but that’s all you know (which is a lot of knowing going on there), and your eyes get this hey-I-recognize-you look, and maybe you even smile and the muscles in your tongue actually begin to run through their “Hey, how’s it going??!!” warm-up routine and just before you say it, the other person gives you a who-the-fuck-are-you-and-you-should-stop-looking-at-me-right-now-weirdo look so your speech assembly line gets all bottlenecked and you feel yourself turning red and wanting to die because maybe you really don’t know the dude you were just giving full-on love eyes to?