Winger

“Shut the fuck up.”

  “Okay.”

  I am such a loser.

  No matter what Megan offered, or tempted me with, I never got over being totally crazy for the totally hot Annie Altman. And playing with Megan was like playing with a rattlesnake. Well, a smoking-hot rattlesnake. With incredible boobs. That Ryan Dean West had actually touched.

  I knew Joey was right.

  I had to stop.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  ANNIE KEPT THE PROMISE SHE’D made that day we told each other our wishes at Stonehenge. Her parents had spoken to mine, so Annie and I got tickets to fly up to Seattle together on Friday after school. I was going to spend the weekend at my best friend’s house. And every time I’d almost get up enough courage to ask where I’d be sleeping (and what I should wear, since I don’t have any drop-seat pajamas with feet on them—in fact, I don’t have any pajamas at all), hoping she’d say something ultrahot like, “On the couch in my room,” to which she might add, parenthetically, “And I believe that sleep is something that should only be done while completely naked,” my throat knotted up and my ears turned red. God! What a dork I am.

  It was blissful and it was terrifying at the same time. And as I made my way through the week, I just stumbled around in the stupidest kind of daze.

  I fantasized about our first game and the prospect of receiving just the perfect degree of injury so Annie would want to play the naughty nurse all weekend long as I lay on her couch, naked, in constant need of sponge baths and hernia exams. At 1,492 total thought episodes per day, it was my Columbus-discovers-perversion fantasy.

  So of course it was next to impossible to concentrate at all on schoolwork while keeping meticulous tallies of my impure thoughts, much less for me to listen to Mr. Wellins blather on and on about sex, because, now that I look at it, every single thought in my head—Annie, Megan, Chas, the game—all, in some way, had something to do with sex. So maybe Wellins was right after all, that everything does have something to do with sex, even though I found his argument about the underlying sexual themes in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court to be a bit of a stretch, and totally perverted, too.

  Hello, Central!1

  I mean, come on!

  Annie and I met for lunch at school that day. It was Tuesday; two days before the game, three days before the weekend that I hoped would change my life. JP and Seanie sat across the table from us, and I was between Annie and Isabel, which was kind of hot because Isabel kept brushing up against me, and, even though there wasn’t really room for it in my head, I imagined Annie and her having a warrior-princess-fight-to-the-death for breeding rights with me. I noticed Seanie was particularly fascinated by Isabel’s faint fuzzy moustache. Joey, who almost never sat with the other seniors, was with us too.

  “Do you guys know that this weekend West is coming to my house for two days?” Annie announced.

  I hadn’t told anyone. I noticed Joey glanced at me with a have-you-told-Megan-yet look on his face.

  Seanie kicked me under the table and raised his hand.

  “High five, Winger,” he said. He slapped my hand over our burritos, and I watched Annie’s expression to see if that was the wrong thing to do. Seanie added, “Why does this remind me of salmon swimming upstream to spawn and die?”

  I thought about my white, bloated corpse floating in Puget Sound. At least I imagined I had a contented smile on my face. Fins and gills, too.

  “Probably because you’re a sick freak,” Annie answered.

  “You know, Annie, Ryan Dean doesn’t wear pajamas. So . . . where’s he going to sleep?” Seanie asked.

  “Probably on the couch,” she said.

  OH MY GOD! YES!

  I know . . . she didn’t say which couch, but I figured I was halfway home. Just hearing her answer, so comfortably and honestly, caused yet another of my chronic blood-and-attention-migration episodes, and I nearly jerked my hand skyward for another high five with Seanie, but controlled the urge.

  “Stop being such a pervert, Seanie,” JP said.

  “You’re just in denial that you weren’t thinking the same thing, even if it was about permavirgin Ryan Dean,” Seanie said.

  Permavirgin?

  The moment had come to strike swiftly. I kicked Seanie’s shin and brushed up against Annie’s thigh in the process. Two scores at once.

  “Speaking of perverts, what did you think about Casey Palmer’s MySite, Joey?” I asked. My voice cracked again. I am such a dork.

  “Pretty sick,” Joey said.

  “It’s nasty,” Annie added.

  “You’ve seen it too?” I said.

  I saw Seanie turning red. He also looked really pissed off at me. Oh, well, that’s what he gets.

  And Annie said, “You told me to check it out, West, so I did. And it’s gross. What do you expect from a football player, anyway? It’s probably the only way he can get someone to look at those small, pitiful things.”

  Despite Seanie’s tortured expression, I found myself suddenly thinking about the deeper meaning of the last statement Annie had made there.

  Yeah. I know. I’m such a loser.

  “Are you okay, Ryan Dean?” JP asked.

  “Huh?”

  “Dude, you looked like you were sleeping with your eyes open for the last five minutes,” he said. “Didn’t you hear anything I said?”

  “About what?”

  “Halloween.”

  “Oh,” I said, “what did you say?”

  And I thought, did I accidentally babble something about what I’d like to wear for Annie?

  “About the dance,” Seanie said.

  Halloween was coming up on the Thursday after our game.

  Whenever Halloween fell during the week, since we were so isolated, Pine Mountain would have a dinner dance. I hadn’t even thought about it, beyond my perverted fantasy about Annie, but it suddenly dawned on me that I couldn’t go. Pine Mountain’s rules did not allow O-Hall boys to attend such events.

  “Me and Annie are going together,” JP said.

  Okay. I really wanted to cuss. But I didn’t.

  I felt my eyes get big, and a little watery. I looked at Annie with a what-the-fuck-is-he-talking-about look on my face, but she just looked perfectly normal; perfectly, hotly, matter-of-fact Annie.

  I looked at JP. “What?”

  “Dude. You don’t want her going alone, do you?”

  I looked at Annie again.

  “No. You’re right.”

  I stood up. My head was spinning, and I felt like I was going to end up on my face. I needed to get out of there. Now I knew what it meant, all those times I noticed JP looking at her, watching me, too. I wanted to kick his fucking head in right there, so I just left. I went for the doors and stepped out into the cold afternoon.

  And I could hear her calling, in her I’m-singing-a-song voice, all relaxed and sweet, “West? West? What’s wrong now?” But I didn’t even turn around.

  Joey came after me.

  “Hey,” he said. “Are you okay?”

  “I cannot believe that crap, Joey.”

  “It’s just Annie and JP. It’s no big deal,” Joey said.

  I was practically crying, but there was no way I was going to cry in front of a gay guy, even if he was my friend.

  “I can’t believe he’d do that to me,” I said. “We’re supposed to be friends. Why would he do that?”

  “You know what, Ryan Dean? You’re a fucking hypocrite. So now what are you going to do?”

  And Joey turned around and walked back into the mess hall.

  * * *

  1Okay. If you haven’t read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, you should. Because it is fucking hilarious, and there’s no way you’d understand “Hello, Central” unless you read the book.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  RUGBY PRACTICE CAME. IT WOULD be our last hard practice before the game.

  I wanted to hit someone. I wanted to get hurt, too.

  After two hours o
f running drills, backline plays, and conditioning, we were all of us covered in sweat and grass and mud. It was the toughest practice we’d had all year, and Coach M told us he wasn’t going to let us play a game, which is how we usually ended, because he didn’t want to see us making any mistakes.

  Instead we ended with a resistance drill we called Sumo, a one-on-one drill where a ball carrier had to drive the ball in and touch it down to a very small circle in the grass against one tackler. And the drill would not stop until the ball got there, no matter what; so there have been times when I’ve actually seen guys collapse from exhaustion if they couldn’t get the ball in against a very tough tackler.

  After we’d gone about halfway through the team, Kevin ended up in the middle, as the tackler against Chas. It was an intense fight. They were equal in size and strength, and Kevin just kept taking Chas down, inches before he could touch the ball into the circle, taunting Chas and pissing him off.

  Finally, I think Kevin either got tired or felt sorry for Chas, because Chas slipped his arm through and got the ball down into the circle, diving onto his belly as he did and saying, “Fuck you, Kevin.”

  Then Kevin helped him up to his feet, and I looked at Coach M, who seemed to be pretending he didn’t hear Chas cuss.

  Now Chas was in the middle, and the way we play is that the guy in the middle gets to call out whoever he wants to have run against him.

  I already knew who I’d call when I got a chance.

  Chas looked around the circle of our dirty and tired teammates, and he bullet passed the ball to me and said, “Winger.”

  What a jerk.

  I smiled.

  Chas stood in front of the small circle in the grass and crouched in a hitting position, just staring at me. I took two steps toward him and stopped. He was so flat on his feet, I knew he wouldn’t be able to touch me. I head-faked, then cut back the other way and sailed around him, touching the ball down without Chas even wiping a finger’s width of sweat off me.

  The guys on the team laughed at Chas, murmuring “Betch,” and he turned to me and mouthed, “Fuck you,” in a whisper so Coach couldn’t hear.

  Now I had the ball. Normally, I’d call out Bags, one of our other wings, because we were about the same size, even though he was older, but I’d made my mind up ahead of time that if I got the ball, there was one guy who’d have to run against me.

  “Sartre,” I said.

  Everyone had to figure this would be no contest, that a guy who was built with JP’s strength and drive would be able to stay low and plow right through me, that I had to be insane for calling out our fullback.

  I heard a bunch of low-toned “oooh”s from the guys, and I threw the ball at JP, low, at his knees, so he had to bend down to catch it. It was a dick move; I’ll admit it. Because I took off as fast as the ball, and as soon as it was in his hands, I flew, shoulder first, into JP’s legs and twisted my body as I wrapped him up and drove him into the ground.

  “Fuck,” JP grunted as I hit him.

  Springing to my feet, I pushed myself up by putting my left hand firmly down into his nuts, and JP groaned and doubled up, letting go of the ball. When he tried to scoop the ball back in, I hacked it out of his hand, kicking his fingers as I did. I know this was dirty, but I was pissed off at JP and now, I’m sure, he knew it too; because he had to get up and chase after the ball and try to run it in again.

  JP broke through the circled boys who stood watching us. When he ran to get the ball I’d kicked, I followed right behind him. I noticed that Coach M was moving toward us on the outside of the Sumo ring. He looked amused.

  As soon as JP had his fingers on the ball, I took him down again, this time pulling his jersey up out of his shorts and dragging him with it until it was fully inside out and covering his head. We were about ten feet out of the ring now, and the guys opened a gateway for JP to run through so he could get to the score. If he could make it past me.

  JP stood up, leaving the ball at his feet as he tucked his jersey back into his shorts.

  There were streaks of grass and black mud on his face.

  “What the fuck, Ryan Dean?”

  “Watch your mouth, JP,” Coach M warned. He added, “Nice job, Eleven.”

  I don’t think I’d ever been so physically aggressive in my life, but all I could think about was JP and his smug I’m-taking-your-girlfriend-out announcement over lunch, and how Annie told me to get tough this year. So I was sick of this shit, of being treated like a little kid, especially by my best friends, and I wasn’t going to let it keep on happening to me.

  “Trick or treat, assbreath,” I said.

  I’m certain Coach M had to think about that one, and, since he didn’t say anything, he must have concurred with me that “assbreath” is not a true cuss word.

  JP smiled. “Oh. I get it. Okay, Winger. Happy Halloween to you, too.”

  Now it was clear to everyone. JP and I were in a full-scale fight, the only kind you could possibly get away with at PM.

  He ran at me again, but this time he slipped my tackle and I fell, managing only to wrap the crook of my arm tightly around his left ankle. I rolled, and JP fell on top of me, dropping his knees (on purpose, I’m sure, but it was totally fair for him to do it) right into my back. It felt like he broke my ribs, but as he went down JP dropped the ball, and his left cleat came right off his foot and into my hands.

  I got to my feet. I was sweating and in pain. I could feel my heart drumming against the bones inside my chest. I knew I was just about finished, that I couldn’t keep JP out of the circle much longer and he was getting really pissed off about it.

  I think what probably pushed him over the edge was that, as he was getting up again, I threw his cleat as far as I could down the pitch and some of the guys laughed.

  I could hear Seanie saying, “JP’s Winger’s bitch,” and the guys laughed even more.

  JP stood there, panting, the ball tucked into his arms. He looked to where I’d thrown his cleat, then he looked back at me, not even a hint of friendship in his expression, then he got low, put his head down, and wearing only one shoe, came at me full speed.

  When I hit him from the front, JP went straight into my tackle and landed squarely on top of me. He went down, too, but he brought his knee up into my face and I heard something pop—like stepping on a grape—when he hit my eye. I remember hearing the “ooh”s from the guys when I sat up, and as I tried to get to my feet I saw a blurry red image of JP scoring behind me, and the next thing I knew, Seanie and Joey were there, putting their hands against my shoulders and telling me not to stand up.

  Everyone began crowding around me.

  I looked down at my lap. I was covered in blood, could feel it pulsing down my face and onto my jersey, splattering my muddy legs.

  Coach M kneeled beside me. “Let’s have a look,” he said. I realized my left eye was closed for some reason, so I turned my head to look at him.

  “That’s going to need stitches,” he said.

  And then Seanie was right in my face, saying, “You can see his skull! You can see his skull!”

  Which is probably just about the last thing you want to hear at a time like that, even if Seanie did sound overjoyed by the discovery.

  I started to lie down, but they wouldn’t let me. The physio was there, wrapping gauze and tape like a headband tightly around my pulsing head, over my left eye. Then Seanie and Joey each took an arm and helped me to my feet.

  I was sore and dizzy, but I willed myself not to collapse.

  I remember Coach M telling them to put me in the cart and drive me down the hill to the doctor’s, and I saw JP standing in front of me, holding the cleat I’d thrown.

  “Hey. Sorry, Ryan Dean.”

  “Yeah. Whatever.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  IT TOOK EIGHTEEN STITCHES TO close the cut across my eyebrow, some inside the skin, and some outside. But the cut itself wasn’t that big. The doctor let me look at the stitches in a mirror when he was
finished, but I mostly paid attention to how horrible the rest of me looked. I was filthy and damp and covered with blackened crusty blood that clotted on my skin and in my hair.

  Seanie and Joey stayed there with me while the doctor stitched me up, but he wouldn’t let them stand too close when he was doing the actual sewing part. I didn’t say a word the whole time I was there; all I could do was think about JP and Annie and how mad I was.

  Then the doctor left the room, and his exceedingly five-out-of-five-possible-fruit-arrangements-on-your-head-in-a-Brazilian-dancer-kind-of-way-on-the-Ryan-Dean-West-Samba-mometer nurse came in and asked me to lay my head back on the pillow.

  “Let’s take off that bloody shirt,” she said, so sweetly. “Here. Raise your arms.”

  And—oh my God—she had a stainless-steel basin of warm damp towels with her!

  She pulled my jersey up out of my shorts and lifted it, so gently, over my head. When it was all the way off, I quickly looked around the room to see if my great-grandma and that run-over Chihuahua were present. I was convinced I had died and gone to a much, much better place.

  Thank God for compression shorts.

  “Boiiing!” Seanie said.

  I had to laugh. “Shut up.”

  You know, I sometimes disappoint myself. Because at that moment, if anyone had asked me about Annie, I know I would have said, “Who is that?”

  “Does it hurt?” she asked. She softly swiped a warm towel around my face and began rubbing my hair clean with a second wet towel.

  I tried to look extra sad. “Just a little.”

  I lied. I couldn’t feel it at all.

  “Aww,” she said.

  If I was a cat, I would have purred.

  If I was an alligator, I would have been hypnotized.

  But since I was only me, all I could do was lie there and contemplate everything perverted I had ever dreamed about since I was, like, seven years old.

  She dropped the first blood-rusted towels onto a tray by the bed and grabbed two more. She wiped off my neck and shoulders. She sponge bathed me where blood had dried on my chest and belly, right down to the waistband of my shorts. She even toweled off the thin hair in my armpits, which kind of tickled, but there was no way I was about to giggle. And I wanted to close my eyes, but I couldn’t stop staring at her extreme hotness. Then she gently wiped the blood from my knees and up my thighs, all the way to where my compression shorts ended, and at that point I got so flustered, I began hiccupping.