Winger

  At least, I figured, with five players instead of four, my odds were 5 percent better of not receiving the consequence. I grabbed a twenty from my desk and tossed it down to the Bank of Chas.

  “Here,” I said. “And screw you, Chas.”

  That’s not cussing, is it?

  Then Casey tried to be funny and said, “Is it just me, or is someone here about to get his ass kicked?”

  “Well, if you’re scared, Casey, you could go back to your room and get your pads on, you fucking human tampon,” Kevin said.

  That was cool. I would have high-fived Kevin, but I felt sorry for his arm.

  Casey glared at Kevin. I watched him. Joey was right about Casey Palmer. There was something cruel and cold in that kid’s eyes. Casey Palmer really did know what hate was.

  “Hey, come on,” Joey said. Damn, Joey always stuck up for everyone. Even tools like Casey Palmer.

  I sat, cross-legged, shirtless, and barefoot, with my sheet wrapped around my waist. I probably looked like Gandhi or something, so I put my hands together and said, “Namaste.”

  But Joey was the only one who got it. He laughed, while Kevin looked politely confused, and Casey looked like he was still pissed off about being called a human tampon, and Chas said, “Whatever, you fucking puss. Let’s have a drink.”

  God.

  I looked at Joey’s feet. He and Kevin were wearing our rugby socks again. But this time, Kevin pulled his sweats up and showed he had a full bottle of whiskey tucked inside the top of one of his socks, and a Maxine’s House of Spirits in Atlanta shot glass in the other. I rolled my eyes, but I still had to wonder if Maxine was hot, and if she lived in a haunted house, or was that just made up, and if it was a haunted house, were there any girl ghosts, and can a ghost be hot?

  Yeah . . . I just knew someone was going to die tonight.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

  I DECIDED THAT WHISKEY FROM A Maxine’s House of Spirits in Atlanta shot glass tasted a hell of a lot better than beer from a can, even if I did notice one of Kevin Cantrell’s leg hairs floating in it.

  Oh, well, drinking another guy’s leg hair can’t kill you, can it? But it did make me feel kind of like a zombie. I mean the leg-hair thing—you know, consuming the flesh of the living—not the whiskey, because that made me feel like the Wild Boy of Bainbridge Island.

  And then, too, I had to wonder what Gandhi would have thought about the whole leg-hair thing, him being a vegetarian and all.

  So, yeah, I did have a drink of whiskey.

  Well, to be honest, maybe two.

  I know . . . I’m such a loser.

  And I’m not going to feel sorry for myself or try to defend my stupidity, which had been elevated to a kind of Wild-Boy-Meets-Gandhi religion, but the whiskey did wash those sewing needles out of my throat, and I was so pissed off about JP and Annie hugging that I honestly believe I was trying to hurt myself.

  I had a feeling I wouldn’t be going to my classes in the morning anyway.

  Eventually, the Wild Boy had just about taken over my entire consciousness, and after two tips from Maxine’s shot glass, he was ready to fight Chas and Casey at the same time to settle anything left unfinished between us.

  But then the Gandhi part of me said I should just let them both beat the living crap out of me until they got tired of it.

  So it was a real ethical dilemma.

  Kevin and Joey looked quiet and steady, like they always did. I don’t think they drank as much as the other two guys while we played. Casey and Chas were pretty drunk. I thought it was a miracle that they didn’t start yelling and breaking things and wake up Mr. Farrow.

  After about half an hour, Chas and I were both losing badly, so it became a kind of race between us to see which of us would lose out first and get the consequence, even if the Wild Boy of Bainbridge Island kind of hoped it had something to do with running around in the woods naked in the rain and killing something with my bare hands and eating it raw.

  That’s when Chas said to Casey, “So what’s up with all that shit on your MySite? Now you’ve got a picture of his nutsack . . .”

  Chas hitchhiked his thumb at me.

  Oh, great. Now everyone thinks they’re my balls.

  “. . . with a Band-Aid on it . . .”

  Of course.

  Sean Russell Flaherty’s creative touch, no doubt.

  “. . . and all this shit about how much you love Ryan Dean West, and there must be about fifty pictures of Pussboy on it too.”

  It kind of choked me up that Chas actually knew my name, and also that Seanie had that many pictures of me.

  I hoped they were good ones.

  “I don’t know who the fuck has been doing that,” Casey said.

  I looked at Joey.

  “You don’t really love me, do you, Palmer?” I said.

  “Do you want me to kill you now or later?” he answered.

  Chas bumped Kevin’s good arm and said, “Give me another shot, Maxine.”

  Chas downed the drink in one swallow and said, “Damn that stuff tastes terrible.”

  Okay, that was the precise moment the Wild Boy took complete charge of my sensibilities as the pacifist was sleeping off a binge.

  I said, “You should try it with a splash of Gatorade in it, Chas.”

  Well, to be honest, I actually did say “Gatorade,” but I was thinking “warm-four-day-old-fermented-Pussboy-piss.”

  He said, “You have Gatorade?”

  “Only just a little.”

  “I’ll try it. Thanks, Pusswing.”

  Wow. It was just like Christmas. I got another new hate-name from Chas and I was about to watch him drink my pee. What could be better than that?

  Dear Pussboy Ryan Dean:

  Note to self: After I watch Chas drink my piss, it would be a good time to fully commit to NEVER kissing Megan Renshaw again.

  Ever.

  Kevin began pouring.

  “Leave some room on the arrp,” I said.

  “What?” Kevin asked.

  I realized I had grunted.

  Wild Boy had so taken control that I was losing the ability to express myself with the conventions of spoken language.

  “Room. Leave some.”

  I took the shot glass from Kevin and chimped up to my bunk. I dug around for my Ryan Dean West Emergency Gatorade Bottle Nighttime Urinal and carefully uncapped it.

  In the name of all things holy that piss stunk! I could almost feel the fetid gas cloud escaping from the mouth of the bottle and wafting like a moist cadaver’s hand across my face. A quick splash, a speedy recapping, and I was back down on the floor, sweating in my loincloth, presenting Chas with his drink.

  “Gunga Din to the rescue,” I said.

  “Does anyone ever know what the fuck you’re talking about?” Chas said, and took the glass from me.

  I watched.

  My sheet came unraveled and fell to my feet.

  I sat.

  Chas drank.

  Oh, yeah. Take that, Betch.

  He squinted, cocked his head, smacked his lips, and said, “I think I like it better straight.”

  I looked at Joey. His mouth hung open. He looked like he was witnessing a beheading, or something even grosser, like a beheading where the victim is forced to drink some other guy’s four-day-old fermented piss first. Because it dawned on me that I had told Joey about the Gatorade bottle when we were on the bus coming back to Pine Mountain from Salem.

  “Fuck,” Joey said. And I know he would have high-fived me, but he was too deeply repulsed, and he was probably afraid I had some piss on my hand, besides.

  “What?” Chas asked.

  “Nothing.”

  And then Christmas came twice in the same day, because Casey said, “Let me try some with Gatorade in it too.”

  And that’s when Joey honestly looked at me like I was a depraved serial killer, or I was going to die or something, but I didn’t care because I was the grunting, piss-in-your-drink Wild Boy of Bainbridge Isla
nd.

  I played it unintelligibly cool.

  “I only have enough Grrrrade left for one shot. I was going to have it—me.”

  I had become an ape.

  Looking back, I am actually fairly surprised I didn’t begin wildly sprouting hair from the vast acreage of hairlessness on my skinny-bitch-ass body.

  “Fuck you, then,” Casey said. “I’m going all-in.”

  I hadn’t really been paying attention to the game, what with my jubilation over feeding Chas some piss, but I figured I had a pair of fives, which in my two-shots-in-a-152-pound-sack-of-crap perspective looked pretty good. I called. And I also said, “Well, okay, I’ll give it to you, Palmer.”

  I monkeyed back up to my pissatorium and splashed a heavier dose for Casey.

  I heard Chas say, “I call,” which meant that both of us had our entire stack in play and one of us was definitely going to lose out and get the consequence, but not before that dickhead who busted my nose got his.

  I climbed down and handed Casey his drink.

  “No more Gatorade. Sorry, guys,” I said. “Casey got the last.”

  I was on top of the world as I watched Casey down that shot.

  Then he said, “That’s pretty good.”

  And as he finished his shot of piss-whiskey with a satisfied piss-glistening smirk on his lips, the final card was turned. Casey busted us; and both Chas and I lost out at exactly the same moment.

  PART THREE:

  the consequence

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

  THAT NIGHT BECAME THE STUFF of legends.

  I didn’t mind losing, because I had already kicked ass on a monumental level.

  It was just like T-ball: Everyone got a trophy that night.

  The adrenaline surge that resulted from watching Chas and Casey both fall victim to my depravity was nearly enough to counteract the effects of the whiskey, and even though I could tell I was feverish and sick, I felt like I could take on the world.

  I felt like hunting down JP Tureau and crushing him. Slowly and painfully.

  And I was happy that the whiskey bottle was empty. Joey knew better than to take another drink from the Maxine’s House of Spirits in Atlanta shot glass-slash-bedpan, but Kevin had no idea what was going on, so it did present me with a kind of moral dilemma that I happily avoided, because even the Wild Boy of Bainbridge Island didn’t want to see an okay guy like Kevin Cantrell get piss in his mouth the same week he’d been stabbed by a punk in a street brawl.

  By one in the morning, the game was over, and Casey won the hundred dollars in the bank. But in his victory, there was an understated loss that only Joey and I knew about (at least right at that moment), and history was made because it was the first time ever that two guys lost out at the same time, which meant Chas and I were going to suffer the crucible of the consequence together.

  This was a sobering thought, too, because the Wild Boy part of me began imagining the most horrible and disgusting things that Casey would dream up involving me and a guy I hated as much as Chas.

  But Casey was such an unskilled and unimaginative rookie at doling out consequences, and what he came up with hardly seemed that humiliating to me, although it did sound pretty risky.

  The flashlight turned off. The only light in our room came from the gray squares cut by the moon on the floor through our windowpanes. Casey tossed the five twenties down on the cracked linoleum by my legs.

  “Halloween costumes,” he said.

  But I was already dressed up as Gandhi-slash-Wild Boy of Bainbridge Island, I thought. Well, I would be, once I found where my sheet had gone off to in the dark.

  “What?” Chas said.

  “I want you guys to go into town and get Halloween costumes for all of us. Before school starts in the morning,” Casey explained.

  I gathered up the money. “Fun!” I said.

  Yeah, I was pretty damned stupid. “But it’s twenty-five miles. That’s a long walk,” I said. “Can I at least put some clothes on first?”

  “You’re an idiot,” Casey said.

  Oh yeah? You drank my piss.

  I laughed out loud, then Joey cupped his hand over my mouth and whispered, “Shut the fuck up, Ryan Dean.”

  “Chas has a car. You have to sneak out and take his car. I don’t care where you get them from, but you have to come back with costumes for all of us before first class in the morning,” Casey said.

  “You can’t make him do that,” Joey said. “Chas is too drunk to drive. They’ll get killed.”

  Aww, Joey. Always sticking up for idiots like Chas and losers like me.

  “I’m not too drunk,” Chas said. (Idiot.)

  I knew I should have fought to stay in bed that night. I dug some sweatpants out from the closet and pulled them on. They had holes in them. (Loser.)

  “I’m driving, then,” Joey said. He was sober. “There’s nothing that says I can’t go along to keep them out of trouble.”

  “And they better be good ones, too,” Casey said.

  I opened the window. There was no way I was going to try to sneak downstairs with Mrs. Singer on that floor. I sensed her Ryan-Dean-West radar was going strong.

  I put one leg out over the windowsill, and Chas said, “Hey, Pussboy. Don’t you think you should get on some socks and shoes, and possibly a shirt?”

  Wow. All Wild Boy had on were sweatpants with holes in the crotch. No wonder I was covered in goose bumps.

  “Oh.”

  “You are the most fucked-up useless drunk I’ve ever known,” Chas said.

  Whatever, piss-breath.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

  WE SCRAMBLED OUT INTO THE dark and cold.

  Joey led the way along the trail by the lake to the mess hall, and then we turned up the path that cut between the dorms.

  I wore a black hooded sweatshirt that covered my head against the cold, but my hole-pocked, ventilated sweatpants had become too short for me and rode up past my ankles, which made my socks look like bouncing, glow-in-the-dark . . . uh . . . socks. Or something.

  When we passed the dorms, I looked up at the windows on the girls’ building.

  “Aww,” I whispered, “Annie’s up there. And Megan. And Isabel. And . . .”

  Yeah, I was going to list every girl I could possibly remember, hundreds of them, all so incredibly hot in their own ways. I pictured them all dressed differently in special sleeping outfits, at a big massive slumber party where the Wild Boy of Bainbridge Island was the only guest present equipped with a set of XYs, but then Chas said, “Shut up, dipshit.”

  We made it to Chas’s car.

  Luckily, nobody paid much attention to cars coming or leaving on a Sunday night, and technically, we wouldn’t be considered AWOL until tomorrow morning, anyway.

  But when Joey clicked the doors unlocked, Chas looked across at me and said, “Leave the dipshit here, Joey. We can take care of this by ourselves.”

  And I thought that was a pretty goddamned good idea, considering Chas thought it up.

  But then Joey said, “I’m not going if Ryan Dean doesn’t go.”

  Crap.

  Chas said, “Crap.”

  For the briefest of moments, Chas Becker and I were of like mind.

  I opened the back door and crawled in. At least I could stretch my legs out across the seat. I kicked my shoes off. I wished Annie could come. That would be awesome.

  Just when we were about five miles away from the lights of Bannock, which was the only town close to Pine Mountain, and I was almost falling asleep, reclining sideways across the seats with my back against the car door, Chas reached over from the front and grabbed my leg so hard, he tore the inseam on my pants open all the way from my crotch to my knee.

  He said, “Now you’re going to tell me everything about what’s going on with you and Megan.”

  He must have been stewing about it for days now.

  And I can’t say I didn’t know this was coming.

  I’d seen how Megan and Chas looked,
getting off that plane. I witnessed firsthand Megan’s subtle teases about me in the backseat of that same car as we all drove back to school from our weekends. And, honestly, my back was still bruised from when Chas slammed me up against the soap dispenser the day he caught Megan rubbing her hand on my leg in the mess hall.

  But knowing all that still didn’t lessen the adrenaline jolt of fear that shot through me.

  No matter how smart I thought I could be at a moment like that, I couldn’t think of anything to tell him except the truth.

  Joey joked, “Don’t make me pull this car over, boys.”

  Chas wasn’t loosening his grip.

  He wasn’t smiling, either.

  I swallowed. The pins came back to my throat. My voice cracked as I said, “What do you want to know, Chas?”

  Joey tried changing the subject. “I’m going to stop and get some coffee at the gas station here. You guys want some?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “And I need to pee.”

  “Me too,” Joey said.

  Chas let go of my leg. Joey pulled the car in to a minimart gas station. It was really quiet when he turned off the engine.

  Nobody moved.

  Awkward.

  “We’ve kind of been fooling around,” I said.

  There. I said it. Finally.

  I noticed that Joey had been just about to shoulder his door open, but he froze as soon as he heard my confession.

  It echoed like an empty church in that car. I don’t think anyone so much as took a breath after I said it. And I know Joey was thinking about what he should do if Chas jumped into the backseat and began murdering me on the spot.

  “We just kissed a few times. That’s all.”

  Well, actually, it was exactly twenty-four times, but I felt justified in using the generic “few,” realizing that any number greater than “never” was as good as saying “twenty-four.”

  I could see Joey’s eyes in the rearview mirror.