Nice.
She’d sent the size ten-and-a-half Nikes that I asked for, and in the box with them, she’d added a can of shaving cream, a razor, and some Chanel aftershave cologne. I guess she had a mother’s intuition about that one whisker on my chin. I found an index card in there too. On one side, my mother wrote:
Ryan Dean,
I hope I recognize you next time I see you.
I love you and miss you.
—Mom
And on the other side, in my dad’s writing:
Son,
You’re growing up, my man. I know you’ve seen me do this enough times that you won’t cut the shit out of your face (Mom would be pissed at me for not sending you a book called “How to Shave for the First Time.”) Ha ha.
Love,
Dad
Yeah, my dad talked like that.
So I showered, and I actually shaved, too, and put on some of that cologne. I gelled my hair. Oh, I also switched out of the Pokémon briefs, and I did realize there was a lot to be said for having that “growing room” down there, like Doctor No-gloves told me, but I still intended to wear them on Halloween under my Wild Boy of Bainbridge Island loincloth, growing room or not, just to keep things, uh . . . put away.
I put on those brand new Nikes and my nicest black and blue sideline warm-up suit from my rugby team gear, then headed downstairs before any of the other guys even made it back from practice.
But, in the stairwell, I ran right into something even worse than Doctor No-gloves’s nutsack exam and puberty pep talk, if there could be such a degree of miserableness.
Just as I opened the door from the boys’ floor, I stumbled onto Mr. Farrow and that freakishly unhot witch from downstairs, Mrs. Singer.
Together.
Standing at the landing on the tenantless girls’ floor. They were kissing, and it wasn’t one of those innocent oh-hello-you-frosty-and-cadaverous-old-hag-from-downstairs-so-nice-to-see-you-this-afternoon pecks on the cheek, either. It was all tonguing and moaning and noisy, and Mrs. Singer was wearing only a bathrobe, and it burns my eyes even now to admit that I noticed it, but she didn’t have anything on underneath it; and it sears the very depth of my soul to confess it, but I knew they must have just had sex.
Or something.
I think I screamed.
Like Ned.
Okay, I’ll be honest. I didn’t scream, but, for whatever reason, they both instantly radared in on me standing above them.
“Oh. Uh . . . Ryan Dean!” Mr. Farrow said, pushing himself away from the creature and nonchalantly combing a trembling hand through his wild, just-had-sex hair. I noticed the fresh shine of saliva in the corner of his mouth, and his glasses were crooked.
Apparently, they weren’t in on the doctor’s-appointment-early-return-day for Ryan Dean West, and I’m going to get a little sidetracked here, but I was always totally convinced that Mr. Farrow was completely gay.
Go figure.
I guess he was attracted to corpses and decay and not just to boys.
Then Mrs. Singer looked up at me, but I was too crafty for her. I kept my eyes fixed straight down on the floor until she left and I heard the door close behind her. So it was just me and Mr. Farrow.
Like, superawkward.
I kind of wanted to laugh. I wondered if he had a mom who’d sent him a “How to Have Sex the First Time with a Cadaverous Hag from Hell” leaflet.
Farrow began coming up the stairs toward me.
There was no way out.
“Did you skip practice today, Ryan Dean?” he asked. And he moved and talked all calm and slow, like a murderer. A murderer who had just had sex with a cadaverous hag from hell.
I pointed to my eye.
“I was at the doctor’s. Got my stitches out today.”
“Oh.” He leaned close. He didn’t need to—he could see perfectly fine from where he was. He smelled like sweat. “It looks good.”
“Thanks. Well. Uh. Bye.”
I started to slip past him.
“Ryan Dean.”
I froze.
“Please don’t say anything about this.”
What a creepy child-molester thing to say.
Then Mr. Farrow said, “I can transfer you back into the boys’ dorm at the ten-week grade report. In two weeks.”
I didn’t say anything. The door off the mudroom opened, and Joey and Kevin came in.
“Hey,” Joey said. He stopped and looked at me, then he high-fived me. Not a record breaker, but a solid one nevertheless. “Nice job on the stitches. And, damn, Ryan Dean. You look about two inches taller than yesterday.” And he laughed. “My ears are still ringing from Screaming Ned.”
“That was almost the worst thing I ever had to put up with,” I said.
But, I thought, not even close to what I just saw about a minute ago.
“Hey,” Kevin said. He had a rugby ball tucked inside his sling. “Nice hair, Winger. Let me guess . . . Annie?” And Kevin leaned close to my face and sniffed, then said, “Oooooh.”
I said, “Yeah,” and they kept going upstairs.
I lowered my voice. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Farrow. Say something about what?”
Then Mr. Farrow nodded like we were striking some kind of deal, but we weren’t. Because I thought about it right then. Yeah, I didn’t like Chas Becker. I hated him, in fact. And some of the other guys in O-Hall were real dipshits, and the communal bathroom was always nasty and crowded, and bunk beds are for prisons.
But I knew I couldn’t go back to the boys’ dorm.
“Please don’t transfer me out of O-Hall, Mr. Farrow,” I said. “I’d get in too much trouble. If I went back to my old room, I’d be kicked out of school the first day, and I’m not going to say why, but you just have to believe me. Please?”
And, yeah, I was doing the think-about-peeing face on him.
“Well, then,” he said.
The door opened. Casey and Chas came up the stairs toward us. Chas was saying something to Casey about how “she’s been crying all goddamn day long,” but I avoided looking at them.
I knew what he was talking about, anyway.
Still, I had to wonder what Chas would say if he knew he was pouring his lovesick heart out to a gay guy with the serious hots for the fly half on our rugby team.
I passed them on my way down. And when I glanced back over my shoulder, Mr. Farrow was gone and the stairwell was empty.
At the bottom, I saw Mrs. Singer watching me through the window on the door to the girls’ floor. Then she turned away and the window was empty. It actually made me shudder. I stopped just before going outside and pressed myself up against the girls’ door.
“My name is Ryan Dean West,” I said.
My voice cracked. Loser. “I’m the boy you caught down here in the bathroom that first night before school started. I just wanted to say I’m sorry and ask you to please stop doing all these horrible things to me.”
The door cracked open, and I could see just a bit of her so-unhot-she-looked-like-Screaming-Ned-after-a-close-shave face. Mrs. Singer said, “I’m going to cook you and eat you on Halloween, Ryan Dean West.”
Then I ran.
Okay. To be perfectly honest, she probably said, “Nice to meet you, Ryan Dean West,” but I did my duty by apologizing, and I wasn’t about to stick around and have my soul sucked, receive a cascade of ice shards pouring through the fly of my boxers, come down with diarrhea, suffer a spontaneous bloody nose, or have her lay another ungodly curse on my as-yet-untested reproductive appliances, either.
CHAPTER EIGHTY
ANNIE WAS ALREADY AT STONEHENGE when I got there.
She walked along the wishing-circle path, and I stood back at the edge of the trees and watched her.
“The nurse said for me to tell you that I did not lose the sexy. She said there’s way too much of it going on there.”
She looked at me and laughed.
“Let me see it,” she said.
Hmmm
. . . another Ryan Dean West would have undoubtedly made a perverted comeback to that, but, somehow, I just felt different standing there.
She walked over to me, and I could see her eyeing me up and down, but I watched her face. I leaned close.
Game on, Annie.
She put her thumb on the small scar.
“Well?” I asked.
“Okay,” she said. “You look good dressed like that, and the way you fixed your hair, Ryan Dean. You look taller.”
That’s when I realized that Annie had completely stopped calling me West. I thought it meant something. And I liked it.
“You’re the second person to say that, Annie. I think I’m going to have to come over and have you and your mom fix my pants again.”
“Do you want to come back?”
“Oh my God, Annie, I’d leave right now if I could. I’d start walking.”
Annie said, “Maybe you can come for the four days over Thanksgiving.”
“That would be awesome,” I said, even though I knew it would make my mom and dad unhappy that I wasn’t going home. I held her hand, and we walked under the trees. It was beginning to rain again, but none of it fell through.
“What were you wishing for?” I said.
“Not going to tell you.”
“Okay.” I inhaled. On the walk out here, I’d thought about what I needed to tell her. It was important, and I knew I had to stop acting like such a . . . uh, Wild Boy.
“I need to tell you something, though, Annie. Me and JP got in another fight today. That’s why his eye was black. I punched him. I’m sorry. I’m not going to do it again. I don’t want you to get mad about it, so I told you before you heard it from Seanie or someone else. I don’t know why I’ve been acting so stupid.”
Annie sighed. “Ryan Dean.”
“I know. I’m sorry. And I decided I can’t be upset about you going to the dance with him either. I’m just going to have to forget about it. I’m really sorry, Annie. Will you forgive me for being such a jerk?”
She stood right in front of me, so close we were practically touching. We just looked at each other’s eyes, and I knew we were going to kiss, but she pulled back and said, “I can’t be in love with you, Ryan Dean.”
Yeah. I heard that before. And this time I wasn’t going to be a baby about it and run away. So I said, “Yes you can be.”
For the longest time, it seemed like there was no sound at all except the rain dripping through the trees above us.
I said it again. “Yes, you can be, Annie.”
And she said, “I know.”
“I know, too, because I’ve never said this to anyone, but I am so in love with you, Annie, that I almost can’t stand it, and it’s making me insane.”
Then I don’t know if she laughed or was going to cry, but she kind of shook and she put both of her hands on my shoulders and said, “I do love you, Ryan Dean,” and then we just about collapsed into each other’s arms.
I felt so relieved. I closed my eyes and inhaled, and we kissed like we did that other day in the sawmill, and neither of us would let go. It was better than every wish I ever made coming true all at the same time.
“You smell nice,” she said.
“I shaved.”
She laughed. “Why?”
“Hey, now.”
We walked through the forest, heading back toward O-Hall along the trail by the lake. It was getting late, and I needed to change back into my dress clothes or they wouldn’t let me have dinner.
I didn’t care, though. Everything was perfect, and I just wanted to sleep.
But it was so exciting to think about sitting down to dinner with Annie for the first time as a real, honest-to-God couple. I wanted so badly to be alone with her.
Annie said, “Oh my God. I am in love with a fourteen-year-old boy.”
“Get over it, old hag. When you’re ninety, I’ll be eighty-eight.”
CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE
EVERYTHING IN MY UNIVERSE CHANGED that day.
Annie left me at O-Hall. We promised to meet for dinner in half an hour. I watched her walk away, and after every few steps, she’d turn around and see me following her with my eyes, and she’d say, “Go on, Ryan Dean. Get dressed.”
But I watched her until I couldn’t see her anymore.
I went inside. I could hear the guys upstairs noisily getting ready to storm the mess hall. I paused beside the girls’ door and looked through the window to see if Mrs. Singer was there. For some stupid reason, I wanted to say thanks to her, like she’d lifted the curse or cast some love spell over Annie.
I know. That was dumb.
I pushed the door open and stuck my head inside. The hallway was dark, but I saw Mrs. Singer standing at the far end, just staring at me. She looked like Mary Todd Lincoln . . . and not just because she had the big-black-dress thing going on; I mean, she really looked like someone dug up the corpse of Mary Todd Lincoln fifteen minutes ago and propped her up at the end of the O-Hall girls’ floor hallway.
I said, “Thanks,” and slipped back upstairs.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO
SEANIE AND JP DIDN’T SIT near us at dinner that night.
It didn’t matter to me.
Annie and I played “feet” under the table. We hardly ate anything at all because we just stared at each other, and I could tell it started to annoy Joey and Isabel that we were so focused in our own thing—it was like the rest of our friends didn’t exist.
The next couple of days were kind of like that: Mine and Annie’s universe got smaller and quieter.
Seanie didn’t say much to me.
I know he was mad about my starting that fight with JP at the lake, and how Seanie had to take some punches himself when he got between us. JP had long since stopped talking to me, and Megan just moped around like she was so depressed.
Yeah, she didn’t talk to me either.
Oh. And neither did Chas—ever since last Sunday night and the consequence and Screaming Ned, and me making Chas cry when I confessed that Megan and I had been fooling around.
He didn’t even put forth the effort to call me Pussboy or Asswing anymore.
Nothing.
Joey told me that Megan had broken up with Chas and it was all because of me. So, if I threw in the fact that I’d caught Mrs. Singer and Mr. Farrow practically copulating right there in the O-Hall stairwell, I figured all I’d need to do was publicly out Casey Palmer, then the entire state of Oregon, minus Annie Altman and Joey Cosentino, would want me dead.
I was on thin ice, but I didn’t care.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE
THE DAY BEFORE HALLOWEEN, WE had another rugby match.
We played at our own field, on Wednesday after classes, so Annie got to be there.
Our opposition was a club team from Southern California called the Pumas that had come up on tour to play against teams in the Pacific Northwest, where everyone knows we play a tougher game. None of us really liked playing against club teams; they were notorious cheaters as far as things like player eligibility were concerned, and most club coaches’ only priority was winning, so they’d do anything unethical to get there. Coach M knew it too, but it was preseason and we all wanted to play anyway.
Besides that, Southern California? Give me a break. Saying you play rugby in Southern California is like saying you surf in Colorado.
Dude.
But they were tough, and that’s probably because, to me, it looked like they had some players who had been out of high school for a couple years and were married and had mortgages and tattoos and children of their own.
We ended up beating them pretty badly, though, 42–12, and the coolest thing was that Coach M said he wasn’t going to let anyone wear Kevin’s number for the rest of the season.
Kevin stayed on the sidelines wearing the number four jersey with his arm in a sling. That’s probably what pumped us up the most for the game, even though I knew half the guys on the team didn’t want to talk to me, much less give me
the ball.
Joey did, though, and I scored one time. But Joey was on fire that day and put in three tries by himself.
The boys on the other team got pretty hotheaded, and a couple times it looked like they were going to try to start fighting, but we kept it under control and had a good game of it. Their coach ended up in such a bad mood, though, that he made them leave the social early and get back on their bus to head up to Seattle. That was fine with me, because we all got out of there early enough to give me hope that I’d catch up to Annie in the mess hall before we had to check in at our dorms.
It was dark, and I was afraid she’d already gone home for the night, so as soon as I could, I took off running for the mess hall. And JP was right behind me.
“Hey, fucker,” JP said.
I knew he was there.
I stopped and turned around. It was so quiet and cold. There was no one else around, and I could just barely hear the sounds of the students who were still having dinner in the mess hall.
“I’m not going to fight about it anymore, JP,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Screw you, Ryan Dean.”
“Look. I didn’t mean it when I said I was sorry the other day. But I do now. I’m sorry, JP.”
JP didn’t answer.
“We might as well just find some other way to waste our time, because, trust me, it’s over,” I said.
“Fuck you.”
This would have been a perfect time and place for him to absolutely kill me, and I knew it.
Trouble is, I’m pretty sure he did, too.
Oh, well, I thought, I’d gotten my shots in on JP enough in the past week, and I was way ahead on the scorecard. Worst of all, I knew I deserved it.
“You want to punch me, JP?” I put my hands out. “Go ahead. I told you I’m not going to fight you anymore, and I meant it.”