Ouch. Thinking about that made my eyes water even more.
“They gave us permission at O-Hall to come out tonight,” I said. “Because we’ve been very good, Mr. Wellins. You could call over and ask Mrs. Singer, and she’ll confirm it.”
Mr. Wellins looked like a judge weighing character-reference testimony.
I was shivering.
I said, “Oh. And I have my final essay for you on In Our Time.”
And I knew this was a kill shot: “I wrote it on the sexual tension between Nick and Bill in ‘The Three-Day Blow.’ ”
Yeah, I know. Too easy with a title like that, but I wasn’t going to go there.
I continued, “I mean, how they get drunk together, alone in the cabin, and Nick puts on a pair of Bill’s socks, and Bill tells Nick how he’s glad Nick didn’t get married. Very thick with the taboo of forbidden, unacted upon, and unrequited homosexual curiosity, I think.”
I swear to God, Mr. Wellins looked so emotionally moved, I thought he was going to start sobbing. “You are brilliant, Ryan Dean.”
I just made that shit up on the spot because of how much I had to pee, and how much I wanted in to the dance.
Ugh. Now I knew I’d have to go hammer out that crappy essay before Lit class.
Sorry, Hemingway, but this old guy murdered some of your best chops for a generation of students.
Mr. Wellins said, “Well, it does sound to me as though you boys have been applying yourselves. Have a good time at the dance, Ryan Dean, and I’ll look forward to seeing that essay tomorrow.”
Crap.
Forbidden and unacted upon.
Sometimes, I surprise myself by how much of an idiot I am.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-SEVEN
IN THE DOOR, HIGH FIVES from joey and Kevin for playing Mr. Wellins like one of those balsa-wood-paddle-and-a-red-bouncy-ball-attached-on-a-long-rubber-band-with-a-staple-in-it-that-I-don’t-know-what-the-hell-they’re-called-things, and . . .
First stop: urinals.
So, I’m standing there, thinking, Hey, wearing a miniskirt really does save a lot of time and trouble when a guy needs to pee. Convenient.
When I came out into the dance hall, I found Joey and Kevin, but Casey and Chas were gone, thankfully.
It was hard to recognize anyone else, because I didn’t know what kids were wearing what costumes, and the place was so dark and crowded. I decided I’d have to do my duty and fully check out every single girl there—and, potentially, every cross-dresser—until I found Annie.
I swung past Joey and Kevin and said, “I’m going to look for Annie. I’ll see you guys later. Whatever you do, try to ditch Palmer for good.”
Joey smiled and nodded.
Kevin leaned to my ear and said, “Oh, I don’t think Palmer’s going to be around us after what Joey just said to him.”
I looked at Joey. “What did you say to him?”
“Nothing,” Joey said. “Don’t worry about it. Go find your girlfriend.”
Later, I found out from Kevin that Joey told Casey Palmer straight out that there were plenty of gay kids at Pine Mountain and that Casey needed to stop hitting on him, and that Joey would be happy to introduce him to some of the other gay boys around school.
He said it loud enough that people heard it. Chas Becker, in his permanent state of cluelessness, didn’t realize that Joey Cosentino was not joking.
A girl from the soccer team, wearing a grass skirt, glided up to Kevin and started cooing over his stab wound. Yeah—it was the whole stitches thing with some of these girls. Next thing I saw, Kevin had his hook looped into the top of her skirt and she was leading him out to dance.
The dance floor was crowded with kids dressed in every imaginable disguise. A few of them wore school clothes, which, I guess, was a kind of costume in itself, because there wasn’t much sense in bothering to pack a Halloween costume for incarceration at Pine Mountain. Still, I was glad for mine, especially when I’d get the incidental brush-up from a girl. It was by far the best costume there.
The air in the room was thick and humid.
I waded out through the pulsing, vibrating crowd.
I saw Seanie sitting down on a giant L-shaped sofa next to Isabel. They were drinking sodas. I knew I’d never find him dancing, he was so uptight about stuff like that. And, of course, Seanie was dressed like a flasher, wearing a long yellow raincoat with what looked like nothing on underneath it. Isabel seemed more than a little uncomfortable next to him and kept an obvious gap between them open on the couch. I figured Seanie had already played the want-to-see-what-I-have-on-underneath-my-raincoat game with her.
Isabel was dressed like an octopus or something. I didn’t really get it, but she had a lot of arms. Oh, and a moustache, which I still found kind of hot.
“Hey, Seanie.”
Seanie practically jumped when he saw me.
“Hi, Ryan Dean,” Isabel said. “Awesome costume.”
“Thanks.” I gave her a little flex and showed some thigh.
“How’d you get in?” Seanie asked.
“They let us out of O-Hall. Hey, can I sit down for a second?”
Seanie, always uncoordinated with things like that, scooted over to give me space between him and his date.
Whatever.
I sat.
One of Isabel’s stuffed arms brushed up along my bare leg.
I looked at her, then at Seanie.
“I came to apologize to you again, Seanie. And I’m going to apologize to JP, too. I know we’re probably never going to be friends again, not like we were, but I’m sorry for starting a fight and then getting you caught in the middle of it.”
I held out my hand, and Seanie shook it. I could tell by the way he squeezed that everything was okay with him. Guys can just tell things about other guys with the pressure of a handshake. Too tight, and you’re a competitive asshole. Not tight enough, or cold and moist, you probably spend a lot of time looking at porn sites.
It’s a science.
“We’ll always be friends, Ryan Dean.”
“Thanks.”
Then Seanie said, “Why do I suddenly feel like we should go back to your place and make out or something?”
Isabel coughed.
She didn’t get Seanie at all. I don’t even know why she came out with him in the first place.
Seanie said, “JP isn’t here. He didn’t come. He stayed at home, pouting.”
“That sucks,” I said. “ ’Cause of me. Is Annie here?”
Seanie looked around. “She’s here somewhere. She’s kind of pouty too.”
“What’s she dressed like?”
“A doctor.”
Oh. Score.
“Hi, Ryan Dean!” Mrs. Kurtz appeared before us, obviously surprised to see an O-Hall boy at the dance.
Then she leaned over to Seanie and whispered something to him, which I thought was pretty weird, and he laughed.
Mrs. Kurtz straightened up and gave me a wink, then disappeared into the crowd of dancers.
“What was that all about?” I said.
Seanie said, “She told me to tell you, Pokémon, if you’re going to sit on the couch, maybe you should cross your legs or something.” Then Seanie leaned forward, looked up my loincloth, and said, “Yep. You want to know how come I know you’re gay?”
“Because guys who check out other guys’ balls just kind of do know that stuff?” I guessed.
Yeah, it was back to normal with Seanie, but I still didn’t cross my legs.
Whatever.
What guy crosses his legs?
I saw Megan in the crowd, dancing by herself, or, at least it looked like she was dancing by herself. She could have been dancing with a hundred people, for all I knew.
And, damn, she looked good. She was dressed like a stewardess, complete with that little angel-food-cake-shaped hat, pinned at a tilt in her fluttering hair. She had been watching me.
I stood up.
“We’ll have to make out later, Seanie,” I said
. “I’m going to cruise around and try to find Annie.”
Of course, that wasn’t completely a lie. Well . . . the making-out part was.
Seanie said, “It’s a date.”
So I moved out into the dancers, watching Megan, who was looking right at me.
I reasoned that Halloween was going to turn out to be some kind of a Ryan Dean West twelve-step-and-apologize-to-everyone-whose-feelings-I’ve-hurt night.
Seanie made one down.
Now I had the rest of the fucking planet to go.
Then Mrs. Kurtz hip-bumped me, the way people did when they danced at discos in the seventies.
Two things: (1) Are you kidding me? And (2) That was incredibly hot. Plus, she had just been looking at my underwear, which made me feel warm and . . . um . . . kind of springy.
So I leaned closer to her ear, since the music was blaring, and I said, “I apologize for how I was sitting over there, Mrs. Kurtz. It was rude. I’ve never worn a skirt before.”
And she high-fived me and said, “Ryan Dean, you are adorable.”
Eh . . . the jury’s still out on that word.
I really don’t think I like it much.
Mrs. Kurtz danced off, and I snaked through the flailing bodies.
But, there. I had apologized to two people now, and I hadn’t even been out of the urinal for ten minutes.
Megan wasn’t going to be as easy as those first two, though, because, deep down, I still knew she could get anything she wanted from me.
Anything.
And that was pretty scary.
I got right next to her. It was so hot there in the middle of all those people. And I mean hot, not necessarily “hot,” even though Megan, the naughty stewardess, scored an unarguable five out of five depressurization-air-masks-plus-a-bonus-chicken-potpie on the Ryan Dean West Frequent-Flyer-in-Flight emergency survey.
That’s, like, off-the-scale hot.
“Hey,” I said.
“Dance,” she said.
I’ve never been shy about dancing.
Boys who are shy about dancing look like uncoordinated morons, and girls definitely get turned off by that. So I danced. We got real close, and I held on to Megan’s hips, which, now that I think about it, was a huge mistake, because I suddenly forgot everything in the world except for how incredibly hot (and I don’t mean thermally hot) she was.
“Megan?”
“What, Ryan Dean?”
“Huh?”
She rubbed her hips square into mine. She began hiking up my little leopard-skin loincloth with the curve of her butt. God! Good thing we were out in the middle of the crowd, ’cause this was the kind of dancing you read about in the papers where schools get burned down by angry crowds of torch-carrying, moonshine-cooking, toothless, one-eyed hillbillies.
“I said, ‘What, Ryan Dean?’ ”
RYAN DEAN WEST 2: Think about baseball.
RYAN DEAN WEST 1: Crap. I don’t know a goddamned thing about baseball.
RYAN DEAN WEST 2: It’s just a figure of speech. Think about a place in the universe where there is no such thing as sex.
RYAN DEAN WEST 1: Okay, you’re going to have to give me a hint. Is it Bannock?
RYAN DEAN WEST 2: You’re a fucking idiot. Think about your middle name.
RYAN DEAN WEST 1: Okay. I hate my middle name.
RYAN DEAN WEST 2: So do I.
RYAN DEAN WEST 1: What’s my middle name, anyway?
I couldn’t even remember my middle name.
“Do you know what my middle name is, Megan?”
“No. What is it?”
Then I said it. “Mario.”
I’ll be honest. That actually is my middle name. And saying it helped snap me out of the fact that I was beginning to act like Pedro-the-humping-pug-dog right there in front of half the goddamned school.
And she said, “That is the hottest middle name ever!”
Which didn’t do anything to help slow the boy-to-dog transformation.
“I needed to tell you something,” I said. “Stop dancing for a second.”
Then she looked serious.
We stopped.
I pulled my loincloth, which was up over my belly, down. Nobody even noticed. That’s how high school dances are these days, in case you didn’t know.
“I wanted to say I’m sorry, Megan.”
“Okay, Ryan Dean.”
“I really like you, Megan. You’re honestly the first girl I ever kissed. I really like you. But I’m in love with Annie. You know that, don’t you?”
“I broke up with Chas.”
“I know,” I said. “And if it’s my fault, I’m sorry for that, too.”
“Don’t be.”
“You are a better person for it, Megan. You are beautiful and brilliant, and nobody who sees that in you ever stopped for a minute to consider how you had beaten all the other girls at Pine Mountain to win the dubious prize of Chas Becker.”
I sounded like William Jennings Bryan giving a speech about crosses and gold and shit.
Megan said, “You should be a lawyer, Ryan Dean.”
“Are we okay, then? Or do you hate me?” I asked.
“We’re okay,” she said. But she looked sad. Then she said, “I’m in love with you anyway, Ryan Dean.”
Ugh. I did not see that coming. I swear I almost fell down.
“Start dancing,” I said. My voice cracked, but she couldn’t hear over the music anyway, so I just felt like a loser, I didn’t actually sound like one.
“I’m going to take a little walk. I need to think about things before I screw them up worse than they are.”
Megan started dancing.
“Ryan Dean?”
“What?”
“Annie sure is lucky,” she said. “You’re the best person I know.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. It felt terrible and amazingly wonderful all at the same time.
It sure sounded nicer than “adorable.”
She kept her eyes on me. I felt embarrassed and stupid as I backed away through all the dressed-up dancers.
Someone tugged at me from behind. Kevin had switched his hook into his good hand and caught my shoulder strap with it. He was dancing with about six girls, and he pulled me into the middle of the circle.
“Isn’t this awesome?” he said.
“Have you seen Annie?”
He shrugged.
I was dripping with sweat.
“I need to find her,” I said.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT
IT TOOK ME A WHILE to break out from Kevin’s girl-circle.
It was kind of like playing Red Rover, only against six hot girls who I didn’t mind bumping into over and over until I finally made my way through.
As soon as I cleared a path, I ran face-first directly into a big blue C.
“Watch it, Pussboy.”
For just a second, I was almost touched that Chas Becker was speaking to me again.
I gulped.
I had to do it. I was on a mission.
I put my hand on his shoulder and pulled his Tyrannosaurus Rex head down to my skinny-bitch-ass-size-snack-morsel face.
“Chas, can I talk to you for a second?”
Before you finally kill me.
God! He looked so ridiculous in that outfit.
“What about?”
“I . . . uh . . .”
Yeah, Pussboy forgot what he was doing.
Okay, snap out of it.
“I’m sorry for what I did, Chas. I apologize. A guy should never do the kind of crap I did to you.”
I figured this could officially count as an apology for making him drink my pee, too, if I worded it vaguely enough.
“I guess I let things get out of control, and so I apologize. I also said I’m sorry to Megan, and I promise you both it won’t happen again. So, sorry, Chas. I know you’re probably still going to kill me, but at least I got it off my chest.”
Then I put out my hand for him, and he shook it.
> “You have balls, Winger. But I still fucking hate you.”
Fair enough.
“I hate you, too, Chas,” I said, and smiled.
Then, beyond Chas’s shoulder, at the edge of the dance floor, I caught a glimpse of green surgical scrubs and soft black hair draping over the glint of a stethoscope.
It was Annie. She hadn’t seen me yet.
I moved behind her, stalking her. I put my chin right over her shoulder and whispered, “I know you’re probably booked up, but do you think you could squeeze me in for a quick physical?”
She turned around suddenly.
At first, I thought she was going to slap me, but then she looked shocked and surprised at seeing me, and she gave me that awesome smile where her eyes tear up, and I hate to say it, but just looking at her there kind of made my eyes tear up too.
“Oh my God!” she said.
Then she threw her arms around me, and we hugged like we hadn’t seen each other in years. That felt so good, because I was practically naked anyway, and all sweaty, and here I was hugging an out-of-control physician.
What could be better than that? Well, except for the quick kiss we stole. Kids get in trouble for kissing at Pine Mountain, so you have to be discreet. And the best place to be discreet was out there in the middle of the dance floor, so the Wild Boy of Bainbridge Island took a tight squeeze on Annie’s hand, so we wouldn’t get separated, and I pulled her out through the crowd and into the deepest, darkest, wildest kiss we ever had.
“How did you get in?” she said.
“They let us out of O-Hall, and I dirty-talked Mr. Wellins into letting us come in.”
Annie laughed.
She put her hands in my hair, and we danced.
“I love what you’re wearing,” she said.
“I am the Wild Boy of Bainbridge Island,” I said. I lifted up my loincloth. “With Pokémon undies.”
She laughed and pretended to cover her eyes (but not very convincingly, I noticed), and I said, “Okay. I showed you mine, now you have to show me yours.”
“You are such a pervert, Ryan Dean.”
“I think your pug infected me.”
We danced until we were both exhausted.
When I led her off the floor to get something to drink, I finally remembered that there was one more important thing I had to do, and it wasn’t apologizing to Casey Palmer. I would never do that, no matter how many times I made him drink pee.