ISABEL: His ears look kind of pink to me. I think he’s cute.
ANNIE: You think he’s cute? He’s just a little boy. I’ll probably just ignore his skinny-bitch ass, pretend like he isn’t here.
ISABEL: You always told me how much you liked him.
ANNIE: He acted like an asshole as soon as we got to school on Sunday. First he wouldn’t talk to me, he lied about wanting to go for a run with me, and then he got drunk with Chas Becker. Definitely so not-cute.
And then I thought, Would you really ignore me, Annie? Do I really want to keep walking toward you just so you can kick me in the nuts again?
I glanced back and saw that JP and Seanie were watching me.
Crap!
Something happens when guys watch guys doing things like this. They knew what was going on, and they got to watch the Ryan Dean West suicide mission from the front row. It’s like jumping out of a plane. There’s no time-outs or do-overs, there’s just gravity. That, and lots of witnesses to see your chute collapse as your body plummets helplessly toward certain death.
All I could do now was hope I didn’t cry like a little girl in front of the hundreds of kids having breakfast.
It was a surreal comic of my life, and I pictured the worst possible outcome:
“Annie. Would it be okay if I sat down with you for a minute?” I said in the sweetest, most injured tone of voice I could manage. (It’s not like my voice hadn’t changed last year, though. I was no candidate for a position in one of those churchy boys’ choirs.)
Then she looked at me square in the eyes, and at that moment I knew everything was going to be okay. There’s just ways friends can see things in each others’ faces, kind of like the ha-ha-I-made-Joey-look-at-your-balls/haiku conversation I’d had with Seanie the night before, except, of course, the way Annie looked at me was really nice.
“Hi, West. Sure,” she said.
Score.
Except I really wished she’d call me Ryan Dean.
And I lucked out again, because Isabel was sitting right across from her, which meant I had to sit beside Annie, which gave me the opportunity to ever-so-gently brush my thigh against hers, which caused a very dizzying and embarrassing migration of otherwise fully employed red blood cells to a highly depressed and underemployed (as my Econ professor might speculate) region of Ryan Dean West Land.
“Hi, Isabel.” My voice cracked when I said it. I felt like an idiot. I don’t think there was any blood left in the northern provinces. “Did you have a good summer?”
“Yeah,” Isabel said.
Okay, now go away, moustache-girl (not that your moustache isn’t kind of hot). Ugh. I think I’m passing out.
I cleared my throat. I looked at Isabel. God! I wanted her to leave, because I knew exactly what they’d do after this whole uncomfortable scene ended: They would replay and reinterpret everything that happened, and they would make stuff up, too—things they thought I’d said that never came out of my mouth.
“Annie,” I began.
After that, I didn’t have any idea what to say. I just sat there staring at her. I was so lost, I even thought about the Preamble to the Constitution.
I, the people, am such a loser.
And then, thank God, Annie saved me.
“Are you feeling better this morning?” she asked.
Okay. That’s when I knew, knew, I was totally, totally, in love with her. And that realization made me instantly sad, too, because I’m a smart kid; I knew I had absolutely no chance at all.
I looked at my hands where they rested on the table next to a mustard stain. And I thought I actually did feel pretty good, relieved that Mrs. Singer hadn’t coincidentally caused me to come down with a fit of projectile vomiting or something.
“Yeah. I feel a lot better. How about you?”
“Good. I started reading that Hawthorne story.”
“So did I. It’s weird.”
“Yeah.”
I squeezed my fists as tight as I could. They turned white.
Time to jump.
“Annie, I am really sorry about how stupid I was. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into, but now I’m smarter, but I’m also worse off because I made you mad and I would never do anything, ever, to purposely make you mad, ’cause you’re my best friend in this whole pathetic place, so I’m really sorry and I guess I’ll go now, but I just had to tell you.”
Zen archery of run-on-sentence apologies.
And I almost looked up to see if my chute would catch air or just flutter around up there like a giant dirty sock.
I pressed my hands on the table and started to stand.
Then she put her hand on top of mine and said, “It’s okay, West. I don’t want you to go. And I’m not mad anymore either. You were just temporarily stupid. What boy doesn’t hit that mark at least ten times a day?”
I sighed and relaxed in my seat. My leg touched hers again.
Please don’t move your hand, Annie.
When she started to pull her hand away, I covered it with mine and squeezed. And she squeezed back.
Ryan Dean West was actually holding hands with a girl who wasn’t his mom.
People began moving around us, hefting their books and packs. The day’s first class would be starting in five minutes, but I didn’t want to move. Besides, I probably would have collapsed if I tried to stand up.
Then Isabel got up from her seat and said, “Bye, Ryan Dean. See you later, Annie.”
And, still holding on to Annie’s hand, I said, “Can we just talk later? Alone?”
“Sure.”
“Will you meet me at Stonehenge after practice?”
“You want to go for a run?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
FOR CONDITIONING CLASS, WE DID tear-offs in weight lifting on Tuesdays. Tear-offs can make a guy scream if you do them right. Seanie and JP were spotting the bar and pulling off weights until I was just down to the bar and nothing else, until I couldn’t even lift the bar anymore and they had to help me just to get it back on the braces.
“Damn. Winger’s been lifting weights,” JP said.
I just lay there on the bench and rubbed my shoulders. I felt so good.
“Winger’s pumped,” Seanie said. “What’d Annie say?”
“If I told you, you’d probably make a MySite about it.”
“I already did make an Annie and Ryan Dean MySite,” Seanie said.
“Yeah, right.”
I wasn’t buying his shit anymore.
“Yeah. I did,” Seanie said. “And nothing ever happens on it.”
“Annie’s pretty hot, dude. You really not going to tell us?” JP asked. I grabbed his hand, and he lifted me up so we could trade places.
“She’s not mad at me,” I said. I matched the weights on my side to Seanie’s. Of course, at his size, JP was almost twice as strong as me. And then I added, “And we held hands, too.”
“No way!” Seanie said. “You are such a fucking loser, Ryan Dean. You’re in eleventh grade, not kinderfuckinggarten.”
I flipped Seanie off and then had to pull one of JP’s weights from the bar.
“Just remember, Seanie. I made Joey look at your balls.”
“Dude, Joey’s gay. You can’t make him look at my balls. But you could charge him to. And he hasn’t actually seen them yet.”
Yeah . . . in the weight room, we often have deep, philosophical conversations.
We pulled off another round of weights, but JP was struggling because he started laughing.
When it was Seanie’s turn, JP and I got him all loaded up, and just when he raised the barbell and locked out over his chest, we walked away and left him there as he yelled, “Hey! Fuck you guys! Assholes!”
Of course we didn’t leave him like that. We were just messing with him. But Seanie always had a way of obsessing about things like they were the greatest trespasses ever committed against his
pitiful soul. Maybe that’s one of the things I found so funny about Sean Russell Flaherty.
And when we were changing back into our school clothes for the second class of the day, JP asked if I thought there was going to be any trouble about them coming to visit me in O-Hall the night before.
“As weird as he is, I think Farrow understands that you guys were just trying to help me,” I said. “I wouldn’t expect he’ll turn you in to the headmaster, and even if he does, you guys won’t get into trouble for what you did.”
“I hope you’re right,” JP said.
“I’d kind of like to get put in O-Hall,” Seanie said. “So I could kick your ass at poker.”
“No you wouldn’t. It sucks. And I think that woman who lives downstairs, Mrs. Singer, is a witch or something.”
“You’re fucking crazy, Winger,” JP said.
“Yeah,” Seanie agreed.
But they didn’t see what I’d seen.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
MEGAN RENSHAW WAS A STRESS case. When we went over the Calculus review problems Mrs. Kurtz had assigned from day one, Megan got every one of them wrong. She spun sideways in her desk (her hair brushed across my hand again—yes!), and she practically had tears in her eyes as she complained to Joey and me, “I think I became completely stupid over the summer!”
And then Joey said what I didn’t have the guts to say: “I think hanging out with Betch would lower anyone’s I.Q.”
“Look,” I said, moving my pencil over her paper, just near enough to her hand that I could feel her warmth and smell the ginger lotion on her skin, “here’s where you got this step backward.”
Megan swept her hair back from her face and propped her head on an elbow, resting on my desk. She sighed in defeat.
She was definitely the hottest defeated multivariate calculus student I’d ever seen.
Megan said, “You guys who get this stuff . . . ,” and she looked from Joey to me. When our eyes locked, I had to look away. Megan Renshaw was looking at me like she liked me or something. And she said, “Smart guys are such a turn-on.”
Joey cleared his throat.
Chas Becker must have been a genius in at least one thing Megan Renshaw liked.
Mrs. Kurtz had been looming over us, watching Megan’s frustration, and she said, “Why don’t the three of you form a study group to work on tonight’s assignment?”
And I thought it was just like Seanie’s haiku coming true, except for the Megan part. And the Megan part practically gave me an aneurysm when she put her ginger-lotion hand on my arm and said, with pleading and helpless eyes, “Will you help me, Ryan Dean? Please?”
I wasn’t sure if I could physically tolerate all the up-and-down surging of blood I’d been experiencing that morning. I swear I could actually see my heart thumping in my chest beneath my sweater.
“Sure.” And I was kind of scared—no, terrified—so I said, “Joey can, too.”
And, just like that, the three of us agreed to meet in the library after dinner that night, with Mrs. Kurtz’s approval. Students were allowed to do homework in the library until lights-out, but O-Hall kids had to have a teacher’s consent. So, thanks to Mrs. Kurtz’s facilitation, I had scored my second smoking-hot-girl date on just my second day of eleventh grade.
Things were definitely looking up.
The day before, the day after the poker game, postconsequence, I felt like I had been stuffed with a combination of cement and sleeping pills; but that Tuesday I practically floated through the entire school day.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
NOTE TO ANNIE DURING LIT class:
Don’t forget.
Then I drew a picture on the bottom:
And, yeah, she did think I was a pervert.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
THIS TIME, I SHOWERED AFTER rugby. I put my school clothes back on and tied my necktie as neatly as I could. I even borrowed some cologne from Joey. I got some gel from Kevin Cantrell and put it in my hair and tried to comb it.
Everyone knew something was up.
This time, Casey Palmer and Nick Matthews weren’t waiting at the side of the football field as the guys came streaming down from the locker room.
I would have run on my way to O-Hall, but I didn’t want to get all sweaty before seeing Annie. I planned to just drop off my school books in my room so I wouldn’t have to carry my pack with me all the way to our stone circle.
O-Hall looked deserted when I got there. I guess I must have been the first boy back from school. Despite all the attention I’d paid to my clothes and hair, I’d still rushed to get out of the locker room and managed to make it back to O-Hall before anyone else. So when I opened the outer door to the mudroom and stairwell, I wasn’t expecting to see anyone; and this time, I did kind of squeal more than a little bit when I ran straight into the not-even-hot-on-Pluto Mrs. Singer.
And I don’t know why I was so terrified, but after that diarrhea spell I was convinced she’d laid on me, and the spontaneous bloody nose of the night before, I completely believed that she was determined to do something horrible to me, like turn me into her eunuch slave former-boy, or breathe poison into me.
Maybe that Hawthorne story was getting to me, I don’t know.
Our eyes met as I stood, petrified, at the bottom of the stairwell. And I don’t know where all my blood went, but I know it didn’t go anywhere I particularly cared about.
Then she said, “I am going to suck your fucking soul out through your eye sockets with my lampreylike tongue.”
Well, to be absolutely honest, she actually just said, “Oh, hello. It’s you again,” but I wasn’t about to stand there and listen to her demonic incantations. I was on a mission. I ran upstairs, wondering whether or not I should jump out the window so I wouldn’t have to see her again on my way down.
Damn! I was starting to sweat.
I threw my door open and tossed the book pack up onto my bunk.
I looked out the window, and I could see Chas, Joey, and Kevin returning from practice. At least I knew I wouldn’t have to jump, because Chas and Kevin’s souls were way more suckable than mine; they had to be much more liquefied, since they were forward-pack guys. But what sucked most of all was that just as I was about to leave so I could go meet Annie, Mr. Farrow appeared, blocking the doorway out of my room.
“Ryan Dean,” he said, “it looks as though you’re feeling much better today. Let’s have a chat, shall we?”
On second thought, I would rather have had my soul lamprey-sucked from my skull.
Mr. Farrow stood in the open doorway, just watching me like he was waiting for some kind of confession. My head spun, because there sure was a lot of crap I could potentially be confessing to, pulled from the Ryan Dean West record of the past forty-eight hours. So all I could do was try my best to look and sound innocent, and of course my voice cracked like a Cub Scout’s when I said, “Mr. Farrow, I’m supposed to meet someone before dinner. It’s about a homework assignment, and I’m afraid I’m going to be late.”
I heard the sound of the guys coming up the stairs.
“I’m concerned you may have gotten off to the wrong kind of start this semester, Ryan Dean.”
Oh, God. It sounded like he knew everything.
Now there’d be the inevitable call home; and next thing you knew, Ryan Dean West would be an ex-PM junior on a plane to Boston with a goddamned unaccompanied-minor-smiley-airplane-name-tag-that-says-hi-my-name-is-fucking-loser stuck to his skinny-bitch-ass-fourteen-year-old collar in the morning. I could only hope the stewardess in charge of feeding and toweling me off would be, well . . . five out of five steaming bowls of chowder on the Ryan Dean West In-Flight-Entertainment-Things-You-Don’t-Mind-Burning-Your-Tongue-On Heat Index.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Farrow. I can do better.”
“I expect you can, Ryan Dean, especially if we’ve set a goal of getting you placed back in the boys’ dorm by the semester break.”
It sounded like there was hope after all.
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Now, careful, Ryan Dean. Don’t say too much.
“But as far as the food in the room and your two visitors last night are concerned,” Farrow said, “I think I’m going to have to put you on in-room detention.”
Which was even worse than being kicked out. It meant no Annie. No Megan Renshaw.
What a cruel deal it is to have been born with testicles, and to have to carry them around along with me on my miserable path through life. They may just as well have been the size of Volkswagens for the burden they had become.
I tried my hardest to make some tears pool in my eyes. Thinking about peeing usually does it for me; at least, it works on my parents.
“Please, Mr. Farrow,” I said. “I was really sick, but I forced myself to go through the entire . . .”
Think about peeing. Think about peeing.
“. . . first day of classes because I want to try so hard . . .”
Think about peeing. Think about peeing.
“. . . this year to show I can be better. But then I fell asleep . . .”
Think about peeing. Think about peeing.
“. . . and my friends were concerned, so they woke me up and brought some . . .”
Think about peeing. Think about peeing.
“. . . food.”
To kind-of quote Ovid: “Tears at times have the weight of speech.”
Just as the guys spilled noisily out from the stairwell, one perfect tear streaked down from the corner of my eye. And I quickly wiped it away, pretending I’d be embarrassed if the other guys had seen I was crying.
And I could see by Farrow’s pained expression that the time-tested and sparingly applied Ryan Dean West pee-tear scam worked beautifully.
Ryan Dean West, performance fucking artist.
“Please,” I added, so sweetly, like a bullfighter inserting the final estoque. I imagined the ultrahot and impassioned Annie and Megan throwing a shower of blooms at my feet, and I’d pick one up, smell it, and clench it between my teeth; and the impaled Mr. Farrow looked at the boys coming down the hall, then leaned close as though he were protecting my vulnerability, and whispered, “I’ll let it go this time, Ryan Dean. You just take care. Now run along.”