Winger

  Yes!

  And when I sailed through the hallway, past Joey, I raised my hand and slapped him with the hardest and loudest high five ever executed in the history of gay-straight high fivery, and said, “Thanks for the hair gel, Kevin. Thanks for the smells-good, Joey.”

  And I flew down the stairs, not even slightly concerned that I’d run into that soul-sucking-and-so-unhot Mrs. Singer.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  ANNIE LAUGHED WHEN SHE SAW me. Her eyes squinted, full of water like they get when she laughs. She held the note I gave her in Lit class and waved it at me like a surrender flag.

  “You are such a pervert, West. Babysit? Bathe?”

  “ ‘Here, Beatrice,’ ” I said, quoting our Hawthorne story, “ ‘see how many needful offices require to be done to our chief treasure.’ ” And I swept my hand downward along my body and pointed.

  To me.

  She giggled. “Per-vert!”

  “You would not believe the bullet I just dodged, Annie.”

  We sat on a mossy and black tree trunk that had fallen down in some storm years before I’d ever entered Pine Mountain. I told Annie all about my run-in with Mr. Farrow, and how hard I worked, thinking about peeing, to make myself get a tear from one eye, and she laughed and leaned close to me, so close that we were almost touching. And, unfortunately, at that moment I realized that all my pee-mantra meditations with Mr. Farrow and the recounting of the story actually did make me want to pee, but I wasn’t about to move, either.

  “I’ve never seen you with gel in your hair, West,” she said. And she leaned her face really close to my neck (I tipped just a little closer toward her, hoping her lips would touch me), and she inhaled and said, “And you smell like cologne.”

  “I always wear this stuff,” I said, trying to sound as confident and masculine as possible, considering the magnitude of my certain and fourteen-year-old wimposity.

  “Well, you look absolutely adorable,” she said.

  I just stared at her soft knees, where they peeked out from beneath the perfect hem of her skirt.

  I hate that word. “Adorable.” Especially the way Annie said it. Because it sounded like something any girl might say about a pink hoodie sweatshirt in a Hollister catalog, not something she’d say about a boy. Unless he was wearing diapers or drop-seat pajamas with feet on them and had a pacifier in his mouth, which kind of gave me a semiperverted idea for a Halloween costume I’d like to wear just for Annie. Okay . . . I’ll be honest. It wasn’t semi-, it was totally perverted.

  I sighed.

  “Thanks, Annie,” I said. “You look totally hot yourself. Want to make out now?”

  Well, I didn’t actually say the “want to make out” part, but I sure wanted to say it. But just thinking it was a mistake, because I suddenly couldn’t think of anything else and found that, once again, Ryan Dean West’s brain was strained to its capacity with thinking of . . . well, sex. And, as usual, I couldn’t get my mind off of it, so I quickly drew up a brain-function chart in my bloodless head:

  I am such a loser.

  “Hey, Annie, did you really mean what you said when you told me that having me as a friend was the only thing you like about this school?”

  “Well, I did like the smoothie I had at lunch today, but, yes. I do mean it.”

  “Thanks.”

  And I wanted to hold her hand so bad right then, but I was afraid. Can you imagine that? Yesterday I took down Casey Palmer, and today I was scared of touching a girl’s hand.

  And I said, “Are you going back home this weekend?”

  Annie’s parents lived near Seattle, so it was an easy trip.

  “Yeah.”

  “It sucks being here alone on the weekend. All my friends are gone,” I said. “Maybe one weekend you could stay, so we could do something together.”

  She stood up, and we walked into the center of our Stonehenge, toward the spiral path.

  “I know,” she said, “I’ll ask my parents if you can come home with me one weekend. That would be fun. They’ve been dying to meet you.”

  Score!

  “Have you told them about me?”

  “Of course.”

  I wondered what she’d said. If she made me sound like a pitiful little boy to them.

  “Do you promise to ask them? This weekend, ask them, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Suddenly, my brain was at 100 percent imagining spending a weekend with Annie at her house. I could have peed in my pants right then and not even known it.

  We started following the spiral wish path toward the center.

  I gulped.

  I reached over and held her hand.

  She held mine back.

  We stopped walking, and Annie said, “Hey, West, are we holding hands?”

  “Uh. Yeah.”

  “Weird.”

  “I know.”

  “Want to let go?”

  “No.”

  “Okay.”

  And that’s all she said. Okay. In that singing, relaxed kind of voice she had that made everything sound painless, like it didn’t matter, like there were no big deals anywhere in the universe.

  When we walked back out of the path, she said, “What did you wish for?”

  And I said, “I didn’t think you were supposed to tell.”

  “Tell this one time.”

  “Okay,” I said, “come here.”

  And I led her over to where we’d been sitting on that log. I brushed the dirt on the ground flat with my brand new shoes and kneeled down. I drew two overlapping circles: a Venn diagram.

  “That’s what I wished for, Annie.”

  “It looks like a Venn diagram, West.”

  “It is.” I put my finger in one of the circles. “These are all the boys here at Pine Mountain. We’re all almost totally the same. We dress the same, we all pretty much like the same stuff, we all play sports, and every one of us thinks you, Annie Altman, are totally hot.”

  “Shut up.” She laughed.

  I put my finger in the narrow crescent of the other circle, the outside part.

  “And here’s Ryan Dean West. Well, at least, it’s the one tiny part of Ryan Dean West that makes him stand out as being so different, the only thing that everyone notices about him. The number fourteen. And you think that makes me so different, like I’m a little kid. But the thing is, everyone has that little part that’s outside the overlap of everyone else. And a lot of people zero in on that one little thing they can’t get over. Like for Joey, ’cause he’s gay, I guess. Some people are better than others about not getting that outside-the-overlap part so noticed, but not me. So that was my wish. What do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. She looked suddenly serious.

  “I didn’t mean to make you feel bad,” I said. “Sorry. What was your wish?”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t say.”

  “No fair, Annie.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Serious.”

  “I wished for you to get your wish.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  AFTER DINNER, JOEY AND I walked to the library with our Calculus books to meet Megan. I guess I didn’t feel right after seeing Annie out in the woods, like maybe I’d said too much and it was going to ruin our friendship now, so I was a little depressed and didn’t say anything to Joey.

  I kept picturing those circles in my head. I hoped I’d made sense to Annie, that I didn’t sound like a whiny little crybaby. And I thought about Joey too, and how bad and terribly lonely he must feel sometimes; and that’s why I tried to always go out of my way to not notice the thing about him you couldn’t notice anyway.

  We stayed in the library until they kicked us out, at nine forty-five. Megan looked so deliciously good, and she smiled so broadly when it finally all started coming back to her. I guess Joey and I counteracted the brain-loss effect caused by Chas Becker’s brilliance.

  Megan walked us back to O-Hall, between Joey and me, with her arms lo
cked inside each of ours. I will admit that twice I feigned tripping on a rock just so my right arm would brush against her breast, and that was awesome.

  The performance artist was on the mark that day.

  When we got back to O-Hall, Joey and I said good night to Megan and started for the door.

  “Thank you boys so much for helping me,” Megan said. “You are such good friends, and I love you both.”

  “No problem,” Joey said.

  “Yeah.”

  Then Megan stepped up to Joey and kissed him on the cheek, and I could see he kissed her back too, all suave and mannered, like he did that kind of stuff all the time. He pulled open the door to the mudroom, and Megan turned to me.

  I thought I was actually going to die. Megan Renshaw, in all her smoking five-out-of-five-habanero hotness, was going to kiss me, Ryan Dean Never-Been-Kissed-by-Anyone-Who-Wasn’t-Alive-When-Sputnik-Got-Launched West.

  I closed my eyes.

  She put her hands on the sides of my jaw.

  She kissed me right on the mouth.

  AND SHE STAYED THERE.

  I think she actually had to hold me up when she slipped her tongue past my lips.

  Then she put her face to my ear and whispered, “I think you are really adorable.”

  Okay . . . I’ll admit I no longer hated that word.

  Then she whirled around and left us there.

  In the stairwell, I gave Joey the all-time-record-breaking gay-straight high five.

  And he said, “You don’t have to worry about me. I won’t tell Chas about you making out with Megan. He’s a douche bag, anyway, and you know he’d kill you for it.”

  PART TWO:

  the sawmill

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  BY THE FIRST WEEK OF october, it was freezing cold up there in the Cascades at Pine Mountain Academy. And things just continued along from day to day in their usual way.

  We’d played poker a couple more times, always on Sunday nights, because that’s when the guys got back from their weekends. But I never drank beer again after that first time. Chas tried to make me do it, and I thought I was actually going to get into a certain-death-for-Ryan-Dean-West fistfight over it, but Joey got between us and let Chas know that he was ready to fight him about it too. I even lost again, the second time we played, and that time the guys made me swim across the lake in the middle of the night wearing only my boxers. It was so cold, I could hardly breathe, and I was convinced as I paddled through that liquid hell that Mrs. Singer was going to turn herself into a multitentacled monster and drag me down to her icy black lair.

  In Lit class, we had finished reading Billy Budd, Foretopman, and I was convinced by that time that Mr. Wellins was some sort of pervert, because he believed that everything we read had something to do with sex. According to him, “Rappaccini’s Daughter” was about incest, and, he argued, Billy Budd was about homosexuality. Mr. Wellins said it didn’t matter what a writer intended his work to mean, that the only thing that mattered was what it meant to the reader, and I guess I could see his point, but I still thought he was a creepy old pervert. Anyway, I just thought Melville wrote a good story, but what do I know?

  And by mid-October, Coach M had pretty much named the first fifteen on the rugby team. I kept my spot and my nickname, at number eleven, JP made fullback, Seanie made scrum half, and the rest of the team were the returning seniors from last year, including Chas, Kevin, and Joey. We were also getting ready to play our first preseason friendly match against Sacred Heart Catholic School in Salem. So, with that game coming up, we were all pretty damned excited and nervous.

  And, on the topic of being excited and nervous, that night during the first week of school—the night I’d made out with Megan Renshaw—I remember that when I got back to my room, I could hardly face Chas. I felt like I had stolen something, but I felt damned good about it too. And after that, anytime Chas laid it on thick with his put-downs and threats, I’d just smirk and think to myself, Your girlfriend puts her tongue in my mouth and she likes it, and my smirk would piss off Chas even more because he had no idea why I had suddenly become so confident around him.

  Megan Renshaw and I flirted constantly in Calc and Econ, and sometimes we’d get kind of perverted about it. Joey just watched it and laughed at us, and he never said anything to anyone, because that was the kind of guy Joey Cosentino was. But I was still kind of afraid of Megan, and had no misconceptions as to who was holding the power in our quirky relationship.

  One time, she even followed me out of class when I left for the bathroom, and we made out for about thirty nonstop and frenzied seconds in a drinking fountain alcove, and then she just left me there, completely unable to walk to the bathroom, much less back to class.

  I felt really weird about the whole fooling-around-with-steaming-hot-Megan-Renshaw thing. First of all, and I’ll be honest, I felt really guilty before and afterward. It was during, though, that I didn’t feel anything even close to guilt—when Megan had her mouth all over mine and let me slip my hand up inside her sweater. When that was going on, it definitely was not guilt that occupied my mind.

  When I was away from her—and could think sanely, that is—if I wasn’t having any perverted fantasies about airline stewardesses or Halloween costumes, I felt terrible, because I knew I was being the same kind of asshole to Chas Becker that he was to everyone else; and I tried to do anything I could to not think about how Annie would feel if she found out about us.

  It tore me up, except for the couple minutes here and there when Megan would sneak off and get that nasty-policewoman-who-wants-to-arrest-bad-Ryan-Dean look in her eyes, but I felt like there was nobody I could talk to about it. If I talked to JP and Seanie, everyone else would know. Shit, Seanie would make a website about it. I definitely couldn’t talk to Annie, because I knew I was being bad and doing something that was just plain wrong (even if I liked the occasional chance to play Bad Ryan Dean). The only person I could talk to about it, of course, was Joey, who was gay.

  I tried asking Megan about it, but she played me off. I got the impression she really did like me, which made me feel worse about Annie. In the end, it just seemed to me that Megan Renshaw was the kind of girl who only wanted a Chas Becker trophy mate because all the other girls at Pine Mountain wanted him. It was a game to Megan, and I felt sorry for how sad and lonely she was going to end up.

  The Monday before the team took the bus to Salem to play, Joey and I walked back to O-Hall together after practice.

  “Oh. I’ve been meaning to ask you, Ryan Dean,” Joey began, “what’s the deal with that Casey Palmer website? I didn’t think he was so . . . extroverted, I guess, but I could be wrong.”

  Score. I had succeeded in making Joey look at Seanie’s balls.

  This was, indeed, the stuff of future epic sonnets.

  “I only heard about it,” I said. “I haven’t seen it.”

  “Oh, sure,” he said, and laughed, like he didn’t believe me. “Then why are there so many comments posted by you on there about how gay Casey is?”

  Seanie. Even when you think you’ve caught up with him, you realize he’s always pushing it a step further.

  “Seanie Flaherty’s a dick,” I said.

  Joey laughed.

  I sighed.

  And Joey said, “You guys shouldn’t mess around with Casey Palmer’s ego. I’ve seen that guy do some pretty crazy shit.”

  “Like what?” I said.

  “He flips out. He can hurt guys,” Joey said.

  “Oh.” I shrugged. “I’ll tell Seanie to lay off. He won’t listen, though.”

  “Seanie never does.”

  “Joey, I need to ask you. You’re the only guy I can talk to about this, and it’s really bugging me. What do you think I should do about Megan?”

  “You’re going to do whatever you want to do, it looks like. Or, whatever she wants you to do,” Joey said.

  “Someone’s going to find out.”

  “Bound to,” he agreed.
br />   “Really. I don’t care what Chas does to me if he finds out, ’cause I do deserve it. I just think it’s unfair to treat a guy like that, even if it’s Chas, but especially if we’re on the same team. But I really do like Megan. She’s supersmart. And she is so freakin’ hot.”

  “Ryan Dean, I know you’d feel terrible if someone you care about ended up getting hurt over this.”

  “Like Annie.”

  “Exactly. And, anyway, don’t you love Annie or something?” Joey asked.

  “Dude, I am so insanely in love with Annie Altman that I can’t even think straight. No gay pun intended.”

  Joey smiled.

  “Well, obviously you can’t think, straight or otherwise,” Joey said. “That’s why you’re messing around with Megan.”

  Then Joey stopped walking, and he looked directly at me. He looked pissed off, too. “It’s one thing to be an asshole to Betch. He deserves it. But why would you hurt Annie? Why don’t you fucking grow up, Ryan Dean? At the very least, you have to talk to Annie about it. She is your best friend, isn’t she?”

  I stopped in my tracks.

  I had never been told off like that by Joey.

  It stung.

  And he said, “Sorry.”

  “No, Joe. You’re right.” I sighed.

  We started walking again. “How come you don’t have these problems?”

  “Are you fucking stupid, Ryan Dean?”

  I pushed him. “Just kidding, Joey.”

  Joey smiled, and I said, “But you know, I really don’t get this liking-boys-better-than-girls thing. No offense, ’cause you know I’d like you the same, no matter what. I just don’t get it.”

  “Ryan Dean?”

  “What?”