Текст книги "Winger"

Автор книги: Andrew Smith

Соавторы: Andrew Smith
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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

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.

Then Chas did something that nobody would ever have expected. He turned away from me and sighed. He actually looked like it hurt him to hear what I’d said.

“That’s what she told me yesterday,” he said. “I didn’t believe her. I thought she was just screwing around with me. You know how Megan is. Why the fuck would you do something like that to a guy on your own team, Winger?”

“I don’t know.”

Okay, why do teenagers use that answer so often, especially when we really do know? Of course I knew why I did it, and so did Chas, and so would anyone else who ever looked one time at Megan Renshaw.

Then I said, “We’re not doing it anymore.”

I put my shoes on and opened my door.

“I’m going to pee,” I said.

I heard Joey get out of the car behind me. Chas stayed in the passenger seat. As I was rounding the corner to the men’s room, Joey caught up to me.

“Damn, Ryan Dean. I think Chas is crying,” he said.

“Why am I such a punk, Joe?”

“I tried telling you,” Joey said. “You want coffee?”

“Yeah. Black.”

Joey went inside the minimart, and I went around back and peed in the bushes. I can’t stand gas station men’s rooms. I met Joey around front again, and he handed me two cups in paper sleeves. He held an elastic keychain, wrapped around his wrist.

“You need a key for the toilets,” he said.

“I peed in the trees.”

Joey said, “Oh. I’ll be right back.”

He went around the corner, and when I got back to the car, Chas was gone.

CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

WE SPENT THE NEXT FIFTEEN minutes looking for Chas around the gas station, even walking both directions away from it along the road, but we couldn’t find any trace of him.

It started raining again, so Joey and I went back to the car and sat.

“I don’t know where he’d go,” Joey said.

I had a good idea Chas was probably running around in the woods naked, looking for something to kill. Probably something that weighed exactly 152 pounds.

I sighed.

“You really did make him drink pee tonight, on top of everything else, didn’t you?”

“Casey, too,” I said.

“Damn. Well, he’s probably not heading back to PM. It’s way too far.” Joey looked at his wristwatch. “It’s a little after two. We can finish this costume hunt, and maybe we’ll find him on the way back. I’m sure we will. He’s gotta be around here somewhere, just sitting alone, cooling off. We might get back in time to sleep a couple hours, at least, that way.”

I didn’t really feel bad about anything I’d done, but I did feel sorry that Chas was hurting over Megan, because I knew that feeling firsthand. But I tried to remind myself how stupid it was for me to feel sorry for a guy like Chas. Still, the whole thing made me think about how crazy I was for Annie, and how JP was trying to do the same thing to me that I’d been doing to Chas all along.

“Okay.” I yawned.

Joey started the car and we drove into Bannock.

“You don’t need to say it, Joey. I know this is all my fault.”

“It’s not totally your fault, Ryan Dean,” he said. “But you did let it go a little too far.”

“Yeah.” My eyes scanned ahead. I saw the lights of an all-night grocery store. What grocery store wouldn’t have costumes for sale just four days before Halloween?

“Hey, Joey,” I said. “Why don’t you have a boyfriend or anything?”

“What makes you think I don’t?”

“Well, no one ever sees you with anyone at school. I mean, not like that,” I said.

“I wouldn’t do that at school. It would be too much trouble for both of us.”

“Oh. So you do have a boyfriend?”

“Of course.”

“Well I’m glad for you, then. It sucks being alone. Believe me, I know. Let’s try this store,” I said, and pointed to the supermarket. I really didn’t want to find out too much about Joey’s boyfriend, because it made me feel really awkward. I just wanted to know if Joey was okay in his life, because, like I said, I really liked Joey. But I do mean that in a totally non-gay way.

Joey pulled in to the parking lot. It was nearly empty, dark, and rain slicked, with a few scattered shopping carts reflecting the headlights from Chas’s car.

“Are there even any other gay guys at Pine Mountain?” I asked.

Joey laughed. “Oh my God, Ryan Dean, why do you care? You’re not curious, are you? Did Chas completely scare you off girls or something? ’Cause I wouldn’t believe that could ever happen.”

I shrugged. “No. I was just wondering. ’Cause I can’t tell. I mean, I would have never even thought you were gay except you told me. But I do know exactly how many fourteen-year-old juniors there are at Pine Mountain. One. And he’s a skinny-ass-loser. But he’s not gay.”

“Well, there are a lot of gay kids at Pine Mountain.”

“Hopefully, JP Tureau?” I said.

That would be awesome. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about anything.

Joey laughed out loud. “You know? You and Kevin are, like, the only straight guys who’ve ever talked to me about me, about this stuff, who weren’t trying to play some kind of fucked-up game, Ryan Dean.”

“Well, why not? You’re my friend. You’re probably the best guy friend I have. But I don’t think I could ever be gay.”

“Everyone knows you’re not gay,” Joey said, and I thought, Phew! That’s a relief, just in case Joey was wondering if I was gay and trying to make, well, gay small talk, and then I thought, damn, that was a screwed-up thing to think about my best friend.

“But you want to know something crazy? And you can’t say anything to anyone about this, Ryan Dean. You know who’s been seriously trying to hit on me ever since school ended last year? Ever since I came out to everyone?” And then Joey paused to see if I would make a guess (which, I would have said Sean Russell Flaherty just because he’s so, well, not like other guys), but Joey said, “Casey Palmer. Can you believe it? Casey Fucking Palmer is gay. That’s why he begged Chas to get in the game with us tonight. He won’t leave me alone. He fucking scares me, he’s so hopped up about getting with me.”

Wow. That was a monumental secret, a career-builder for a guy like Seanie Flaherty. If Seanie kept such records, he would easily call that piece of info five out of five J. Edgar Hoovers in off the shoulder sundresses on the Sean Russell Flaherty Ruin Your Life Rating Scale.

“Casey Palmer is gay?”

“I’m pretty sure he wasn’t hitting on me because he thought I was a girl,” Joey said.

“Casey Palmer is gay?” I said again. Then I doubled over, laughing.

“Remember,” Joey said, “you are not going to say anything, okay? You know, football and everything. He’s a piece of shit, but leave him alone about it.”

“I pissed in his drink,” I said. “A lot. And the idiot thought it tasted good too.”

“Yeah. You’ve got balls, Ryan Dean. Except for when it comes to girls.”

“Well, he deserved it. He busted my nose.”

Then Joey stepped out of the car and said, “Come on. Let’s get some Halloween crap and get the fuck out of here.”

And as I followed Joey into the store, I kept asking him, “What do you mean, ‘except for when it comes to girls’?”

But he just said, “Never mind.”

CHAPTER SEVENTY

IN LESS THAN THIRTY MINUTES, we paid for five Halloween costumes, two tall cans of energy soda (I believed one of us was going to puke before we got back, and I hoped it would end up on Chas’s leather upholstery), and some cold medicine and throat lozenges for me.

I opened the box of cold pills before we were out of the store and popped three of them into my mouth. I washed them down with the energy drink.

So, yeah . . . between the whiskey, the cold pills, the energy drink, cherry-menthol (is there anything that tastes more unnaturally disgusting?) throat lozenges, and the pumped-up rushed feeling from completely ruining Chas Becker’s life, I was pretty much prepared to have some kind of seventies-Grateful-Dead-flashback-only-it-was-twenty-years-before-I-was-born experience.

We found some passable costumes for the five of us who played the game that night, too, even though I tried to convince Joey not to get one for Chas; and that way he could be the Invisible Man. But Joey said that wasn’t funny, because if we didn’t find Chas and he got into trouble or something, it would look like we’d stolen his car and ditched him.

Here’s what we ended up with (in alphabetical order):

Becker, Charles: Well, we found Chas a Superman cape, but there was nothing to go with it. Fortunately, the supermarket sold kids’ underwear and we bought him a three-pack of boys’ size XL briefs with Pokémon characters on them. Then we also got him some red women’s pantyhose to go underneath the briefs. So, basically, Chas’s most horrible night in his life had just gotten worse. Oh, well, that’s what he gets for leaving me and Joey alone and trusting us to be in charge of his future.

Cantrell, Kevin: Kevin would be the token pirate. We found him a hat, an eye patch, and a plastic hook we thought would look perfect sticking out from his black arm sling.

Cosentino, Joseph: Joey got the cool costume: prison stripes from Alcatraz, a fitting outfit for someone who was spending his senior year in O-Hall.

Palmer, Casey: Casey lucked out in a big way. We chose one of those plastic face masks of Wonder Woman and a golden lasso rope accessory for the guy with the serious case of the hots for Joey. We could have been much, much crueler, and even Joey admitted that he thought Casey would be jealous because Chas’s costume was so much gayer. Of course, I had to laugh about that.

West, Ryan Dean: A discovery of true Zen-like perfection, I got a leopard-spotted caveman-loincloth kind of thing that had one suspender strap that tied in a knot over the shoulder. The Wild Boy of Bainbridge Island would be in full effect on Thursday night in O-Hall.

Score.

The O-Hall boys were not allowed to go to the dance with Pine Mountain’s good boys and girls, but that would not stop us from dressing up and having our own Halloween.

We left the store with our bags of goods, determined to seek out Chas’s hiding place and get back to Pine Mountain in time to scrounge at least three hours of sleep before class, but it wasn’t going to turn out to be that easy.

Just as Joey opened his door, a voice came from the darkness in the lot behind the car.

“Can I talk to you boys a minute?”

And my juvenile-delinquent-from-Boston self instantly thought, great, it’s a cop. A man cop, no less, to make things even worse. But when I turned around, I realized that unless the Bannock Police Department hired hundred-year-old officers who got around with walkers, we were pretty safe. And even if they did, I thought, I knew it would be easy enough to talk Joey into making a run for it.

Or a brisk walk for that matter.

The old man came out of the rain at the speed of a newborn glacier, taking two steps, then lifting the walker, then setting it down, then two steps, lift, set. I rubbed my chin to see how much that one whisker had grown in the time it took for him to get to Joey’s side of the car.

And why does Joey always have to be so goddamned nice and understanding?

Joey said, “Leave us alone and go to hell, fucking crusty old man.”

Well, um . . . to be honest, Joey didn’t actually say that. I think I was wishing it so hard, I actually imagined it, which was the girliest thing I’ve probably ever done in my life. He actually just said, “Sure.”

Two steps. Lift. Set.

I needed a shave.

And the poor guy looked terrible. He had a dirty white beard and just kept his eyes fixed ahead, staring at me and Joey as he two-stepped-lifted-set inch by inch, wearing what looked like rain-soaked and food-stained pajamas.

“Can you boys please give me a ride home? I’ll pay you,” he said.

Please, for once in your life, don’t be nice, Joey.

“What are you doing out here?” Joey said.

“I just went for a walk,” he said.

And I thought, he either lives about twelve feet away from here or he started his walk during the Reagan Administration.

“And then I got caught in this damned rain.”

“Where do you live?” Joey asked.

No!

But it was too late. I knew Joey and I were both helplessly being sucked into a black hole of Joey Cosentino’s niceness.

“I live in a residential group home for child molesters who kill teenage boys with hatchets,” he said.

Okay, I’ll be honest. I think the whiskey-cold-medicine-energy-soda-disgusting-cherry-menthol-throat-lozenge-lack-of-sleep effect was taking its toll on me. What he really said was something like, “I live in Bannock on Battle Point Lane. It’s about two miles from here.”

“We could call you a cab,” I said. I held the remainder of the poker bank out in my hand. “We’ll even pay for it.”

“Naw,” Joey said. “Come on. We’ll take you home.”

Good old perfect Joey.

Goddamnit.

“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you boys so much.”

I just hoped he killed Joey first.

We loaded the old man’s walker and our bags into the back of Chas’s SUV, then helped him up into the passenger seat beside Joey. I sat in the back and hunted around for something that could be used as a weapon.

“Joey?” I said from the backseat as he started the car.

“What?”

“Why are my pants ripped all the way down and my underwear hanging out?”

“Remember? Chas?”

“Um. No.”

That cold medicine was the shit.

“Maybe you should go to sleep, Ryan Dean.”

“Why are we driving Chas’s car without him?”

“I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.”

“You’re the best, Joey.”

Joey shook his head. When we came to the entrance to the parking lot, the old man pointed him to turn right. Then he patted Joey on the shoulder and said, “Thanks again. You’re going to take a right up here at Haley Street. By the way, my name is Ned.”

And then Ned dug around in his pocket and said, “How much do you want for the cab ride, boys?”

“You don’t need to pay us,” Joey said.

I closed my eyes and lay down across the seat. Then I felt the car turn right and begin lurching forward along a bumpy, unpaved road.

“This is Battle Point,” Joey said. “How far up here do you live?”

Then I knew we were completely hosed.

Ned said, “Where?”

It began pouring.

Joey said, “Is this your street?”

And Ned said, “I live in Waterloo, Iowa.”

Oh, yeah. Me and Joey. Both total losers.

So I said, “Ned? Will you please kill Joey first? He really, really deserves it.”