Текст книги "Winger"
Автор книги: Andrew Smith
Соавторы: Andrew Smith
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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 21 страниц)
CHAPTER FIVE
“OKAY, DOUCHE BAG.” CHAS SHOVED me, sending me back against the doorjamb as soon as I crossed the threshold into our room.
Now, this was the Chas Becker I had been expecting earlier that morning.
“I had to pick your shit up off the floor—your stinky socks, your sweaty underwear—and put them away all nice and folded like your mommy, or we’d be restricted by Farrow. And, not only did you leave your shit all over the floor, you left the door wide-fucking open too, so he could see how WE left it. This is O-Hall, Winger. You don’t get caught doing stupid shit like that.”
That doorjamb really hurt between my shoulder blades. And Chas was standing so close, the only thing I could do besides watch his fist clenching just at the bottom of my field of vision was offer him a semiwheezing but fully sincere, “Uh. God. I’m sorry, Chas.”
Chas pushed me again, his hand pinning me against the jamb. And I estimated, hand, door frame . . . I am about three and a half inches thick right now. Maybe less.
“Yeah, well, this is the one time. The one time, Winger. If you were someone not on the team, I would probably kill you right now. But Coach would get pissed.”
He slackened his pressure on my sternum. I thought about saying thanks, but I just kept my mouth shut and my eyes down. I went over to my cubbies and pulled out some clean clothes and a towel and disappeared down the hall for the showers.
It was time for dinner, and I missed my friends.
CHAPTER SIX
I FOUND SEANIE AND JP seated together in the mess hall. They were already on dessert, or maybe their entire meal consisted exclusively of desserts.
One of the only good things about PM was the food, because nobody stopped you from making poor choices. Our rugby team had a “physio,” which is what we call a nutritionist-slash-doctor, though, and during season, there were only certain things we were allowed to eat and drink, and he’d keep watch on the mess hall from November until May.
I had been having such an all-around crappy day, and seeing JP and Seanie didn’t make me feel too much better. I felt isolated, even though we were right there together. I felt like I couldn’t tell them how frustrated I was about this whole Annie thing. Even though we were all juniors and going through reasonably the same kinds of crap, Seanie and JP both had two years of extra confidence on me. So I always struggled with pretending that maybe my friends could overlook that I was only fourteen, even if I couldn’t.
“Hey. I made it,” I said.
“It’s about time, Winger,” JP said. “I don’t think I’m liking this new living arrangement. Seanie and I were just talking about leaving after dessert.”
I sat down across from them with my tray of tacos and salad. I scanned the hall for Annie. She wasn’t there. Among the hundred or so students who were having dinner, I saw Chas sitting with Megan, over where all the seniors hung out. I didn’t get the Megan thing. She was so smart; she was going to be in the Advanced Calculus class with me, and Chas could barely count.
Megan Renshaw played Chas Becker like he was a pair of pocket aces. She knew what his alpha status was worth in social settings, but all the kids in the smart classes saw the obvious softness Megan Renshaw had for intelligent and sensitive boys who would never have breeding rights in the wolf packs run by the Chas Beckers of the world.
That was just another reason why I thought Megan Renshaw was so untouchably hot. She gave hope to losers like me.
JP was wearing his ever-present striped beanie, pulled down over his ears so that just the last inch or two of his wavy light hair curled out over his eyes. He was so popular and smart, and seemed to just go from girl to girl without ever taking it the slightest bit seriously.
“I’m going back for more, anyway,” Seanie said. “So don’t worry about being late, Ryan Dean.”
“Dudes,” I said, “I do honestly believe Betch was just about to kill me before dinner.”
I told them about my run up to Buzzard’s Roost, but I also told them Annie and I ran the whole way together. They listened quietly to my story about our walk in the circle at Stonehenge. I knew they were kind of jealous, too. Not one of us had a girlfriend, and we all recognized how unattainable—and hot—Annie Altman was. Then, of course, I ended the story with my return to O-Hall and a very pissed off Chas Becker.
“You’re not going to make it to the end of the semester alive,” JP concluded.
“You ever seen Betch’s MySite?” Seanie said.
We both looked at him. Seanie was such a video-game-Internet geek with a strong stalker flavor to his personality. I guess he could see what we were both thinking, because Seanie said, in a surprised kind of tone, “What? Well, haven’t you seen Betch’s MySite?”
“I haven’t,” I said.
“Me neither,” JP added.
“Well, it’s creepy, that’s all,” Seanie said. “It’s nothing but pictures of Betch. Almost every one is Betch without a shirt on. Betch wallpaper. Betch in front of a bathroom mirror. A downloadable Betch calendar, which, by the way, I downloaded and printed out and have right now in our room . . . just in case a perfect opportunity should ever arise. And then there’s all these comments about what a stud Betch is. I made up a fake account with a picture of a hot girl just so I could get him to friend me.”
“You’re really kind of sick, Seanie,” I said.
“I know.” Seanie smiled, like he was letting us in on a dark secret.
Then JP said, “Sometimes I lie awake at night thinking about how horrible my life could be if you hated me,” and he added, “stalker.”
I took a bite of taco. “Maybe that should be his new nickname.”
Seanie just stared at us both with his unblinking stalker eyes. He had one of the strangest senses of humor of anyone I ever knew, because it was always so hard to tell whether he was joking around or if you should really be afraid of him. Either way, I guess it was a good thing Seanie was our friend.
“And, dude, anyway, you gotta tell us what happens at the poker game,” JP said.
“Hey,” Seanie said, “I could loan you my deck of Betch playing cards.”
And he said it so straight-faced, but he had to be joking.
Seanie, expressionless, with his unblinking dead eyes, exhaled and stood, saying, “I’m going for more ice cream.”
I watched Seanie get up and walk across the mess hall, stopping for a moment to say something undoubtedly creepy and demented to a group of freshmen, and JP just smiled and shook his head. That’s when I saw Annie come in. She was with her roommate, Isabel Reyes, who was also kind of hot in a faintly mustached kind of way. Annie smiled and waved at me, and I waved back as JP just sat there, watching me watch her.
CHAPTER SEVEN
LIGHTS-OUT CAME AT TEN O’CLOCK every night, except for Fridays and Saturdays, when they’d let us stay up until midnight. Usually, guys would hang out in the common areas, where we didn’t have to wear uniforms—we could just wear T-shirts if we wanted to—watching television until bedtime. In the regular dorms, there was a common area for every two or three bedrooms, but in O-Hall, there was only one TV room for the entire floor, and we currently had twelve guys living here, along with Mr. Farrow and Mrs. Singer, who got the first-floor living room all to herself since there were currently no girls in O-Hall.
So when the TV went off at ten, we all went back to our rooms. As I closed our door behind us, I saw that Chas had already set out a deck of cards (regular, not “Betch” cards, which I highly doubt ever existed unless Seanie made them himself, which is something Seanie would actually take the time to do) and a case of thirteen-gram poker chips on top of one of the desks.
I’ll admit I was kind of scared about Chas’s poker game. I really didn’t want to get into trouble on day negative-one of my junior year at Pine Mountain.
I pointed at the empty desk, nervously trying to make conversation.
“Is that one going to be my desk?” I asked.
“Yeah, sure,” Chas said, obvious in his lack of enthusiasm at engaging his new roomie in conversation. “Whatever. Turn off the lights and get in bed.”
“Oh. Okay.”
I turned off the light and began taking off my pants.
“What are you doing, you idiot?” Chas whispered. “Keep your clothes on. We’re going to play poker, asswipe.”
I honestly thought we were going to bed.
I pulled my pants up.
“Oh. Yeah. Sorry.”
I really didn’t get it, but I knew if Chas said keep my clothes on, I was keeping them on. I climbed up onto the top bunk and instantly fell asleep.
I woke up to a burning flashlight beam stabbing my eyes as Joey Cosentino thumbed one of my eyelids up and whispered, “Nah, he’s alive.”
It took me a minute to register where I was and what was going on. I looked at the red numbers on the digital alarm clock. It was midnight. Actually, 12:04.
They start their games at midnight when there is going to be school in the morning?
“Wake up, kid. I thought you wanted to play,” Chas said.
I sat up.
There were four of us: me, Chas, Joey, and Kevin Cantrell. The three guys I was playing with were all seniors. There was something especially scary about that. I swung my feet over the edge of the bed, and, rubber-legged, hopped down onto the floor.
Chas collected twenty dollars from everyone and put the money in the chip box. He handed out stacks of chips and explained the blinds. The game was Hold ’Em. I rubbed my eyes. The other guys looked perfectly awake, like it was lunchtime or something. I tried to straighten my hair, but it always did whatever it wanted to do, anyway.
There was a towel stuffed along the floor at the bottom of the door, and another covering the creepy tilting-window thing on top, so no one would see the light from our room.
None of us wore shoes. Kevin and Joey obviously had to keep it as stealth as possible, sneaking through the hallway past Farrow’s door. I was wearing my school uniform pants, my belt, unbuckled and twisted halfway around to my back, and a wrinkled T-shirt. Chas was still in his uniform shirt from dinner, but without the tie, and Joey and Kevin wore loose sweatpants and T-shirts. And the funny thing is, I noticed they were wearing their black and blue hoop rugby socks, too, and I thought, God, either these guys are really dorks, or they just can’t wait for the season to begin.
We sat on the cool linoleum floor, all facing each other, Chas with his back resting against the bottom bunk. The floor space was barely big enough for us, and those three other guys were monsters, anyway. Kevin played lock alongside Chas, so he was exactly Chas’s height; and Joey, who was six-one, played fly half, number ten, which is kind of the equivalent to quarterback in American football. So I had more dealings with Joey in practice and during games, since we were both in the back line, and I got along with him and trusted him, too, and I wasn’t creeped out or anything about Joey being gay.
Everyone on the team knew that Joey was gay, but no one ever had a problem with it, either. He was honest about it with the guys, and they accepted him because of it, plus he never acted or talked like the stereotypical gay guys that people think are caricatures of the entire population. I mean, who does that, anyway?
That’s one of the other things about rugby too: I think that because it is such a fringe kind of sport that practically borders on the insane, rugby guys stick up for and tolerate one another more than boys tend to do in other sports. Sure, sometimes the guys would make teasing jokes behind Joey’s back and even to his face, but they did that to every single player on the team, and being gay, or uncoordinated, or only fourteen and in eleventh grade for that matter, didn’t really have anything to do with it, because there was absolute equality of opportunity in being picked on in a good-natured kind of way. But no one on our team ever took it too seriously.
Chas was kind of the exception on the team, and maybe he was always overcompensating through his bullying because he recognized that he didn’t fit in very well; and maybe, too, the guys and the coach just put up with his being such a colossal asshole because he was a great athlete.
I yawned and folded my legs, Indian style, as we put in the first blinds and Chas shuffled the non-Betch cards.
Chas looked across at Joey and Kevin and said, “Did you bring the refreshments?”
“Sure did.” Kevin smiled, and then he and Joey stretched their legs out straight, so their socks were practically in my face, and pulled up their sweats from the bottom. That was when I could see why they wore their rugby socks. Both of them had two tall cans of beer on each of their legs, snugged down tightly inside our team hoops.
So when they rolled their socks down and made a little shrine from eight twenty-four-ounce cans of beer on the floor beside us, I really felt scared . . . because three didn’t divide evenly into eight, and I had never, never, taken a drink of alcohol in my life.
What if it stunted my growth?
“And they’re still pretty cold,” Joey said. He obviously was the designated beer-passer-outer. He handed a can to Chas, then Kevin, and then he grabbed one from the shrine and tilted it toward me, a calm and serious look in his steady, fly half eyes.
“I never had a drink before in my life,” I said.
“It’s okay, Winger,” Joey said. “I was just offering. I understand.”
I was so relieved, and I liked Joey even more at that moment, but I mean that in a totally non-gay way, because I felt like he was sticking up for me.
Chas and Kevin had already opened their beers and were drinking before the first deal, and Joey took the beer he’d offered me and popped it open for himself. Then Chas reached across our little poker circle and grabbed a can of beer away from Joey’s arrangement, pulled the tab forward so I could hear and smell that beer trying to find a way out of the can, and placed it on the floor beside my knee.
“It’s time for you to lose your beer virginity, Winger,” he said. Then he raised his can to the center and said, “Cheers.”
And we all tapped cans. Six eyes watched me, and I closed mine as tight as I could and took my first-ever swallow of beer.
As Chas began dealing the cards out, all these things kind of occurred to me at once:
1. The taste. Who ever drinks this piss when they’re thirsty? Are you kidding me? Seriously . . . you’ve got to be kidding.
2. Little bit of vomit in the back of my throat. It gets into my nasal passages. It burns like hell, and now everything also smells exactly like barf. Nice. Real nice.
3. I am really scared. I am convinced something horrible is going to happen to me now. I picture my mom and dad and Annie (she is so smoking hot in black) at my funeral.
4. Mom and Dad? I feel so terrible that I let them down and became a dead virgin alcoholic at fourteen.
5. For some reason, Chas, Joey, and Kevin are all looking at me and laughing as quietly as they can manage.
6. Woo-hoo! Chas dealt me pocket Jacks.
An hour later, I had finished an entire beer. I needed to pee so bad, there were tears pooling in my eyes. I forgot what my home phone number was—I don’t know why it mattered, I don’t even know why I silently asked myself the question Hey, Ryan Dean West . . . what’s your home phone number?, but I was emotionally devastated, crushed, that I forgot my home phone number—and I was the first player to lose all his chips, too.
By two in the morning, the game was finished. Joey won everyone’s money, which gave him the right to determine the consequence.
Oh, yeah . . . the consequence.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THANK GOD IT HAD NOTHING to do with getting naked.
Thank God, again, it had something to do with peeing.
I needed to pee so bad, I sat rocking back and forth in a near-catatonic state, with my hand jammed down between my legs.
Then Joey told me, “Here’s all you gotta do, Ryan Dean. This is a easy one. All you gotta do is go downstairs and take a pee in the downstairs girls’ bathroom.”
“But Mrs. Thinger is down there.”
(I couldn’t remember her name.)
“Singer,” Chas corrected.
I rocked. I thought he was telling me I had to sing, too. Oh, well. I kind of felt like singing.
Yeah, 142 pounds gets pretty stupid when you add twenty-four ounces of beer to it.
“Hey,” I said, continuing my journey into stupidity, “Do any of you guys know my home phone number? I think it’s got a twenty-four in it, too.”
At that moment, I think everything in my universe had a twenty-four in it.
“Come on, retard, before you piss in your pants,” Kevin said, pulling me up by my armpits. It felt like I was standing on ice skates, and I nearly fell down, but Chas was right there behind me, holding me steady.
“Hey, thanks,” I said. “You guys are really awesome.”
I would have shaken hands with them, but I didn’t dare let go of my dick.
They turned out the flashlight and pushed me toward the door.
“You remember what you gotta do?” Chas said.
“Yeah,” I said, confidently. “What?”
“Go pee in the girls’ bathroom downstairs,” Joey reminded.
“Oh, yeah,” I said, “And sing, too.”
I don’t know exactly where I got the singing part from, but Chas, Joey, and Kevin weren’t about to stand in the way of my willingness to compound my idiocy.
“Come on,” Chas whispered, pushing me out the door. “And you better do it, ’cause we’re going to be following.”
“You guys are the best,” I said, and they all three whispered “Shhh!” as we made our way down the lightless hall to the stairwell.
And every step I took made me feel like a water balloon filled to the bursting point. I was convinced I would explode in a shower of pee and guts right there on the stairs. It hurt so much to move, but each foot forward brought me closer to relief.
I was sweating like a heroin smuggler at a border crossing when we cracked the door open onto the girl-less girls’ floor. I ice-skated in my socks down the dustless linoleum hallway. It felt nice under my feet, so nice I almost began laughing, but I wasn’t stupid enough to do that, yet. Chas, Joey, and Kevin made their way around the outside of the building. They instructed me to pull open the window once I’d gotten into the bathroom so they could help me get away if I needed to.
And I thought, no wonder I couldn’t remember my home phone number (but it still choked me up, nevertheless), because I drew a mental Ryan Dean West Brain-Capacity-Allocation Pie Chart, and it came out like this:
So there you go. It’s a miracle I didn’t forget to breathe.
I am such a loser.
I found the bathroom. When I got inside and shut the door, I reached over to flick on the lights, but the switch was on the opposite side of the door from the boys’ bathroom, and this gave me time to realize how stupid turning on the lights would actually have been.
But, drunk or not, at least I was smart enough to latch the door behind me.
And then I thought, Wow, this is a really nice bathroom, so clean and spotless, with nice clean curtains hanging across the row of shower stalls. It was so nice, I almost wanted to lie down on the cool, clean floor and take a nap. But I had to pee too bad. So I turned toward the wall opposite the showers and hurriedly unzipped.
The urinals were gone!
Oh, yeah.
So, standing there as I was, pulled halfway out of my pants, made me want to pee even worse. I literally almost began to cry. Then I heard a scraping at the window and ran over and unfastened the catches.
Chas lifted up the window and stuck his head inside.
My pants fell down around my ankles.
I pushed open a stall.
The goddamned toilet seat was down!
Too bad. I couldn’t slow down for such genteel considerations as raising a toilet seat (something for which I hadn’t been yelled at since I was about seven).
Sweet mother of God, it felt good to pee. And it wasn’t just peeing, it was something more: It was the God of Peeing, it was Zen archery, but with a stream of piss rather than a bow and arrow.
And it was so loud and musical sounding, which reminded me to start singing. Heck, I figured the stream wouldn’t likely slow down before dawn, anyway. So, while I am sure that the natural sound of Zen Peeing was, in itself, loud enough to roust Mrs. Singer, the girls’ floor resident counselor, from her sleep, my choice of song ensured the fact.
I began singing a rugby song called “Proper Ranger,” whose lyrics include some of the most tasteless imaginable descriptions of sex acts. And it doesn’t even rhyme very well, either, but some of those words just don’t have good rhyming matches, anyway. The thing about the song, though, is that if you are a rugby player and are present when another rugby player begins to sing it, you have to sing along . . . so, Chas, Joey, and Kevin all joined in at the appropriate time while I continued the liberation of my unstoppable torrent of pee.
And, Zen-like, everything came together at the end. I shook off, pulled my pants up (failing with the complexities of my zipper), the song finished (with words I won’t repeat here), and the very unhot Mrs. Singer began rattling the doorknob and trying to pound her way in.
“What are you doing in there?” she demanded through the door.
And I giggled, because I thought, That’s a dumb question. Who, within a hundred feet, door or not, couldn’t tell what I was doing in there?
Pound pound pound.
“Who’s in there?”
And Chas said, “Come on, Winger!”
And just as Chas and Kevin grabbed my wrists and pulled me through the window, I heard the exceedingly never-spent-a-fraction-of-a-minute-in-her-life-being-hot Mrs. Singer say through the door, “I am going to put a diarrhea spell on you.”
Well, I can’t be sure exactly, but it sounded like that was what she said to me.
I fell down, giggling, in a clump of ferns beneath the windowsill.
“Hey. Where are my shoes?” I asked. I studied my feet, where I had propped them up on the outside of the log-constructed O-Hall.
Yeah, I was ultrastupid.
“You weren’t wearing any, retard,” Chas whispered.
“Then why’d I come outside if I wasn’t wearing shoes?”
It was like I’d forgotten everything that had taken place in the past two hours and was willing to have a conversation about it so I could fill in the holes. I realized then that the Ryan Dean West Pie Chart of Brain Activity was an empty tin. Not even a crumb of crust left in that skull.
Thank God I had my teammates there to look after me.
Well, at least I had Chas, because Joey and Kevin had already climbed up the outer wall of O-Hall and squeezed back inside their window.
“Come on, Winger. We gotta go,” Chas said. He began climbing up the corner logs on the bottom floor and whispered over his shoulder, “I am not carrying you, so you better get moving now or your ass is toast.”
