Stand-Off (12 page)

But I had to be nice at practice. Well, at least I had to not be mean, since I was captain and had to set an example of all the ethical and
responsible stuff that frequently went against my gut instincts.

Spotted John walked in front of me and rubbed the Abernathy's head. That was something else everyone on the team did too. Every day on the way into the locker room and on our way out at the end of practice, all the guys rubbed Sam's hair and called him Snack-Pack. JP Tureau seemed to take pleasure in pointing out at any opportunity how Snack-Pack Abernathy also happened to be
my
roommate.

“How's it hanging, Snack-Pack?” Spotted John said.

“Hi, Spotted John. What happened to your pants, Ryan Dean?” the Abernathy annoyingly persisted in his investigation into my trousers.

I fantasized about putting Snack-Pack Abernathy in a chokehold and washboarding my knuckles on his head with enough friction to start a fire. But Captain Ryan Dean outmuscled Immature Ryan Dean. And, speaking of this inner struggle, I was absolutely convinced that Immature Ryan Dean was far more likely to go skinny-dipping with Annie Altman than Captain Ryan Dean, who responsibly and wholeheartedly embraced Mrs. Blyleven's all-boys Health class Ten Commandments to My Penis.

“There's a wolverine back there by the soccer field,” I said. “It tried to tear my leg off.”

I winced and looked away as I touched the Abernathy's dirty little-boy hair. You know, rituals and customs, you have to do them in rugby, even if they're completely disgusting.

“Really?”

“No. Not really. And stop talking to me.”

And while I was getting changed into my rugby stuff, our little manager-fetus told on me. Not because I was mean to him; the Abernathy told Coach M that Captain Ryan Dean was bleeding from his kneecap, which meant I had to go back inside the coaching office and allow manager-grub Sam Abernathy to clean and tape up my cut, since there are very strict laws against playing rugby while hemorrhaging from open wounds and stuff, and taping up semidetached body parts was one of the things rugby managers sometimes had to do, along with collecting up all the dirty uniforms and towels from the locker room floor at the end of a game.

Why anyone would volunteer to do such a thing mystified me, and I refused to consider—as Annie had theorized—that Sam Abernathy only volunteered to manage the rugby team because it was his singular mission to become friends with me.

I'd told her he was more likely trying to give me a burst blood vessel in my brain.

And the Abernathy's hands were too small for medical gloves. When he put them on, it looked as though skin was dripping like melted wax from the ends of his tiny baby fingers. He even got one of the fingertips stuck beneath the pressure wrap when he wound it around my knee.

“So, how did you do this, again?” Sam Abernathy asked.

“I told you. A wolverine.”

Sam Abernathy laughed.

“I think you're one of the funniest guys I know, Ryan Dean.”

I shrugged and cleared my throat. I was still perturbed about the way Joey's brother Nico had completely dismissed me—worse, he
broed
me—so I was in no mood to entertain the Abernathy's attempt at flattery.

The front-row guys—the props and the hooker—because they were honestly pretty fat, referred to Thursday practices as “hashtag throw-up Thursdays” because they were generally the toughest workouts of the week. That day, the day of my run-in with Joey's family and my scuffed-up knee, was no exception. Our practice seemed to expand through time, with endless suicide sprints and ladder drills until Coach finally relented and divided us up into four teams for sevens.

Playing the game was what we all lived for, anyway, and Coach M knew exactly how to time things so that just as we were all ready to collapse he could use the final reward of some honest and hard-hitting play to get our heads back into what we were there for. Unfortunately for me, my head wasn't where it was supposed to be that day, after missing lunch and hanging out in Headmaster Name-that-shall-not-be-spoken's office and then the terrible experience in the parking lot, as well as having to endure first-aid treatment from Snack-Pack Abernathy.

And my team was poised to win it all, too. I had the brute Spotted John Nygaard playing center for me, and Seanie Flaherty feeding the
ball back from the front guys. But during our last game, just after getting the ball out of our three-man scrum, I got distracted by something.

Well, to be honest, it wasn't just
something
. I looked up for a moment and I could swear I saw that dude I'd been drawing—the one in black named Nate—standing in goal at the far end of the pitch, just watching me from behind the posts.

And it was while I was caught in that momentary distraction that JP Tureau, who was playing on the opposite team, sailed shoulder-first into my chest and crushed me into the turf of the pitch. I felt something pop, and I tried rolling over to protect the ball, but JP had his hands twisted in my jersey and he pinned me there, rucking over me so his teammates could poach the ball.

Being on the bottom of a ruck in rugby is one of the worst places a human being could ever find himself. Luckily for me, rucks in sevens didn't involve as many assailants as a ruck in a full game, but still, they gave your opponents easy chances to rough you up with grabs, hair pulls, occasional punches, and frequent kicks. I got a little bit of all that while JP pinned me down. He even put his face next to my ear and called me a bitch before raking the ball out of my arms with his cleats, and then feeding it to Bags, who went on to score and win the game.

I thought about things. I decided that my eyebrows and the inner arch of my right foot were the only parts of my body that were not sending pain signals to my brain.

Which was just about when Coach M blasted the whistle to end practice.

I was in no mood to get up. I lay on my side, tasting the little bits of grass and dirt that had somehow crossed the border and migrated into my mouth, thinking how if there ever were a flavor of ice cream called Oregon or Failure-Pain Swirl, it would pretty much taste exactly like dirt and grass.

Coach M stood above me as the rest of the guys filed off the pitch.

“Are you all right, Ryan Dean?”

“I just don't feel like getting up yet, Coach.”

“All right, then,” Coach M said. “You know, he who hesitates . . .”

“Gets rucked,” I said.

I WAS PRETTY SURE JP TUREAU
had cracked a rib, but I wasn't going to say anything about it, especially with only one week to go until our first preseason friendly.

A friendly is a rugby match that doesn't count for anything. And, like most rugby matches that actually
do
count, they're usually friendly affairs, because rugby tends to be like that.

“It seems like we hardly see each other lately,” Annie said.

She sat beside me in the dining hall as we ate dinner that night. And let me tell you, those preformed fiberglass benches we sat on seemed to shoot spikes of pain upward through my rib cage. It hurt so bad, I could hardly take a breath.

“We saw each . . . other in Culinary Arts,” I said, stuttering and gasping through the pain. “Remember? You and the Abernathy . . . won the . . . Coquilles St.-Jacques com—competition. Mine looked . . . like giant scabs.”

“You sound strange. Is something wrong, Ryan Dean?”

“I kind of have . . . the hiccups,” I lied.

JP leered at me from across the table, no doubt trying to gauge whether or not his tackle had had any lingering effect on me. But I was a rock. Well, a stuttering rock. But there was no way I'd ever admit to being hurt in front of JP Tureau, or anyone for that matter. I
turned my face at just the perfect angle so nobody could see the tears pooling in the corners of my eyes.

“You should scare him,” Isabel suggested. “That always works when I have the hiccups.”

I still hadn't found out if Isabel had lost her virginity over the summer. It was killing me almost as much as my ribs. Actually, more.

And then JP said, “Hey, Ryan Dean, a few of us guys are planning on sneaking over to the old O-Hall at midnight tomorrow and busting in to the place. You game?”

I dropped my fork. It was plastic, so it wasn't very dramatic at all.

“Fun—Funny, JP.”

“Nobody told me about that,” Seanie said.

To be honest, nobody ever told Seanie anything, unless they wanted the entire planet chatting about it.

“Oh. I guess that didn't work on the
hiccups
, huh, Ryan Dean?” JP said. “Well, can't blame a guy for trying, right Snack-Pack Senior? How about if I said we all found out you broke Penis Commandment Nine?”

Two things: First, JP and some of the forwards were effectively getting the rugby team to adopt Snack-Pack Senior as my new nickname, since I couldn't properly be called Winger anymore. I did not like the name Snack-Pack Senior. It was really creepy, because it almost gave the impression that the Abernathy was my spawn. Besides, the Bagnuolo brothers who played the wings both already had nicknames,
so some of the guys on the team couldn't break themselves from still calling me Winger, which I definitely preferred to Snack-Pack Senior. Second, four of my rugby teammates, including JP Tureau and Seanie Flaherty, were in the same all-boys twelfth-grade Health class with Mrs. Blyleven, so we all had to write down and sign and memorize our own copies of the Pine Mountain Academy Ten Commandments to My Penis.

To be honest, the first few penis edicts made sense and were reasonable—kind of—but, by the end of the list, whoever had come up with those decrees (and I am absolutely confident the responsible person was not God) had to have been pulling stuff out of his (or her, because I think Mrs. Blyleven was the original author) ass to stretch the list out to Number Ten. Number Nine, undeniably terrifying, involved motorized household appliances.

But I didn't have hiccups, much less a motorized household appliance, so that didn't work either.

Then Seanie, all deadpan creepiness, said, “Dude. Ryan Dean, did you bring a vacuum cleaner with you to PM?”

And Isabel asked, “You guys have
penis rules
on the rugby team?”

“Grr—Great conversation,” I said, and then winced.

“It's a list of rules the boys in Senior Health had to sign,” Annie explained. “I'll tell you about them later.”

And then she giggled and looked at me, which was simultaneously embarrassing and totally hot, because I would have done anything
in the world to be there when Annie told Isabel about our Penis Commandments.

But, unfortunately, that wasn't going to happen.

•  •  •

I told Annie about meeting Nico Cosentino in Headmaster Whatever-you-want-to-call-him's office that day when I wasn't having lunch with her. I didn't tell her why I'd gone to the office in the first place. Annie still foolishly held out this expectation that I would forge a deep and meaningful friendship with Snack-Pack Abernathy.

But, like eavesdropping on Annie Altman's recounting of the Ten Commandments to My Penis to her roommate, Isabel Reyes, that was another something that was too far-fetched to ever consider happening.

We stole a good-night hug behind the screen of shrubbery at the De-Genderized Zone after dinner. I'll admit it hurt enough to make me gasp, and Annie grabbed me by my shoulders and asked, “Ryan Dean, are you
crying
?”

My eyes were watering because of the pain in my ribs, but I still took the opportunity to score major emotional points with Annie Altman.

“No,” I said, and wiped my eyes.

But everyone knows
No
is going to be the answer a boy gives to that question, no matter what the truth is, so Annie just stood there, staring at me. Then she put her hand on my cheek.

“I'm sorry about what happened with Joey's brother,” she said.
“But he
isn't
Joey, you know. He has to deal with things in his own way. You get that, right?”

“Oh. I know, Annie. Still, it would have been cool if we could have just talked a bit, you know?”

Annie nodded. “I love you, Ryan Dean.”

“I love you, Annie.”

Then our perfect and quiet moment was ruined by Mr. Bream's punch-in-the-ribs baritone: “Ryan Dean! Are you managing to sleep better these days?”

In the same way I neglected to tell Annie about my torn-up kneecap and JP cracking my ribs, I also failed to mention to her that I'd been having near-nightly episodes where I'd been terrified of everything. And nothing was getting better.

“Oh. Huh? Uh . . . yes, Mr. Bream,” I said. “Much better.”

But I could see the pain and concern on Annie's face.

She said good night, and added, “The weekend before your regular season starts, you're coming home with me to Bainbridge Island, okay?”