Stand-Off (2 page)

The End

Mom and Dad had helped me move in this time. It was weird. All the other times they'd dropped me off at Pine Mountain, it was like they couldn't possibly leave fast enough.

Dad carried in my two plastic totes. One of them contained all my clothes and boy stuff—you know, deodorant and the razor Dad sent me last fall that was still as unnecessary as ever—and the other had school supplies, some brand new bedsheets, and a microwave oven, which I had no idea why they'd insisted I bring along. I lugged in the big canvas duffel bag filled with all my rugby gear that was soon to be packed away in my locker over at the sports complex.

I wanted to play rugby again almost as much as I wanted to see Annie, whom I hadn't seen since she left Boston for Seattle five days before.

And—
ugh!
—Mom cried when she put my new sheets on the exceedingly gross, slept-on-countless-times-before, yellowing boys' dorm twin-size fucking mattress, and I just stood there, helplessly giving my dad a
what-the-fuck
look. He shrugged.

At home in Boston, I had a big bed. I'm not sure where my Boston bed fit in on the hierarchy of royalty—you know, queens and kings and such—but it was easily twice as big as a twin, if this thing even
was
an actual twin. It was probably a preemie or something—the afterbirth of a twin. So we'd had to stop at a department store in this little town called Bannock, which is about twenty minutes from Pine Mountain, to get some sheets, and the only ones they had that would fit my dorm bed following the incoming rush of PM brats were pink flannel and decorated with a winged unicorn who, according to the inscription beneath her glinting hooves, was named
Princess Snugglewarm
.

Yeah. It was going to be a great year, wasn't it?

“Why are you crying, Mom? Don't worry about the unicorns. We can hide them beneath the blanket. I checked. It only has Princess Snugglewarm on one side, so we can flip it over so it only looks a little gay,” I said.

Mom sniffled. “Oh, Ryan Dean. It's not that, baby. There's only so many more times left in our lives when I'll be able to put sheets on your bed and tuck you in.”

This coming from the woman who wept when she bought me a box of condoms because she actually thought Annie and I were having sex—like that was ever going to happen—when I was fourteen.

It was hopeless.

And not only do horses with big fucking spikes coming out of their heads scare me, but I hate flannel sheets besides.

JOE RANDOMKID TURNED OUT TO
be named Sam Abernathy.

It had to be a fake name. Nobody in the world could possibly be named
Sam Abernathy
.

I realized that every time I'd been dropped off for the start of school at Pine Mountain Academy, there came the predictable and awful dread of wanting my parents to just get the hell out of there so I could mope for a while in the quiet of my mold-and-disinfectant-smelling room. And each time, I'd wonder why in the name of hell I was here to begin with, and convince myself that I was not going to be able to make it through an entire school year on my own, alone.

That's what I was doing: lying on my little pink bed in my ID-photo school tie, button-down shirt, and creased slacks, moping and frightening myself with visions of a dreadful future here, when Sam Abernathy—well, to be honest, it was Sam and the entire fucking Abernathy clan—knocked on my dorm room's door.

And who knocks, anyway? You don't knock on the door to your own dorm room. It wasn't like they didn't give Sam Abernathy a key to Princess Snugglewarm's 130-square-foot empire.

So, thinking it was someone else, and not my new roommate, Joe Randomkid, I ignored the knock and resumed my pout session.

Thirty seconds later:
knock knock knock!

For just a minute, I thought that maybe it was Annie. But there was no way Annie Altman would ever break a rule like no-girls-allowed-in-the-boys'-dorm at Pine Mountain Academy, even if it would have been a highly combustible five out of five propane tanks in a campfire on the Ryan Dean West Scale of Hot Things You Are Never Supposed to Do.

Ugh!
I wanted to go home already, and I wanted Annie, too. And I felt like such a pathetic loser for forgetting to register my dorm preference and ending up in a ground-floor double with someone who undoubtedly was a match in every degree to my colossal loserdom.

Knock knock knock!

“Go away.”

Through the door came a very soft voice that could easily have belonged to one of Princess Snugglewarm's loyal subjects—maybe a royal eunuch or something.

“Uh. But I'm supposed to live here.”

“Then why the fuck are you knocking?”

Okay. To be honest, I didn't say “fuck.” I never cuss out loud. Well, I can't say
never
, but, really, it's like
almost never
. And it didn't happen that day before the start of school as I lay on my less-than-twin-size Princess Snugglewarm bed, pouting and listening to Joe Randomkid, a.k.a. Sam Abernathy, timidly and patiently knocking on his own goddamned front door.

Click. Squeak. Creak.

The door cracked open, just about two inches. I saw a flash of a Pine Mountain necktie and an eyeball. It was human, I'm pretty sure. Then the door closed again, and I heard this:

TIMID VOICE IN THE HALLWAY:
He . . . he's in bed.

MAN'S VOICE IN THE HALLWAY:
Maybe we should wait out here for a while.

WOMAN'S VOICE IN THE HALLWAY:
What's he doing?

TIMID VOICE IN THE HALLWAY:
I don't know. I didn't really look. All I know is he's in bed.

LITTLE BOY'S VOICE IN THE HALLWAY:
Is he naked?

LITTLE GIRL'S VOICE IN THE HALLWAY:
Eww. Boys are so gross.

WOMAN'S VOICE IN THE HALLWAY:
Maybe letting Sam room with a twelfth-grader, even if he
is
only fifteen, wasn't such a good idea after all, Dave.

MAN'S VOICE IN THE HALLWAY:
Honey, why don't you take Evie out to the car? The boys and I can wait here till Sam's roommate wakes up or puts some clothes on or whatever.

And, at precisely that moment, I was wondering if I could figure out a way to turn a microwave oven into a bomb.

You can do that, right? If anyone would know how to turn a microwave oven into an explosive, it would be my friend Seanie Flaherty, assuming he was still my friend after the separation of summer vacation, and after the fights I'd gotten into last year with
JP Tureau, who was Seanie's roommate and my decidedly ex-friend.

I pulled the door open.

“I'm not naked, and I wasn't asleep, and it's your room, so I'm assuming you probably possess your very own key, which is why you will never be allowed to knock again.”

I'll admit I was a little edgy, and the Abernathy clan looked as though I'd slapped each one of them across the face with a dead cod or something. They were all so nice looking, like if they had wings, you would swear you were looking at a family of angels: father, mother, two angelic, big-eyed, blond-headed sons, one of whom was dressed in a perfect Pine Mountain boy's uniform, and a little daughter who looked like the poster child for all things pure and scented of baby powder.

Mr. Abernathy, being the brave cod-slapped angel that he was, forced a contrived smile at me and said, “Sam, this must be your roommate, Ryan.”

To be honest, I didn't know where to begin. Initially, I wanted to launch into a scolding tirade about my name
not being goddamned Ryan
, that it was Ryan Dean and I hated it when people took it upon themselves to assume the appropriateness of an abbreviation, but I was momentarily overcome by the realization that Sam Abernathy—Joe Randomkid—was only twelve years old.

And he was going to be my roommate this year.

Princess Snugglewarm, save me!

I FOUND OUT THAT THE
idea behind pairing me up for the year with Sam Abernathy came from the headmaster himself, Mr. Lavoie, and the school psychologist, Mrs. Dvorak. The Abernathy Tabernacle Choir was concerned about having their supergenius kid start Pine Mountain at the tender age of twelve, so Mr. Lavoie and Mrs. Dvorak thought it would be a perfect plan to room the boy up with the only other person in the history of Pine Mountain Academy who'd ever done such a ridiculous thing: a really nice, comic-drawing, supersmart, rugby-player boy from Boston named Ryan Dean West, who was a senior, and only fifteen years old.

Ryan Dean West could show little Sam the ropes, Headmaster Lavoie promised!

Ugh.

I felt like I'd been signed up against my will on one of those creepy online dating sites and I had no power to refuse my suitor.

And, by the way, did I look that small when I was a twelve-year-old freshman here?

Sam Abernathy could have fit in my pocket.

No wonder Annie felt sorry for me back then. They might just as well have left Sam Abernathy in a diaper inside a wicker basket on my doorstep. Or a cigar box.

I did
not
want to do this.

My quiet pouting turned to silent rage after all the Abernathys crowded into our tiny princessdom and began setting up Sam's closet and desk and making his bed and folding his little outfits. I decided I wasn't going to say a word to them, not even when Sam Abernathy's four-year-old brother, Dylan (which, by the way, is an annoyingly perfect name for a little kid who looks like one of the babies—take your pick—in Raphael's
The Madonna of the Goldfinch
) climbed up on my bed—
my bed!
—and sat down beside me and asked me if I wanted to make a fort with my blanket.

Ignoring a four-year-old is as good as granting full consent.

“Princess Snugglewarm!” Dylan gurgled as he tugged away the top layer of my fucking bed.

Everything in the room went deathly silent.

All ten Abernathy eyes fixed on me with congruent expressions of wonder and acceptance.

I was one with all things Abernathy.

“Oh, you boys are going to be such good friends!” Mrs. Abernathy cooed as she unfolded and spread out Sam Abernathy's Super Mario Bros. sheets.

I made a mental note to myself that as soon as I got back from Headmaster Lavoie's office to petition for an impossible-to-get dorm assignment change, I was going to hunt down Seanie Flaherty and ask him if he knew how to make a microwave oven explode.

So I left without saying anything, certain that when I came back I'd find an elaborate live-action camping diorama set up on the floor between our beds, complete with campfire-singing Abernathys, toasted s'mores, and swarms of lightning bugs and mosquitos.

Okay. Well, you know how when you're storming over to some important person's office in order to voice an outraged yet well-deserved complaint peppered with the adverb-adjective double combo of “completely unacceptable” and then as you get closer and closer to that important person's office you begin to realize that (1) you're actually afraid of that important person—in this case, Headmaster Lavoie—and (2) you don't really know how to pronounce his last name because you've only ever seen it written on official letters from his office of importance, and nobody ever says his name out loud, which makes you think he could quite possibly be some unearthly manifestation of the Dark Lord, and (3) your armpits are sweating a lot (hello, being fifteen years old!) and you have really bad B.O., so you start walking slower and slower and then just about the time the administration offices come into view and you're halfway around the goddamned lake you suddenly realize there could be nothing in the world worse than starting off the year—no, negative year, since the year hadn't officially begun—by getting into a complaint match with someone who frightens you
and
whose name you can't pronounce, so you decide to give up and turn your stinky sweaty self back in the direction you came from?

Yeah.

That.

So I stopped and I thought about all the terrible things that had happened to me last year, and tried to erase the nagging premonition that I was fooling myself if I didn't think this year was going to be even worse. I took a deep breath.

I sat down on a bench and faced out across the lake to the spot in the woods where O-Hall, the “bad kids” dorm they put me in last year, sat abandoned and shut down.

Why did I come back?

I put my face in my hands.

I decided a long time ago that I was never going to cry again. Never. So I just sat there, trying to zone out, seeing if I couldn't just fall asleep, so maybe I would wake up and find out that everything had been a dream and I was fourteen still, or even thirteen again, so things wouldn't be as bleak as they were now in Ryan Dean West's fifteen-year-old nightmare.

“Dude. Winger? Ryan Dean?”

I snapped my head up and turned around. Sean Russell Flaherty and Jean-Paul Tureau had been standing there on the walk, watching me. They must have just come out of the registration lines in the admin building.

I got up. I really didn't want Seanie and JP to think I was still feeling sorry for myself.

“Holy crap!” Seanie said. “Dude. You're, like, taller than me.”

He was right. Growing is something about which you don't have any say-so when you're a teenage boy, and my body had stretched out another three inches of vertical over the summer.

“Maybe he'll go out for basketball this year,” JP, always glum, always digging at me, added.

That's all right, JP,
I thought.

“Actually, I'm considering going out for number fifteen,” I said, and smiled.

Fifteen in rugby is fullback, which was JP's position. I wasn't crazy enough to want to ever be fullback, which is the worst position on the field besides hooker, which isn't what you think, okay? But if JP wanted to start the year off hurling shitballs at me, he was going to get them right back.