Stand-Off (27 page)

Side note: What the fuck am I saying? You're not starting to cry, are you Ryan Dean? You better not fucking start crying.

“I've been trying to find my heart since last year. I don't know if I have yet. Maybe we'll find out after seventy minutes of rugby. We've always been a great team, but too many things got in our way last year. Now it's a new year, right?”

Some of the guys said, “Right!”

It made me feel weird. I didn't think anyone was listening to me. I don't even know if I was listening to myself.

I said, “It's supposed to be fun. Joey would want us to have fun. I'm pretty sure he'd give us some serious shit if we didn't have fun out there today, no matter what the numbers look like when we clean up and go home. Right?”

And now the whole team answered, “Right!”

Side note: I really did say “shit,” and Coach M, who was very strict about cussing, never said one thing about it to me. Also, I hadn't noticed, since I was actually looking at my feet—because I was afraid I might have drippy eyes—but while I was talking to the team (and my feet), another boy had come into the locker room. It was Nico Cosentino.

He stood behind the team, watching us and listening to me. When I looked at him, he nodded his chin in a silent,
hey, bro
kind of greeting that guys do sometimes.

So, yeah, even his chin
broed
me.

And he was dressed like a Pine Mountain kid—all done up in a full school uniform and tie. That was weird. I thought Nico withdrew from Pine Mountain. I looked at Coach and could see right away that he'd known Nico was coming to the game. It had to have been as big a thing—or bigger—to Coach M as it was for me. But I also could see that Nico didn't want to be pointed out to everyone. He wasn't that kind of guy. I knew that about Nico from the first time I'd ever said anything to him in Headmaster What-the-fuck's office. So before he could get noticed by the other twenty-two kids getting ready to play the game, Nico turned around and walked out of the locker room.

ANNIE WAS WAITING FOR ME.
She stood beside the gate to the rugby pitch, just past the door where the guys came out of our locker room.

And I'll be honest—I felt a little guilty and ashamed because I was wearing Joey's jersey, and Annie knew it. Joey had been just as good a friend to Annie as he had been to me.

I grabbed her hand and squeezed while the team filed past us onto the field.

“Are you nervous?” she asked.

“Like always,” I said.

“It should make you feel good to get out there again.”

“Yeah. Hey, look—there's someone here that I want you to meet,” I said.

“Oh? Who?”

“It's a surprise. Come on.”

And I led Annie up into the bleachers, which were surprisingly full. There weren't a lot of things to do around Pine Mountain, so I was never sure if the kids and staff actually liked rugby or just came to the games to see who'd be carried off in a stretcher. I found Nico sitting near the top of the stands, all alone. It was kind of weird that I felt sorry about him being alone. What would I expect? Nobody here knew him—he
was just this anonymous new kid who'd never been seen around before.

I said, “Nico Cosentino, I'd like you to meet Annie Altman.”

Nico—as I would have expected of
anyone
who was related to Joey—stood up when I introduced Annie. And I watched her blush—
ugh!
—when he gently took her hand.

“Are you—” Annie began.

“Joey's brother,” Nico said. “Joey told me about you. You're just as beautiful as he said you were.”

I kind of choked a little. And then I said something really stupid.

“Annie's my girlfriend. We had sex last Sunday.”

Okay. I'll admit it. The stupid thing I said did
not
include that second sentence, even if I wanted to say it. Because what made that entirely stupid was that I
knew
Joey would have told him Annie and I were boyfriend and girlfriend, but it was just that Nico was so goddamned good looking and nice, and I actually saw Annie blush.

“Bro. I know she's your girlfriend. Duh.”

“Oh. Uh, I better get down on the field before someone says something. I just wanted you to have someone to hang out with during the game. Uh. Bro.”

So there. I
broed
him back.

“Thanks, man.”

This was interesting. Apparently, broing a bro promotes you to “man.”

“Enjoy the game,” I said. Then I gave Annie a quick ninja cheek-peck and clattered my metal cleats down the stands.

And as I was walking away from them, Nico said, “Hey, Ryan Dean. I like that jersey on you.”

I stopped in my tracks. I turned around and locked eyes with Nico Cosentino. Neither of us said anything. We didn't have to.

•  •  •

It was a rough game, which as far as rugby is concerned made it a perfect game.

The team we hosted traveled down from Bellingham, Washington, where, apparently, there are a lot of really big teenage boys who play rugby, because all things considered, we were completely outsized. The opposing number ten was at least thirty pounds heavier than me. We hit each other a few times, and I definitely felt each and every one of those extra pounds.

Before the first half ended, Seanie Flaherty caught an elbow on the top of his head, which cut him pretty good. He had to come out of the game because he was a bloody mess, so T-Bag moved up to play scrum half, and a replacement winger came in. Seanie needed stitches. There was almost nothing our medic could do for a cut in the top of a kid's scalp except tell Seanie to keep it pinched shut, because Seanie refused to leave the sidelines until the game was over.

At halftime, when we were down 3–0, Seanie told me, “Hey, Ryan Dean, I'm going to get to see that hottie nurse after the game.”

“Lucky you, dude,” I said. I didn't have the heart to tell him that Nurse Hickey was out on maternity leave and that he'd most likely get the full-on once-over from Doctor No-gloves.

Poor Seanie.

Halftime in rugby lasts exactly five minutes, and during that time players are not allowed to step off the field of play. That's how the game is: brutal. We circled up so we could talk about what we needed to do to pull the win. And I glanced up in the stands and saw Nico Cosentino looking right at me, like he was saying,
Hey, bro, get your shit together
. He was sitting between Isabel and Annie, which, for whatever stupid laundry list of reasons, made me feel kind of jealous.

Coach M never said anything to us about how we were playing during games. He'd just stay on the sidelines, taking notes and watching. That was one of the things that made him such a great coach. He'd say that his time to tell us what we needed to do was at practice. During a game, he said, we were all on our own. The real game was our chance to show him what we had learned, what we could do, and all the grown-up talk in the world was not going to change what boys do out on the pitch.

“Nice job at scrummie, T-Bag,” I said, and patted Timmy Bagnuolo's shoulder.

“Yeah. Nice job,” Spotted John said.

“Look, we're going to have to ruck and post and run on these guys, even if we only get five meters at a time, because we're not busting
through in open-field play,” I said. “Let the forwards do their job.”

JP looked mad. The open field was my responsibility, and I wasn't getting us anywhere today.

“Bullshit,” JP argued. “Get the ball to me, Ryan Dean. I'll put it in goal.”

I looked at JP. Another stare-down standoff.

I nodded. “I think you can do it, JP. Let's give it a try.”

So there, asshole.

And I added, “If we can get a scrum deep in their end, let's wheel it and see if we can't get them tripping all over themselves and open up for us.”

“That's dangerous, and against the laws,” the Abernathy, who had carried water bottles onto the field and had also, apparently, been studying the International Rugby Board law book, said. (There are no rules in rugby—there are only “laws,” which, like all laws, only have teeth if people get caught breaking them.)

“Shut up, Snack-Pack,” Cotton Balls said. “We know what we're doing.”

I'll admit it: Intentionally wheeling a scrum is dangerous and arguably illegal, but we'd been practicing plays with the forward pack where we'd wheel the scrum (which means causing the pack of bodies to rotate) just slightly—twenty-two-and-a-half degrees, to be precise—which could really block off the opposing scrum half and back line if we did it right, and if we also had them butted up
against a touch line. (“Touch” is what Americans think of as “out of bounds.”)

We tried, we tried, but almost nothing worked against those guys.

When seventy minutes had elapsed, our teams were tied at three points each. Almost unbelievably, and to both sides' forwards' credit, neither team had been able to get the ball into goal. Our scores were both penalty kicks. JP, who admittedly was Pine Mountain's best kicker, made ours for us to tie the match and save us from a preseason loss late in the game.

Usually, during preseason friendly matches, if the score is tied when time has expired, they'd usually let it stand as a tie, since there was little sense in getting players messed up over a game that didn't count for anything. But the coaches talked to the referee, and both sides agreed to play a sudden-death overtime so that the game would end with one team winning.

Which meant someone had to lose.

Our opportunity (to win, not to lose) came quickly. Overtime was our kickoff, and I was the guy who did kickoffs. I'd been working on high, deep hangers that gave our fastest backs the opportunity to get underneath them and actually receive our own kicks, and I nailed one. The Bellingham fullback took his eyes off the ball, which gave our inside center, Corn Dog (you really do not want to know how he got that name) a chance to get under it and take the ball for Pine Mountain.

JP came crashing up from the back, hollering for the ball. It was a very risky move, considering the fullback is the last line of defense and there was a hell of a lot of open pitch behind us.

Just as he got caught up in a crushing maul that was not going to move anywhere, Corn Dog popped the ball back to JP, who was busting through at full speed. JP made it over the goal line and—
whack!
—he got hit so hard by one of Bellingham's flankers, it sounded like a two-by-four breaking on a cinder-block wall.

Okay, so here's another rugby lesson for you if you don't know the game: In order to score a try (which is what a goal is called in rugby), the ball has to be touched down onto the grass in goal by the ball carrier. This is where the ridiculous term “touchdown” comes from in American football—where nothing at all gets
touched down
and there is most often silly dancing involved, which is absolutely against the law in rugby. If an opposing player can slip his hand (or any other body part—
ewww!
) between the ball and the grass, then the score does not count and the ball is called “held up in goal,” which is what looked like was going to happen to JP.

Our guys piled onto JP from behind, trying to get him down to the grass, while the Bellingham guys plowed into JP from the opposite side, trying to keep him up on his feet. I stayed back, just off T-Bag's right shoulder, in case the ball got to our scrummie.

It didn't.

JP Tureau was monstrously strong. The muscles on his legs strained
so hard, I swear it looked like he was about to snap his thigh bones like pencils. He drove forward and got the ball lower. And that's when just about the worst possible thing that could ever happen to a dude with a titanic ego like JP Tureau's happened to JP Tureau and his titanic ego.

The HMS
JP Tureau
hit the knock-on iceberg.

As JP got the ball down to grass level, a surging press from Bellingham twisted him around (it looked like JP nearly snapped in half), and—
plunk!
—the ball squirted forward from JP's fingers and bounced free. That, in rugby, is what is called a knock-on, which means the ball carrier somehow allowed his ball to drop free in front of his body, and it is not a good thing. When it happens in goal, the referee calls for a scrum (with the opposing team given the slight advantage of feeding the ball in) on the five-meter line.

So this was it: We were close to the goal, in a scrum, with Bellingham butted up against a line of touch—a perfect storm for our little wheel play.

In set plays, like scrums, I would call audibles to the team. The stand-off, number ten, is equivalent to quarterback in American football, so that was my responsibility. As the front- and second-row guys began lining up, Spotted John turned back to me and pointed his index finger at his left palm, which meant he wanted to try to sneak the ball out from the scrum. The only two players who are allowed to reach below the scrum's tangle of bodies and pull the ball out are the
scrum half and the eight-man, and when the number eight did it—this was usually rare—it often caught the other team by complete surprise.

I shook my head, dismissing Spotted John's idea.

“Twenty-two point five!” I called, which was the signal for the tighthead prop to drive an extra step forward and the loosehead prop to ease back after engagement, which would angle the scrum, make it more difficult for the Bellingham scrum half to reach the ball, and paint their number ten into a corner.

The scrum was set. The teams hit. It sounded like a herd of bulls slamming into a herd of bigger bulls, and the twist worked perfectly. Cotton Balls, who was a natural lefty anyway, hooked the ball back toward Eli Koenig, Tarzan, our number seven flanker, and Eli kept the ball right at the edge of the scrum. The Bellingham scrum half couldn't even see the ball through the forest of legs below the pack.