Stand-Off (9 page)

I rubbed my eyes and shook rainwater from my hair. Then I ran back to the boys' dorm.

I LAY IN BED, STUDYING
the handout on units of measure Mrs. O'Hare gave out in Culinary Arts until I couldn't stand it anymore. So I turned off the reading lamp clipped to the windowsill beside my Princess Snugglewarm cot and tried to go to sleep.

Click
.

On came the light.

Whoop! Skreek!

Up slid the blind, then the window.

Rattle rattle rattle. Fluff!

“What are you doing, Abernathy?”

“Oh! Are you awake, Ryan Dean?”

I groaned. But in my defense, it wasn't a mean groan.

“I'm just hanging up your clothes. You don't want to leave wet clothes all balled up on the floor,” the Abernathy explained.

“Yes. Yes, I do, Sam. Really,” I said.

“Why didn't you come down to dinner?”

“Are we really
talking
right now? And, if so, shut the window. I didn't feel like having dinner.”

“That's not good for you, Ryan Dean. Annie was worried. I should go tell her you're all right.”

Okay. There was just so much wrong with what the Abernathy just said to me that I didn't even know where to begin. So I got out of my little bed and stood in front of the window as gusts of a frigid Pacific Northwest low-pressure system buffeted my previously warm body. I reached up to shut it, trying to not look outside (what was wrong with me?), and someone yelled, “Nice undies, Ryan Dean. What are you, like, twelve?”

Pretty close, I thought.

I recognized the voice. It was our eight-man, Spotted John Nygaard. There was no mistaking the chop-edged Danish accent that always made him sound like he was really pissed off, and also an emotionless serial killer who wouldn't bat an eye about using an electric carving knife on you while mocking you for your choice in undergarments. And Spotted John was one of the very few guys on the team who didn't know that I was only fifteen, which made me feel kind of manly, in a fifteen-year-old sort of way.

“Shut up, Spotted John!” I feebly fired back. “They're comfortable.”

Then I slammed the window and shut the blind.

“Dude,” I said, “it's raining.
Raining
. We are
not
going to go through this every night.”

I squeezed back into bed.

The Abernathy started hyperventilating or something. I couldn't be sure, since I had never been in the presence of a twelve-year-old in
respiratory arrest. All I know is it sounded like this:
Hwupp! Hwupp! HWUPP!

I tried to ignore it.

Okay. So, you know how when you're lying in bed and you're pissed off about so many things, you don't know which one of those things, exactly, tops the list, and then your twelve-year-old claustrophobic roommate who just picked up your fucking clothes from the floor and hung them all up, putting, I might add, a perfect crease down the legs of your official school trousers, and who also has a very obvious crush on your girlfriend, turns all pale (I'm only assuming because I was so definitely
not
looking at the Abernathy) and begins making this most desperate-sounding codfish-in-the-desert wheezing noise and you're thinking
this can't be fucking happening
and you hope it will just go away and work itself out or something, you know,
resolve itself
, but then it doesn't go away and you're, like,
what am I supposed to do when a twelve-year-old kid starts hyperventilating?
and your mind flashes on something you're supposed to do involving a bag and the face of the afflicted child, so you get out of bed and dig through the trash can and—
Eureka!
—you find last night's empty bag from his microwave-fucking-midnight-popcorn festival, and you sniff it because, let's face it, popcorn bags smell really good even if your roommate
does
happen to sound like an old Plymouth with a blown starter, and then you hold the bag out to him and say nicely, “Here, kid, try this,” but he's just staring straight ahead with a look of frozen I-can't-breathe
terror on his little pink (but rapidly blanching to off-white) face, so then you actually have to press the bag over his tiny nose and mouth and hold it on his actual head while you're standing there in nothing but your underwear and thinking,
If you die, my whole night's going to be shot, so I may as well not tell anyone about your corpse until tomorrow sometime
?

Yeah. That.

The Abernathy came back to life.

Ryan Dean West, reanimator.

“Mrff mrff wmmmpr fruhh mrrrffibb,” the Abernathy said, and the bag expanded and withered, expanded and withered.

“What?”

The Abernathy pushed my hands away from his face.

“I told you I'm claustrophobic,” he said.

“I never doubted it.”

Let me say here that there was definitely an acidic look on the little dumpling's face too—and I had just saved his life!—but this was a side of the Abernathy I had not seen (granted, I had been trying not to look at him from any side for the past couple of days).

“Well, are you trying to kill me or something?”

The Abernathy's eyes glazed over and he began to wobble a bit. He put the popcorn bag back around his little airholes. As I walked over to the door and turned off the light, Sam Abernathy started wheezing again.

“I'm going to bed. Try to die quickly and quietly if you can.”

Okay. I'll admit it that I felt a little bad when the Abernathy started crying, but come on! We could not keep the window open up here in the Cascades. What was he thinking?

He was probably thinking about oxygen at that moment, and how nice it would feel inside his little lungs, and how he couldn't get any, I thought.

Wheeze! Hwupp! Hwupp!

I sighed and sat down on the edge of my bed.

“Are you going to be okay?” I said.

There wasn't much of an answer—just some rumpling of paper and something that sounded like a muffled “mrrfffrr.” And then I thought,
Did he just call me “motherfucker”?

“Sam?”

Nothing.

This was total bullshit. I fucking hated everything about Pine Mountain at that moment.

“Sam?”

I gave up. My ass was just kicked by a twelve-year-old.

I stood, pulled the blind up a few inches and slid open the window.

“Is that okay?” I said. “Just a few inches, Sam. I don't need creepers like Spotted John or Seanie Flaherty doing weird stuff through our window all night.”

Sam Abernathy calmed down and started breathing again.

“Thank you, Ryan Dean.”

“Whatever.”

I climbed back into bed.

“Can I open the door?”

“No. The window or the door. One or the other. That's as far as I'll go.”

“Okay. Thanks, Ryan Dean. I'll take the window.”

I didn't say anything. It was finally quiet and dark, even if it was a little damp and drizzly. I rolled over and put my arm over my head.

“Ryan Dean?”

Really?
Really?

“What?”

“Will you do me a favor?”

I had already saved his life. What could he possibly want from me now?

“What?”

“Will you go outside so I can pee and change into my pajamas?”

“No. Shut up.”

“Please?”

“Dude. Abernathy. Don't you play a sport? Everyone here plays a sport. Don't tell me you have your own private locker room and urinal. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Okay. You know. I didn't really say “fuck.” But I really
wanted
to. I also really wanted someone in our room—and I'll be honest, I didn't
care who it was—to be abducted by aliens or something.

“They gave me a one-year exemption on account of how I only weigh seventy-two pounds. I'm the smallest person at Pine Mountain. Girls included.”

Bullshit.

Exemption? Pine Mountain never did anything like that for me. And I thought,
I wonder how far I could throw seventy-two pounds?

Try to ignore him. Try to ignore him. Try to ignore him.

“Ryan Dean?”

“Look. I saved your life. I actually held a bag over your face for you. I gave you the window. I gave you forty degrees inside our bedroom. That's the extent of my saintliness. You can sleep in your school tie and hold your pee till your bladder explodes, but that's it. I am not leaving
my room
.”

“Oh.”

I had a sudden realization that the world was turning, that I'd undoubtedly be talking to the Abernathy until sunrise if something didn't give.

The something that gave was a fifteen-year-old loser named Ryan Dean West.

And while I stood out in the hallway in my underwear and wrapped up in a Princess Snugglewarm blanket, waiting for Sam Abernathy to manage his affairs in private, just about every guy I did not want to see (because they all lived at more desirable elevations and had to pass
me on the way to the elevators), walked past me. And mocked.

SEANIE FLAHERTY:
Dude. Ryan Dean. You know my birthday's coming up, right? Well, the only thing I want for a present is for you to finally be honest with everyone and come out of the closet. And preferably dressed just like you are right now. Is that too much to ask of you?

And then—

SPOTTED JOHN NYGAARD:
Dude. Ryan Dean. Um, why are you standing in the hallway in your underwear?

RYAN DEAN WEST:
My roommate needs some alone time.

SPOTTED JOHN NYGAARD:
You should just teach him the hang-a-sock-on-the-doorknob signal. That's what I do. Everyone knows that.

RYAN DEAN WEST:
That's totally gross, Spotted John. I did not need to know that.

And of course—

MR. BREAM:
Well, well! Ryan Dean! Is it too hot in your room for you? I could adjust the heat down for you!

That was more than enough humiliation for one night. Unfortunately, dorm room doors are always locked, a fact that I overlooked before going out into the hallway in my goddamned underwear. So I had to knock.

And while I was knocking on my own door in my underwear and clutching a blanket with unicorns around my waist, asking Sam Abernathy nicely if he would please let me back in, JP Tureau came
through the hall. He stood there, staring at me, shaking his head.

JP TUREAU:
Dude. That Annie Altman is the
luckiest girl
at Pine Mountain Academy.

Finally, it was over. Little Sam Abernathy, all pajamaed up and smelling like seventy-two pounds of Colgate, let me back inside our refrigerator.

“Thank you, Ryan Dean,” he blubbered.

I threw myself onto my bed, mumbling something about how this was
never
going to happen again and the Abernathy had better come to terms with how things worked in the real world.

Then, out of the dark, drifting across the arctic expanse of a 130-square-fucking-foot room like the damp finger of a ghost, came the voice of a claustrophobic, toothpaste-smelling, soccer-ball-pajama-wearing, cooking-savant angel.

“I like Annie.”

Blood pressure = off the chart.

“Please. Never talk to me about my girlfriend again.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

Why did he have to do it? I was suddenly so angry, the rising waves of heat coming from my forehead were likely going to collide with the cold front coming through the window and produce thunder and hail.

There was only one reasonable conclusion: Sam Abernathy was trying to kill me. I made up my mind: One of us was going to have to go.

Calm down, Ryan Dean. Calm down.

“What sport do you play, Ryan Dean?”

“Rugby. Shut up.”

Maybe three seconds of shutting up ensued.

“Is it fun?”

“No. Shut up.”

One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand . . .

“Did you remember to brush your teeth, Ryan Dean?”

“Shut. Up. Now.”

Five seconds passed.

“Would it bother you if I watched TV, Ryan Dean?”

I'm pretty sure I cried myself to sleep after that.

AS TERRIBLE AS THE RUN-UP
to bedtime was, what happened to me that night was worse than anything I'd ever been through. And I had no idea where it came from.

No idea at all.

I know this: I was lying on my back when my eyes opened. And even though all the covers had been kicked off my bed, I wasn't cold or anything. I knew the television was still on—someone was saying something about blanching fava beans—and across the room the Abernathy had clearly fallen asleep.

But something was terribly wrong with me, with getting air into my lungs, with the tilt of the earth, with pretty much everything. I couldn't move. I felt dizzy, like I was disconnecting from my body, and everything looked fuzzy and swirling. I was simultaneously sicker than I'd ever been in my life, and so terrified of everything that I felt absolutely certain I was going to die—I was having some kind of heart attack, and if I said anything, or made any sound at all, I was sure it would kill me.