Winger (14 page)

It was blissful and it was terrifying at the same time. And as I made my way through the week, I just stumbled around in the stupidest kind of daze.

I fantasized about our first game and the prospect of receiving just the perfect degree of injury so Annie would want to play the naughty nurse all weekend long as I lay on her couch, naked, in constant need of sponge baths and hernia exams. At 1,492 total thought episodes per day, it was my Columbus-discovers-perversion fantasy.

So of course it was next to impossible to concentrate at all on schoolwork while keeping meticulous tallies of my impure thoughts, much less for me to listen to Mr. Wellins blather on and on about sex, because, now that I look at it, every single thought in my head—Annie, Megan, Chas, the game—all, in some way, had something to do with sex. So maybe Wellins was right after all, that
everything
does have something to do with sex, even though I found his argument about the underlying sexual themes in
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
to be a bit of a stretch, and totally perverted, too.

Hello, Central!
¹

I mean, come on!

Annie and I met for lunch at school that day. It was Tuesday; two days before the game, three days before the weekend that I hoped would change my life. JP and Seanie sat across the table from us, and I was between Annie and Isabel, which was kind of hot because Isabel kept brushing up against me, and, even though
there wasn’t really room for it in my head, I imagined Annie and her having a warrior-princess-fight-to-the-death for breeding rights with me. I noticed Seanie was particularly fascinated by Isabel’s faint fuzzy moustache. Joey, who almost never sat with the other seniors, was with us too.

“Do you guys know that this weekend West is coming to my house for two days?” Annie announced.

I hadn’t told anyone. I noticed Joey glanced at me with a have-you-told-Megan-yet look on his face.

Seanie kicked me under the table and raised his hand.

“High five, Winger,” he said. He slapped my hand over our burritos, and I watched Annie’s expression to see if that was the wrong thing to do. Seanie added, “Why does this remind me of salmon swimming upstream to spawn and die?”

I thought about my white, bloated corpse floating in Puget Sound. At least I imagined I had a contented smile on my face. Fins and gills, too.

“Probably because you’re a sick freak,” Annie answered.

“You know, Annie, Ryan Dean doesn’t wear pajamas. So . . . where’s he going to sleep?” Seanie asked.

“Probably on the couch,” she said.

OH MY GOD! YES!

I know . . . she didn’t say which couch, but I figured I was halfway home. Just hearing her answer, so comfortably and honestly, caused
yet another of my chronic blood-and-attention-migration episodes, and I nearly jerked my hand skyward for another high five with Seanie, but controlled the urge.

“Stop being such a pervert, Seanie,” JP said.

“You’re just in denial that you weren’t thinking the same thing, even if it
was
about permavirgin Ryan Dean,” Seanie said.

Permavirgin?

The moment had come to strike swiftly. I kicked Seanie’s shin and brushed up against Annie’s thigh in the process. Two scores at once.

“Speaking of perverts, what did you think about Casey Palmer’s MySite, Joey?” I asked. My voice cracked again. I am such a dork.

“Pretty sick,” Joey said.

“It’s nasty,” Annie added.

“
You’ve
seen it too?” I said.

I saw Seanie turning red. He also looked really pissed off at me. Oh, well, that’s what he gets.

And Annie said, “
You
told me to check it out, West, so I did. And it’s gross. What do you expect from a football player, anyway? It’s probably the only way he can get someone to look at those small, pitiful things.”

Despite Seanie’s tortured expression, I found myself suddenly thinking about the deeper meaning of the last statement Annie had made there.

Yeah. I know. I’m such a loser.

“Are you okay, Ryan Dean?” JP asked.

“Huh?”

“Dude, you looked like you were sleeping with your eyes open for the last five minutes,” he said. “Didn’t you hear anything I said?”

“About what?”

“Halloween.”

“Oh,” I said, “what did you say?”

And I thought, did I accidentally babble something about what I’d like to wear for Annie?

“About the dance,” Seanie said.

Halloween was coming up on the Thursday after our game.

Whenever Halloween fell during the week, since we were so isolated, Pine Mountain would have a dinner dance. I hadn’t even thought about it, beyond my perverted fantasy about Annie, but it suddenly dawned on me that I couldn’t go. Pine Mountain’s rules did not allow O-Hall boys to attend such events.

“Me and Annie are going together,” JP said.

Okay. I really wanted to cuss. But I didn’t.

I felt my eyes get big, and a little watery. I looked at Annie with a what-the-fuck-is-he-talking-about look on my face, but she just looked perfectly normal; perfectly, hotly, matter-of-fact Annie.

I looked at JP.
“What?”

“Dude. You don’t want her going alone, do you?”

I looked at Annie again.

“No. You’re right.”

I stood up. My head was spinning, and I felt like I was going to end up on my face. I needed to get out of there. Now I knew what it meant, all those times I noticed JP looking at her, watching me, too. I wanted to kick his fucking head in right there, so I just left. I went for the doors and stepped out into the cold afternoon.

And I could hear her calling, in her I’m-singing-a-song voice, all relaxed and sweet, “West? West? What’s wrong
now
?” But I didn’t even turn around.

Joey came after me.

“Hey,” he said. “Are you okay?”

“I cannot believe that crap, Joey.”

“It’s just Annie and JP. It’s no big deal,” Joey said.

I was practically crying, but there was no way I was going to cry in front of a gay guy, even if he was my friend.

“I can’t believe he’d do that to me,” I said. “We’re supposed to be friends. Why would he do that?”

“You know what, Ryan Dean? You’re a fucking hypocrite. So now what are you going to do?”

And Joey turned around and walked back into the mess hall.

¹
Okay. If you haven’t read
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
, you should. Because it is fucking hilarious, and there’s no way you’d understand “Hello, Central” unless you read the book.

RUGBY PRACTICE CAME. IT WOULD
be our last hard practice before the game.

I wanted to hit someone. I wanted to get hurt, too.

After two hours of running drills, backline plays, and conditioning, we were all of us covered in sweat and grass and mud. It was the toughest practice we’d had all year, and Coach M told us he wasn’t going to let us play a game, which is how we usually ended, because he didn’t want to see us making any mistakes.

Instead we ended with a resistance drill we called Sumo, a one-on-one drill where a ball carrier had to drive the ball in and touch it down to a very small circle in the grass against one tackler. And the drill would not stop until the ball got there, no matter what; so there have been times when I’ve actually seen guys collapse from exhaustion if they couldn’t get the ball in against a very tough tackler.

After we’d gone about halfway through the team, Kevin ended up in the middle, as the tackler against Chas. It was an intense fight. They were equal in size and strength, and Kevin just kept taking Chas down, inches before he could touch the ball into the circle, taunting Chas and pissing him off.

Finally, I think Kevin either got tired or felt sorry for Chas, because Chas slipped his arm through and got the ball down into the circle,
diving onto his belly as he did and saying, “Fuck you, Kevin.”

Then Kevin helped him up to his feet, and I looked at Coach M, who seemed to be pretending he didn’t hear Chas cuss.

Now Chas was in the middle, and the way we play is that the guy in the middle gets to call out whoever he wants to have run against him.

I already knew who I’d call when I got a chance.

Chas looked around the circle of our dirty and tired teammates, and he bullet passed the ball to me and said, “Winger.”

What a jerk.

I smiled.

Chas stood in front of the small circle in the grass and crouched in a hitting position, just staring at me. I took two steps toward him and stopped. He was so flat on his feet, I knew he wouldn’t be able to touch me. I head-faked, then cut back the other way and sailed around him, touching the ball down without Chas even wiping a finger’s width of sweat off me.

The guys on the team laughed at Chas, murmuring “Betch,” and he turned to me and mouthed, “Fuck you,” in a whisper so Coach couldn’t hear.

Now I had the ball. Normally, I’d call out Bags, one of our other wings, because we were about the same size, even though he was older, but I’d made my mind up ahead of time that if I got the ball, there was one guy who’d have to run against me.

“Sartre,” I said.

Everyone had to figure this would be no contest, that a guy who was built with JP’s strength and drive would be able to stay low and plow right through me, that I had to be insane for calling out our fullback.

I heard a bunch of low-toned “oooh”s from the guys, and I threw the ball at JP, low, at his knees, so he had to bend down to catch it. It was a dick move; I’ll admit it. Because I took off as fast as the ball, and as soon as it was in his hands, I flew, shoulder first, into JP’s legs and twisted my body as I wrapped him up and drove him into the ground.

“Fuck,” JP grunted as I hit him.

Springing to my feet, I pushed myself up by putting my left hand firmly down into his nuts, and JP groaned and doubled up, letting go of the ball. When he tried to scoop the ball back in, I hacked it out of his hand, kicking his fingers as I did. I know this was dirty, but I was pissed off at JP and now, I’m sure, he knew it too; because he had to get up and chase after the ball and try to run it in again.

JP broke through the circled boys who stood watching us. When he ran to get the ball I’d kicked, I followed right behind him. I noticed that Coach M was moving toward us on the outside of the Sumo ring. He looked amused.

As soon as JP had his fingers on the ball, I took him down again, this time pulling his jersey up out of his shorts and dragging him with it until it was fully inside out and covering his head. We were about
ten feet out of the ring now, and the guys opened a gateway for JP to run through so he could get to the score. If he could make it past me.

JP stood up, leaving the ball at his feet as he tucked his jersey back into his shorts.

There were streaks of grass and black mud on his face.

“What the fuck, Ryan Dean?”

“Watch your mouth, JP,” Coach M warned. He added, “Nice job, Eleven.”

I don’t think I’d ever been so physically aggressive in my life, but all I could think about was JP and his smug I’m-taking-your-girlfriend-out announcement over lunch, and how Annie told me to get tough this year. So I was sick of this shit, of being treated like a little kid, especially by my best friends, and I wasn’t going to let it keep on happening to me.

“Trick or treat, assbreath,” I said.

I’m certain Coach M had to think about that one, and, since he didn’t say anything, he must have concurred with me that “assbreath” is not a true cuss word.

JP smiled. “Oh. I get it. Okay, Winger. Happy Halloween to you, too.”

Now it was clear to everyone. JP and I were in a full-scale fight, the only kind you could possibly get away with at PM.

He ran at me again, but this time he slipped my tackle and I fell, managing only to wrap the crook of my arm tightly around his left
ankle. I rolled, and JP fell on top of me, dropping his knees (on purpose, I’m sure, but it was totally fair for him to do it) right into my back. It felt like he broke my ribs, but as he went down JP dropped the ball, and his left cleat came right off his foot and into my hands.