Winger (8 page)

The reason I mention this is that as I lifted the backpack away from my sweaty face, Seanie slipped me a folded square of paper with flowers and hearts drawn on it, and said, “Here. Read this. I wrote you a haiku about how gay you are for sitting next to Joey for two classes in a row.”

“I also sat right behind Megan Renshaw.”

“That’s called compensation.”

I slipped my hand inside my vest and put Seanie’s note in my front pocket.

“Nice,” I said. “In Lit class I’m going to write you a sonnet about how nothing could possibly be gayer than writing your friend a haiku.”

IT JUST PROVED THAT EVERYONE
was right about Seanie being a stalker.

Why would he be so obsessed as to find out exactly where I sat in my classes? He probably kept little stalker charts and notebooks on everyone he knew.

I had been feeling so sick that day that I wasn’t even thinking about Annie until I saw her in our American Literature class.

Just seeing her made me feel momentarily healed.

I walked down the aisle beside her desk and sat in the empty seat next to hers. She just glanced at me and then refocused on a paperback she was reading.

“Hi. Can I sit next to you?”

“I don’t care.”

Whoa. The very last time I had seen her, she actually touched me; she rubbed her hand through my hair, she called me Ryan Dean, and she said she hoped I’d feel better.

And
now
?

All of a sudden she was so obviously pissed off at me. JP sat down on the other side of her. I saw him look at me. He had watched our little exchange. I could tell he saw something was up too. But, before I could ask her about it, Mr. Wellins began blathering away about
American Literature and Nathaniel Hawthorne (an author I honestly
do
like, but how was I supposed to pay attention to him when I felt like crap
and
Annie Altman had just about slapped me across my face with her “I don’t care”?).

Note to self: Now, that last paragraph ended with a cluster of punctuation marks I have never seen together—in that order—in my life.

I took Seanie’s note out and unfolded it. He actually did write me a haiku (and there was no way I was going to waste my time responding with a sonnet). The top of the page had been decorated with a rainbow. Beneath it were two crudely drawn stick figures holding hands. Arrows pointed to each of them from identifying names: “Winger” on one side and “Joey” on the other.

Winger and Joey

Beside each other in class

“Let’s be study buddies.”

And I wrote underneath it:

YOUAREAFUCKINGMORONWHOCAN’TEVENCOUNTSYLLABLESSEANIE!!!

Is something wrong, Annie?

I wrote it on the edge of Seanie’s note. I put a smiley face next to the question mark.

She leaned over and scrawled:

I heard you got drunk last night.

You’re an ASSHOLE!

I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.

You’re an asshole just like Chas.

Don’t even talk to me.

See ya.

And that was that. She ignored me for the rest of that endless lecture on Hawthorne, which I couldn’t listen to. My ears were ringing.

I sat there, wishing I could just die.

And, underneath the note I had left for Seanie, I wrote one more line:

ANDFUCKYOUFORTELLINGANNIEIGOTDRUNK LASTNIGHTTOO!!! GOODFRIEND.

When Mr. Wellins dismissed us for lunch, Annie sprang out of her chair and rushed out the door.

“Annie, wait.”

But I knew I wouldn’t catch her.

“What’s going on?” JP asked.

“Nothing. She’s pissed off at me.”

“You think?” JP tried to smile. “Let’s go get lunch.”

“I’m not feeling good,” I said. “I’ll see you at rugby.”

JP just shrugged and packed up his stuff.

NOW I REALLY FELT TERRIBLE.
I wanted to give up, and I wanted to kick Chas Becker in the teeth too.

Just about everyone was crowding into the mess hall, all buzzing with first-day-back stories. Those who didn’t hang out inside sat in segregated groups on the grass between the mess hall and the stadium.

I followed the path along the lake, alone, and found a bench near O-Hall. I put my pack down as a pillow and kicked off my hot, brand new shoes that turned my socks black in spots. I lay down, staring up into the branches on the pines that towered over me.

This was the worst day of my life.

Scarcely twenty-four hours had passed since my parents had abandoned me here, and already my life was spiraling out of control. I got drunk with Chas Becker, the ultra-unhot Mrs. Singer downstairs did
something
weird to me, my best friend hated me, which made me realize that I would never have any chance with her or any other girl for that matter because I was a fourteen-year-old-skinny-ass-loser-bitch, and I felt like steaming hot dog crap.

Other than that, things were just swell.

Then I did something I actually, honestly, have not done since I was in, like, fourth grade. I actually, honestly, started to cry.

I am such a loser. I really didn’t belong here.

I folded my arm across my eyes. I think only about two tears came out before I got hold of myself and stopped feeling so stupid and useless. Well, maybe I got hold of myself; maybe those two tears drained all the fluid I had left in me. And I just lay there like that until I began hearing the motion of kids on their way to afternoon classes, so I straightened up, put my shoes on, and headed back to the locker room for the last class of the day.

IT MADE ME FEEL ALIVE
to lace up my rugby boots. As long as they were on me, I could forget about everything else that swirled around inside this 142-pound sack of dehydrated failure.

I love the sound of all those metal cleats moving around on the cold concrete floor in the locker room. There was something ancient in that noise, the music of a coordinated herd. I sat on the bench between Seanie and JP while we changed. I pulled the folded haiku from my pocket and gave it back to Seanie.

“You suck at poetry,” I said.

Seanie was tying up the drawstring inside his shorts.

“You pissed off Annie, too,” JP said.

Sometimes, just sometimes, Seanie could be sincere about things. He said, “I’m sorry I told her about you, Ryan Dean. I thought she’d think it was funny too. Really. I’m sorry.”

JP sat on the bench and pulled his long socks up to his knees.

“God,” he said, “I’ve been dying to play all summer. I need to hit someone.”

“Me too,” I said.

“You want to hit me, Ryan Dean?” Seanie asked.

“Get a ball in front of me on the field and you’re going the other
way, yeah,” I said. “Other than that, I don’t think I’d ever hit anyone off the field.”

“Me too,” JP said.

And that was all we needed to say to let Seanie know it was okay.

I couldn’t wait to see Coach McAuliffe—Coach M, we called him—again. He was a little guy, a former winger too, and he was a transplant from England who could talk the most civilized-sounding shit you would ever hear, and he could cuss you out with the most vicious obscenities and it would sound like he was reading from Shakespeare. But Coach M was a die-hard traditionalist as far as the sport was concerned, and everything had to be perfectly maintained that way, from the words we used (and didn’t use, because on the pitch
nobody
could cuss except for Coach M) when we were around him, to the clothes we wore during practice. He’d make us wear the shortest rugby shorts anyone ever saw. Now, inexperienced observers do not understand why the shorts in rugby have to be the way they are, but just trust me, that’s how they need to be.

Nowadays, pretty much all the guys wore compression shorts under them anyway, and those would just about go down to our knees, but compression shorts were crucial because you’d almost never make it through a game without getting a square hit, punch, elbow, grab, or sometimes even the bottom of a foot, right in your balls.

One of the funniest things I ever saw happened when Seanie first started playing after he’d quit the basketball team. Since Seanie was so
tall and skinny, Coach M wanted us to try to lift him in lineout practice. A lineout is when the ball gets thrown in from out of bounds and players can lift up a teammate (by his shorts, usually) so he can reach the ball. Well, Seanie, at the time, was just wearing boxers under his shorts, rather than compression shorts, and when the forwards lifted him, he said it felt like his balls ended up in back of his nipples. His eyes bugged out, his hands both went right down to his crotch, and he said, “Ohmyfuckinggod!” Of course, the ball just sailed past him. He had other things on his mind.

And he never came back to the pitch without some tight compression shorts on under everything.

We shook hands with the other guys (the team always had to do that) when we passed through the locker room, and the three of us walked together up the hill path that cut between the other practice fields to the rugby pitch. This, of course, took us right beside the fields where the soccer and football teams practiced.

We always got along well with the soccer team; they tended to be pretty clever with the jokes they’d play on us and were always appreciative of what we’d do to them. But, for whatever reasons, the football team just absolutely hated us. I don’t even think “hate” is a strong enough word for the emotions we stirred in them, which is why two of them had no problem whatever in deciding to put my face in a toilet the day before.

I figured there was a sort of predictable pattern to a football-player-
versus-rugby-player exchange that went something like this: The football player fires a put-down he’d probably been thinking about all day; then the rugby player comes up with an even more-scathing comeback and laughs; then the football player, who can only think of one thing to say and nothing else, says something about wanting to fight and walks away.

So, as I fully expected, when JP, Seanie, and I passed the football field, Casey Palmer, the quarterback and practically my next-door neighbor in O-Hall, and Nick Matthews, his roommate and coconspirator in the give-Ryan-Dean-a-welcoming-bath-in-the-toilet plot, were standing by the fountain trough at the edge of the sideline, and Casey shouted to us: “Oooh! Rugby players! Nice shorts, gayboys!”

Good one. What a predictable dipshit.

And Seanie, as stoic as ever, said, “You wanna know how I know you’re gay, Palmer? ’Cause you got a picture of some guy’s ballsack on your MySite, that’s how! Ha ha!”

“Are you the one who did that, Flaherty? If you are, I’ll fucking kill you!” Casey yelled back.

JP and I just looked at each other, and then at Seanie.

“Does he have a picture of some guy’s balls on his MySite?” I asked.

“Sure,” Seanie said. “Haven’t you seen it?”

“No.”

“No,” JP added.

Then Seanie just looked at us with his cold reptilian eyes and said,
“Okay. It took me about ten straight hours on Friday to hack his password and put that picture on. I guess he hasn’t been able to resolve the issue yet. Maybe he’ll figure it out if he goes home this weekend. I sent a mass e-mail out to everyone on the football team, saying, ‘I wonder why there is a picture of some guy’s nutsack on Casey Palmer’s MySite.’ ”

JP and I began laughing, staring right at Casey, who looked at that moment like he could kill someone.

“The best part is, they’re my balls,” Seanie said, absolutely straight-faced. “I have a printout, if you guys want to see it.”

“Sean Russell Flaherty,” I said. “You are so disturbed.”

“That’s fucking demented,” JP agreed. “In an elegant way, though. And, no, you don’t have to show me the printout of your balls, Seanie.”

“Dude, Seanie,” I said. “You put a picture of
your own balls
on the Internet.”

“I know.” Seanie actually laughed. Twice. Monotone. Weird.

“This is probably the best reason I have right now for why I don’t have a MySite,” I said.

“Oh, but you do have a MySite, my friend,” Seanie said in an incredibly creepy voice. “I’ve seen it. You friended me. And JP’s got one too.”

“You are fucking kidding me,” JP said. He sounded pissed.

“Ha ha!” Seanie said, “Yeah. I’m just kidding.”

And again, that was what was so fucking creepy about Seanie. Who could tell if he really was kidding?

And then, as we were about halfway up the hill toward the pitch, as if Casey Palmer’s inflated sense of masculinity hadn’t been assailed enough, we all heard a soft, familiar voice with an English accent say, “Why are you boys staring at my players’ asses?” Because I guess Casey and Nick just kept watching us as we walked up the hill.

Coach M knew what was up. He’d never let the football team get away with any shit on us.

Not ever.

PRACTICE WAS LIGHT. COACH M
said we weren’t going to start hitting until he could see what he had; and I was okay with that because I was weak and felt so shitty after what I’d gone through.

We ran through a usual warm-up: a slow jog, some stretches, a few quick-hands passing drills, then we ran some forties and suicides, and that’s when Coach M noticed that I was definitely
not
the fastest guy out there.

He said, “Did you slow down over the summer, Winger? You’re going to need to put on some speed if you expect to keep your job.”

And that made me feel even worse, because not only did I screw things up for myself and Annie, but I let Coach M down too. So, before we broke up into teams for a little touch sevens, I asked Coach M if I could talk to him.