by Andrew Smith
But he just took a deep breath, rubbed his eyes, and sat up.
When he put his bare feet down on the floor, he looked around our room in the foggy light and said, “It’s fucking cold.”
“Yeah.”
He held his hand out so I could help pull him to his feet.
Chas stripped and got into some thermals and sweats, gloves, and a hat. He looked like he was ready to go snowshoeing, and I have to admit I wished I had more layers on too.
At least I’d stuffed a couple microwave breakfast sandwiches into my pockets. They were still warm, so I kind of hated giving one up for Chas when we stepped outside and into the drizzle.
They tasted nasty, but Chas thanked me for bringing him breakfast in bed, even if, according to his understanding of the universe, it only proved how much of a homo I was.
We knew the places to look, anyway.
There was a big drainage culvert halfway between O-Hall and the highway to Bannock. It was where O-Hall boys sometimes went to smoke weed or cigarettes with their friends, or, if they were alone, to jerk off to some nasty old porn mags everyone seemed to leave there.
Nobody was there.
Chas took a piss against the side of the drainpipe and asked if I had any cigarettes or chew.
I shook my head.
He said, “Yeah. I didn’t think so.”
“You really think I’m a pussy, don’t you?”
Chas stared at me, unblinking, like a rhino or something equally terrifying, standing three feet away from me while he tucked his dick back inside his thermals, and said, “Fuck. You? You’re about the most unpussy sack of shit winger I’ve ever seen on a rugby pitch in my fucking life. I think half your scrawny-ass weight must be taken up by balls. Winger.”
I nodded.
I wished I had a cigarette to give him after that.
We followed the lake around toward Stonehenge.
It started to snow, a wet, Pacific Northwest snow that fell in clumps, soaking and unpleasant. We ran into two Forest Service rangers near Stonehenge. They got excited when they saw us, and took out the photocopied pictures they’d been carrying of Joey’s school ID, holding the images between their eyes and us like they were some kind of prism that could sort out and break up the bullshit from the truth.
Nothing.
But we kept looking.
saturday afternoon
THEY FOUND JOEY IN THE woods, not far from O-Hall, at about three o’clock that afternoon.
He was tied to a tree, stripped naked, and had been beaten to death.
later
I NEED TO VENT.
But I can’t.
The words won’t come.
playing the game
I’LL BE HONEST. I DIDN’T cry.
I didn’t even say anything at all.
Because I didn’t want to hear it, so I just didn’t talk to anyone anymore.
Annie and I would walk together. Sometimes, we would go to the wishing circle, and I’d always hold her hand. When I needed to, I would whisper to her. She was the only one.
But I stopped talking after Joey died. I was too afraid.
My parents tried to take me out of Pine Mountain. They said I needed help.
I sent them a letter so they’d know I would be okay, and in it, I wrote that taking me away from Annie would kill me. So, after two weeks, Annie’s mother and father came to Pine Mountain so they could see me.
Doc Dad watched me play rugby. I gave him the Pine Mountain RFC shirt he wanted, but I didn’t talk to him. He shook my hand, and I could tell he was happy to see me, but I couldn’t look him in the eyes, because I knew they’d look like hurt, and I wasn’t going to cry in front of anyone.
I swear to God, when I played, sometimes I would see Joey out there leading the back line, but it was always someone else.
During our game, I could hear Doc Dad on the sidelines, cheering. He enjoyed the game. It made me feel good. I liked Annie’s father.
Doc Mom came to see me, alone, in my room.
We didn’t say anything, and it was dark. The window was covered. I sat on my bed, and she sat across from me in a chair.
It was like that for twenty minutes: just dark nothing. Then she stood up and sat beside me on my bed and she put her arm around my shoulders, and I began talking.
I told her about my iPod and how I sang for Joey the last time I ever saw him.
After a while, she said, “Anyone in the world would be so lucky to call you their friend, Ryan Dean.”
I told her about how Joey always stuck up for anyone, even people he didn’t like. And I told her the story about how Chas made me drink beer the night before school started. I told her about how we drank whiskey, too, before Halloween, and I’d peed in Chas’s and Casey’s drinks that night when Joey drove us into Bannock to get costumes and we lost Chas but picked up Screaming Ned.
And telling that story made me smile, but it hurt so much.
So when I was finished talking about Joey, Doc Mom said, “Okay, Ryan Dean, I am not a therapist anymore. Now I’m just a mom.”
Then she squeezed me so tight and she kissed my head and said, “I am so sorry, baby. I am so sorry,” and we both cried for I don’t know how long.
Annie waited outside. But when I was finished with my crying, I told Doc Mom that I couldn’t go out.
“I don’t want anyone to know I was crying,” I said.
Doc Mom said, “Okay, Ryan Dean. I’ll wait as long as you want me to.”
“I’ll be okay, Doc Mom.”
in the boys’ dorm
ON THE DAY THEY FOUND joey, the police sealed off O-Hall, and we never went back there again.
Never.
They talked to Chas and me for hours, separately. I told them almost everything, but not the stuff I didn’t think would matter.
They didn’t ask, anyway.
Casey Palmer and Nick Matthews killed Joey that night of the dance. They got drunk. They were mad. They beat him until he stopped being Joey.
I loved Joey Cosentino.
After I told the police what I knew about Casey, they went to his home.
Casey Palmer and Nick Matthews never came back to school. I heard they both confessed right away, and I figured it was because Casey didn’t want it coming out in his trial about how he’d been chasing after Joey for so long. That’s what I think, but I could be wrong.
Either way, I didn’t care about Casey’s reasoning.
Pine Mountain closed down O-Hall. None of us ever saw Mr. Farrow or Mrs. Singer again. They were gone, cut loose. Nobody needed them, and nobody needed anything like O-Hall again, either.
I’ll be honest. I was actually sad about them closing down O-Hall, as weird as that sounds. I wished I could go back to the noise and the smell, the crowded and dirty bathroom.
They moved me and Kevin and Chas in together at the boys’ dorm, each of us with our private bedroom, and the big living room where we’d sometimes fight over what to watch on our television.
We talked about it once, much later, and we decided that we were all better suited to live in O-Hall, so I told Kevin and Chas that I was going to do my best to get them to reopen it and then I’d do something bad so they would have to send me there for my senior year.
Chas said, “You’re a fucking idiot, Winger.”
Yeah. I know.
Chas Becker and I became friends. He didn’t turn me into an asshole, and I didn’t teach him how to draw comics. It was a balanced relationship, but a weird one.
Wingers and forwards are not allowed to be friends.
But Chas and I needed each other.
He picked on me. That was to be expected. Kevin Cantrell, like always, was the calming peacemaker in our new three-man family. We played poker on Sundays. We invited Seanie Flaherty and JP Tureau to the games.
There were no more consequences.
How could you top the magnificent shit we had done in O-Hall?
How could you ever make anything worse?
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The thing about rugby is this: You can hate a guy off the pitch who will save your fucking balls on the pitch when you play on the same side. There is nothing more glorious than that.
One time, in the boys’ dorm, while we were playing a game of Hold ’Em, I made JP Tureau laugh.
I thought, When we are seniors, me and JP are going to be cool again.
thanksgiving
THIS TIME, I REMEMBER TO take off my belt before I walk through the metal detector at the airport, so I avoid the humiliation of a second strip search from Officer Nutgrabber.
What happened to Joey messed me up worse than anything I ever had to recover from. And I’ll be honest. It scared me to leave Pine Mountain, even if it did mean spending four days with Annie. I couldn’t sleep those nights before Thanksgiving came.
As ridiculous as it sounds, I kept thinking something terrible would happen if I left Kevin and Chas.
But I knew I was being stupid and that I had to do something to make myself get over being afraid, if I was ever going to grow up and get better.
After all, I was supposedly on a mission to do just that—to reinvent Ryan Dean West—in my junior year at Pine Mountain Academy.
Well, fuck that.
We hold hands for the entire flight. I point out the window, grinning, and say, “Remember?” I kiss her when we cross the Columbia River, and Annie smiles and says, “You are such a pervert.”
I imagine that there will never be a moment in my life when I am not in love with Annie Altman. Being back on Bainbridge Island is almost like filling my lungs up with the same air again, the air that smells so green and thick with the ocean.
We walk out on the beach in the freezing and damp cold of the evening. Her parents watch us go, standing in the open doorway. But they leave us alone.
“I’m going to be better, Annie.”
“First thing tomorrow, we’re going for a run. Even if it’s raining. You can tear your clothes off if you feel like it, and we’ll jump in the hot tub when we’re done.”
“You’re asking for the Wild Boy to return, you know.”
And Annie laughs and takes off, running down the beach. I chase after her, but she lets me catch her too easily, and we kiss right there as her parents watch us.
I know it’s kind of ridiculous, but I realize now how wrong that old pervert Mr. Wellins is. Almost nothing at all is ever about sex, unless you never grow up, that is.
It’s about love, and, maybe, not having it.
What an old, delusional idiot he is.
But what do I know?
I’m just fourteen.
quiet time
I’LL SAY IT NOW. I didn’t talk for those weeks because I was afraid of the words.
The words came together and said how Joey died: alone and scared.
And he never did anything bad to anyone.
Ever.
But when I was quiet, I could hold on to Annie’s hand, and that was a word that didn’t need to be spoken. And Doc Mom, sitting with her arm around me and listening and crying, that made words too.
The same words that make the horrible things come also tell the quieter things about love.
I found out something about words. There are plenty of words I can put on paper, words I can see with my eyes and scribble with my hand, that I never had the guts to say with my mouth.
Sometimes, I used to think I was brave; but I don’t believe that anymore.
And then it’s always that one word that makes you so different and puts you outside the overlap of everyone else; and that word is so fucking big and loud, it’s the only thing anyone ever hears when your name is spoken.
And whenever that happens to us, all the other words that make us the same disappear in its shadow.
Okay. I got it out.
Time to be quiet.
I can breathe again.
ANDREW SMITH is the author of several award-winning novels for young adults, including The Marbury Lens. He lives in a very remote area in the mountains of Southern California with his family, two horses, two dogs, and three cats. He doesn’t watch television, and occupies himself by writing or bumping into things outdoors and taking ten-mile runs on snowy trails. He maintains a blog and website about his strange writing life at ghostmedicine.blogspot.com.
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JACKET DESIGN BY LUCY RUTH CUMMINS
JACKET PHOTOGRAPHY BY MEREDITH JENKS
JACKET ILLUSTRATION BY SAM BOSMA
The text for this book is set in Adobe Garamond.
The illustrations for this book are rendered in charcoal and ink washes.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smith, Andrew (Andrew Anselmo), 1959-
Winger / Andrew Smith. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Two years younger than his classmates at a prestigious boarding school, fourteen-year-old Ryan Dean West grapples with living in the dorm for troublemakers, falling for his female best friend who thinks of him as just a kid, and playing wing on the Varsity rugby team with some of his frightening new dorm-mates.
ISBN 978-1-4424-4492-8 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4424-4494-2 (eBook)
[1. Bording schools—Fiction. 2. High schools—Fiction. 3. Schools—Fiction. 4. Interpersonal relations—
Fiction. 5. Rugby football—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.S64257Wi 2013
[Fic]—dc23
2011052750
Contents
Acknowledgments
The Toilet World
Part One: The Overlap of Everyone
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Part Two: The Sawmill
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Ch
apter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Part Three: The Consequence
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Chapter Seventy
Chapter Seventy-One
Chapter Seventy-Two
Chapter Seventy-Three
Chapter Seventy-Four
Chapter Seventy-Five
Chapter Seventy-Six
Chapter Seventy-Seven
Chapter Seventy-Eight
Chapter Seventy-Nine
Chapter Eighty
Chapter Eighty-One
Chapter Eighty-Two
Chapter Eighty-Three
Chapter Eighty-Four
Chapter Eighty-Five
Chapter Eighty-Six
Chapter Eighty-Seven
Chapter Eighty-Eight
Chapter Eighty-Nine
