Winger

Sweet mother of God, it felt good to pee. And it wasn’t just peeing, it was something more: It was the God of Peeing, it was Zen archery, but with a stream of piss rather than a bow and arrow.

And it was so loud and musical sounding, which reminded me to start singing. Heck, I figured the stream wouldn’t likely slow down before dawn, anyway. So, while I am sure that the natural sound of Zen Peeing was, in itself, loud enough to roust Mrs. Singer, the girls’ floor resident counselor, from her sleep, my choice of song ensured the fact.

I began singing a rugby song called “Proper Ranger,” whose lyrics include some of the most tasteless imaginable descriptions of sex acts. And it doesn’t even rhyme very well, either, but some of those words just don’t have good rhyming matches, anyway. The thing about the song, though, is that if you are a rugby player and are present when another rugby player begins to sing it, you have to sing along . . . so, Chas, Joey, and Kevin all joined in at the appropriate time while I continued the liberation of my unstoppable torrent of pee.

And, Zen-like, everything came together at the end. I shook off, pulled my pants up (failing with the complexities of my zipper), the song finished (with words I won’t repeat here), and the very unhot Mrs. Singer began rattling the doorknob and trying to pound her way in.

“What are you doing in there?” she demanded through the door.

And I giggled, because I thought, That’s a dumb question. Who, within a hundred feet, door or not, couldn’t tell what I was doing in there?

Pound pound pound.

“Who’s in there?”

And Chas said, “Come on, Winger!”

And just as Chas and Kevin grabbed my wrists and pulled me through the window, I heard the exceedingly never-spent-a-fraction-of-a-minute-in-her-life-being-hot Mrs. Singer say through the door, “I am going to put a diarrhea spell on you.”

Well, I can’t be sure exactly, but it sounded like that was what she said to me.

I fell down, giggling, in a clump of ferns beneath the windowsill.

“Hey. Where are my shoes?” I asked. I studied my feet, where I had propped them up on the outside of the log-constructed O-Hall.

Yeah, I was ultrastupid.

“You weren’t wearing any, retard,” Chas whispered.

“Then why’d I come outside if I wasn’t wearing shoes?”

It was like I’d forgotten everything that had taken place in the past two hours and was willing to have a conversation about it so I could fill in the holes. I realized then that the Ryan Dean West Pie Chart of Brain Activity was an empty tin. Not even a crumb of crust left in that skull.

Thank God I had my teammates there to look after me.

Well, at least I had Chas, because Joey and Kevin had already climbed up the outer wall of O-Hall and squeezed back inside their window.

“Come on, Winger. We gotta go,” Chas said. He began climbing up the corner logs on the bottom floor and whispered over his shoulder, “I am not carrying you, so you better get moving now or your ass is toast.”

Chapter Nine

THE NEXT THING I CAN remember is thinking, What is that fucking noise?

Somehow, I had managed to get out of my clothes and under the sheets. So much for memory. And for a brief instant, a thought flashed of all those cheesy and predictable crime dramas where someone kills another someone and then doesn’t remember doing it. I thought I should check my hands for blood or something, but it felt like I’d left my arms in another room, in another state, or maybe on another planet.

Please make that goddamned noise go away.

The alarm clock was blaring. It was seven o’clock, the first day of school, and I was lying there twisted up in my bedding on the top bunk, alone in my O-Hall cell.

Chas was gone.

Maybe I killed Chas Becker.

The alarm clock would not shut up.

And when I sat up and tried to get my feet down off the bed, it felt like I left the inside part of my head, the invisible Ryan Dean West part, on the pillow next to me.

This wasn’t good.

I was almost about to start crying because the alarm clock wouldn’t leave me alone. I tried to remember what happened the night before, but everything seemed disjointed and out of sequence. I felt horrible. I somehow had convinced myself that everyone in the world had woken up to the news that Ryan Dean West had gotten drunk off one giant beer and had ruined his entire life in the span of about three hours.

By the time I could stand, it was 7:04. The alarm clock and my head were still buzzing.

Classes began in fifty-six minutes.

I finally got the alarm turned off, opened the door, and stumbled down the hallway toward the bathroom, wearing only my boxer shorts and one dirty pulled-down sock with bits of what looked like ferns on it, pie chart still empty, with no idea how I ended up like this. If I could have thought clearly enough at that moment to formulate a plan of action, I would certainly have killed myself on the spot.

I did not kill Chas Becker.

Chas was in the bathroom, wrapped in a towel, shaving. I saw him smirk at me in the mirror when I staggered through the door. I stood at the sink beside him, turned the water on cold, and held my face in front of the mirror with both of my hands propped on the tile countertop, elbows locked, like I was steadying myself on one of those godforsaken crab boats in the Bering Sea. And I don’t know why I turned the water on either, because I just stood there, looking horrified at my reflection in the mirror as Chas smirked and shaved and smirked and shaved.

“I think you can skip a shave today, Winger,” he said, and wiped some menthol-smelling shaving cream on my never-so-much-as-fuzzed cheek. And Chas just looked so normal, too, like he could do shit like that every night and it didn’t even affect him.

I suddenly felt very sick.

“Oooh, Winger partied too hard last night,” Chas said, and I heard some other voices laughing, but I really can’t say for sure who else was in there. Ghosts of dead teenage alcoholic former O-Hall inmates, probably. I pushed away from the sink, leaving the water running, and I thought, Why did I forget to put my face under that flow and drown myself? And then I thought, Oh yeah, because . . . I . . . need . . . a . . . toilet.

I stumbled past the row of shower stalls with their torn and moldy plastic curtains, and the bank of urinals opposite them, and I began to remember being in this place, but it was different, too.

God! I was sick.

I made it to a toilet stall and slammed the door shut. I hardly had time to pull my boxers down and sit, and that’s when it all came back to me, and I remembered Mrs. Singer’s cursing me.

A diarrhea spell.

You have got to be kidding me.

I knew it was just a weird coincidence—it had to be—but this really, really, sucked.

Welcome to the eleventh grade, loser.

As I stumbled out of the stall, my skin cold and sweaty, feeling like one of those eyeless white cave salamanders, Chas was there, still smirking, wiping his face, and watching me.

“Hey, asswing, you better hurry up if you want to have time to eat,” he said.

Asswing? That was a new one. Clever.

“Eat?”