Winger

I had to stop. I doubled over laughing. And Seanie still didn’t even crack a smile.

“I locked her out. She was pissed off. The guys pulled me out the window.”

“So then,” Seanie said, emotionless, “did Joey look at your wiener?”

“That’s messed up,” I said. “I like Joey. And he’s a hell of a fly half.”

“Joey’s cool,” JP added.

And Seanie yelled up to the sky, “Universal takeback! I am sorry, Joey! I will never, ever make fun of your gayness again!”

Of course Joey, who was a senior, wouldn’t have been anywhere near the class, anyway.

We had reached the turnaround spot and were heading back to the gym.

JP asked, “What song did you sing?”

“Proper Ranger.”

“Oh. Nice.”

Then Seanie and JP started singing it, and I had to join in, and some of the guys ahead of us heard it too, and the ones on the rugby team were singing up there right with us. But I didn’t tell Seanie and JP about the diarrhea spell, because I didn’t believe it was anything more than a sick coincidence—karma, kind of. It served me right for being stupid enough to get drunk in the first place.

And I didn’t tell them about seeing Mrs. Singer staring at me from behind the door when I left for school, either.

Chapter Twelve

BY THE TIME I MADE it to calculus, I felt like the hangover/diarrhea spell was losing strength, but now I realized that I desperately needed to go back to sleep too. The only real sleep I had gotten the night before was when I dozed off before the game even started.

I have never slept during a class, though, and I was honestly afraid that if I did, two horrible things would happen. First, I would have a dream about that witch downstairs (I had now convinced myself, after two more stops at the toilet—I must be caving in! I must have lost 30 percent of my skinny-bitch-ass body weight—that Mrs. Singer was an honest-to-God witch); and, second, I would get an extension on my sentence in O-Hall. After the night before, I realized that I needed to get out of there before Chas succeeded, as my friends warned me, at turning me into an asshole.

When I thought about it, as inevitably I did, stumbling down the corridor toward the mind-numbing experience of Calculus, I figured out that most of the guys in O-Hall except for me (the cell-phone hacker), and three compulsive class ditchers, were in Opportunity Hall for fighting. Eight of twelve of us were fighters: five football players, and Kevin, Chas, and Joey.

Of all the guys you’d think would never get into a fight, you’d have to pick Joey. I never asked him about it, but I figured it had to have something to do with him sticking up for himself when another guy was trying to start some shit. Probably.

And, because Advanced Calculus was pretty much the end of the math highway (unless you took Statistics, which I planned to take in twelfth grade), the class had only eight students in it. I was the last one through the door.

There were so many empty desks. I was overwhelmed by the pressure of choosing where to sit. And every single person in the goddamned room, even Mrs. Kurtz, the teacher, who was actually kind of hot in a bespectacled-Lois-Lane kind of way, seemed to be watching the Ryan Dean West Show, aware of the internal dialogue taking place in my headachey-hangovery-diarrhea-dehydrated head:

RYAN DEAN WEST 1: Sit in the very back of the room. Close to the door.

(Ryan Dean West glances at the solitary desk beside the door.)

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: Dude, that is entirely . . . three . . . four . . . five empty desks away from the closest other person. They will think we’re a pathetic fourteen-year-old loser with no social skills.

RYAN DEAN WEST 1: Uh. So? We are.

(Ryan Dean West drops his Calculus book. It weighs almost as much as he does. Suppressed laughter among the students in the room. He turns red.)

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: Are you turning red? You are such a fucking loser.

(Ryan Dean West picks up the book.)

MRS. KURTZ: Why don’t you come up front and sit close to everyone else?

RYAN DEAN WEST 1: How the fuck did she get in the play?

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: I don’t know, but she’s kind of hot.

(Ryan Dean West looks at the seats in the front of the room.)

RYAN DEAN WEST 2 (cont.): If you sit next to Joey, the other kids might think you’re gay.

RYAN DEAN WEST 1: They might just think I’m confident, and comfortable with my own sexuality.

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: Dude, “Ryan Dean West,” “Confident,” and “Sexuality” are entirely distinct concepts which cannot exist simultaneously in the same universe. It could cause a black hole or something.

RYAN DEAN WEST 1: Fuck you. I’m sitting next to Joey.

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: Is it because you feel guilty ’cause Seanie the Stalker made fun of him being gay?

RYAN DEAN WEST 1: I don’t feel guilty. And I’m going to sit next to him. And I don’t care what you or anyone else thinks, ’cause you know I’m not gay.

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: Score! That’s right behind Megan Renshaw (five out of five chicken potpies on the Ryan Dean West Heat Index). Maybe her hair will accidentally brush against your hand.

RYAN DEAN WEST 1: Chicken potpies?

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: Whatever.

(Ryan Dean West takes seat next to Joey.)

“Hey, Ryan Dean.”

“Hey, Joey.” I cleared my throat. “Hi, Megan.”

“Hi, Ryan Dean!” She smiled and turned around in her desk. Her soft blond hair swept across my desktop and over my hand. It felt so cool.

Score.

Then she even put her hand on top of mine and said, “Look at you! You must have grown a foot. You look totally hot! How was your summer?”

I almost lost consciousness; I could feel all the blood in my dehydrated skinny-bitch-ass body surging downward to some useless region below my belt.

“Amazing.”

“What did you do?”

“I can’t remember.”

“I heard about you last night.” Megan patted my hand. “Sounds like you had a little fun.”

I looked at Joey.

“I didn’t tell her,” he said. “Are you okay?”

“God. I am so sick. Don’t ever let me do that again.”

“I tried to stop you. You know. Chas wouldn’t let me.”

“I know.”

We all sat in the same arrangement in Macroeconomics, too: Megan in front of me, Joey on my right. I wondered why teenagers do that sort of thing, but I’ve seen it happening in classes ever since I can remember. I guess it’s like an unconscious way of making the universe consistent and uniform, even if your anchors to reality happen to be (1) extremely hot and unattainable, and (2) gay.

After Econ, we had a twenty-minute break. I just looked around for a bench in the shade and stretched out