Winger

Okay, I thought, this was it. I had done as much to my body as it could take in the last twenty-four hours. Now I was surely dying. I prepared myself to look into the tunnel of light and see my great-grandma and the little Chihuahua dog I had when I was four that got run over by a UPS van.

Well, they didn’t both get run over by the UPS van, but you know what I mean.

Then I heard a whistle, and the football coach screamed at Casey and Nick to get back over to their standing-around drill, and I knew I wasn’t dead, but my nose was bleeding pretty good.

“God. I am such an idiot,” I said.

“Why the fuck did you do that?” Joey sounded pissed off.

“Overlap. Two on one.”

I slipped my shirt off and held it over my face. I pulled it back and looked. I wasn’t bleeding so bad anymore.

Maybe I was empty.

“You better get cleaned up, or you’re going to be in a lot of trouble.”

I wiped off the blood as much as I could with my ruined shirt and stood up.

“I’ll just say it happened in practice,” I said. “Tackling a guy. It’s the truth.”

I’d gotten more bloody noses playing rugby than I could count.

Well, actually, I only have one nose that’s been bloodied, but it has happened dozens of times.

“God. I am so done for today.”

I balled up my shirt and stuffed it into my backpack. I took off for O-Hall just as I saw the guys from our team coming out from the locker room and making their way down the hill.

Joey just stood there at the edge of the football field, looking at those assholes practice, waiting for our teammates to catch up to him.

Chapter Eighteen

THE WATER ON THE TILES in the shower stall turned pink around my feet where the dried blood washed down from my body. When it was finally clear, I turned the water to full cold and stood there for thirty seconds. It almost made me scream. I toweled off and went to bed.

It was five o’clock.

I lay there with my books, finishing the small amount of homework I’d been assigned—just a couple review problems in Calculus. Then I opened a paperback and began reading. We were supposed to read “Rappaccini’s Daughter” and write a response paper on it, but I had until Wednesday. So I read the first page, then put it down beside my pillow and stared up at the ceiling.

I love the way Hawthorne said things. I wished that I could also find “no better occupation than to look down into the garden” beneath my window, but I had, in such a short time, gotten myself so occupied with crap that I lay there convinced there was no way I would make it through my eleventh-grade year.

I opened my notebook and wrote a letter to Annie. Even if I never gave it to her, at least I felt like I could write down what I wished I could tell her. In true Ryan Dean West fashion, I drew a Venn diagram on the note, trying to explain to her something about myself, the little boy, hoping that maybe she would realize what I thought was so obvious about the people we deal with, who are all around us, everywhere and every day. And as soon as I’d written the first couple of sentences, I reread them and they sounded so pathetic and lost that I just tore the page from my notebook and threw it away.

I was so tired.

I climbed down from the bed, undressed, and turned off the light.

Chapter Nineteen

“WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG with you?” Seanie said.

The light came on and I woke up.

My books were scattered around my head, and I was lying, face up, on top of the covers.

Seanie, JP, and Joey were standing just inside the door, dressed in their shirts and ties, like they had just come from dinner at the mess hall.

I propped myself up on my elbows and looked at them.

I rubbed my hair and sat up. My head nearly touched the ceiling, but not quite.

“I just needed to sleep,” I said. “What time is it?”

I looked at the clock. It was eight fifteen.

“Everyone was looking for you,” JP said. “You missed dinner.”

Yeah. I bet Casey Palmer was looking for me too.

“I wasn’t hungry.” But now that they mentioned it, I felt like I was starving.

“Well,” Seanie kind of whispered, glancing around, “we smuggled you some food, just in case you were.”

Taking food from the mess hall was a definite violation. But as far as rule breaking was concerned, having visitors from the regular dorms in O-Hall was probably just as bad.

Seanie placed a wadded napkin and a paper coffee cup on top of the Calculus book next to my pillow. “It’s a ham sandwich and some tomato soup.”

Now, that was awesome. It sounded so good.

“Thanks, Seanie,” I said. “And thanks for not wrapping it up in your printout from Casey’s MySite.”

JP laughed.

“Have you ever seen Casey’s MySite, Joey?” I asked.

Seanie had a sick and pissed-off expression on his face.

“No. Why?”

“Well, when you go home this weekend, look it up,” I said.

“Okay.”

Joey’s parents were ultrarich. They lived in San Mateo and flew him home every Friday after school. I saw how Seanie was looking at me, so I just fired him back a Ha-Ha-I-just-got-Joey-to-look-at-your-balls-so-write-a- haiku-about-that, fucker expression, if there is such a thing.

But whether or not there actually is such a look, Seanie and I just had an intense and wordless conversation about Japanese poetry, his balls, and our gay friend, Joey Cosentino.

“I got you something to drink,” Joey said.

I looked at him. Maybe I still had the balls/haiku expression on my face, so I guess Joey thought I didn’t trust his evening beverage selection.

“Not beer,” he added, and smiled. He pulled a bottle of water and another of Gatorade from his school pack.

Now, that was a miracle. I was so thirsty, I opened the Gatorade and emptied the bottle without even taking a breath.

“Joey told everyone what happened,” JP said.

“Dude, you’re like a superhero, laying out Casey Palmer, sticking up for your fly half,” Seanie said.

“I wasn’t sticking up for Joey,” I said. “I was sticking up for me. I have to walk up and down that hill every day too. We can’t let them start off with crap like that on the first day of practice. So I just kind of closed my eyes and took him out. I was so pissed off about everything anyway, so I did something really stupid that I’m lucky didn’t end up with me being killed. Like we said in the locker room, I wanted to hit someone, and a game of touch rugby didn’t quite do it for me today.”

“How’s your nose?” Joey asked.

I hadn’t even thought about it since seeing that blood in the bottom of the shower stall. I took a bite of the