Winger

ever seen where you just sit there yelling inside your head, “Don’t open that door, you fucking idiot!”

So what did I do? I opened the door.

Then I almost screamed like a little girl, but I was too scared to do that, and if I hadn’t just done what I did a minute earlier, I would have peed myself too, because when I opened the door, I was standing there, in nothing but my underwear, face to face with the so-unhot-she-is-quite-likely-the-only-two-legged-female-besides-his-mom- no-wait-including-his-mom-Ryan-Dean-West-wouldn’t-want-to-run-into-at-night-when-he-is-only-wearing-boxers- and-nothing-else Mrs. Singer from downstairs.

And I thought, I am never going to not-have diarrhea for the rest of my life.

I am such a loser.

And she was standing right there, inches away from me, in a black robe and her black hair tied back in a black scarf, looking like some kind of child-sacrificing Druid, or a bad illustration from an endless volume of Dickens; and for a moment, I was so startled, I just froze.

I should have used the Gatorade bottle.

When my knees thawed, I spun around and ran back down the hallway without saying anything or turning around, my feet frantically slapping their way back to my bedroom.

I felt something cool on my chest. My nose was bleeding again.

Okay, I thought, she’s not a witch. Casey Palmer made your nose bleed; it wasn’t that creepy Mrs. Singer. I pressed my hand to my nose, and it was immediately covered in blood.

When I got back to my room, I pulled the bloodstained shirt I was wearing when Casey punched me from my school pack and held it to my face. That shirt was beyond salvation at this point anyway. Then I attempted to one- handedly maneuver my way back to the upper bunk.

To make matters worse, I kicked Chas in the head when I climbed back up onto my bunk, not that there wasn’t a pretty big part of me that was deeply satisfied by kicking him in the head after he forced me to get drunk and caused Annie to hate me. It probably would have been more satisfying if he woke up, but he just grunted and rolled over as I pulled myself up onto my bed.

My heart was pounding. I panted. I rubbed my hair as I stared up at the ceiling, pressing the wadded-up shirt against my nose to stop the bleeding. I was actually sweating. I couldn’t get comfortable, and I guess I was fidgeting a bit, convinced that Mrs. Singer had it in for me and was just slowly working on some weird method of killing me. Then Chas punched the mattress from below; I felt the thud of a fist in my kidney.

“Please tell me you’re not doing what I think you’re doing up there, you fucking homo.”

What was he thinking? What an absolute moron Chas Becker was.

“I’m not doing nothing,” I said, my voice muffled in my ruined shirt. “I got a bloody nose. Sorry.”

He went back to sleep.

I tried to relax, but I kept thinking about that weird woman downstairs, imagining the horrible crap she was going to put me through in the morning. What could possibly be worse than day one?

I sighed, and drifted off to sleep again.

Chapter Twenty-One

WE BOTH WOKE UP AT the same time to the buzzing jangle of the alarm clock.

I felt so rested and ready for a real, and hopefully normal, day of school. When I got down from the bed, Chas saw the bloody shirt and said, “Is that from Casey Palmer?”

I said, “Yeah.”

“I heard about that. You want me to fuck him up?”

And I thought, wow, I could almost fool myself into thinking Chas Becker cared about me or something.

“Naw.”

I threw the shirt down onto the floor of our closet; then I picked it up and put it into the laundry bag marked WEST as Chas glared at me.

“He’s a puss, anyway,” Chas said. “And I heard you laid him out pretty good.”

“I guess.”

“You got some balls for a little kid.”

And I thought, Screw you, Betch.

Little kid.

Chapter Twenty-Two

I COULD FEEL MYSELF GET lighter; my heart beat faster, and my scalp kind of tingled when I saw her. Maybe it was just the dandruff shampoo I used that someone had left in the shower that morning.

I’ll be honest. If someone asked me am I in love with Annie Altman, I’d have to say I don’t know, because I really don’t know. I have nothing to compare with how I feel about her. But I do know that I feel this kind of a need where she is concerned; I need her to notice me more than she does; I need to think that I make her feel lighter when she sees me. And there’s no way I could ever believe that was possible, because it was just little me, Ryan Dean West, fourteen years old, walking around in the exact same clothes and tie as four hundred other guys here at Pine Mountain, every one of us so much the same, except for me, except for that one thing she noticed that she couldn’t get over, that made me so unattractively different from every other eleventh- grade boy in this shithole.

It’s what I tried to tell her in the note I threw away the night before.

It was a waste, anyway, because I knew I’d given her enough of a good reason for not ever talking to me again: I had crossed over, tried to make myself so much the same as a guy like Chas Becker by breaking the rules and playing poker and getting drunk, as if those stupid behaviors could ever incite some magical evolution in the ape of Ryan Dean West and cause him to shed his tail and walk upright in Annie’s eyes.

But I could hope, even if I was such a loser.

She sat across from Isabel Reyes at breakfast, eating a bagel and sipping from a carton of orange juice. And despite JP calling out “Hey, Ryan Dean,” and Seanie trying to wave me over to where they sat by the door so they could see every girl who came and went, I ignored them, but not in an unfriendly, stuck-up way, because I was kind of scared and had this jumping-off-the-highest-ever-high-dive feeling as I kept my eyes focused forward and walked right to where Annie sat.

She saw me coming up, but I couldn’t tell from her expression whether or not she was happy to see me. As always, Annie looked totally hot, but so did Isabel in her rustic, more-facial-hair-than-Ryan-Dean-West-will-have- in-college kind of way (God! Why do I think that’s hot?). And then I saw Annie lean over and whisper something to Isabel, and I could only imagine what they were saying.

What the Girls Probably Said: A Play by Ryan Dean West

ANNIE: Here comes that fucking alcoholic Ryan Dean West. Observe how I treat him like he’s some kind of pathetic red-eared slider turtle.

ISABEL: His ears look kind of pink to me. I think he’s cute.

ANNIE: You think he’s cute? He’s just a little boy. I’ll probably just ignore his skinny-bitch ass, pretend like he isn’t here.

ISABEL: You always told me how much you liked him.

ANNIE: He acted like an asshole as soon as we got to school on Sunday. First he wouldn’t talk to me, he lied about wanting to go for a run with me, and then he got drunk with Chas Becker. Definitely so not- cute.

And then I thought, Would you really ignore me, Annie? Do I really want to keep walking toward