I flipped Seanie off and then had to pull one of JP’s weights from the bar.
“Just remember, Seanie. I made Joey look at your balls.”
“Dude, Joey’s gay. You can’t
Yeah . . . in the weight room, we often have deep, philosophical conversations.
We pulled off another round of weights, but JP was struggling because he started laughing.
When it was Seanie’s turn, JP and I got him all loaded up, and just when he raised the barbell and locked out over his chest, we walked away and left him there as he yelled, “Hey! Fuck you guys! Assholes!”
Of course we didn’t leave him like that. We were just messing with him. But Seanie always had a way of obsessing about things like they were the greatest trespasses ever committed against his pitiful soul. Maybe that’s one of the things I found so funny about Sean Russell Flaherty.
And when we were changing back into our school clothes for the second class of the day, JP asked if I thought there was going to be any trouble about them coming to visit me in O-Hall the night before.
“As weird as he is, I think Farrow understands that you guys were just trying to help me,” I said. “I wouldn’t expect he’ll turn you in to the headmaster, and even if he does, you guys won’t get into trouble for what you did.”
“I hope you’re right,” JP said.
“I’d kind of like to get put in O-Hall,” Seanie said. “So I could kick your ass at poker.”
“No you wouldn’t. It sucks. And I think that woman who lives downstairs, Mrs. Singer, is a witch or something.”
“You’re fucking crazy, Winger,” JP said.
“Yeah,” Seanie agreed.
But they didn’t see what I’d seen.
Chapter Twenty-Four
MEGAN RENSHAW WAS A STRESS case. When we went over the Calculus review problems Mrs. Kurtz had assigned from day one, Megan got every one of them wrong. She spun sideways in her desk (her hair brushed across my hand again—yes!), and she practically had tears in her eyes as she complained to Joey and me, “I think I became completely stupid over the summer!”
And then Joey said what I didn’t have the guts to say: “I think hanging out with Betch would lower anyone’s I.Q.”
“Look,” I said, moving my pencil over her paper, just near enough to her hand that I could feel her warmth and smell the ginger lotion on her skin, “here’s where you got this step backward.”
Megan swept her hair back from her face and propped her head on an elbow, resting on my desk. She sighed in defeat.
She was definitely the hottest defeated multivariate calculus student I’d ever seen.
Megan said, “You guys who get this stuff . . . ,” and she looked from Joey to me. When our eyes locked, I had to look away. Megan Renshaw was
Joey cleared his throat.
Chas Becker must have been a genius in at least one thing Megan Renshaw liked.
Mrs. Kurtz had been looming over us, watching Megan’s frustration, and she said, “Why don’t the three of you form a study group to work on tonight’s assignment?”
And I thought it was just like Seanie’s haiku coming true, except for the Megan part. And the Megan part practically gave me an aneurysm when she put her ginger-lotion hand on my arm and said, with pleading and helpless eyes, “Will you help me, Ryan Dean? Please?”
I wasn’t sure if I could physically tolerate all the up-and-down surging of blood I’d been experiencing that morning. I swear I could actually see my heart thumping in my chest beneath my sweater.
“Sure.” And I was kind of scared—no, terrified—so I said, “Joey can, too.”
And, just like that, the three of us agreed to meet in the library after dinner that night, with Mrs. Kurtz’s approval. Students were allowed to do homework in the library until lights-out, but O-Hall kids had to have a teacher’s consent. So, thanks to Mrs. Kurtz’s facilitation, I had scored my second smoking-hot-girl date on just my second day of eleventh grade.
Things were definitely looking up.
The day before, the day after the poker game, postconsequence, I felt like I had been stuffed with a combination of cement and sleeping pills; but that Tuesday I practically floated through the entire school day.
Chapter Twenty-Five
NOTE TO ANNIE DURING LIT class:
Don’t forget.
Then I drew a picture on the bottom:
And, yeah, she did think I was a pervert.
Chapter Twenty-Six
THIS TIME, I SHOWERED AFTER rugby. I put my school clothes back on and tied my necktie as neatly as I could. I even borrowed some cologne from Joey. I got some gel from Kevin Cantrell and put it in my hair and tried to comb it.
Everyone knew something was up.
This time, Casey Palmer and Nick Matthews weren’t waiting at the side of the football field as the guys came streaming down from the locker room.
I would have run on my way to O-Hall, but I didn’t want to get all sweaty before seeing Annie. I planned to just drop off my school books in my room so I wouldn’t have to carry my pack with me all the way to our stone circle.
O-Hall looked deserted when I got there. I guess I must have been the first boy back from school. Despite all the attention I’d paid to my clothes and hair, I’d still rushed to get out of the locker room and managed to make it back to O-Hall before anyone else. So when I opened the outer door to the mudroom and stairwell, I wasn’t expecting to see anyone; and this time, I did kind of squeal more than a little bit when I ran straight into the not- even-hot-on-Pluto Mrs. Singer.
And I don’t know why I was so terrified, but after that diarrhea spell I was convinced she’d laid on me, and the spontaneous bloody nose of the night before, I completely believed that she was determined to do something horrible to me, like turn me into her eunuch slave former-boy, or breathe poison into me.
Maybe that Hawthorne story was getting to me, I don’t know.
Our eyes met as I stood, petrified, at the bottom of the stairwell. And I don’t know where all my blood went, but I know it didn’t go anywhere I particularly cared about.
Then she said, “I am going to suck your fucking soul out through your eye sockets with my lampreylike tongue.”
Well, to be absolutely honest, she actually just said, “Oh, hello. It’s you again,” but I wasn’t about to stand
