Well, I didn’t actually say the “want to make out” part, but I sure wanted to say it. But just thinking it was a mistake, because I suddenly couldn’t think of anything else and found that, once again, Ryan Dean West’s brain was strained to its capacity with thinking of . . . well, sex. And, as usual, I couldn’t get my mind off of it, so I quickly drew up a brain-function chart in my bloodless head:
I am such a loser.
“Hey, Annie, did you really mean what you said when you told me that having me as a friend was the only thing you like about this school?”
“Well, I did like the smoothie I had at lunch today, but, yes. I do mean it.”
“Thanks.”
And I wanted to hold her hand so bad right then, but I was afraid. Can you imagine that? Yesterday I took down Casey Palmer, and today I was scared of touching a girl’s hand.
And I said, “Are you going back home this weekend?”
Annie’s parents lived near Seattle, so it was an easy trip.
“Yeah.”
“It sucks being here alone on the weekend. All my friends are gone,” I said. “Maybe one weekend you could stay, so we could do something together.”
She stood up, and we walked into the center of our Stonehenge, toward the spiral path.
“I know,” she said, “I’ll ask my parents if you can come home with me one weekend. That would be fun. They’ve been dying to meet you.”
Score!
“Have you told them about me?”
“Of course.”
I wondered what she’d said. If she made me sound like a pitiful little boy to them.
“Do you promise to ask them? This weekend, ask them, okay?”
“Okay.”
Suddenly, my brain was at 100 percent imagining spending a weekend with Annie at her house. I could have peed in my pants right then and not even known it.
We started following the spiral wish path toward the center.
I gulped.
I reached over and held her hand.
She held mine back.
We stopped walking, and Annie said, “Hey, West, are we
“Uh. Yeah.”
“Weird.”
“I know.”
“Want to let go?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
And that’s all she said. Okay. In that singing, relaxed kind of voice she had that made everything sound painless, like it didn’t matter, like there were no big deals anywhere in the universe.
When we walked back out of the path, she said, “What did you wish for?”
And I said, “I didn’t think you were supposed to tell.”
“Tell this one time.”
“Okay,” I said, “come here.”
And I led her over to where we’d been sitting on that log. I brushed the dirt on the ground flat with my brand new shoes and kneeled down. I drew two overlapping circles: a Venn diagram.
“That’s what I wished for, Annie.”
“It looks like a Venn diagram, West.”
“It is.” I put my finger in one of the circles. “These are all the boys here at Pine Mountain. We’re all almost totally the same. We dress the same, we all pretty much like the same stuff, we all play sports, and every one of us thinks you, Annie Altman, are totally hot.”
“Shut up.” She laughed.
I put my finger in the narrow crescent of the other circle, the outside part.
“And here’s Ryan Dean West. Well, at least, it’s the one tiny part of Ryan Dean West that makes him stand out as being so different, the only thing that everyone notices about him. The number fourteen. And you think that makes me so different, like I’m a little kid. But the thing is, everyone has that little part that’s outside the overlap of everyone else. And a lot of people zero in on that one little thing they can’t get over. Like for Joey, ’cause he’s gay, I guess. Some people are better than others about not getting that outside-the-overlap part so noticed, but not me. So that was my wish. What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She looked suddenly serious.
“I didn’t mean to make you feel bad,” I said. “Sorry. What was your wish?”
“Maybe I shouldn’t say.”
“No fair, Annie.”
“Seriously?”
“Serious.”
“I wished for you to get your wish.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
AFTER DINNER, JOEY AND I walked to the library with our Calculus books to meet Megan. I guess I didn’t feel right after seeing Annie out in the woods, like maybe I’d said too much and it was going to ruin our friendship now, so I was a little depressed and didn’t say anything to Joey.
I kept picturing those circles in my head. I hoped I’d made sense to Annie, that I didn’t sound like a whiny little crybaby. And I thought about Joey too, and how bad and terribly lonely he must feel sometimes; and that’s why I tried to always go out of my way to not notice the thing about him you couldn’t notice anyway.
We stayed in the library until they kicked us out, at nine forty-five. Megan looked so deliciously good, and she smiled so broadly when it finally all started coming back to her. I guess Joey and I counteracted the brain-loss effect caused by Chas Becker’s brilliance.
Megan walked us back to O-Hall, between Joey and me, with her arms locked inside each of ours. I will admit that twice I feigned tripping on a rock just so my right arm would brush against her breast, and that was awesome.
The performance artist was on the mark that day.
When we got back to O-Hall, Joey and I said good night to Megan and started for the door.
“Thank you boys so much for helping me,” Megan said. “You are such good friends, and I love you both.”
“No problem,” Joey said.
“Yeah.”
Then Megan stepped up to Joey and kissed him on the cheek, and I could see he kissed her back too, all suave and mannered, like he did that kind of stuff all the time. He pulled open the door to the mudroom, and Megan turned to me.
I thought I was actually going to die. Megan Renshaw, in all her smoking five-out-of-five-habanero hotness, was going to kiss me, Ryan Dean Never-Been-Kissed-by-Anyone-Who-Wasn’t-Alive-When-Sputnik-Got-Launched West.
I closed my eyes.
