Winger

She put her hands on the sides of my jaw.

She kissed me right on the mouth.

AND SHE STAYED THERE.

I think she actually had to hold me up when she slipped her tongue past my lips.

Then she put her face to my ear and whispered, “I think you are really adorable.”

Okay . . . I’ll admit I no longer hated that word.

Then she whirled around and left us there.

In the stairwell, I gave Joey the all-time-record-breaking gay-straight high five.

And he said, “You don’t have to worry about me. I won’t tell Chas about you making out with Megan. He’s a douche bag, anyway, and you know he’d kill you for it.”

PART TWO: the sawmill

Chapter Twenty-Nine

BY THE FIRST WEEK OF october, it was freezing cold up there in the Cascades at Pine Mountain Academy. And things just continued along from day to day in their usual way.

We’d played poker a couple more times, always on Sunday nights, because that’s when the guys got back from their weekends. But I never drank beer again after that first time. Chas tried to make me do it, and I thought I was actually going to get into a certain-death-for-Ryan-Dean-West fistfight over it, but Joey got between us and let Chas know that he was ready to fight him about it too. I even lost again, the second time we played, and that time the guys made me swim across the lake in the middle of the night wearing only my boxers. It was so cold, I could hardly breathe, and I was convinced as I paddled through that liquid hell that Mrs. Singer was going to turn herself into a multitentacled monster and drag me down to her icy black lair.

In Lit class, we had finished reading Billy Budd, Foretopman, and I was convinced by that time that Mr. Wellins was some sort of pervert, because he believed that everything we read had something to do with sex. According to him, “Rappaccini’s Daughter” was about incest, and, he argued, Billy Budd was about homosexuality. Mr. Wellins said it didn’t matter what a writer intended his work to mean, that the only thing that mattered was what it meant to the reader, and I guess I could see his point, but I still thought he was a creepy old pervert. Anyway, I just thought Melville wrote a good story, but what do I know?

And by mid-October, Coach M had pretty much named the first fifteen on the rugby team. I kept my spot and my nickname, at number eleven, JP made fullback, Seanie made scrum half, and the rest of the team were the returning seniors from last year, including Chas, Kevin, and Joey. We were also getting ready to play our first preseason friendly match against Sacred Heart Catholic School in Salem. So, with that game coming up, we were all pretty damned excited and nervous.

And, on the topic of being excited and nervous, that night during the first week of school—the night I’d made out with Megan Renshaw—I remember that when I got back to my room, I could hardly face Chas. I felt like I had stolen something, but I felt damned good about it too. And after that, anytime Chas laid it on thick with his put- downs and threats, I’d just smirk and think to myself, Your girlfriend puts her tongue in my mouth and she likes it, and my smirk would piss off Chas even more because he had no idea why I had suddenly become so confident around him.

Megan Renshaw and I flirted constantly in Calc and Econ, and sometimes we’d get kind of perverted about it. Joey just watched it and laughed at us, and he never said anything to anyone, because that was the kind of guy Joey Cosentino was. But I was still kind of afraid of Megan, and had no misconceptions as to who was holding the power in our quirky relationship.

One time, she even followed me out of class when I left for the bathroom, and we made out for about thirty nonstop and frenzied seconds in a drinking fountain alcove, and then she just left me there, completely unable to walk to the bathroom, much less back to class.

I felt really weird about the whole fooling-around-with-steaming-hot-Megan-Renshaw thing. First of all, and I’ll be honest, I felt really guilty before and afterward. It was during, though, that I didn’t feel anything even close to guilt—when Megan had her mouth all over mine and let me slip my hand up inside her sweater. When that was going on, it definitely was not guilt that occupied my mind.

When I was away from her—and could think sanely, that is—if I wasn’t having any perverted fantasies about airline stewardesses or Halloween costumes, I felt terrible, because I knew I was being the same kind of asshole to Chas Becker that he was to everyone else; and I tried to do anything I could to not think about how Annie would feel if she found out about us.

It tore me up, except for the couple minutes here and there when Megan would sneak off and get that nasty-policewoman-who-wants-to-arrest-bad-Ryan-Dean look in her eyes, but I felt like there was nobody I could talk to about it. If I talked to JP and Seanie, everyone else would know. Shit, Seanie would make a website about it. I definitely couldn’t talk to Annie, because I knew I was being bad and doing something that was just plain wrong (even if I liked the occasional chance to play Bad Ryan Dean). The only person I could talk to about it, of course, was Joey, who was gay.

I tried asking Megan about it, but she played me off. I got the impression she really did like me, which made me feel worse about Annie. In the end, it just seemed to me that Megan Renshaw was the kind of girl who only wanted a Chas Becker trophy mate because all the other girls at Pine Mountain wanted him. It was a game to Megan, and I felt sorry for how sad and lonely she was going to end up.

The Monday before the team took the bus to Salem to play, Joey and I walked back to O-Hall together after practice.

“Oh. I’ve been meaning to ask you, Ryan Dean,” Joey began, “what’s the deal with that Casey Palmer website? I didn’t think he was so . . . extroverted, I guess, but I could be wrong.”

Score. I had succeeded in making Joey look at Seanie’s balls.

This was, indeed, the stuff of future epic sonnets.

“I only heard about it,” I said. “I haven’t seen it.”

“Oh, sure,” he said, and laughed, like he didn’t believe me. “Then why are there so many comments posted by you on there about how gay Casey is?”

Seanie. Even when you think you’ve caught up with him, you realize he’s always pushing it a step further.

“Seanie Flaherty’s a dick,” I said.

Joey laughed.

I sighed.

And Joey said, “You guys shouldn’t mess around with Casey Palmer’s ego. I’ve seen that guy do some pretty crazy shit.”

“Like what?” I said.

“He flips out. He can hurt guys,” Joey said.

“Oh.” I shrugged. “I’ll tell Seanie to lay off. He won’t listen, though.”

“Seanie never does.”