Winger

“Shut up, Seanie. Annie knows what’s going on.”

“Everyone on the planet knows what’s going on. Except you.”

“Seanie?”

“What?”

“Thanks for not saying nothing about JP and me.”

“There’s nothing to say.”

Chapter Thirty-Five

I WAS AFRAID THAT JOEY would be waiting outside when I headed back to O-Hall. I didn’t want to hear him lecture me about Megan again. But there wasn’t anyone there, and I walked along the trail by the lake in the dark alone.

I got lectured anyway.

I stopped by the shore so I could just stare out at the blackness of the lake, and that’s where I got that arguing and taunting voice in my head that went something like this:

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: Now what are you going to do about Megan?

RYAN DEAN WEST 1: What are you going to do about Megan—times infinity?

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: You are such a loser.

RYAN DEAN WEST 1: And she’s so five out of five Space Needles on the Ryan Dean West Reasons-Why- Male-Architects-Design-Structures-Shaped-Like-That-in-the-First-Place Hall of Fame.

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: You must spend a lot of time thinking up perverted stuff.

MR. WELLINS: Proof that sex actually does motivate everything.

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: Sex doesn’t even exist in Ryan Dean West’s universe. Not even in the architecture. Everything is skinny-ass-bitch flat and flabby.

MR. WELLINS: Good point. Maybe I need to go fine-tune my theory.

RYAN DEAN WEST 1: Hey! How did an old pervert end up in my play?

RYAN DEAN WEST 2: Your head is a freaking watering hole in the desert of purity for all things perverted. So . . . back to the issue at hand: You know what you got to do about Megan. So do it.

MRS. KURTZ: Don’t forget your study group tomorrow night, Ryan Dean!

RYAN DEAN WEST 1: Ugh.

(Ryan Dean West throws a rock out into the lake.)

ANNIE: What are you doing, Ryan Dean?

Oh, wait . . . that was real.

“What are you doing, Ryan Dean?”

And she called me Ryan Dean.

“Nothing. I was just thinking.”

I turned around and looked at her.

She was so beautiful, standing there in the dark. I kept thinking about what Seanie had said—about why I didn’t just get it over with and kiss her. I mean, what’s the worst that could happen, right? We’ve known each other for more than two years, and I’ve only held her hand a couple times. God! I wanted to kiss her so bad, but I didn’t have the guts.

I am such a loser.

“What are you thinking about?”

I smiled. “God, Annie. Don’t you know me by now?”

She laughed. “Oh, yeah. You are so perverted, Ryan Dean.”

Wow. She called me that twice.

And I could see the real smile in her eyes. I loved that about her.

She touched her fingers to her eyebrow, like I was a mirror or something. “Does that hurt?”

“Not really.”

“You’re mad at me, aren’t you?”

“Kind of.” I sighed. “It’s stupid. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

“Seanie said you and JP were really in a fight.”

I looked out at the lake. I didn’t want to talk about this with Annie.

“I’m going to be in trouble if I don’t check in at O-Hall in, like, two minutes, Annie.”

“Come on,” she said. Then she held my hand and walked me to my dorm.

We stopped in the dark outside the mudroom door.

“Good night, Annie.”

She didn’t let go of my hand.

“Wait,” she said. “Don’t be mad at me, Ryan Dean. I’m so looking forward to this weekend. Please don’t be mad at me.”

And I thought, Crafty girl almost sounds like I did when I fake-cried for Mr. Farrow.

“Okay, Annie.”

Then she got real close to me. Her unbuttoned jacket even tickled, brushing against the zipper on my pants, and I suddenly forgot everything in the world about JP and stitches, or anything else that existed at an altitude higher than my waist besides Annie Altman. Our lips were just inches apart, and I could feel her heat and smell that awesome stuff she uses on her hair, and I thought, Oh my God, she is finally going to kiss me. We are finally going to kiss, and this is going to be the best thing I’ve ever felt and tasted in my entire pathetic life, and I knew we were going to kiss; and just then the door opened and the glacially unhot Mrs. Singer stuck her head out and said, “Young man, you are going to be late if you do not check in with your resident counselor immediately!”

And that was like a Niagara Falls of razor-sharp ice cubes pouring right through the fly on my pants. Oh . . . and some of those ice cubes were shaped like rusty bear traps and triple fishhooks, too.

She had to be a witch.

Annie released my hand and turned away.

“See you, West,” she said.

I sighed. The biggest part of me wanted to go after her and just get it over with, like Seanie told me, but my only chance was gone, and Mrs. Singer stood there watching me, unblinking, holding the door propped open against the cold and dark.

Do not look into her eyes.

As I passed Mrs. Singer, I kept my eyes on the floor, unwilling to battle the soul-sucking-diarrhea-spell- casting witch that she was. Then I felt her arctic fingers on my shoulder, and she said, “Your head would happen to look nice on a serving platter.”

And I squeaked like a frightened baby mouse and hurried for the stairs.

Well, to be perfectly honest, I am pretty sure she said, “What happened to your head? Is something the matter?” But that could just have been part of the spell-thing-whatever-it-is she’d been working on me ever since she caught me peeing in the girls’ bathroom. And as I made my way up the darkened stairway, she said either “You better be afraid” or “Why are you afraid?” But, again, I can’t be sure which it was, to be totally honest. But I swear, I swear, I really do think I heard her say something about “a catastrophic injury to your penis” just as I slammed shut the door to the boys’ floor behind me.

Diarrhea I can handle, but the catastrophic-penis-injury thing strikes the deepest imaginable chord of fear in any boy’s mind.

I was sweating, stitched-up, panting, and terrified. But at least I wasn’t late.