JOEY WATCHED ME WALK THROUGH the doorway to Calculus class. We hadn’t said anything at all to each other since practice, not even after the fight in the bathroom with Chas, but he didn’t need to say anything. His pissed-off look was enough. I know what he would have said, without the words.
As soon as I stumbled to my seat, Megan spun around, her amber hair sweeping silently across my desktop and over my fingers—
And then Joey intervened, looking as serious as he did the night before, after Chas backed down. Joey leaned over between Megan and me and grabbed my chin firmly and said, “Let me see that.”
He tilted my head like an unskilled barber and looked quickly over my stitches. My hair was still wet from the run.
“You going to be good to play tomorrow?” Joey said flatly, still holding my head steady.
“Uh-huh. You know I will.”
Then he kind-of whispered, even though I know Megan heard the whole thing, “Get your shit together, Ryan Dean.”
I didn’t know if he was talking about JP or Megan or Annie or just me. No . . . I guess I did know.
Then, birdlike, and in a hot-therapist kind of way, Mrs. Kurtz was looming over us, chirping, “Oh my goodness, Ryan Dean! What happened to you?”
Joey let go of my face.
“I play rugby,” I said. “I got eighteen stitches.”
“What a stud!” Mrs. Kurtz said. She always said the dorkiest things, but I never met a student who didn’t love her. Then she tousled my wet hair, which, due to her mysterious, my-best-friend’s-mom-kind-of-hotness, made me feel weak and flustered and convinced that I was destined to keep making the same kinds of stupid mistakes with girls over and over, no matter how spectacular my 2 x BALLS argument to Annie was, and she said, “Maybe you should take it easy today, Ryan Dean.”
“I think Ryan Dean should skip our study group tonight,” Joey said. “So he can rest. We have our first game tomorrow.”
I fired a look at Joey, then at Megan.
I sighed.
Joey was right, and I realized then that I was still just making excuses to avoid dealing with my out-of- control Megan thing.
Megan said, “I’ll miss you tonight, Ryan Dean.” Then she put her hand over mine.
“You should definitely stay in bed tonight,” Mrs. Kurtz said. I, of course, thought this was a very hot thing to say.
“Thanks, Mrs. Kurtz,” I said. “Thanks, Joe. Sorry, Megan.”
But to me, my voice sounded so pathetic, almost like I was crying.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
IT HAPPENED AT PRACTICE.
The worst thing imaginable.
Practice is always relaxed and fun the day before a game, especially in the rain. Coach would usually just talk about a game plan, then we’d play a fun little scrimmage, just so we could get all muddy. Nothing serious.
My head was taped up, so I was okay, and I was glad Coach could see that I was ready for the game. We were all just having fun.
Seanie and I ended up on opposite teams, playing sevens, which, like I said, is a much more wide-open and fast game with fewer pileups. I had the ball and was running downfield when I got caught up in a tackle from a flanker who was playing on Seanie’s team.
In rugby, when you’re tackled, you have to let go of the ball. Usually, you do it in a way that makes it easy for your own teammates to pick it up. But when I released the ball, no one was there to get it, so Seanie stepped right over me and poached the ball away for his team.
And the terrible thing is, right when he stepped through, he planted his foot between my legs.
Yeah.
Like the world wasn’t big enough for Seanie to find somewhere else to put his fucking foot.
And that’s how Sean Russell Flaherty, my good friend, the same guy who contrived so many Internet hoaxes about so many people, the same guy who’d told Annie Altman, the girl I am insanely in love with, that I got drunk with Chas Becker the night before school began, that same guy, wearing size twelve metal cleats, stepped right onto my balls.
I became a black hole.
Let me explain the physics of having your balls stepped on.
The entire Ryan Dean West universe instantly collapsed to the size of a five-eighths-inch metal cleat stud, and everything I knew, everything I
Newton obviously skipped that one crucial law.
When my hearing came back, I heard Seanie saying, “Uh-oh.”
And I’m pretty sure that everyone in the Pacific Northwest heard Ryan Dean West shout, “YOUSTEPPEDONMYFUCKINGNUTS YOUSONOFABITCH!”
Yes, I will admit to cussing that time.
My universe gradually began expanding, but so did the agony. I could think again, and the thinking led to a heightened sensation of pain, if there could be such a thing, and a frightening realization, too.
Mrs. Singer.
And as I lay on my side, in the fetal position, hands clutching for what I could only imagine in my most horrific visions had been damaged beyond salvation, my teammates formed, for the second time in the past twenty-four hours, a mournful and morbidly fascinated circle around me.
“He’s dead,” one of them said.
“If he isn’t dead, he should kill himself immediately,” another added.
“Did you really step on his nuts?” A third one.
I tried to answer them, but the only sound I could make sounded something like
Coach M blew his whistle to break practice.
I rolled onto my back in the mud, my face turned up into the rain, eyes blurred, scanning the darkness of the clouds for the giant face of a mocking God who might be up there laughing at my stitched-and-stomped-on-skinny- bitch-ass.
“Not exactly the best two days of your life, eh, Ryan Dean?” Coach tried to smile, looking down at me, rain dripping from the brim of his hat. “Can you move?”
And Seanie fell beside me, trying to help sit me up.
But he was kind of laughing when he said, “Dude, my bad, Ryan Dean. And I know you’ve probably waited all your life to hear another guy say this to you, but, dude, how are your balls?”
And, all at once, I somehow instantly composed a haiku in my mind about how much I hated Seanie Flaherty, and, in a simultaneous flash of inspiration, derived a kind of mathematical, tautological formula about reality, that I could easily envision as a Venn diagram:
Finding Humor in Getting Hit in the Balls = The Universe Minus One
Seanie helped me to my feet. My head was groggy, my eyes swirled with tears of pain, and I felt like
