Winger

Annie continued, “I’ll put him in the little room across from mine.”

Next thing I knew, I heard the clicking of manicured dog nails on the wood floor, followed by the chirplike shriek of repetitive barking, and then this smash-faced little dog appeared and immediately came after my leg in a hump ambush.

“Pedro!” Annie scolded.

“Just kick him,” Doc Mom said. “He never quits, otherwise.”

You know, when someone tells you to kick their dog—the same dog who is currently in a breeding frenzy with your nicest pair of dorky school pants—it’s a difficult thing to judge exactly how hard the dog should be kicked. So I decided I’d give Pedro a conservative three out of five Cossack dancers on the Ryan Dean West How-Far-to- Kick-a-Gay-Pug Spectrum.

“That’s mean!” Annie said, but she did kind of laugh as Pedro skittered like a hockey puck toward the sunken living room.

“Good man, Ryan Dean,” Doc Dad said. “I don’t know why we haven’t cut his balls off yet.”

And why is it, I thought, that whenever boys consider such measures—despite their justifiability—we always get a bit scared, morose, and angsty?

Oh, well.

“Come on,” Annie said. Then she grabbed my hand to lead me down the hallway to our right. She stopped suddenly.

Annie must have realized what she was doing (unlike Pedro, she could control the involuntary impulse to conjugate with Ryan Dean West), because she immediately let go like my hand was a red-hot thing that gets . . . red . . . hot.

Or something.

I followed her, lugging my suitcase and the bag from the sporting goods store.

“The door on the right is your room,” she said. “Just across the hall from mine.”

I opened my door and set my bags down on the floor.

It’s amazing how much a guy can appreciate a non-bunk-bed bed and a bathroom that doesn’t have at least two other guys in it at all times. The window was uncovered and looked out at the beach and tall dark pines, and I had my own television and a huge bathroom with an ice-block shower cubicle.

“How do you like it?” Annie said.

“Please adopt me,” I said. Then I added, “No. On second thought, that could get a little weird. Let’s just hop across the border to Canada and get married.”

Annie laughed. I kicked my shoes off and said, “I’ll get changed.”

“Okay. Meet me in the hall in, like, thirty seconds,” she said.

Hmmm . . . I thought, thirty seconds meant I’d have time to get out of my clothes but not into them. Oh, well, wishful thinking. Docs Mom and Dad would probably disapprove of the clothing-optional houseguest, and that dog was out there waiting for me, anyway.

“Okay,” I said, and Annie left me alone.

Whenever I get off an airplane, I feel like I’ve been deep fried, dripping in oil. And I probably smelled like booze from drunk-bald-fat-guy slobbering on my shoulder. So it felt really good to tear all my clothes off (without a couple security guards pawing through them), and even better to just throw them onto the floor, something I hadn’t been able to do all year.

Now, with all the scattered, discarded articles of boy-clothes, this looked like a real guy’s room.

All I needed to do was mess up the perfectly smoothed bedcovers, which I did with a jump.

I put on the red trunks they bought me, as well as a gray Pine Mountain RFC (which means Rugby Football Club) sweatshirt, some clean, inside-in socks, and my running shoes, and I was out my door and in the hall in under a minute.

Annie opened her door.

No matter what she wore, Annie Altman always looked perfect. She had changed into faded jeans that were just wearing through at the knees and along the bottoms of the pockets, with a pale blue sweater that really made her black hair and blue eyes stand out, even in the dim light of the hallway.

I had never seen her dressed in “home clothes” before, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

And, I am such a loser, I couldn’t even speak when she asked, “Want to see my room?”

Her room was so . . . Annie. The walls were covered with paintings, and sculptures of fish and birds that she’d made. Her windows looked out into the forest, and she had French doors that opened to a stepping-stone path.

Next to her bed was a Wonder Horse, one of those spring-mounted things kids used to play on, like, a hundred years ago.

“Wow,” I said, but my voice cracked like a kid who suddenly realized he was alone inside the bedroom of the girl he loved, which made sense, considering the oppressive reality of my surrounding conditions. “Do you still ride?”

Annie laughed. “Come on.”

She opened the paned doors and led me onto the path outside her room.

Chapter Fifty-Four

WE WALKED ALONG THE ROCKY beach in the sunset.

The water in the sound was so black and rolling, jagged and alive. Everything smelled like the sea and trees. Between the cracks in the rocks, I could see the claws of wedged-in crabs, spitting bubbles, sometimes moving slightly like they wanted to keep an eye on us, like they were spying on us.

“Tomorrow morning we can go run out past that point.” Annie’s hand indicated a distant and darkening stand of trees.

“This is so nice,” I said. My shoes were wet from walking too close to the water. “Thanks so much for asking me, Annie.”

“I knew you’d like it.”

“I never knew you were such an artist,” I said.

“Just like you,” she said.

“Crud. You are so much more. I draw stick figures. You make stuff that’s real.”

“I can tell my mom and dad really like you.”

I pulled out the leg of my trunks. “I got the trunks on.”

“They look good.”

We stopped and turned back toward the house. It was beginning to get dark.

I was convinced she was playing the same game with me that I was playing with her, but I wasn’t going to fall for it. Not for a second. There was still that sensible and pathetic part of my mind that kept telling me Annie Altman only thought I was a little kid and nothing else.

But we did stand there for a minute, and I could smell her, and feel the warmth like a static charge coming from her. And she looked at my face, and we were so close when she said, “Your stitches look like they’re getting better.”

I leaned closer to her. Damn, she looked so nice, and I was so impressed by how she lived and the beautiful things she’d created there with her own hands, and I wanted to . . .

Do not kiss her, Ryan Dean West.

Ugh.

I am such a loser. She knew exactly what she was doing.

She started back to the house and said over her shoulder in her singing voice, the voice that knew everything and made nothing matter, “Don’t even tell me that you didn’t almost do it just now, Ryan Dean.”

Damn.

I couldn’t say anything.