Winger

“Yeah. I know.”

I tried to swallow the dry and hairy tennis ball in my throat.

Annie did that to me.

Especially when she used the scolding tone.

I looked at my feet as we walked.

This was actually a beautiful place, especially with Annie walking beside me. The lake was about a mile and a half long, half a mile wide, and surrounded by tall pines that stood like an army of giants stretching all the way up to the tops of the mountains surrounding us.

Of course, Annie stayed in the girls’ dorm, which was a good walk in the opposite direction down the lake from the secluded O-Hall. It was built near the mess hall, class and office buildings, the sports complex, and the boys’ dorm.

The top floor of O-Hall was for the boys, with the ground floor segregated for girls. But, girls being girls, it almost never had any residents. It was perfectly clean and unoccupied now, except for the resident girls’ counselor, a frightening mummy of an old woman named Mrs. Singer.

“Well, what classes do you have this semester, West?”

Annie and I sat on an iron bench facing the lake and exchanged schedules. I looked at her ID card. Her picture was so perfectly radiant, it burned my eyes. She just had this faint, closed-mouth, typically Annie smile, like she knew something embarrassing about the photographer. And she looked so confident, too, staring straight ahead with her dark blue eyes and the most perfect-looking black eyebrows, her hair hanging down across her forehead. I could never tell if she wore lipstick and makeup; her skin and lips always looked so flawless and, well, Annie- like.

“West. You’re just staring at my ID. The schedule’s on the bottom.”

“Oh. Sorry. Nice picture, Annie.”

I saw her thumb my ID card over. And there I was, staring out from behind the lamination, necktied and looking all lost between my goofy ears, mouth half-open in a not-really-a-smile smile, short-cropped dirty blond hair that never sat even, and that pale skin of mine that looked like it would never, ever so much as sprout a stray strand of peach fuzz.

“Aww,” she said. “What a cute boy.”

Okay, I’ll be honest. I think she actually said “little boy,” but it was so traumatizing to hear that I may have blocked it out.

She might as well have kicked me square in the nuts.

I am such a loser.

I had two PE classes—Conditioning in the morning and Team Athletics at the end of the day—but at least Annie and I had one class together, American Literature, just before lunch break. Annie’s sports were cross country in the fall and track in the spring. Rugby season started in November, so playing on the team was a year-round commitment since it didn’t end until May.

“Cool. We got Lit together,” I said. “I better go.”

I stood up abruptly and handed Annie her stuff.

“Are you mad or something, West?”

“No. I gotta go and get my stuff unpacked, or Farrow’s going to get after me. O-Hall. You know,” I lied.

“If you’re sure you’re okay,” she said. She stood up.

“Yeah.”

I took my schedule and ID from her and started off toward my new home.

“Look,” she said, “I’m going on a trail run before dinner. You want to come with me?”

“I can’t,” I said.

And without turning back I went straight for the O-Hall doorway.

Little boy.

What a bunch of crap.

Chapter Four

IT TOOK ABOUT FIVE MINUTES for me to unpack. That’s all. I didn’t have anything. Of course Chas wasn’t there. He’d be out goofing around with his friends, or sneaking off somewhere with Megan Renshaw, who I also thought was unendurably sexy, but not in a mature, Annie kind of way; it was more like an intimidating and scary female-cop-that-arrested-me-in-Boston way. But she was still hot. And, yes, I did get arrested in Boston when I was twelve. It’s what inspired my parents to enroll me in Pine Mountain Academy in the first place.

I know you’re going to ask, so I might as well tell you: It was for breaking into and trying to drive a T train.

I was twelve.

Boys like trains.

Back to unpacking.

Chas had left the bottom cubbies open and bared enough of the closet rod for me to hang up my school jacket and sweater, as well as the uniform pants and shirts that would supply me from wash day to wash day. After I did that I was alone, so I just stared out the window at the lake and sat there in the dark room on a chair that I wasn’t really sure I’d be allowed to sit on.

I sighed.

My parents had dropped me off that morning, along with my bags, a supply of cash, adequate stereophonic warnings about my behavior and what they expected from me now that I was a full-fledged “young man,” and instructions to phone them at the usual time every Saturday afternoon. They didn’t even get out of the rental car; they had to hurry back to the airport to catch their flight to Boston, where I lived for the few unfrozen months out of the year.

When I saw Annie run by, alone, out on the trail around the lake, I immediately tore off all my clothes, pulled on my running shorts, and dug around in my formerly organized cubbies for my running shoes. I had been so busy sitting there moping and feeling lonely that I’d nearly forgotten my commitment—well, plan, at least—to try reinventing myself this year, to not be such an outcast. I took off out the door, leaving it open wide, displaying the wreckage of scattered clothing and footwear I’d left behind in my hurry to catch up to Annie Altman.

I knew where she was going. It was a trail we’d run together many times, winding to the north side of the lake and then along a rock-lined switchback path through the forest to the highest point around, a lookout post called Buzzard’s Roost where you could see out in every direction—the entire valley where our school had been built on one side, and, on the other, a faint and hazy flatness that was the Pacific Ocean.

I estimated that by the time I got my shoes on and was out on the trail, Annie would be nearly a mile ahead of me, so as I ran along the lake I tried to script the innocent-sounding lies I’d say to her when she caught me on her way back down from the top. Because of course I really did want to take the run with Annie when she asked, and if it wasn’t for that kick-Ryan-Dean-in-the-balls comment she’d made, I’d be up there with her right now, and we’d be talking about all kinds of things that just naturally come out of your head when you run.

The trail cut away from the lake through the densest part of the forest. Last year, in a clearing cut by loggers, Annie and my then-roommates and I built a circle of stones. We called it Stonehenge.

I stopped there to shake the twigs from my shoes.

Although some ferns had overgrown the outer ring of rocks, our monument was still standing. I didn’t have any socks on, or a shirt, either. Just my running shorts, because I had been in too much of a hurry once I saw Annie run past O-Hall. My ankles were streaked with dirt from the combination of dust and sweat. It was hot and muggy, and I was slick and dripping as I started up the switchback trail, following Annie’s shoeprints.