Winger

“Yeah.” My eyes scanned ahead. I saw the lights of an all-night grocery store. What grocery store wouldn’t have costumes for sale just four days before Halloween?

“Hey, Joey,” I said. “Why don’t you have a boyfriend or anything?”

“What makes you think I don’t?”

“Well, no one ever sees you with anyone at school. I mean, not like that,” I said.

“I wouldn’t do that at school. It would be too much trouble for both of us.”

“Oh. So you do have a boyfriend?”

“Of course.”

“Well I’m glad for you, then. It sucks being alone. Believe me, I know. Let’s try this store,” I said, and pointed to the supermarket. I really didn’t want to find out too much about Joey’s boyfriend, because it made me feel really awkward. I just wanted to know if Joey was okay in his life, because, like I said, I really liked Joey. But I do mean that in a totally non-gay way.

Joey pulled in to the parking lot. It was nearly empty, dark, and rain slicked, with a few scattered shopping carts reflecting the headlights from Chas’s car.

“Are there even any other gay guys at Pine Mountain?” I asked.

Joey laughed. “Oh my God, Ryan Dean, why do you care? You’re not curious, are you? Did Chas completely scare you off girls or something? ’Cause I wouldn’t believe that could ever happen.”

I shrugged. “No. I was just wondering. ’Cause I can’t tell. I mean, I would have never even thought you were gay except you told me. But I do know exactly how many fourteen-year-old juniors there are at Pine Mountain. One. And he’s a skinny-ass-loser. But he’s not gay.”

“Well, there are a lot of gay kids at Pine Mountain.”

“Hopefully, JP Tureau?” I said.

That would be awesome. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about anything.

Joey laughed out loud. “You know? You and Kevin are, like, the only straight guys who’ve ever talked to me about me, about this stuff, who weren’t trying to play some kind of fucked-up game, Ryan Dean.”

“Well, why not? You’re my friend. You’re probably the best guy friend I have. But I don’t think I could ever be gay.”

“Everyone knows you’re not gay,” Joey said, and I thought, Phew! That’s a relief, just in case Joey was wondering if I was gay and trying to make, well, gay small talk, and then I thought, damn, that was a screwed-up thing to think about my best friend.

“But you want to know something crazy? And you can’t say anything to anyone about this, Ryan Dean. You know who’s been seriously trying to hit on me ever since school ended last year? Ever since I came out to everyone?” And then Joey paused to see if I would make a guess (which, I would have said Sean Russell Flaherty just because he’s so, well, not like other guys), but Joey said, “Casey Palmer. Can you believe it? Casey Fucking Palmer is gay. That’s why he begged Chas to get in the game with us tonight. He won’t leave me alone. He fucking scares me, he’s so hopped up about getting with me.”

Wow. That was a monumental secret, a career-builder for a guy like Seanie Flaherty. If Seanie kept such records, he would easily call that piece of info five out of five J. Edgar Hoovers in off the shoulder sundresses on the Sean Russell Flaherty Ruin Your Life Rating Scale.

“Casey Palmer is gay?”

“I’m pretty sure he wasn’t hitting on me because he thought I was a girl,” Joey said.

“Casey Palmer is gay?” I said again. Then I doubled over, laughing.

“Remember,” Joey said, “you are not going to say anything, okay? You know, football and everything. He’s a piece of shit, but leave him alone about it.”

“I pissed in his drink,” I said. “A lot. And the idiot thought it tasted good too.”

“Yeah. You’ve got balls, Ryan Dean. Except for when it comes to girls.”

“Well, he deserved it. He busted my nose.”

Then Joey stepped out of the car and said, “Come on. Let’s get some Halloween crap and get the fuck out of here.”

And as I followed Joey into the store, I kept asking him, “What do you mean, ‘except for when it comes to girls’?”

But he just said, “Never mind.”

Chapter Seventy

IN LESS THAN THIRTY MINUTES, we paid for five Halloween costumes, two tall cans of energy soda (I believed one of us was going to puke before we got back, and I hoped it would end up on Chas’s leather upholstery), and some cold medicine and throat lozenges for me.

I opened the box of cold pills before we were out of the store and popped three of them into my mouth. I washed them down with the energy drink.

So, yeah . . . between the whiskey, the cold pills, the energy drink, cherry-menthol (is there anything that tastes more unnaturally disgusting?) throat lozenges, and the pumped-up rushed feeling from completely ruining Chas Becker’s life, I was pretty much prepared to have some kind of seventies-Grateful-Dead-flashback-only-it- was-twenty-years-before-I-was-born experience.

We found some passable costumes for the five of us who played the game that night, too, even though I tried to convince Joey not to get one for Chas; and that way he could be the Invisible Man. But Joey said that wasn’t funny, because if we didn’t find Chas and he got into trouble or something, it would look like we’d stolen his car and ditched him.

Here’s what we ended up with (in alphabetical order):

Becker, Charles: Well, we found Chas a Superman cape, but there was nothing to go with it. Fortunately, the supermarket sold kids’ underwear and we bought him a three-pack of boys’ size XL briefs with Pokemon characters on them. Then we also got him some red women’s pantyhose to go underneath the briefs. So, basically, Chas’s most horrible night in his life had just gotten worse. Oh, well, that’s what he gets for leaving me and Joey alone and trusting us to be in charge of his future.

Cantrell, Kevin: Kevin would be the token pirate. We found him a hat, an eye patch, and a plastic hook we thought would look perfect sticking out from his black arm sling.

Cosentino, Joseph: Joey got the cool costume: prison stripes from Alcatraz, a fitting outfit for someone who was spending his senior year in O-Hall.

Palmer, Casey: Casey lucked out in a big way. We chose one of those plastic face masks of Wonder Woman and a golden lasso rope accessory for the guy with the serious case of the hots for Joey. We could have been much, much crueler, and even Joey admitted that he thought Casey would be jealous because Chas’s costume was so much gayer. Of course, I had to laugh about that.

West, Ryan Dean: A discovery of true Zen-like perfection, I got a leopard-spotted caveman-loincloth kind of thing that had one suspender strap that tied in a knot over the shoulder. The Wild Boy of Bainbridge Island would be in full effect on Thursday night in O-Hall.

Score.

The O-Hall boys were not allowed to go to the dance with Pine Mountain’s good boys and girls, but that would not stop us from dressing up and having our own Halloween.

We left the store with our bags of goods, determined to seek out Chas’s hiding place and get back to Pine Mountain in time to scrounge at least three hours of sleep before class, but it wasn’t going to turn out to be that easy.

Just as Joey opened his door, a voice came from the darkness in the lot behind the car.

“Can I talk to you boys a minute?”

And my juvenile-delinquent-from-Boston self instantly thought, great, it’s a cop. A man cop, no less, to make