Winger

be afraid of him. Either way, I guess it was a good thing Seanie was our friend.

“And, dude, anyway, you gotta tell us what happens at the poker game,” JP said.

“Hey,” Seanie said, “I could loan you my deck of Betch playing cards.”

And he said it so straight-faced, but he had to be joking.

Seanie, expressionless, with his unblinking dead eyes, exhaled and stood, saying, “I’m going for more ice cream.”

I watched Seanie get up and walk across the mess hall, stopping for a moment to say something undoubtedly creepy and demented to a group of freshmen, and JP just smiled and shook his head. That’s when I saw Annie come in. She was with her roommate, Isabel Reyes, who was also kind of hot in a faintly mustached kind of way. Annie smiled and waved at me, and I waved back as JP just sat there, watching me watch her.

Chapter Seven

LIGHTS-OUT CAME AT TEN O’CLOCK every night, except for Fridays and Saturdays, when they’d let us stay up until midnight. Usually, guys would hang out in the common areas, where we didn’t have to wear uniforms—we could just wear T-shirts if we wanted to—watching television until bedtime. In the regular dorms, there was a common area for every two or three bedrooms, but in O-Hall, there was only one TV room for the entire floor, and we currently had twelve guys living here, along with Mr. Farrow and Mrs. Singer, who got the first-floor living room all to herself since there were currently no girls in O-Hall.

So when the TV went off at ten, we all went back to our rooms. As I closed our door behind us, I saw that Chas had already set out a deck of cards (regular, not “Betch” cards, which I highly doubt ever existed unless Seanie made them himself, which is something Seanie would actually take the time to do) and a case of thirteen- gram poker chips on top of one of the desks.

I’ll admit I was kind of scared about Chas’s poker game. I really didn’t want to get into trouble on day negative-one of my junior year at Pine Mountain.

I pointed at the empty desk, nervously trying to make conversation.

“Is that one going to be my desk?” I asked.

“Yeah, sure,” Chas said, obvious in his lack of enthusiasm at engaging his new roomie in conversation. “Whatever. Turn off the lights and get in bed.”

“Oh. Okay.”

I turned off the light and began taking off my pants.

“What are you doing, you idiot?” Chas whispered. “Keep your clothes on. We’re going to play poker, asswipe.”

I honestly thought we were going to bed.

I pulled my pants up.

“Oh. Yeah. Sorry.”

I really didn’t get it, but I knew if Chas said keep my clothes on, I was keeping them on. I climbed up onto the top bunk and instantly fell asleep.

I woke up to a burning flashlight beam stabbing my eyes as Joey Cosentino thumbed one of my eyelids up and whispered, “Nah, he’s alive.”

It took me a minute to register where I was and what was going on. I looked at the red numbers on the digital alarm clock. It was midnight. Actually, 12:04.

They start their games at midnight when there is going to be school in the morning?

“Wake up, kid. I thought you wanted to play,” Chas said.

I sat up.

There were four of us: me, Chas, Joey, and Kevin Cantrell. The three guys I was playing with were all seniors. There was something especially scary about that. I swung my feet over the edge of the bed, and, rubber- legged, hopped down onto the floor.

Chas collected twenty dollars from everyone and put the money in the chip box. He handed out stacks of chips and explained the blinds. The game was Hold ’Em. I rubbed my eyes. The other guys looked perfectly awake, like it was lunchtime or something. I tried to straighten my hair, but it always did whatever it wanted to do, anyway.

There was a towel stuffed along the floor at the bottom of the door, and another covering the creepy tilting-window thing on top, so no one would see the light from our room.

None of us wore shoes. Kevin and Joey obviously had to keep it as stealth as possible, sneaking through the hallway past Farrow’s door. I was wearing my school uniform pants, my belt, unbuckled and twisted halfway around to my back, and a wrinkled T-shirt. Chas was still in his uniform shirt from dinner, but without the tie, and Joey and Kevin wore loose sweatpants and T-shirts. And the funny thing is, I noticed they were wearing their black and blue hoop rugby socks, too, and I thought, God, either these guys are really dorks, or they just can’t wait for the season to begin.

We sat on the cool linoleum floor, all facing each other, Chas with his back resting against the bottom bunk. The floor space was barely big enough for us, and those three other guys were monsters, anyway. Kevin played lock alongside Chas, so he was exactly Chas’s height; and Joey, who was six-one, played fly half, number ten, which is kind of the equivalent to quarterback in American football. So I had more dealings with Joey in practice and during games, since we were both in the back line, and I got along with him and trusted him, too, and I wasn’t creeped out or anything about Joey being gay.

Everyone on the team knew that Joey was gay, but no one ever had a problem with it, either. He was honest about it with the guys, and they accepted him because of it, plus he never acted or talked like the stereotypical gay guys that people think are caricatures of the entire population. I mean, who does that, anyway?

That’s one of the other things about rugby too: I think that because it is such a fringe kind of sport that practically borders on the insane, rugby guys stick up for and tolerate one another more than boys tend to do in other sports. Sure, sometimes the guys would make teasing jokes behind Joey’s back and even to his face, but they did that to every single player on the team, and being gay, or uncoordinated, or only fourteen and in eleventh grade for that matter, didn’t really have anything to do with it, because there was absolute equality of opportunity in being picked on in a good-natured kind of way. But no one on our team ever took it too seriously.

Chas was kind of the exception on the team, and maybe he was always overcompensating through his bullying because he recognized that he didn’t fit in very well; and maybe, too, the guys and the coach just put up with his being such a colossal asshole because he was a great athlete.

I yawned and folded my legs, Indian style, as we put in the first blinds and Chas shuffled the non-Betch cards.

Chas looked across at Joey and Kevin and said, “Did you bring the refreshments?”

“Sure did.” Kevin smiled, and then he and Joey stretched their legs out straight, so their socks were practically in my face, and pulled up their sweats from the bottom. That was when I could see why they wore their rugby socks. Both of them had two tall cans of beer on each of their legs, snugged down tightly inside our team hoops.

So when they rolled their socks down and made a little shrine from eight twenty-four-ounce cans of beer on the floor beside us, I really felt scared . . . because three didn’t divide evenly into eight, and I had never, never, taken a drink of alcohol in my life.

What if it stunted my growth?

“And they’re still pretty cold,” Joey said. He obviously was the designated beer-passer-outer. He handed a can to Chas, then Kevin, and then he grabbed one from the shrine and tilted it toward me, a calm and serious look in his steady, fly half eyes.

“I never had a drink before in my life,” I said.

“It’s okay, Winger,” Joey said. “I was just offering. I understand.”

I was so relieved, and I liked Joey even more at that moment, but I mean that in a totally non-gay way,