Stand-Off (13 page)

“You still have that dog?” I asked.

Annie had a pug named Pedro who liked to hump my legs whenever he saw me.

“Don't worry,” she said, “we had his balls cut off.”

Suddenly, everything in my body, my soul included, was wracked with pain.

Poor, poor Pedro.

I DRAGGED MYSELF THROUGH UNIT
113's doorway, wondering if it would even be possible to lie in my bed and not feel pain.

The Abernathy, all soccer-jammied-up, was already there watching television, wrapped in his blankets next to the open fucking window. And what a surprise—it was the Cooking Channel.

Mrs. O'Hare would probably dock me points for not calling it the Culinary Arts Channel.

“Hi, Ryan Dean. Want some popcorn?”

“No.”

Watch. Watch. Watch.

I sat on the edge of my bed and snaked off my belt, acutely aware that I was unable to bend forward enough to untie my shoes. I kicked them off and stiffly unbuttoned my shirt.

The Abernathy was still watching me, as opposed to paying attention to the riveting feature about marmalade preservation.

“Is something wrong?”

Duh. My ribs hurt so bad, I couldn't even take my pants off. I was not about to ask Sam Abernathy to lend a hand. I lay down on my bed, a mess of unbuttoned, unfastened school clothes.

“No.”

“Are you drunk?”

Why, I wondered, was it the case that every syllable from the Abernathy's lips was like a little rusty knife stabbing into my side?

“Stop . . . talk—talking to me.”

“Is that why you're sleeping in your clothes? Because you're drunk? I heard some of the forwards talking about getting drunk and smoking marijuana with Spotted John. So if you did, you can trust me. I won't tell anyone.”

What kid says “marijuana”? And anyway, Spotted John was from Denmark. That explained everything, right?

Still, I refused to engage. Also, my pain receptors, like the larva in soccer pajamas, refused to quiet down.

“How's your knee?”

NO.

Look, I knew it was going to be a long season and a rough year. The Abernathy wasn't making things any easier for me either. The simple truth is that number ten—the stand-off—gets hit more often than any player on a rugby team, so I couldn't reasonably count on being
out
of pain until May or June. I was also well aware that there was nothing that could be done for injured ribs besides taking painkillers of some kind. I was desperate, too—desperate enough to actually say something to Sam Abernathy.

Painkillers.

That was it. Legendary rule breaker and future Prince of Denmark
Spotted John Nygaard could hook me up. I should have thought of it before getting halfway out of my clothes and lying down. I rolled over and slid my knees down to the floor. I thought about slipping my shoes back onto my feet, but the thought was enough to sway me over to the hell-no camp.

“Ryan Dean! You
are
drunk, aren't you?”

“No. Shut—shut up.”

I heard the soft little sound of Abernathy feet hitting the floor behind me.

“Are you okay? Do you need help? Are you going to make vomit?”

Who says “make vomit”?

“No. I . . . my ribs . . . I think I crack—cracked them.”

I groaned and stood up. Sam Abernathy's baby cow eyes were as big as billiard balls.

“Oh my gosh, Ryan Dean! Oh my gosh!”

Holding up my pants, I slid my socked feet toward the door.

“If . . . If you say . . . anything to Coach . . . about this, our claus—claustrophobia truce ends. Got it?”

And the Abernathy repeated, “Oh my gosh, Ryan Dean!”

“Let me back in . . . when I . . . knock.”

“Where are you going, Ryan Dean? Do you need help? Can I come with you?”

“No.”

I didn't even have the strength to grab my room key from my little desk.

I left.

Spotted John Nygaard's room was on the sixth floor, a level in the caste of Pine Mountain that I was destined only to look up to from my untouchable earthbound banishment in the wasteland called Abernathy.

Some random kid with a ketchup stain on his shirt was waiting for the elevator. He looked me up and down and said, “You missing a few articles of clothing, dude?”

Funny.

And I said, “Did you miss your fucking mouth with that french fry, asshole?”

Well, to be honest, I
thought
about saying that, but I didn't.

I buttoned my beltless pants, which wouldn't stay up because I'd dropped a few pounds, and then I did that elevator thing where you just stare directly ahead at the crack in the door and wonder when the fuck the random ketchup-stain kid is going to get the hell out of
my elevator
. And when the random kid got out at floor three, I flipped him off. After the doors were closed, though.

That's how I roll when I have busted ribs, an open (but unstained) shirt, and only one sock on.

Daring.

And my greatest fear was that Seanie Flaherty would be standing in
the hallway when I got out of the elevator. He and JP Tureau also lived on the celestial floor six, which I had been to a couple of times but always imagined as some kind of endless pleasure dome of fun, which was a stupid thing to fantasize about, being that there were only boys on the sixth floor and this was Pine Mountain, where pleasure domes—like campfires, kissing, and cell phones—were against the rules.

Luckily for me, the hallway was empty except for the potted palms on either side of the elevator. And then I found myself momentarily seething with jealousy over the sixth floor's foliage, when all floor one had was a claustrophobic, insane twelve-year-old who wore soccer pajamas and knew how to make hollandaise sauce from scratch. Unfortunately for me, there was a sock slung over Spotted John's doorknob, which I understood to be the internationally accepted boys' dorm symbol for “keep out.”

Keep out, unless it's an emergency, right?

And as I stood there, debating whether or not to actually ignore The Sock, I thought,
Hey . . . convenient. I could use an extra sock right about now
.

And then I wondered if it was clean and if I could actually stand the pain of putting it on.

Gross.

I decided to bury Spotted John's sock in a shallow, unmarked grave in one of the potted palms.

And again, as luck—or the absolute absence of luck—would have it, just as I was finishing up my sock funeral, the elevator doors slid open and out walked Seanie Flaherty and JP Tureau.

“Ryan Dean! Why are you digging in our palm tree? And why are you practically naked?” Seanie Flaherty said.

“And are you even
allowed
up here?” JP added.

I had to think on my feet, one of which was bare.

“I . . . uh . . . need some palm . . . root . . . for Cu—Culinary Arts class.”

Brilliant.

JP stared at me. He could tell he hurt me at practice; I knew it. Then he leaned over the potted palm's pot and looked at me, then at my bare foot, then at me again.

“And why are you burying your sock in our palm tree?” he asked.

Seanie saw it too. He shook his head. “Dude. That's so fucking gross. Why don't you just throw your
special sock
in the trash, like a normal guy would do?”

Seanie made air quotes with his fingers when he said “special sock.”

“It's not . . . my . . . sock.”

Which was probably the worst thing I could say.

“Dang,” Seanie said. “Snack-Pack's got some big feet.”

“I hate . . . hate you . . . Seanie.”

Then Seanie Flaherty gave me his creepier-than-usual creepy Seanie Flaherty expression and backed toward his doorway.

“Well, it was nice seeing you, and, uh, your sock, Ryan Dean. Or Snack-Pack's sock. Whatever. It's all
okay
with me.”

Seanie made air quotes when he said “okay.”

And he continued, “I'd invite you in to kick it with some TV or shit, but you probably need to finish doing what you were doing with your sock. Or whoever's sock. Or getting dressed. Or whatever. Dude.”

I WAS ALONE IN THE
hallway again.

I knocked on Spotted John's door.

“Fuck off,” came a voice from the other side. “Can't you fucking see the sock?”

“There is no sock, Spotted John,” said the guy who murdered and buried Spotted John's sock. “It's me, Ryan Dean.”

I heard some movement inside the dorm room, and the door creaked open. I looked up, expecting to see the towering monster of our Danish eight-man, but there was only open airspace where Spotted John's head should have been. Spotted John's roommate, our hooker, Cotton Balls, who stood roughly even with my collarbones, peered out at me.

“Hey, Cotton,” I said, “I need to ask Spotted John a favor.”

Jeff Cotton—Cotton Balls—looked down at the doorknob, then he looked at my one-sock-on-and-one-sock-off feet.

“Is that our door sock?”

“No. It's mine. My foot sock.”

“Why do you only have one sock, Ryan Dean?”

“Long story. Is Spotted John awake?”

“Why is your shirt unbuttoned?”

Hookers get hit in the head an awful lot. To be honest, hookers' heads are the battering ram of a rugby team.

Cotton turned away from his door crack. “Hey, Spotted John, Snack-Pack Senior's here. Should I let him in?”

Oh yeah, hookerballs. Snack-Pack Senior. Great.

From behind the cracked door, Spotted John asked, “Is he alone?”

Cotton stuck his head out the door and looked behind me, trying to see if maybe I was smuggling an Abernathy upstairs to spy on our forwards for Coach M. Then he yawned and let me inside.

I don't know what was more irritating to me at the time: the pain in my rib cage or the intense feeling of outrageous indignation at seeing the interior of Spotted John's and Cotton Balls's apartment—because that's what it was, an apartment. They had a
living room
that was bigger than the entire hellhole I shared with the Abernathy, and each of them had his own separate, doored-off bedroom, both of which were clearly bigger than good old Unit 113. And Spotted John's apartment was like a shrine, a museum for all things prohibited at Pine Mountain Academy. He had two cell phones sitting next to a six-pack of beer on a coffee table, which was in front of the plaid sleeper sofa where Spotted John Nygaard sat in his boxers and a T-shirt that said
I WOULD PREFER NOT TO
, doing something on a prohibited iPad that was obviously connected to the Internet. It was like standing inside a massive glass-fronted diorama display of “Everything Good Boys Are Not Allowed to Do at Pine Mountain.”
Also, the place smelled a little like pot, and I noticed that a plastic bag had been duct-taped over the unit's smoke detector. They also had one of those inflatable life-size girl dolls standing in the corner beside one of their desks, and that really made me feel gross and creepy, because the vinyl girl was naked except for a scrum cap, which is one of those douche-looking foam pads that forwards wear on their heads.

It was almost too much to take in, but at the same time I couldn't look away from all the rule breaking going on in front of me. It felt like the time I'd visited Seanie Flaherty's house in Beaverton and he showed me my first porn film, which I also felt extremely guilty about not looking away from.

I never knew anyone who so flagrantly violated our no-tech contract at Pine Mountain, but, still, with his entire family on the other side of the world, I couldn't really blame Spotted John for smuggling in outlawed communication devices.

Spotted John popped off a beer cap and took a long drink.

“What brings Snack-Pack Senior up to the high-rent district?” Spotted John asked in his clipped and creepy Arnold Schwarzenegger drone.

“I have a broken rib. I don't want Coach to know. I thought you might have some painkillers or something.”

Spotted John nodded. “Broken ribs are fuckers.”

Cotton Balls said good night to the inflatable girl (her name,
apparently, was Mabel) and lumbered into one of the actual bedrooms.

“See you tomorrow, Cotton,” I said.

Cotton Balls stopped at his bedroom door and said, “Don't touch Mabel. If I come out and find her popped and slimy in the morning, you're dead, Snack-Pack Senior.”

“I never thought anything could be grosser than playing the front row. Until now,” I said.

“Yeah. Whatever. Good night.”

Cotton shut the door. I noticed the light click off in the bottom gap.

I couldn't take my eyes off the iPad and the cell phones that were just sitting there. It was almost too much for me to resist touching them.

Spotted John looked at me. “Do you want a beer?”

I shrugged. It hurt. But there's an unwritten code when dealing with Mafia dons and forwards, especially if you're the stand-off
and
the team captain.

“Uh, sure. Thanks.”

Spotted John handed me a bottle of beer and an opener that looked like a shark.

I grunted when I tried to pry the cap off the beer. Everything I did hurt like hell.

“What rib?” Spotted John asked.

I pulled my shirt back and showed Spotted John the
chrysanthemum-shaped purple blotch JP Tureau had stamped on my bottom right rib cage at practice.

Spotted John nodded. I flinched when he pressed his fingertips against my side. “Yeah. I don't think they're broken. Just a fucker of a bruise. Sit down.”

I sat on the couch beside Spotted John Nygaard. It was awkward, because the couch was actually a love seat, which meant our personal space melted us into conjoined twins, and Spotted John was in his underwear, but I kind of wanted to spy over his shoulder to see what he was doing online.