Winger (39 page)

We followed the lake around toward Stonehenge.

It started to snow, a wet, Pacific Northwest snow that fell in clumps, soaking and unpleasant. We ran into two Forest Service rangers near Stonehenge. They got excited when they saw us, and took out the
photocopied pictures they’d been carrying of Joey’s school ID, holding the images between their eyes and us like they were some kind of prism that could sort out and break up the bullshit from the truth.

Nothing.

But we kept looking.

THEY FOUND JOEY IN THE
woods, not far from O-Hall, at about three o’clock that afternoon.

He was tied to a tree, stripped naked, and had been beaten to death.

I NEED TO VENT.

But I can’t.

The words won’t come.

I’LL BE HONEST. I DIDN’T
cry.

I didn’t even say anything at all.

Because I didn’t want to hear it, so I just didn’t talk to anyone anymore.

Annie and I would walk together. Sometimes, we would go to the wishing circle, and I’d always hold her hand. When I needed to, I would whisper to her. She was the only one.

But I stopped talking after Joey died. I was too afraid.

My parents tried to take me out of Pine Mountain. They said I needed help.

I sent them a letter so they’d know I would be okay, and in it, I wrote that taking me away from Annie would kill me. So, after two weeks, Annie’s mother and father came to Pine Mountain so they could see me.

Doc Dad watched me play rugby. I gave him the Pine Mountain RFC shirt he wanted, but I didn’t talk to him. He shook my hand, and I could tell he was happy to see me, but I couldn’t look him in the eyes, because I knew they’d look like hurt, and I wasn’t going to cry in front of anyone.

I swear to God, when I played, sometimes I would see Joey out there leading the back line, but it was always someone else.

During our game, I could hear Doc Dad on the sidelines, cheering. He enjoyed the game. It made me feel good. I liked Annie’s father.

Doc Mom came to see me, alone, in my room.

We didn’t say anything, and it was dark. The window was covered. I sat on my bed, and she sat across from me in a chair.

It was like that for twenty minutes: just dark nothing. Then she stood up and sat beside me on my bed and she put her arm around my shoulders, and I began talking.

I told her about my iPod and how I sang for Joey the last time I ever saw him.

After a while, she said, “Anyone in the world would be so lucky to call you their friend, Ryan Dean.”

I told her about how Joey always stuck up for anyone, even people he didn’t like. And I told her the story about how Chas made me drink beer the night before school started. I told her about how we drank whiskey, too, before Halloween, and I’d peed in Chas’s and Casey’s drinks that night when Joey drove us into Bannock to get costumes and we lost Chas but picked up Screaming Ned.

And telling that story made me smile, but it hurt so much.

So when I was finished talking about Joey, Doc Mom said, “Okay, Ryan Dean, I am not a therapist anymore. Now I’m just a mom.”

Then she squeezed me so tight and she kissed my head and said, “I am so sorry, baby. I am so sorry,” and we both cried for I don’t know how long.

Annie waited outside. But when I was finished with my crying, I told Doc Mom that I couldn’t go out.

“I don’t want anyone to know I was crying,” I said.

Doc Mom said, “Okay, Ryan Dean. I’ll wait as long as you want me to.”

“I’ll be okay, Doc Mom.”

ON THE DAY THEY FOUND
joey, the police sealed off O-Hall, and we never went back there again.

Never.

They talked to Chas and me for hours, separately. I told them almost everything, but not the stuff I didn’t think would matter.

They didn’t ask, anyway.

Casey Palmer and Nick Matthews killed Joey that night of the dance. They got drunk. They were mad. They beat him until he stopped being Joey.

I loved Joey Cosentino.

After I told the police what I knew about Casey, they went to his home.

Casey Palmer and Nick Matthews never came back to school. I heard they both confessed right away, and I figured it was because Casey didn’t want it coming out in his trial about how he’d been chasing after Joey for so long. That’s what I think, but I could be wrong.

Either way, I didn’t care about Casey’s reasoning.

Pine Mountain closed down O-Hall. None of us ever saw Mr. Farrow or Mrs. Singer again. They were gone, cut loose. Nobody needed them, and nobody needed anything like O-Hall again, either.

I’ll be honest. I was actually sad about them closing down O-Hall,
as weird as that sounds. I wished I could go back to the noise and the smell, the crowded and dirty bathroom.

They moved me and Kevin and Chas in together at the boys’ dorm, each of us with our private bedroom, and the big living room where we’d sometimes fight over what to watch on our television.

We talked about it once, much later, and we decided that we were all better suited to live in O-Hall, so I told Kevin and Chas that I was going to do my best to get them to reopen it and then I’d do something bad so they would have to send me there for my senior year.

Chas said, “You’re a fucking idiot, Winger.”

Yeah. I know.

Chas Becker and I became friends. He didn’t turn me into an asshole, and I didn’t teach him how to draw comics. It was a balanced relationship, but a weird one.

Wingers and forwards are not allowed to be friends.

But Chas and I needed each other.

He picked on me. That was to be expected. Kevin Cantrell, like always, was the calming peacemaker in our new three-man family. We played poker on Sundays. We invited Seanie Flaherty and JP Tureau to the games.

There were no more consequences.

How could you top the magnificent shit we had done in O-Hall?

How could you ever make anything worse?

The thing about rugby is this: You can hate a guy off the pitch who
will save your fucking balls on the pitch when you play on the same side. There is nothing more glorious than that.

One time, in the boys’ dorm, while we were playing a game of Hold ’Em, I made JP Tureau laugh.

I thought,
When we are seniors, me and JP are going to be cool again.

THIS TIME, I REMEMBER TO
take off my belt before I walk through the metal detector at the airport, so I avoid the humiliation of a second strip search from Officer Nutgrabber.

What happened to Joey messed me up worse than anything I ever had to recover from. And I’ll be honest. It scared me to leave Pine Mountain, even if it did mean spending four days with Annie. I couldn’t sleep those nights before Thanksgiving came.

As ridiculous as it sounds, I kept thinking something terrible would happen if I left Kevin and Chas.

But I knew I was being stupid and that I had to do something to make myself get over being afraid, if I was ever going to grow up and get better.

After all, I was supposedly on a mission to do just that—to reinvent Ryan Dean West—in my junior year at Pine Mountain Academy.

Well, fuck that.