Winger (9 page)

“I’m sorry, Coach, I’m just really sick today. I’ll be back up to speed tomorrow.”

“What’s the matter, Ryan Dean?”

“I just . . .” And then, “Last night was my first night in Opportunity Hall. And I couldn’t sleep at all. I feel horrible.” It wasn’t really a lie.

He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “I understand, Ryan
Dean. Let’s hope you can get your shit straightened out this year and get out of O-Hall.”

See? That’s just how he talks, but it sounds so musical and soothing with that English accent. And then he added, “Before Chas Becker turns you into an asshole.”

Coach M picked four guys to be team captains, and then we had a little sevens tournament. Sevens is a scaled-down version of rugby where there are only seven, as opposed to fifteen, players on a team. And we were playing touch instead of tackle, so the entire game was really based on speed and ball handling.

I was still surprised, though, when Joey, who is our regular Backs Captain, picked me first to be on his team. JP was also on our team, along with a couple centers and some of the second-string loose forwards.

Seanie actually ended up on a team with Chas and Kevin, so I knew the games would be really competitive, and, when it came down to the end, it was our two teams in the final match. I scored first off a sweet fake-loop pass from Joey, because as soon as I had that ball in my hands I was gone. But that was all we managed to put up, and Chas’s team came back with three unanswered scores to win the tournament.

Sometimes, losing in rugby is more fun than winning. On that day, at the end of practice, Coach M made the three losing squads jog down to the practice fields and sing a song to the football team.
Joey led us, and we all decided to sing “Oh! Susanna,” but we changed “Susanna” to “Casey.” And we are horrible singers, but we sing really loud, so Casey and the other football players couldn’t do anything about it. They tried to ignore us, but they were helpless, and all they could manage to do was fire out comments like “What a bunch of faggots.”

When we were finished, some of the football players actually clapped. At least they got it, that it was all in fun and that if you messed with the rugby team, we were going to mess right back. But it wasn’t a threatening or intimidating “messing with”—it was always meant to show that we could take a joke, and joke back, too.

Casey started it with his “nice shorts” comment at the start of practice, and now he had to endure being the object of our serenading. When we finished the first verse and one chorus, we jogged down to the locker room.

The day had finally ended, and as I sat down on the bench and took off my cleats, the horrible day I’d had came back to me, and I thought again about what a loser I was already turning out to be on the first day of my eleventh-grade year.

I THREW MY CLOTHES ON
without showering. I could do that back at O-Hall, even though the showers here in the locker room were so much cleaner and more private. But all I wanted to do was get away from school and deposit myself into bed. So I just wadded up my gear and stuffed it into my locker. I put my sweater inside my backpack and sloppily hung my tie over my shoulders without even buttoning or tucking in my shirt. The day was over, and now it didn’t matter if we were dressed properly or not.

I didn’t even wait for Seanie and JP to get out of the showers. I shook hands with a few of the guys as I left the locker room.

I guess it was about four thirty when I made my way down the hill on the path toward the lake. I could see some people walking around the campus below, but most kids at that time of day were either back in their dorms or finishing up whatever team sports were being practiced in September.

I noticed Joey walking on the path, maybe about a hundred yards ahead of me, obviously heading back to O-Hall too. But when he got down to the football field, I saw Casey and Nick step out of a crowd of players who were standing around doing nothing (which is what most football players do all practice) and run over to Joey. And I could tell just by the way they were moving that they were looking to start
shit with Joey, so I turned around, but no one else from the rugby team was walking down from the locker room yet.

Great.

Me and Joey versus the entire steroid-crazed-dumbass football team.

I started walking faster. Casey and Nick didn’t even notice I was coming. They looked up the hill toward the locker room as Joey got closer, but who would notice my skinny-bitch-ass body coming down that way? Or, if they did notice me, what would it matter to them, anyway?

Then I saw Casey, puffing his chest out, walk right up to Joey and push him hard, knocking Joey back. And Casey said, “You think you’re funny with your song, queer?”

I threw my backpack down and ran as fast as I could.

I knew Joey would fight. He wasn’t afraid of anyone. You had to be like that to be a fly half, and I’m sure that Joey had been hit square against his unpadded body at least a thousand times more than Casey ever had. But I wasn’t going to let him get gang-jumped by those assholes.

So I ran faster than I did in practice. I had to. And just as Joey was making a fist, Nick was circling behind him, and Casey was in the process of throwing the first punch, I launched myself, head up and shoulder down, right into Casey’s knees and wrapped my arms around his legs, driving him, crashing, to the ground.

I sprang up off Casey.

Casey said, “What the fuck?” and he punched me in the face just as I got to my feet, knocking me down into Joey.

And just then, one of the football coaches saw what was happening and yelled at us to cut it out. The coach just stood there, down the field, holding a clipboard and spitting tobacco, watching us like he was too lazy to come over and see if this was really a fight or not.

All I can say is that if Coach M had seen what I did, my ass would be done. Over. Off the team. Kicked out of school.

“What the fuck you think you’re doing, you little piece of shit?”

I could only assume Casey Palmer was talking to me.

Then I noticed my chest was covered in blood and my unbuttoned, once-white school uniform shirt was splattered with red. My knees buckled. I had to sit down.

Okay, I thought, this was it. I had done as much to my body as it could take in the last twenty-four hours. Now I was surely dying. I prepared myself to look into the tunnel of light and see my great-grandma and the little Chihuahua dog I had when I was four that got run over by a UPS van.

Well, they didn’t
both
get run over by the UPS van, but you know what I mean.

Then I heard a whistle, and the football coach screamed at Casey and Nick to get back over to their standing-around drill, and I knew I wasn’t dead, but my nose was bleeding pretty good.

“God. I am such an idiot,” I said.

“Why the fuck did you do that?” Joey sounded pissed off.

“Overlap. Two on one.”

I slipped my shirt off and held it over my face. I pulled it back and looked. I wasn’t bleeding so bad anymore.

Maybe I was empty.

“You better get cleaned up, or you’re going to be in a lot of trouble.”

I wiped off the blood as much as I could with my ruined shirt and stood up.

“I’ll just say it happened in practice,” I said. “Tackling a guy. It’s the truth.”

I’d gotten more bloody noses playing rugby than I could count.

Well, actually, I only have one nose that’s been bloodied, but it has happened dozens of times.

“God. I am so done for today.”

I balled up my shirt and stuffed it into my backpack. I took off for O-Hall just as I saw the guys from our team coming out from the locker room and making their way down the hill.

Joey just stood there at the edge of the football field, looking at those assholes practice, waiting for our teammates to catch up to him.

THE WATER ON THE TILES
in the shower stall turned pink around my feet where the dried blood washed down from my body. When it was finally clear, I turned the water to full cold and stood there for thirty seconds. It almost made me scream. I toweled off and went to bed.

It was five o’clock.

I lay there with my books, finishing the small amount of homework I’d been assigned—just a couple review problems in Calculus. Then I opened a paperback and began reading. We were supposed to read “Rappaccini’s Daughter” and write a response paper on it, but I had until Wednesday. So I read the first page, then put it down beside my pillow and stared up at the ceiling.

I love the way Hawthorne said things. I wished that I could also find “no better occupation than to look down into the garden” beneath my window, but I had, in such a short time, gotten myself so occupied with crap that I lay there convinced there was no way I would make it through my eleventh-grade year.

I opened my notebook and wrote a letter to Annie. Even if I never gave it to her, at least I felt like I could write down what I wished I could tell her. In true Ryan Dean West fashion, I drew a Venn diagram on the note, trying to explain to her something about myself,
the
little boy
, hoping that maybe she would realize what I thought was so obvious about the people we deal with, who are all around us, everywhere and every day. And as soon as I’d written the first couple of sentences, I reread them and they sounded so pathetic and lost that I just tore the page from my notebook and threw it away.

I was so tired.

I climbed down from the bed, undressed, and turned off the light.

“WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG
with you?” Seanie said.

The light came on and I woke up.

My books were scattered around my head, and I was lying, face up, on top of the covers.

Seanie, JP, and Joey were standing just inside the door, dressed in their shirts and ties, like they had just come from dinner at the mess hall.

I propped myself up on my elbows and looked at them.

I rubbed my hair and sat up. My head nearly touched the ceiling, but not quite.

“I just needed to sleep,” I said. “What time is it?”

I looked at the clock. It was eight fifteen.

“Everyone was looking for you,” JP said. “You missed dinner.”

Yeah. I bet Casey Palmer was looking for me too.

“I wasn’t hungry.” But now that they mentioned it, I felt like I was starving.

“Well,” Seanie kind of whispered, glancing around, “we smuggled you some food, just in case you were.”

Taking food from the mess hall was a definite violation. But as far as rule breaking was concerned, having visitors from the regular dorms in O-Hall was probably just as bad.

Seanie placed a wadded napkin and a paper coffee cup on top of the Calculus book next to my pillow. “It’s a ham sandwich and some tomato soup.”

Now, that was
awesome
. It sounded so good.

“Thanks, Seanie,” I said. “And thanks for not wrapping it up in your printout from Casey’s MySite.”

JP laughed.

“Have you ever seen Casey’s MySite, Joey?” I asked.

Seanie had a sick and pissed-off expression on his face.

“No. Why?”

“Well, when you go home this weekend, look it up,” I said.

“Okay.”

Joey’s parents were ultrarich. They lived in San Mateo and flew him home every Friday after school. I saw how Seanie was looking at me, so I just fired him back a Ha-Ha-I-just-got-Joey-to-look-at-your-balls-so-write-a-haiku-about-that, fucker expression, if there is such a thing.

But whether or not there actually is such a look, Seanie and I just had an intense and wordless conversation about Japanese poetry, his balls, and our gay friend, Joey Cosentino.

“I got you something to drink,” Joey said.

I looked at him. Maybe I still had the balls/haiku expression on my face, so I guess Joey thought I didn’t trust his evening beverage selection.

“
Not
beer,” he added, and smiled. He pulled a bottle of water and another of Gatorade from his school pack.

Now,
that
was a miracle. I was so thirsty, I opened the Gatorade and emptied the bottle without even taking a breath.

“Joey told everyone what happened,” JP said.

“Dude, you’re like a superhero, laying out Casey Palmer, sticking up for your fly half,” Seanie said.

“I wasn’t sticking up for Joey,” I said. “I was sticking up for me. I have to walk up and down that hill every day too. We can’t let them start off with crap like that on the first day of practice. So I just kind of closed my eyes and took him out. I was so pissed off about everything anyway, so I did something really stupid that I’m lucky didn’t end up with me being killed. Like we said in the locker room, I wanted to hit someone, and a game of touch rugby didn’t quite do it for me today.”

“How’s your nose?” Joey asked.

I hadn’t even thought about it since seeing that blood in the bottom of the shower stall. I took a bite of the sandwich—it tasted better than anything I could possibly imagine—then touched my nose.

“It’s not broken or nothing,” I said, inhaling. “I think. Just stuffed up. Man, thanks so much for the food. I think I actually feel
normal
again.”

But feeling normal meant I immediately thought about Annie, too.

“Did any of you guys see Annie tonight?”

“I talked to her,” JP said. “She is really pissed off at you, Ryan Dean.”

Maybe my head was still a little off, but I kind of got the feeling that JP was glad about Annie feeling that way.

“Dude, her being pissed just shows how much she cares about you,” Seanie said.

That sounded like something you’d tell your kid before giving him a spanking.

“I think she feels like you didn’t tell her the truth,” JP explained.

“I never had the chance to. I never had a minute to talk to her about it.” I guess I sounded pretty whiney.