“Did you go to the top?”
She gave me a “duh” look, hands on her hips.
“Well, could you see the ocean?”
“Yeah. It’s really clear today.”
“You want to go back up?” I asked.
“No,” she said, so matter-of-factly, like she was singing a song in grade school, like nothing at all mattered to her. The way she always sounded. “I’m going back.”
I quickly calculated my alternatives. If I just stopped there, turned around, and followed along with her, that would make me look pathetic and wimpy. And, after all, she was the one who told me just this morning that I was going to have to get tough this year. I said the same thing to myself, even if I had serious doubts about my ability to pull off the transition from little boy to something else, something less insignificant—if “less insignificant” is actually a combination of descriptors that doesn’t cause some kind of literary black hole. Plan B meant sprinting like hell to the top, taking a quick three-sixty just so I could say I saw the ocean too, then running like hell again back down the trail to catch up to her before she got to Stonehenge. That would work, but I’d have to burn it, because Annie was a damn fast runner, and I had this feeling that she was going to try to not let me catch up to her.
So I took off for Buzzard’s Roost as fast as I could. My legs burned, but I had to get even with her somehow, to try and salvage the last day of summer, and the last wimpy shreds of my little-boy ego.
There.
I made it to the top. I was dizzy and dripping with sweat. My hair lay plastered, flat and dark against my scalp, and when I rubbed it, a misty spray of soothing droplets rained down on me. I lifted my arms to let the faint breeze blow a cooling breath under my arms and across my aching ribs. I looked down at the school, the narrow black strip of lake that cut a gash through the dark green points of the trees, and turned around to see where the sky faded down to a grainy fog-gray over the distant line of the Pacific.
Did it. I took off back down the trail after Annie as fast as I could.
I almost fell three times sprinting down that trail when my feet shot out in front of me, rolling over loose rocks. But after I came around the corner of the final switchback, before the trail flattened out through the forest, I saw Annie ahead of me.
And part of me wanted to just stay back and watch her, seeing her legs and arms move so smoothly while her black hair swung from shoulder to shoulder like a pendulum. She was one of those girls who never seemed to sweat. Everything about Annie Altman was perfection.
The shade beneath the pines was cool and fresh, and the air smelled like summer and freedom, the smell of never having to go home.
“Hey!” I called out.
She turned back, looking over her tan shoulder as her hair brushed across the line of her jaw. I couldn’t tell if she smiled, but she did slow down to a jog so I could catch up to her.
“You’re hard to catch,” I said between gasps.
“Did you go to the top?”
“Yeah. It was awesome.” We slowed our pace even more. “Look, Annie, I’m sorry about not running with you. I was mad, I guess.”
“I know,” she said. “You think I couldn’t tell?”
“It’s nothing.” And then I told a major lie. “I’m just mad about being in O-Hall. Away from my friends.”
Our eyes met. She had that same look she had in her picture, like she knew the truth.
“You know what we’re going to do this year?” Annie said, and my heart just about stopped cold, because I was really scared she was going to say something, well . . . scary. “I’m going to find you a girlfriend.”
I stopped running, and Annie took about three more strides and stopped too, but she kept on talking. “What freshman girl wouldn’t just die to go out with you? I mean, it’s the best of both worlds: You’re the same age, plus you’re an upperclassman and a varsity rugby player. Don’t worry, West, I’ll find you the best one.”
“What if I don’t want a girlfriend?” I said.
Then she got this smirky look and said, “You want a boyfriend?”
And I know she was just teasing me, but I turned away and walked off the path and into the trees.
I heard her following. “Come on, West. Don’t get all I-can’t-take-a-joke on me. I’m just looking out for you.”
“Don’t do me any favors, Annie.”
I stopped, knee deep in ferns, sweating, at the edge of the circle of stones.
“Hey, it’s still here,” she said.
“I looked for it on the way up.”
I wouldn’t look at her. I was still mad. But I felt her heat; she was standing so close to me.
Stonehenge wasn’t much like Stonehenge. The rocks were small enough to position with just the four of us working on it. Sure, some of the outer rocks were fairly heavy—they were the ones stacked in threes, a ring of doorways like the monument on Salisbury Plain—but it wasn’t, like, an amazing feat of engineering to get them there. It was more a feat of boredom last spring as we all got ready to go off in separate directions for a break from school.
In the middle of the circle was a spiral path; two lines of evenly spaced smaller stones that wound around and around, coiling in on themselves until the path ended right in the center of the ring. That was the part of our Stonehenge that took the longest time to create. We started in the center and worked our way out, and when we finished, I think the path might have been a quarter-mile long if you could stretch it out straight.
Annie proclaimed it a wishing circle and told us if you walked it all the way in and then all the way out without saying anything, you’d get your wish. Of course I knew she had just made that up, because I’d only ever wished for one thing whenever I walked in and out on that path, and that one thing never came true.
“I don’t want you to do it, Annie,” I said. “I don’t want you to look for a girlfriend for me.”
“Suit yourself,” she said, shrugging. “I was just trying to help.”
“Like you said, things are going to be different this year. But I’m going to do it for myself.”
“Okay.”
We stood at the opening to the spiral path.
“You want to do it?” she said.
You know, there have been times when I would have just about cut a finger off to hear Annie, or any girl for that matter, but especially Annie, ask me that question. Do you want to do it? Of course I knew she was only asking if I wanted to walk the pathway with her, but on that Sunday just before the school year started, I guess I was feeling pretty down about things. And I almost said no, but then I decided to do the usual Ryan Dean West retreat from reality and try to make her laugh, just so I could take my mind off of things, off of how I felt.
I noticed she was looking at me. She was staring at me.
“Oh, yeah,” I said, holding my arms out and turning my open palms upward. “It’s not easy getting all this going. Every day, all over the world, countless men endure the pain and humiliation of laser treatments and waxing to achieve a body like this. It really is a burden.”
I flexed.
Annie laughed. I liked the way I could so easily see the water building in her eyes when she laughed. It was a real laugh.
“You know, that’s the only thing I even like about this craphole school,” she said.
“What?”
“Having you as a friend.”
“Shut the fuck up, Annie.”
Okay, well . . . yeah, I didn’t really say “Shut the fuck up,” because I honestly don’t cuss. But I wanted to. I think, in reality, I raised my finger to my lips and said, “Shhhhh,” so she wouldn’t say anything else as we spiraled into the center of that wish circle.
CHAPTER FIVE
“OKAY, DOUCHE BAG.” CHAS SHOVED me, sending me back against the doorjamb as soon as I crossed the threshold into our room.
Now, this was the Chas Becker I had been expecting earlier that morning.
“I had to pick your
shit up off the floor—your stinky socks, your sweaty underwear—and put them away all nice and folded like your mommy, or we’d be restricted by Farrow. And, not only did you leave your shit all over the floor, you left the door wide-fucking open too, so he could see how WE left it. This is O-Hall, Winger. You don’t get caught doing stupid shit like that.”
That doorjamb really hurt between my shoulder blades. And Chas was standing so close, the only thing I could do besides watch his fist clenching just at the bottom of my field of vision was offer him a semiwheezing but fully sincere, “Uh. God. I’m sorry, Chas.”
Chas pushed me again, his hand pinning me against the jamb. And I estimated, hand, door frame . . . I am about three and a half inches thick right now. Maybe less.
“Yeah, well, this is the one time. The one time, Winger. If you were someone not on the team, I would probably kill you right now. But Coach would get pissed.”
He slackened his pressure on my sternum. I thought about saying thanks, but I just kept my mouth shut and my eyes down. I went over to my cubbies and pulled out some clean clothes and a towel and disappeared down the hall for the showers.
It was time for dinner, and I missed my friends.
CHAPTER SIX
I FOUND SEANIE AND JP seated together in the mess hall. They were already on dessert, or maybe their entire meal consisted exclusively of desserts.
One of the only good things about PM was the food, because nobody stopped you from making poor choices. Our rugby team had a “physio,” which is what we call a nutritionist-slash-doctor, though, and during season, there were only certain things we were allowed to eat and drink, and he’d keep watch on the mess hall from November until May.
I had been having such an all-around crappy day, and seeing JP and Seanie didn’t make me feel too much better. I felt isolated, even though we were right there together. I felt like I couldn’t tell them how frustrated I was about this whole Annie thing. Even though we were all juniors and going through reasonably the same kinds of crap, Seanie and JP both had two years of extra confidence on me. So I always struggled with pretending that maybe my friends could overlook that I was only fourteen, even if I couldn’t.
“Hey. I made it,” I said.
“It’s about time, Winger,” JP said. “I don’t think I’m liking this new living arrangement. Seanie and I were just talking about leaving after dessert.”
I sat down across from them with my tray of tacos and salad. I scanned the hall for Annie. She wasn’t there. Among the hundred or so students who were having dinner, I saw Chas sitting with Megan, over where all the seniors hung out. I didn’t get the Megan thing. She was so smart; she was going to be in the Advanced Calculus class with me, and Chas could barely count.
Megan Renshaw played Chas Becker like he was a pair of pocket aces. She knew what his alpha status was worth in social settings, but all the kids in the smart classes saw the obvious softness Megan Renshaw had for intelligent and sensitive boys who would never have breeding rights in the wolf packs run by the Chas Beckers of the world.
That was just another reason why I thought Megan Renshaw was so untouchably hot. She gave hope to losers like me.
JP was wearing his ever-present striped beanie, pulled down over his ears so that just the last inch or two of his wavy light hair curled out over his eyes. He was so popular and smart, and seemed to just go from girl to girl without ever taking it the slightest bit seriously.
“I’m going back for more, anyway,” Seanie said. “So don’t worry about being late, Ryan Dean.”
“Dudes,” I said, “I do honestly believe Betch was just about to kill me before dinner.”
I told them about my run up to Buzzard’s Roost, but I also told them Annie and I ran the whole way together. They listened quietly to my story about our walk in the circle at Stonehenge. I knew they were kind of jealous, too. Not one of us had a girlfriend, and we all recognized how unattainable—and hot—Annie Altman was. Then, of course, I ended the story with my return to O-Hall and a very pissed off Chas Becker.
“You’re not going to make it to the end of the semester alive,” JP concluded.
“You ever seen Betch’s MySite?” Seanie said.
We both looked at him. Seanie was such a video-game-Internet geek with a strong stalker flavor to his personality. I guess he could see what we were both thinking, because Seanie said, in a surprised kind of tone, “What? Well, haven’t you seen Betch’s MySite?”
“I haven’t,” I said.
“Me neither,” JP added.
“Well, it’s creepy, that’s all,” Seanie said. “It’s nothing but pictures of Betch. Almost every one is Betch without a shirt on. Betch wallpaper. Betch in front of a bathroom mirror. A downloadable Betch calendar, which, by the way, I downloaded and printed out and have right now in our room . . . just in case a perfect opportunity should ever arise. And then there’s all these comments about what a stud Betch is. I made up a fake account with a picture of a hot girl just so I could get him to friend me.”
“You’re really kind of sick, Seanie,” I said.
“I know.” Seanie smiled, like he was letting us in on a dark secret.
Then JP said, “Sometimes I lie awake at night thinking about how horrible my life could be if you hated me,” and he added, “stalker.”
I took a bite of taco. “Maybe that should be his new nickname.”
Seanie just stared at us both with his unblinking stalker eyes. He had one of the strangest senses of humor of anyone I ever knew, because it was always so hard to tell whether he was joking around or if you should really 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 whispere
d. “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.