Winger (27 page)

I played it unintelligibly cool.

“I only have enough
Grrrrade
left for one shot. I was going to have it—me.”

I had become an ape.

Looking back, I am actually fairly surprised I didn’t begin wildly sprouting hair from the vast acreage of hairlessness on my skinny-bitch-ass body.

“Fuck you, then,” Casey said. “I’m going all-in.”

I hadn’t really been paying attention to the game, what with my jubilation over feeding Chas some piss, but I figured I had a pair of fives, which in my two-shots-in-a-152-pound-sack-of-crap perspective looked pretty good. I called. And I also said, “Well, okay, I’ll give it to you, Palmer.”

I monkeyed back up to my pissatorium and splashed a heavier dose for Casey.

I heard Chas say, “I call,” which meant that both of us had our entire stack in play and one of us was definitely going to lose out and get the consequence, but not before that dickhead who busted my nose got his.

I climbed down and handed Casey his drink.

“No more Gatorade. Sorry, guys,” I said. “Casey got the last.”

I was on top of the world as I watched Casey down that shot.

Then he said, “That’s pretty good.”

And as he finished his shot of piss-whiskey with a satisfied piss-glistening smirk on his lips, the final card was turned. Casey busted us; and both Chas and I lost out at exactly the same moment.

THAT NIGHT BECAME THE STUFF
of legends.

I didn’t mind losing, because I had already kicked ass on a monumental level.

It was just like T-ball: Everyone got a trophy that night.

The adrenaline surge that resulted from watching Chas and Casey both fall victim to my depravity was nearly enough to counteract the effects of the whiskey, and even though I could tell I was feverish and sick, I felt like I could take on the world.

I felt like hunting down JP Tureau and crushing him. Slowly and painfully.

And I was happy that the whiskey bottle was empty. Joey knew better than to take another drink from the Maxine’s House of Spirits in Atlanta shot glass-slash-bedpan, but Kevin had no idea what was going on, so it did present me with a kind of moral dilemma that I happily avoided, because even the Wild Boy of Bainbridge Island didn’t want to see an okay guy like Kevin Cantrell get piss in his mouth the same week he’d been stabbed by a punk in a street brawl.

By one in the morning, the game was over, and Casey won the hundred dollars in the bank. But in his victory, there was an understated loss that only Joey and I knew about (at least right at that
moment), and history was made because it was the first time ever that
two
guys lost out at the same time, which meant Chas and I were going to suffer the crucible of the consequence together.

This was a sobering thought, too, because the Wild Boy part of me began imagining the most horrible and disgusting things that Casey would dream up involving me and a guy I hated as much as Chas.

But Casey was such an unskilled and unimaginative rookie at doling out consequences, and what he came up with hardly seemed that humiliating to me, although it did sound pretty risky.

The flashlight turned off. The only light in our room came from the gray squares cut by the moon on the floor through our windowpanes. Casey tossed the five twenties down on the cracked linoleum by my legs.

“Halloween costumes,” he said.

But I was already dressed up as Gandhi-slash-Wild Boy of Bainbridge Island, I thought. Well, I would be, once I found where my sheet had gone off to in the dark.

“What?” Chas said.

“I want you guys to go into town and get Halloween costumes for all of us. Before school starts in the morning,” Casey explained.

I gathered up the money. “Fun!” I said.

Yeah, I was pretty damned stupid. “But it’s twenty-five miles. That’s a long walk,” I said. “Can I at least put some clothes on first?”

“You’re an idiot,” Casey said.

Oh yeah? You drank my piss.

I laughed out loud, then Joey cupped his hand over my mouth and whispered, “Shut the fuck up, Ryan Dean.”

“Chas has a car. You have to sneak out and take his car. I don’t care where you get them from, but you have to come back with costumes for all of us before first class in the morning,” Casey said.

“You can’t make him do that,” Joey said. “Chas is too drunk to drive. They’ll get killed.”

Aww, Joey. Always sticking up for idiots like Chas and losers like me.

“I’m not too drunk,” Chas said. (Idiot.)

I knew I should have fought to stay in bed that night. I dug some sweatpants out from the closet and pulled them on. They had holes in them. (Loser.)

“I’m driving, then,” Joey said. He was sober. “There’s nothing that says I can’t go along to keep them out of trouble.”

“And they better be good ones, too,” Casey said.

I opened the window. There was no way I was going to try to sneak downstairs with Mrs. Singer on that floor. I sensed her Ryan-Dean-West radar was going strong.

I put one leg out over the windowsill, and Chas said, “Hey, Pussboy. Don’t you think you should get on some socks and shoes, and possibly a shirt?”

Wow. All Wild Boy had on were sweatpants with holes in the crotch. No wonder I was covered in goose bumps.

“Oh.”

“You are the most fucked-up useless drunk I’ve ever known,” Chas said.

Whatever, piss-breath.

WE SCRAMBLED OUT INTO THE
dark and cold.

Joey led the way along the trail by the lake to the mess hall, and then we turned up the path that cut between the dorms.

I wore a black hooded sweatshirt that covered my head against the cold, but my hole-pocked, ventilated sweatpants had become too short for me and rode up past my ankles, which made my socks look like bouncing, glow-in-the-dark . . . uh . . . socks. Or something.

When we passed the dorms, I looked up at the windows on the girls’ building.

“Aww,” I whispered, “Annie’s up there. And Megan. And Isabel. And . . .”

Yeah, I was going to list every girl I could possibly remember, hundreds of them, all so incredibly hot in their own ways. I pictured them all dressed differently in special sleeping outfits, at a big massive slumber party where the Wild Boy of Bainbridge Island was the only guest present equipped with a set of XYs, but then Chas said, “Shut up, dipshit.”

We made it to Chas’s car.

Luckily, nobody paid much attention to cars coming or leaving on a Sunday night, and technically, we wouldn’t be considered AWOL until tomorrow morning, anyway.

But when Joey clicked the doors unlocked, Chas looked across at me and said, “Leave the dipshit here, Joey. We can take care of this by ourselves.”

And I thought that was a pretty goddamned good idea, considering Chas thought it up.

But then Joey said, “I’m not going if Ryan Dean doesn’t go.”

Crap.

Chas said, “Crap.”

For the briefest of moments, Chas Becker and I were of like mind.

I opened the back door and crawled in. At least I could stretch my legs out across the seat. I kicked my shoes off. I wished Annie could come. That would be awesome.

Just when we were about five miles away from the lights of Bannock, which was the only town close to Pine Mountain, and I was almost falling asleep, reclining sideways across the seats with my back against the car door, Chas reached over from the front and grabbed my leg so hard, he tore the inseam on my pants open all the way from my crotch to my knee.

He said, “Now you’re going to tell me everything about what’s going on with you and Megan.”

He must have been stewing about it for days now.

And I can’t say I didn’t know this was coming.

I’d seen how Megan and Chas looked, getting off that plane. I witnessed firsthand Megan’s subtle teases about me in the backseat of that same car as
we all drove back to school from our weekends. And, honestly, my back was still bruised from when Chas slammed me up against the soap dispenser the day he caught Megan rubbing her hand on my leg in the mess hall.

But knowing all that still didn’t lessen the adrenaline jolt of fear that shot through me.

No matter how smart I thought I could be at a moment like that, I couldn’t think of anything to tell him except the truth.

Joey joked, “Don’t make me pull this car over, boys.”

Chas wasn’t loosening his grip.

He wasn’t smiling, either.

I swallowed. The pins came back to my throat. My voice cracked as I said, “What do you want to know, Chas?”

Joey tried changing the subject. “I’m going to stop and get some coffee at the gas station here. You guys want some?”

“Yeah,” I said. “And I need to pee.”

“Me too,” Joey said.

Chas let go of my leg. Joey pulled the car in to a minimart gas station. It was really quiet when he turned off the engine.

Nobody moved.

Awkward.

“We’ve kind of been fooling around,” I said.

There. I said it. Finally.

I noticed that Joey had been just about to shoulder his door open, but he froze as soon as he heard my confession.

It echoed like an empty church in that car. I don’t think anyone so much as took a breath after I said it. And I know Joey was thinking about what he should do if Chas jumped into the backseat and began murdering me on the spot.

“We just kissed a few times. That’s all.”

Well, actually, it was exactly twenty-four times, but I felt justified in using the generic “few,” realizing that any number greater than “never” was as good as saying “twenty-four.”

I could see Joey’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

Then Chas did something that nobody would ever have expected. He turned away from me and sighed. He actually looked like it hurt him to hear what I’d said.

“That’s what she told me yesterday,” he said. “I didn’t believe her. I thought she was just screwing around with me. You know how Megan is. Why the fuck would you do something like that to a guy on your own team, Winger?”

“I don’t know.”

Okay, why do teenagers use that answer so often, especially when we really
do
know? Of course I knew why I did it, and so did Chas, and so would anyone else who ever looked one time at Megan Renshaw.

Then I said, “We’re not doing it anymore.”

I put my shoes on and opened my door.

“I’m going to pee,” I said.

I heard Joey get out of the car behind me. Chas stayed in the passenger
seat. As I was rounding the corner to the men’s room, Joey caught up to me.

“Damn, Ryan Dean. I think Chas is crying,” he said.

“Why am I such a punk, Joe?”

“I tried telling you,” Joey said. “You want coffee?”

“Yeah. Black.”

Joey went inside the minimart, and I went around back and peed in the bushes. I can’t stand gas station men’s rooms. I met Joey around front again, and he handed me two cups in paper sleeves. He held an elastic keychain, wrapped around his wrist.

“You need a key for the toilets,” he said.

“I peed in the trees.”

Joey said, “Oh. I’ll be right back.”

He went around the corner, and when I got back to the car, Chas was gone.

WE SPENT THE NEXT FIFTEEN
minutes looking for Chas around the gas station, even walking both directions away from it along the road, but we couldn’t find any trace of him.

It started raining again, so Joey and I went back to the car and sat.

“I don’t know where he’d go,” Joey said.

I had a good idea Chas was probably running around in the woods naked, looking for something to kill. Probably something that weighed exactly 152 pounds.

I sighed.

“You really did make him drink pee tonight, on top of everything else, didn’t you?”

“Casey, too,” I said.

“Damn. Well, he’s probably not heading back to PM. It’s way too far.” Joey looked at his wristwatch. “It’s a little after two. We can finish this costume hunt, and maybe we’ll find him on the way back. I’m sure we will. He’s gotta be around here somewhere, just sitting alone, cooling off. We might get back in time to sleep a couple hours, at least, that way.”

I didn’t really feel bad about anything I’d done, but I did feel sorry that Chas was hurting over Megan, because I knew that feeling
firsthand. But I tried to remind myself how stupid it was for me to feel sorry for a guy like Chas. Still, the whole thing made me think about how crazy I was for Annie, and how JP was trying to do the same thing to me that I’d been doing to Chas all along.

“Okay.” I yawned.

Joey started the car and we drove into Bannock.

“You don’t need to say it, Joey. I know this is all my fault.”

“It’s not
totally
your fault, Ryan Dean,” he said. “But you did let it go a little too far.”

“Yeah.” My eyes scanned ahead. I saw the lights of an all-night grocery store. What grocery store
wouldn’t
have costumes for sale just four days before Halloween?

“Hey, Joey,” I said. “Why don’t you have a boyfriend or anything?”

“What makes you think I don’t?”

“Well, no one ever sees you with anyone at school. I mean, not like that,” I said.

“I wouldn’t do that at school. It would be too much trouble for both of us.”

“Oh. So you do have a boyfriend?”

“Of course.”

“Well I’m glad for you, then. It sucks being alone. Believe me, I know. Let’s try this store,” I said, and pointed to the supermarket. I really didn’t want to find out too much about Joey’s boyfriend, because it made me feel really awkward. I just wanted to know if Joey
was okay in his life, because, like I said, I really liked Joey. But I do mean that in a totally non-gay way.

Joey pulled in to the parking lot. It was nearly empty, dark, and rain slicked, with a few scattered shopping carts reflecting the headlights from Chas’s car.