Andrew Smith - Winger

I did not kill Chas Becker.

Chas was in the bathroom, wrapped in a towel, shaving. I saw him smirk at me in the mirror when I staggered through the door. I stood at the sink beside him, turned the water on cold, and held my face in front of the mirror with both of my hands propped on the tile countertop, elbows locked, like I was steadying myself on one of those godforsaken crab boats in the Bering Sea. And I don’t know why I turned the water on either, because I just stood there, looking horrified at my reflection in the mirror as Chas smirked and shaved and smirked and shaved.

“I think you can skip a shave today, Winger,” he said, and wiped some menthol-smelling shaving cream on my never-so-much-as-fuzzed cheek. And Chas just looked so normal, too, like he could do shit like that every night and it didn’t even affect him.

I suddenly felt very sick.

“Oooh, Winger partied too hard last night,” Chas said, and I heard some other voices laughing, but I really can’t say for sure who else was in there. Ghosts of dead teenage alcoholic former O-Hall inmates, probably. I pushed away from the sink, leaving the water running, and I thought, Why did I forget to put my face under that flow and drown myself? And then I thought, Oh yeah, because . . . I . . . need . . . a . . . toilet.

I stumbled past the row of shower stalls with their torn and moldy plastic curtains, and the bank of urinals opposite them, and I began to remember being in this place, but it was different, too.

God! I was sick.

I made it to a toilet stall and slammed the door shut. I hardly had time to pull my boxers down and sit, and that’s when it all came back to me, and I remembered Mrs. Singer’s cursing me.

A diarrhea spell.

You have got to be kidding me.

I knew it was just a weird coincidence—it had to be—but this really, really , sucked.

Welcome to the eleventh grade, loser.

As I stumbled out of the stall, my skin cold and sweaty, feeling like one of those eyeless white cave salamanders, Chas was there, still smirking, wiping his face, and watching me.

“Hey, asswing, you better hurry up if you want to have time to eat,” he said.

Asswing? That was a new one. Clever.

“Eat?”

“Yeah. You know. Breakfast. Eggs. Milk. Yogurt.”

Bastard. The yogurt part did it. Why the hell did he have to say yogurt ?

I went back into the stall.

ALL THE BOYS IN O-HALL left before me. I’m sure they were enjoying their yogurt and talking about their classes, or about how Ryan Dean West got drunk last night and ruined his life.

Somehow, I managed to get myself dressed: gray socks, tan pants, white long-sleeved shirt, black and royal blue striped school tie, dark navy sweater vest, black shoes. And I thought, what a stupid waste of energy since period one was Conditioning 11M (that meant it was for eleventh-grade boys), and I’d just have to take all these stupid clothes off right away, but at PM you couldn’t walk anywhere on campus during the school day without being in the proper uniform.

I thought about going to see the doctor, because I had to make two more trips to the toilet before I was fully dressed, but I was afraid that the doctor would discover that I was a fourteen-year-old with booze in his system, and that was too scary for me to deal with. So I decided I’d have to be tough, like Annie told me, and suck it up, even if it felt like I was dying.

I made certain this time that our room was entirely clean and the beds were made before I grabbed my schedule and backpack. It was seven forty-five. I wondered what Chas had done with those beers, and then, just thinking about it made me realize another stop at the bathroom was required.

And as I went downstairs and pushed through the double doors that opened on O-Hall’s large mudroom, I saw the so-not-hot-you-should-never-look-at-her-when-you-have-a-hangover Mrs. Singer, just standing on the other side of the window in the door that opened onto the hallway of the girl-less girls’ floor, with her arms folded across her withered breasts, breathing on the glass, watching me as I left for school.

Nothing in the world could convince me at that moment that she didn’t know I was the sick and guilty sonofabitch who woke her up five hours earlier.

How could she not know?

I practically ran out of O-Hall, which was a mistake, because the speed at which I was moving made me feel sick again.

I kept my head down as I walked through the crowds of uniformed kids clustered around the main campus, smelling all the nauseating smells of brand new clothes, brand new backpacks, brand new shoes, and hair gel. It was like I was a bug trapped inside a Macy’s bag. I felt like every one of the eight hundred students at PM knew about what I’d done the night before, and what a loser I was, so I just concentrated on the path that would lead me to the locker room at the sports complex.

I ran through my schedule in my mind as I staggered to first period:

1. Conditioning 11M. Seanie and JP would be in that class with me.

2. Advanced Calculus. Scary-hot Megan Renshaw and Joey Cosentino, who knew what an “asswing” I was, were both in that class.

3. AP Macroeconomics. Megan and Joey, hour two of two.

4. American Lit. Ultrahot Annie. Oh, and JP, too.

5. Lunch. I could find a shady spot away from my friends to die.

6. Team Athletics. The first day of rugby, a possible reason for rising from the grave of lunch.

“Hey! West! Wait up!”

It was too late to just put my head down and pretend I didn’t notice her. Annie came running up behind me, fantastically perfect in her school skirt. I knew I looked so guilty, too, like I had done something wrong to her. I felt sick. And I almost wanted to cry when I saw her, but I didn’t have any idea exactly why.

“Where were you? I was looking for you this morning,” she said. Then I noticed her expression change when she got close enough to see my eyes.

“I’m sorry, Annie. I am really sick.”

“Oh my God, Ryan Dean, you look terrible!”

And it was so wonderful to hear her actually say my first name like that.

I sighed. “Gee, thanks.”

I looked at my watch. There were no bells at PM. You just had to be where you had to be, when you had to be there. It was 7:55.

“Maybe you should go see the doctor,” she said. “What’s wrong with you?”

“I’ll be okay,” I said. “I didn’t want to miss first day. I’m going to be late for PE. I’ll see you in Lit, okay?”

I turned away, and she brushed my hair with her hand and said, “I hope you feel better.”

ON THE FIRST DAY OF conditioning, we had to go out on a three-mile run to the north shore of the lake and back. I knew Seanie and JP could tell something was wrong with me. We all stayed in the back of the pack, jogging slow so we could talk.

“What happened last night?” JP asked it first.

“The game got started at midnight,” I said.

“That’s when it started ?” Seanie said.

“A little bit after midnight,” I said. “Kevin Cantrell, Joey Cosentino, me, and Chas. And they brought beer with them.”

Just saying it made me feel sick again.

“God, Ryan Dean, you could get so thrown out of school for that,” JP said.

“Did you drink?” Seanie asked.

“They kind of made me.” We ran a few steps in silence. I thought I could tell what they were thinking, and I said, “I got drunk. And I lost out first, too.”

“Oh, God,” JP said.

And Seanie, always the cheerful one, added, “So . . . what’s it feel like to be a fucking alcoholic ?” Then he pushed me, and I almost fell into the lake. I knew he was just joking around, but Seanie was always so creepy about how he said things.