Andrew Smith - Winger

“Naw.”

I threw the shirt down onto the floor of our closet; then I picked it up and put it into the laundry bag marked WEST as Chas glared at me.

“He’s a puss, anyway,” Chas said. “And I heard you laid him out pretty good.”

“I guess.”

“You got some balls for a little kid.”

And I thought, Screw you, Betch.

Little kid.

I COULD FEEL MYSELF GET lighter; my heart beat faster, and my scalp kind of tingled when I saw her. Maybe it was just the dandruff shampoo I used that someone had left in the shower that morning.

I’ll be honest. If someone asked me am I in love with Annie Altman, I’d have to say I don’t know, because I really don’t know. I have nothing to compare with how I feel about her. But I do know that I feel this kind of a need where she is concerned; I need her to notice me more than she does; I need to think that I make her feel lighter when she sees me. And there’s no way I could ever believe that was possible, because it was just little me, Ryan Dean West, fourteen years old, walking around in the exact same clothes and tie as four hundred other guys here at Pine Mountain, every one of us so much the same, except for me, except for that one thing she noticed that she couldn’t get over, that made me so unattractively different from every other eleventh-grade boy in this shithole.

It’s what I tried to tell her in the note I threw away the night before.

It was a waste, anyway, because I knew I’d given her enough of a good reason for not ever talking to me again: I had crossed over, tried to make myself so much the same as a guy like Chas Becker by breaking the rules and playing poker and getting drunk, as if those stupid behaviors could ever incite some magical evolution in the ape of Ryan Dean West and cause him to shed his tail and walk upright in Annie’s eyes.

But I could hope, even if I was such a loser.

She sat across from Isabel Reyes at breakfast, eating a bagel and sipping from a carton of orange juice. And despite JP calling out “Hey, Ryan Dean,” and Seanie trying to wave me over to where they sat by the door so they could see every girl who came and went, I ignored them, but not in an unfriendly, stuck-up way, because I was kind of scared and had this jumping-off-the-highest-ever-high-dive feeling as I kept my eyes focused forward and walked right to where Annie sat.

She saw me coming up, but I couldn’t tell from her expression whether or not she was happy to see me. As always, Annie looked totally hot, but so did Isabel in her rustic, more-facial-hair-than-Ryan-Dean-West-will-have-in-college kind of way (God! Why do I think that’s hot?). And then I saw Annie lean over and whisper something to Isabel, and I could only imagine what they were saying.

ANNIE: Here comes that fucking alcoholic Ryan Dean West. Observe how I treat him like he’s some kind of pathetic red-eared slider turtle.

ISABEL: His ears look kind of pink to me. I think he’s cute.

ANNIE: You think he’s cute ? He’s just a little boy . I’ll probably just ignore his skinny-bitch ass, pretend like he isn’t here.

ISABEL: You always told me how much you liked him.

ANNIE: He acted like an asshole as soon as we got to school on Sunday. First he wouldn’t talk to me, he lied about wanting to go for a run with me, and then he got drunk with Chas Becker. Definitely so not-cute .

And then I thought, Would you really ignore me, Annie? Do I really want to keep walking toward you just so you can kick me in the nuts again?

I glanced back and saw that JP and Seanie were watching me.

Crap!

Something happens when guys watch guys doing things like this. They knew what was going on, and they got to watch the Ryan Dean West suicide mission from the front row. It’s like jumping out of a plane. There’s no time-outs or do-overs, there’s just gravity. That, and lots of witnesses to see your chute collapse as your body plummets helplessly toward certain death.

All I could do now was hope I didn’t cry like a little girl in front of the hundreds of kids having breakfast.

It was a surreal comic of my life, and I pictured the worst possible outcome:

“Annie. Would it be okay if I sat down with you for a minute?” I said in the sweetest, most injured tone of voice I could manage. (It’s not like my voice hadn’t changed last year, though. I was no candidate for a position in one of those churchy boys’ choirs.)

Then she looked at me square in the eyes, and at that moment I knew everything was going to be okay. There’s just ways friends can see things in each others’ faces, kind of like the ha-ha-I-made-Joey-look-at-your-balls/haiku conversation I’d had with Seanie the night before, except, of course, the way Annie looked at me was really nice.

“Hi, West. Sure,” she said.

Score.

Except I really wished she’d call me Ryan Dean.

And I lucked out again, because Isabel was sitting right across from her, which meant I had to sit beside Annie, which gave me the opportunity to ever-so-gently brush my thigh against hers, which caused a very dizzying and embarrassing migration of otherwise fully employed red blood cells to a highly depressed and underemployed (as my Econ professor might speculate) region of Ryan Dean West Land.

“Hi, Isabel.” My voice cracked when I said it. I felt like an idiot. I don’t think there was any blood left in the northern provinces. “Did you have a good summer?”

“Yeah,” Isabel said.

Okay, now go away, moustache-girl (not that your moustache isn’t kind of hot). Ugh. I think I’m passing out.

I cleared my throat. I looked at Isabel. God! I wanted her to leave, because I knew exactly what they’d do after this whole uncomfortable scene ended: They would replay and reinterpret everything that happened, and they would make stuff up, too—things they thought I’d said that never came out of my mouth.

“Annie,” I began.

After that, I didn’t have any idea what to say. I just sat there staring at her. I was so lost, I even thought about the Preamble to the Constitution.

I, the people, am such a loser.

And then, thank God, Annie saved me.

“Are you feeling better this morning?” she asked.

Okay. That’s when I knew, knew , I was totally, totally , in love with her. And that realization made me instantly sad, too, because I’m a smart kid; I knew I had absolutely no chance at all.

I looked at my hands where they rested on the table next to a mustard stain. And I thought I actually did feel pretty good, relieved that Mrs. Singer hadn’t coincidentally caused me to come down with a fit of projectile vomiting or something.

“Yeah. I feel a lot better. How about you?”

“Good. I started reading that Hawthorne story.”

“So did I. It’s weird.”

“Yeah.”

I squeezed my fists as tight as I could. They turned white.

Time to jump.

“Annie, I am really sorry about how stupid I was. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into, but now I’m smarter, but I’m also worse off because I made you mad and I would never do anything, ever, to purposely make you mad, ’cause you’re my best friend in this whole pathetic place, so I’m really sorry and I guess I’ll go now, but I just had to tell you.”

Zen archery of run-on-sentence apologies.

And I almost looked up to see if my chute would catch air or just flutter around up there like a giant dirty sock.