Andrew Smith - Winger

I stopped in my tracks.

I had never been told off like that by Joey.

It stung.

And he said, “Sorry.”

“No, Joe. You’re right.” I sighed.

We started walking again. “How come you don’t have these problems?”

“Are you fucking stupid , Ryan Dean?”

I pushed him. “Just kidding, Joey.”

Joey smiled, and I said, “But you know, I really don’t get this liking-boys-better-than-girls thing. No offense, ’cause you know I’d like you the same, no matter what. I just don’t get it.”

“Ryan Dean?”

“What?”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“Okay.”

I am such a loser.

No matter what Megan offered, or tempted me with, I never got over being totally crazy for the totally hot Annie Altman. And playing with Megan was like playing with a rattlesnake. Well, a smoking-hot rattlesnake. With incredible boobs. That Ryan Dean West had actually touched.

I knew Joey was right.

I had to stop.

ANNIE KEPT THE PROMISE SHE’D made that day we told each other our wishes at Stonehenge. Her parents had spoken to mine, so Annie and I got tickets to fly up to Seattle together on Friday after school. I was going to spend the weekend at my best friend’s house. And every time I’d almost get up enough courage to ask where I’d be sleeping (and what I should wear, since I don’t have any drop-seat pajamas with feet on them—in fact, I don’t have any pajamas at all), hoping she’d say something ultrahot like, “On the couch in my room,” to which she might add, parenthetically, “And I believe that sleep is something that should only be done while completely naked,” my throat knotted up and my ears turned red. God! What a dork I am.

It was blissful and it was terrifying at the same time. And as I made my way through the week, I just stumbled around in the stupidest kind of daze.

I fantasized about our first game and the prospect of receiving just the perfect degree of injury so Annie would want to play the naughty nurse all weekend long as I lay on her couch, naked, in constant need of sponge baths and hernia exams. At 1,492 total thought episodes per day, it was my Columbus-discovers-perversion fantasy.

So of course it was next to impossible to concentrate at all on schoolwork while keeping meticulous tallies of my impure thoughts, much less for me to listen to Mr. Wellins blather on and on about sex, because, now that I look at it, every single thought in my head—Annie, Megan, Chas, the game—all, in some way, had something to do with sex. So maybe Wellins was right after all, that everything does have something to do with sex, even though I found his argument about the underlying sexual themes in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court to be a bit of a stretch, and totally perverted, too.

Hello, Central! [1] Okay. If you haven’t read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court , you should. Because it is fucking hilarious, and there’s no way you’d understand “Hello, Central” unless you read the book.

I mean, come on!

Annie and I met for lunch at school that day. It was Tuesday; two days before the game, three days before the weekend that I hoped would change my life. JP and Seanie sat across the table from us, and I was between Annie and Isabel, which was kind of hot because Isabel kept brushing up against me, and, even though there wasn’t really room for it in my head, I imagined Annie and her having a warrior-princess-fight-to-the-death for breeding rights with me. I noticed Seanie was particularly fascinated by Isabel’s faint fuzzy moustache. Joey, who almost never sat with the other seniors, was with us too.

“Do you guys know that this weekend West is coming to my house for two days?” Annie announced.

I hadn’t told anyone. I noticed Joey glanced at me with a have-you-told-Megan-yet look on his face.

Seanie kicked me under the table and raised his hand.

“High five, Winger,” he said. He slapped my hand over our burritos, and I watched Annie’s expression to see if that was the wrong thing to do. Seanie added, “Why does this remind me of salmon swimming upstream to spawn and die?”

I thought about my white, bloated corpse floating in Puget Sound. At least I imagined I had a contented smile on my face. Fins and gills, too.

“Probably because you’re a sick freak,” Annie answered.

“You know, Annie, Ryan Dean doesn’t wear pajamas. So . . . where’s he going to sleep?” Seanie asked.

“Probably on the couch,” she said.

OH MY GOD! YES!

I know . . . she didn’t say which couch, but I figured I was halfway home. Just hearing her answer, so comfortably and honestly, caused yet another of my chronic blood-and-attention-migration episodes, and I nearly jerked my hand skyward for another high five with Seanie, but controlled the urge.

“Stop being such a pervert, Seanie,” JP said.

“You’re just in denial that you weren’t thinking the same thing, even if it was about permavirgin Ryan Dean,” Seanie said.

Permavirgin?

The moment had come to strike swiftly. I kicked Seanie’s shin and brushed up against Annie’s thigh in the process. Two scores at once.

“Speaking of perverts, what did you think about Casey Palmer’s MySite, Joey?” I asked. My voice cracked again. I am such a dork.

“Pretty sick,” Joey said.

“It’s nasty,” Annie added.

“ You’ve seen it too?” I said.

I saw Seanie turning red. He also looked really pissed off at me. Oh, well, that’s what he gets.

And Annie said, “ You told me to check it out, West, so I did. And it’s gross. What do you expect from a football player, anyway? It’s probably the only way he can get someone to look at those small, pitiful things.”

Despite Seanie’s tortured expression, I found myself suddenly thinking about the deeper meaning of the last statement Annie had made there.

Yeah. I know. I’m such a loser.

“Are you okay, Ryan Dean?” JP asked.

“Huh?”

“Dude, you looked like you were sleeping with your eyes open for the last five minutes,” he said. “Didn’t you hear anything I said?”

“About what?”

“Halloween.”

“Oh,” I said, “what did you say?”

And I thought, did I accidentally babble something about what I’d like to wear for Annie?

“About the dance,” Seanie said.

Halloween was coming up on the Thursday after our game.

Whenever Halloween fell during the week, since we were so isolated, Pine Mountain would have a dinner dance. I hadn’t even thought about it, beyond my perverted fantasy about Annie, but it suddenly dawned on me that I couldn’t go. Pine Mountain’s rules did not allow O-Hall boys to attend such events.

“Me and Annie are going together,” JP said.

Okay. I really wanted to cuss. But I didn’t.

I felt my eyes get big, and a little watery. I looked at Annie with a what-the-fuck-is-he-talking-about look on my face, but she just looked perfectly normal; perfectly, hotly, matter-of-fact Annie.

I looked at JP. “What?”

“Dude. You don’t want her going alone, do you?”

I looked at Annie again.

“No. You’re right.”

I stood up. My head was spinning, and I felt like I was going to end up on my face. I needed to get out of there. Now I knew what it meant, all those times I noticed JP looking at her, watching me, too. I wanted to kick his fucking head in right there, so I just left. I went for the doors and stepped out into the cold afternoon.