Andrew Smith - Winger

And Mr. Farrow cleared his throat, mousylike, saying, “You’re going to need to reinvent the haircut, Chas.”

Nothing that bordered on the undisciplined or unorthodox was tolerated at PM. Not even facial hair, not that I had anything to worry about as far as that rule was concerned. I’d seen some girls at PM who came closer to getting into trouble over that rule than me. The only thing I’d ever shaved was maybe a few points off a Calculus test so my friends wouldn’t hate me if I set the curve too high.

“I’ll shave it off after schedules,” Chas said.

“You’ll need to do it before,” Farrow answered. He explained, “You know that ID pictures are today, and you’re not going in looking like that.”

I waited until Chas backed up a step, and then I stood up, hitting my head squarely on the metal frame beneath my new sleeping spot. And as I rubbed my scalp I thought Chas was probably just waiting for Farrow to leave so he could reassign me to the floor.

“You need to wear a scrum cap when you go to bed, too, Winger?” Scrum caps are things that some players wear to protect their heads in rugby. But wings don’t wear them, and all they really are good for is keeping your ears from getting torn off, so second-row guys like Chas had to wear them. In fact, I clearly saw one on top of his kit bag when he came in and I felt like— really felt like—giving him a clever comeback so Farrow could see the new, eleventh-grade version of me, but I couldn’t think of anything witty because my head hurt so bad.

I fucking hated Chas Becker.

There were chairs at each of the desks in the room, but I knew better than to pull one out, because Chas would just say that was his too. And as I fumbled with climbing up onto the top bunk, wondering how I was ever going to get in and out of bed if I needed to pee in the middle of the night, already mentally rigging the Ryan Dean West Emergency Gatorade Bottle Nighttime Urinal I would have to invent, Farrow slipped backward out the door and pulled it shut behind him.

So it was me and Chas.

Pure joy.

Bonding time.

And I couldn’t help but wonder how much blood could actually be contained by the 160-pound sack of skin I walked around in.

Well, to be honest, it’s 142.

Yeah . . . I am a skinny-ass loser.

And I’d had a talk with my very best friend, Annie, just that morning when we showed up at school. Annie Altman was at Pine Mountain because she chose to enroll at the school. Go figure.

Annie Altman was going into eleventh grade too, which meant she was two full years older than me, so, most people would think there couldn’t possibly be anything between us beyond a noticeable degree of friendship, even if I did think she was smoking hot in an alluring and mature, “naughty babysitter” kind of way. I was convinced, though, that as far as Annie was concerned, I was more or less a substitute for a favored pet while she had to be here at PM, probably a red-eared turtle or something. At least she usually got to go home on weekends and see the pets she really loved.

I had hoped that she’d get over it, but there’s no balancing act between fourteen-year-old boys and girls who are sixteen, even if I did grow taller over the summer, even if I didn’t sound or look like such a little kid anymore.

Even if Annie knew everything in the world about me.

Well, I didn’t tell her about the toilet thing.

Anyway, Annie told me that this was going to be my make-it-or-break-it year, and that I was going to have to suck it up if I was going to survive in O-Hall, which is about the same as a state pen as far as we were concerned.

It kind of made me feel all flustered and choked up when she told me that I might have to take a few lumps in order to gain the respect of the other inmates so they’d learn right away not to mess with Ryan Dean West.

She said she’d learned that particular strategy by watching a documentary about guys who get killed in jail.

So now that Chas and I were alone, I closed my eyes and tried to relax, wondering if I was taking my final breaths or taking the first steps toward standing up to Chas Becker and becoming someone new.

Or something.

There weren’t any lights on in our room. That was bad, I thought. People like to do terrible things to other people when the lights are out, even if it’s daytime.

In the unvoiced and universal language of psychopaths, a flipped-down light switch is like one of those symbol-sign thingies that would show a silhouette stick figure strangling the skinny silhouette stick figure of a fourteen-year-old.

I could see the swath of Chas’s Mohawk pointing at me, and the whites of his eyes looking straight across at me, where I sat on the bunk bed.

Chas began unpacking, stuffing his folded clothes into the cubbies stacked like a ladder along one side of our shared closet.

“You got any money?” he asked.

And I thought, God, he’s already going to start with the extortion . I tried to remember what Annie told me, but the toughest, most stand-up-for-yourself thing that wasn’t in Latin I could think of was “Why?”

Chas folded his empty bags and kicked them under the bed. He turned around, and I could practically feel him breathing on me. He put both of his hands on the edge of my bed, and at that moment I felt like a parakeet—but a tough, stand-up-for-yourself variety of parakeet—in a stare-down with a saltwater crocodile.

“After lights-out, a couple of the guys are going to sneak in here for a poker game. That’s why. We always play poker here on Sundays. Twenty-dollar buy-in. Do you know how to play poker?”

“Count me in.”

I don’t know if the choking or unconsciousness urge was stronger at that point, but I survived my first private, witness-free encounter with the one guy who I was convinced would end up trying his hardest to thoroughly ruin my life just before killing me sometime during my eleventh-grade year at Pine Mountain.

AFTER CHAS TRIMMED HIS MOHAWK down to a buzz cut, we put on our shirts and ties and went to the registrar to get our schedules and ID photos taken—not that we actually walked there together.

I saw my former roommates, Seanie and JP, waiting in line for pictures, and it made me feel good to see my old friends, but sad, too, because I missed rooming with them. We all three shared a room for our first two years at PM.

In the regular boys’ dorm, the rooms were big and comfortable and usually had three or four guys per room, not like O-Hall, where the rooms were like tiny cells with those dreaded metal bunk beds.

Seanie and JP played rugby too. We hung out and got along because they weren’t forwards either. Seanie played scrum half, even though he was really tall and skinny, but he had a wicked pass and flawless hands; and JP played fullback, which is the position usually given to the all-around fittest, most-confident guy on the team, and with the highest tolerance for pain. This year, they’d both be moving up to the varsity team since about half the starters from last year had graduated.

One of the things about rugby that’s an inescapable tradition is that everyone on the team has to sing, and everyone also gets a nickname. It’s not conscious or thought out, it just happens. Like salmon swimming upstream, or the universe expanding . . . or contracting . . . or whatever it does, I guess. And, when someone finally settles on calling you by a nickname, you’re stuck.