Andrew Smith - Winger

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.