Andrew Smith: Winger

I had two PE classes—Conditioning in the morning and Team Athletics at the end of the day—but at least Annie and I had one class together, American Literature, just before lunch break. Annie’s sports were cross country in the fall and track in the spring. Rugby season started in November, so playing on the team was a year-round commitment since it didn’t end until May.

“Cool. We got Lit together,” I said. “I better go.”

I stood up abruptly and handed Annie her stuff.

“Are you mad or something, West?”

“No. I gotta go and get my stuff unpacked, or Farrow’s going to get after me. O-Hall. You know,” I lied.

“If you’re sure you’re okay,” she said. She stood up.

“Yeah.”

I took my schedule and ID from her and started off toward my new home.

“Look,” she said, “I’m going on a trail run before dinner. You want to come with me?”

“I can’t,” I said.

And without turning back I went straight for the O-Hall doorway.

Little boy.

What a bunch of crap.

IT TOOK ABOUT FIVE MINUTES for me to unpack. That’s all. I didn’t have anything. Of course Chas wasn’t there. He’d be out goofing around with his friends, or sneaking off somewhere with Megan Renshaw, who I also thought was unendurably sexy, but not in a mature, Annie kind of way; it was more like an intimidating and scary female-cop-that-arrested-me-in-Boston way. But she was still hot. And, yes, I did get arrested in Boston when I was twelve. It’s what inspired my parents to enroll me in Pine Mountain Academy in the first place.

I know you’re going to ask, so I might as well tell you: It was for breaking into and trying to drive a T train.

I was twelve.

Boys like trains.

Back to unpacking.

Chas had left the bottom cubbies open and bared enough of the closet rod for me to hang up my school jacket and sweater, as well as the uniform pants and shirts that would supply me from wash day to wash day. After I did that I was alone, so I just stared out the window at the lake and sat there in the dark room on a chair that I wasn’t really sure I’d be allowed to sit on.

I sighed.

My parents had dropped me off that morning, along with my bags, a supply of cash, adequate stereophonic warnings about my behavior and what they expected from me now that I was a full-fledged “young man,” and instructions to phone them at the usual time every Saturday afternoon. They didn’t even get out of the rental car; they had to hurry back to the airport to catch their flight to Boston, where I lived for the few unfrozen months out of the year.

When I saw Annie run by, alone, out on the trail around the lake, I immediately tore off all my clothes, pulled on my running shorts, and dug around in my formerly organized cubbies for my running shoes. I had been so busy sitting there moping and feeling lonely that I’d nearly forgotten my commitment—well, plan, at least—to try reinventing myself this year, to not be such an outcast. I took off out the door, leaving it open wide, displaying the wreckage of scattered clothing and footwear I’d left behind in my hurry to catch up to Annie Altman.

I knew where she was going. It was a trail we’d run together many times, winding to the north side of the lake and then along a rock-lined switchback path through the forest to the highest point around, a lookout post called Buzzard’s Roost where you could see out in every direction—the entire valley where our school had been built on one side, and, on the other, a faint and hazy flatness that was the Pacific Ocean.

I estimated that by the time I got my shoes on and was out on the trail, Annie would be nearly a mile ahead of me, so as I ran along the lake I tried to script the innocent-sounding lies I’d say to her when she caught me on her way back down from the top. Because of course I really did want to take the run with Annie when she asked, and if it wasn’t for that kick-Ryan-Dean-in-the-balls comment she’d made, I’d be up there with her right now, and we’d be talking about all kinds of things that just naturally come out of your head when you run.

The trail cut away from the lake through the densest part of the forest. Last year, in a clearing cut by loggers, Annie and my then-roommates and I built a circle of stones. We called it Stonehenge.

I stopped there to shake the twigs from my shoes.

Although some ferns had overgrown the outer ring of rocks, our monument was still standing. I didn’t have any socks on, or a shirt, either. Just my running shorts, because I had been in too much of a hurry once I saw Annie run past O-Hall. My ankles were streaked with dirt from the combination of dust and sweat. It was hot and muggy, and I was slick and dripping as I started up the switchback trail, following Annie’s shoeprints.

Anyway, I thought maybe she’d notice that I’d been lifting weights over the summer, that I was taller, that I really wasn’t a little boy .

Yeah, right.

Just before the summit, the trees gave way to nothing but scrub brush and grasses, and the trail wound around the point of the mountain. I was almost to the top when Annie rounded the corner in front of me on her way down. And I could tell I startled her, too; that she wasn’t expecting to run into anyone up here. She tensed and froze up when she saw me, but I could see her shoulders relax when she realized it was just me.

I put my head down and kept running, only stopping when I came up right next to her.

“I thought you couldn’t run today,” she said.

“I finished early. I had some energy. I didn’t think you’d come up here.” It wasn’t really a lie, but then I added, “I’m sorry.”

“Oh. No big deal,” she said. Then she started running, going downhill again. Without me.

“See ya, West.”

“Hey, wait!”

She stopped about twenty feet down the trail.

“Did you go to the top?”

She gave me a “duh” look, hands on her hips.

“Well, could you see the ocean?”

“Yeah. It’s really clear today.”

“You want to go back up?” I asked.

“No,” she said, so matter-of-factly, like she was singing a song in grade school, like nothing at all mattered to her. The way she always sounded. “I’m going back.”

I quickly calculated my alternatives. If I just stopped there, turned around, and followed along with her, that would make me look pathetic and wimpy. And, after all, she was the one who told me just this morning that I was going to have to get tough this year. I said the same thing to myself, even if I had serious doubts about my ability to pull off the transition from little boy to something else, something less insignificant—if “less insignificant” is actually a combination of descriptors that doesn’t cause some kind of literary black hole. Plan B meant sprinting like hell to the top, taking a quick three-sixty just so I could say I saw the ocean too, then running like hell again back down the trail to catch up to her before she got to Stonehenge. That would work, but I’d have to burn it, because Annie was a damn fast runner, and I had this feeling that she was going to try to not let me catch up to her.

So I took off for Buzzard’s Roost as fast as I could. My legs burned, but I had to get even with her somehow, to try and salvage the last day of summer, and the last wimpy shreds of my little-boy ego.

There.

I made it to the top. I was dizzy and dripping with sweat. My hair lay plastered, flat and dark against my scalp, and when I rubbed it, a misty spray of soothing droplets rained down on me. I lifted my arms to let the faint breeze blow a cooling breath under my arms and across my aching ribs. I looked down at the school, the narrow black strip of lake that cut a gash through the dark green points of the trees, and turned around to see where the sky faded down to a grainy fog-gray over the distant line of the Pacific.