Andrew Smith - Winger

It was like that for twenty minutes: just dark nothing. Then she stood up and sat beside me on my bed and she put her arm around my shoulders, and I began talking.

I told her about my iPod and how I sang for Joey the last time I ever saw him.

After a while, she said, “Anyone in the world would be so lucky to call you their friend, Ryan Dean.”

I told her about how Joey always stuck up for anyone, even people he didn’t like. And I told her the story about how Chas made me drink beer the night before school started. I told her about how we drank whiskey, too, before Halloween, and I’d peed in Chas’s and Casey’s drinks that night when Joey drove us into Bannock to get costumes and we lost Chas but picked up Screaming Ned.

And telling that story made me smile, but it hurt so much.

So when I was finished talking about Joey, Doc Mom said, “Okay, Ryan Dean, I am not a therapist anymore. Now I’m just a mom.”

Then she squeezed me so tight and she kissed my head and said, “I am so sorry, baby. I am so sorry,” and we both cried for I don’t know how long.

Annie waited outside. But when I was finished with my crying, I told Doc Mom that I couldn’t go out.

“I don’t want anyone to know I was crying,” I said.

Doc Mom said, “Okay, Ryan Dean. I’ll wait as long as you want me to.”

“I’ll be okay, Doc Mom.”

ON THE DAY THEY FOUND joey, the police sealed off O-Hall, and we never went back there again.

Never.

They talked to Chas and me for hours, separately. I told them almost everything, but not the stuff I didn’t think would matter.

They didn’t ask, anyway.

Casey Palmer and Nick Matthews killed Joey that night of the dance. They got drunk. They were mad. They beat him until he stopped being Joey.

I loved Joey Cosentino.

After I told the police what I knew about Casey, they went to his home.

Casey Palmer and Nick Matthews never came back to school. I heard they both confessed right away, and I figured it was because Casey didn’t want it coming out in his trial about how he’d been chasing after Joey for so long. That’s what I think, but I could be wrong.

Either way, I didn’t care about Casey’s reasoning.

Pine Mountain closed down O-Hall. None of us ever saw Mr. Farrow or Mrs. Singer again. They were gone, cut loose. Nobody needed them, and nobody needed anything like O-Hall again, either.

I’ll be honest. I was actually sad about them closing down O-Hall, as weird as that sounds. I wished I could go back to the noise and the smell, the crowded and dirty bathroom.

They moved me and Kevin and Chas in together at the boys’ dorm, each of us with our private bedroom, and the big living room where we’d sometimes fight over what to watch on our television.

We talked about it once, much later, and we decided that we were all better suited to live in O-Hall, so I told Kevin and Chas that I was going to do my best to get them to reopen it and then I’d do something bad so they would have to send me there for my senior year.

Chas said, “You’re a fucking idiot, Winger.”

Yeah. I know.

Chas Becker and I became friends. He didn’t turn me into an asshole, and I didn’t teach him how to draw comics. It was a balanced relationship, but a weird one.

Wingers and forwards are not allowed to be friends.

But Chas and I needed each other.

He picked on me. That was to be expected. Kevin Cantrell, like always, was the calming peacemaker in our new three-man family. We played poker on Sundays. We invited Seanie Flaherty and JP Tureau to the games.

There were no more consequences.

How could you top the magnificent shit we had done in O-Hall?

How could you ever make anything worse?

The thing about rugby is this: You can hate a guy off the pitch who will save your fucking balls on the pitch when you play on the same side. There is nothing more glorious than that.

One time, in the boys’ dorm, while we were playing a game of Hold ’Em, I made JP Tureau laugh.

I thought, When we are seniors, me and JP are going to be cool again.

THIS TIME, I REMEMBER TO take off my belt before I walk through the metal detector at the airport, so I avoid the humiliation of a second strip search from Officer Nutgrabber.

What happened to Joey messed me up worse than anything I ever had to recover from. And I’ll be honest. It scared me to leave Pine Mountain, even if it did mean spending four days with Annie. I couldn’t sleep those nights before Thanksgiving came.

As ridiculous as it sounds, I kept thinking something terrible would happen if I left Kevin and Chas.

But I knew I was being stupid and that I had to do something to make myself get over being afraid, if I was ever going to grow up and get better.

After all, I was supposedly on a mission to do just that—to reinvent Ryan Dean West—in my junior year at Pine Mountain Academy.

Well, fuck that.

We hold hands for the entire flight. I point out the window, grinning, and say, “Remember?” I kiss her when we cross the Columbia River, and Annie smiles and says, “You are such a pervert.”

I imagine that there will never be a moment in my life when I am not in love with Annie Altman. Being back on Bainbridge Island is almost like filling my lungs up with the same air again, the air that smells so green and thick with the ocean.

We walk out on the beach in the freezing and damp cold of the evening. Her parents watch us go, standing in the open doorway. But they leave us alone.

“I’m going to be better, Annie.”

“First thing tomorrow, we’re going for a run. Even if it’s raining. You can tear your clothes off if you feel like it, and we’ll jump in the hot tub when we’re done.”

“You’re asking for the Wild Boy to return, you know.”

And Annie laughs and takes off, running down the beach. I chase after her, but she lets me catch her too easily, and we kiss right there as her parents watch us.

I know it’s kind of ridiculous, but I realize now how wrong that old pervert Mr. Wellins is. Almost nothing at all is ever about sex, unless you never grow up, that is.

It’s about love, and, maybe, not having it.

What an old, delusional idiot he is.

But what do I know?

I’m just fourteen.

I’LL SAY IT NOW. I didn’t talk for those weeks because I was afraid of the words.

The words came together and said how Joey died: alone and scared.

And he never did anything bad to anyone.

Ever.

But when I was quiet, I could hold on to Annie’s hand, and that was a word that didn’t need to be spoken. And Doc Mom, sitting with her arm around me and listening and crying, that made words too.

The same words that make the horrible things come also tell the quieter things about love.

I found out something about words. There are plenty of words I can put on paper, words I can see with my eyes and scribble with my hand, that I never had the guts to say with my mouth.

Sometimes, I used to think I was brave; but I don’t believe that anymore.

And then it’s always that one word that makes you so different and puts you outside the overlap of everyone else; and that word is so fucking big and loud, it’s the only thing anyone ever hears when your name is spoken.