Andrew Smith - Winger

There was a towel stuffed along the floor at the bottom of the door, and another covering the creepy tilting-window thing on top, so no one would see the light from our room.

None of us wore shoes. Kevin and Joey obviously had to keep it as stealth as possible, sneaking through the hallway past Farrow’s door. I was wearing my school uniform pants, my belt, unbuckled and twisted halfway around to my back, and a wrinkled T-shirt. Chas was still in his uniform shirt from dinner, but without the tie, and Joey and Kevin wore loose sweatpants and T-shirts. And the funny thing is, I noticed they were wearing their black and blue hoop rugby socks, too, and I thought, God, either these guys are really dorks, or they just can’t wait for the season to begin.

We sat on the cool linoleum floor, all facing each other, Chas with his back resting against the bottom bunk. The floor space was barely big enough for us, and those three other guys were monsters, anyway. Kevin played lock alongside Chas, so he was exactly Chas’s height; and Joey, who was six-one, played fly half, number ten, which is kind of the equivalent to quarterback in American football. So I had more dealings with Joey in practice and during games, since we were both in the back line, and I got along with him and trusted him, too, and I wasn’t creeped out or anything about Joey being gay.

Everyone on the team knew that Joey was gay, but no one ever had a problem with it, either. He was honest about it with the guys, and they accepted him because of it, plus he never acted or talked like the stereotypical gay guys that people think are caricatures of the entire population. I mean, who does that, anyway?

That’s one of the other things about rugby too: I think that because it is such a fringe kind of sport that practically borders on the insane, rugby guys stick up for and tolerate one another more than boys tend to do in other sports. Sure, sometimes the guys would make teasing jokes behind Joey’s back and even to his face, but they did that to every single player on the team, and being gay, or uncoordinated, or only fourteen and in eleventh grade for that matter, didn’t really have anything to do with it, because there was absolute equality of opportunity in being picked on in a good-natured kind of way. But no one on our team ever took it too seriously.

Chas was kind of the exception on the team, and maybe he was always overcompensating through his bullying because he recognized that he didn’t fit in very well; and maybe, too, the guys and the coach just put up with his being such a colossal asshole because he was a great athlete.

I yawned and folded my legs, Indian style, as we put in the first blinds and Chas shuffled the non-Betch cards.

Chas looked across at Joey and Kevin and said, “Did you bring the refreshments?”

“Sure did.” Kevin smiled, and then he and Joey stretched their legs out straight, so their socks were practically in my face, and pulled up their sweats from the bottom. That was when I could see why they wore their rugby socks. Both of them had two tall cans of beer on each of their legs, snugged down tightly inside our team hoops.

So when they rolled their socks down and made a little shrine from eight twenty-four-ounce cans of beer on the floor beside us, I really felt scared . . . because three didn’t divide evenly into eight, and I had never, never , taken a drink of alcohol in my life.

What if it stunted my growth?

“And they’re still pretty cold,” Joey said. He obviously was the designated beer-passer-outer. He handed a can to Chas, then Kevin, and then he grabbed one from the shrine and tilted it toward me, a calm and serious look in his steady, fly half eyes.

“I never had a drink before in my life,” I said.

“It’s okay, Winger,” Joey said. “I was just offering. I understand.”

I was so relieved, and I liked Joey even more at that moment, but I mean that in a totally non-gay way, because I felt like he was sticking up for me.

Chas and Kevin had already opened their beers and were drinking before the first deal, and Joey took the beer he’d offered me and popped it open for himself. Then Chas reached across our little poker circle and grabbed a can of beer away from Joey’s arrangement, pulled the tab forward so I could hear and smell that beer trying to find a way out of the can, and placed it on the floor beside my knee.

“It’s time for you to lose your beer virginity, Winger,” he said. Then he raised his can to the center and said, “Cheers.”

And we all tapped cans. Six eyes watched me, and I closed mine as tight as I could and took my first-ever swallow of beer.

As Chas began dealing the cards out, all these things kind of occurred to me at once:

1. The taste. Who ever drinks this piss when they’re thirsty? Are you kidding me? Seriously . . . you’ve got to be kidding.

2. Little bit of vomit in the back of my throat. It gets into my nasal passages. It burns like hell, and now everything also smells exactly like barf. Nice. Real nice.

3. I am really scared. I am convinced something horrible is going to happen to me now. I picture my mom and dad and Annie (she is so smoking hot in black) at my funeral.

4. Mom and Dad? I feel so terrible that I let them down and became a dead virgin alcoholic at fourteen.

5. For some reason, Chas, Joey, and Kevin are all looking at me and laughing as quietly as they can manage.

6. Woo-hoo! Chas dealt me pocket Jacks.

An hour later, I had finished an entire beer. I needed to pee so bad, there were tears pooling in my eyes. I forgot what my home phone number was—I don’t know why it mattered, I don’t even know why I silently asked myself the question Hey, Ryan Dean West . . . what’s your home phone number? , but I was emotionally devastated, crushed, that I forgot my home phone number —and I was the first player to lose all his chips, too.

By two in the morning, the game was finished. Joey won everyone’s money, which gave him the right to determine the consequence .

Oh, yeah . . . the consequence.

THANK GOD IT HAD NOTHING to do with getting naked.

Thank God, again, it had something to do with peeing.

I needed to pee so bad, I sat rocking back and forth in a near-catatonic state, with my hand jammed down between my legs.

Then Joey told me, “Here’s all you gotta do, Ryan Dean. This is an easy one. All you gotta do is go downstairs and take a pee in the downstairs girls’ bathroom.”

“But Mrs. Thinger is down there.”

(I couldn’t remember her name.)

“Singer,” Chas corrected.

I rocked. I thought he was telling me I had to sing, too. Oh, well. I kind of felt like singing.

Yeah, 142 pounds gets pretty stupid when you add twenty-four ounces of beer to it.

“Hey,” I said, continuing my journey into stupidity, “Do any of you guys know my home phone number? I think it’s got a twenty-four in it, too.”

At that moment, I think everything in my universe had a twenty-four in it.

“Come on, retard, before you piss in your pants,” Kevin said, pulling me up by my armpits. It felt like I was standing on ice skates, and I nearly fell down, but Chas was right there behind me, holding me steady.

“Hey, thanks,” I said. “You guys are really awesome.”

I would have shaken hands with them, but I didn’t dare let go of my dick.

They turned out the flashlight and pushed me toward the door.

“You remember what you gotta do?” Chas said.

“Yeah,” I said, confidently. “What?”