Andrew Smith: Winger

TO PLAY RUGBY AND TO be a rugby player are inextricably enmeshed. There is something about the sport that attaches to character. Some of the greatest people I will ever know are ruggers. This book would never have worked its way out of me and onto the page without them. Davis Russ, a fly half, and Kyle Alvarez, a lock, had the bravest and most honorable makeup of anyone I’ve ever known, on and off the pitch. They were the models for all the good, selfless things the kids in Winger do. Landon Drake Alexsander Veis, a center, and Beau Mitchell Donohoe, a scrum half, made me laugh so many times, and I apologize if any of the funny things in Winger are an embarrassment to them. My friend and fellow author Joe Lunievicz, a fullback, was the first “real” person who got to read this manuscript. He is, after all, a rugger, and I had to be certain that I did the sport justice. And to Amy—the author A. S. King—thanks for keeping me from going as crazy as I likely would have gone.

And what a great team Winger has. Many thanks to my editor, David Gale, and Navah Wolfe, for their faith and persistence in making this story come to life; and to Sam Bosma for his amazing and spot-on artwork.

I have endless appreciation and love for my wife and kids who put up with me. Writing is every bit as hard on them as it is on me, and it’s just as tough as rugby.

crede quod habes, et habes

I SAID A SILENT PRAYER.

Actually, silent is probably the only type of prayer a guy should attempt when his head’s in a toilet.

And, in my prayer, I made sure to include specific thanks for the fact that the school year hadn’t started yet, so the porcelain was impeccably white—as soothing to the eye as freshly fallen snow—and the water smelled like lemons and a heated swimming pool in summertime, all rolled into one.

Except it was a fucking toilet.

And my head was in it.

My feet, elevated in Nick Matthews’s apelike paws while Casey Palmer tried to drive my face down past the surface of the pleasant-smelling water, were somewhere between my skinny ass and Saturn, pointing toward the plane my parents were currently heading back to Boston in, and whatever else is up there.

I hate football players.

And I gave thanks, too, or I thought about it while grunting and grimacing, for the weights I’d lifted over the summer, because even though they were about to snap like pencils, my locked elbows kept my actual face about three inches away from actual toilet fucking water.

But then I felt bad, because I was convinced that cussing during a prayer—even a silent one—meant that I would make my rookie debut in hell as soon as Casey and Nick succeeded at drowning me in a goddamned school-issue community toilet.

And I realized that all those movies and stories about how clearly a guy’s thoughts and perceptions materialize in the expanding moments just before death were actually true, because I couldn’t help but notice the nearly transparent and unperforated one-ply toilet paper that curled downward from the shiny chrome toilet-paper-cover-thing-that-looks-like-an-eighteen-wheeler’s-mudflap-but-I-don’t-know-what-the-hell-those-devices-are-called, and I thought to myself, God! They make us use THAT kind of toilet paper here?

And all this happened in the span of maybe three seconds, now that I think about it.

Oh, yeah. And I had spent the previous five weeks or so chanting a near-constant antiwimp, inner tantric mantra as an attempt to convince my brain that I was going to reinvent myself this year, that I wasn’t going to be the little kid everyone ignored or, worse, paid attention to for the purpose of constructing cruel survival experiments involving toilets and the tensile strength of my skinny-bitch arms.

My mom and dad—Dad especially—were always getting on me about paying better attention to stuff. It kind of choked me up to think how proud he’d be of his boy at that moment for all the minute details I was taking in about my new, upside-down toilet world.

But I guess I should have paid more attention earlier to the fact that room two, which was my dorm room, wasn’t the second fucking door down from the stairwell.

So when I walked in on Casey and Nick’s room—room six, whose location made absolutely no mathematical sense to me at all—carrying my suitcase and duffel bag, and they were somewhere near what I could only guess were the completion stages of rolling a joint (some kids, especially kids like Casey and Nick, do that here because the woods are like one big, giant pot party to them), they not only warned me, in a very creepy Greek-chorus-in-a-tragedy-that-you-know-is-not-going-to-end-well-for-our-hero kind of way, to not ever step foot in their fucking room again, they came up with this spontaneous welcoming ritual that involved a toilet, the elevation of my feet (one of which had detached itself from a shoe, the same way a lizard loses its tail to distract potential predators) . . . and me.

That was a really long sentence, wasn’t it?

I should probably stick to drawing pictures, which I do sometimes.

Okay. So there I was, in Upside-Down Toilet Land, about to collapse, wondering how bad toilet water could possibly taste, and I gritted my teeth and recited the convince-yourself mantra I’d been using: “Crede quod habes, et habes,” which means something like, if you believe in what you have, you’ll have it.

At that moment, I believed I’d have the ability to hold my breath for a really long time.

Grunt.

Big inhale.

And maybe some cosmic forces happened to perfectly converge in the Universe of the Upside-Down Toilet. Maybe O-Hall had some kind of spell on it; or maybe things really were going to be different for me this year, because just at the precise limit of my endurance, a voice called out from the hallway.

“Mr. Palmer! Mr. Matthews!”

And they let me go.

Feet and head reoriented themselves.

The universe, which smelled pretty nice and lemony, was right again.

Nick Matthews started giggling like an idiot. Come to think of it, he did just about everything that way.

And Casey said, “Fuck. It’s Farrow.”

The boys ran out of the bathroom and left me there, alone, kind of like the last clueless guy at a party who just doesn’t know when to go home.

But I wasn’t going home.

I had stuff to do.

JOEY TOLD ME NOTHING EVER goes back exactly the way it was, that things expand and contract—like breathing, but you could never fill your lungs up with the same air twice. He said some of the smartest things I ever heard, and he’s the only one of my friends who really tried to keep me on track too.

And I’ll be honest. I know exactly how hard that was.

NOTHING COULD POSSIBLY SUCK WORSE than being a junior in high school, alone at the top of your class, and fourteen years old all at the same time. So the only way I braced up for those agonizing first weeks of the semester, and made myself feel any better about my situation, was by telling myself that it had to be better than being a senior at fifteen.

Didn’t it?

My name is Ryan Dean West.

Ryan Dean is my first name.

You don’t usually think a single name can have a space and two capitals in it, but mine does. Not a dash, a space. And I don’t really like talking about my middle name.