Stand-Off

by Andrew Smith

  But, of course, I had to knock. My key was still locked inside, where I’d left it the night before.

  “Oh! Hi, Ryan Dean!” the Abernathy said when he opened the door, dressed in his obvious weekend leisure outfit: camo sweatpants, plaid flannel bedroom slippers, and a hoodie with a rainbow print of cats wearing space helmets and shooting lasers at each other.

  “Hi.”

  Then I was, like, Did I just say “hi” to the Abernathy?

  It was a reflex. Sometimes guys just can’t stop themselves from saying hi when someone wearing slippers surprises us with a greeting at an open door. I had to shake it out of my head.

  Do not talk to him. Do not talk to him.

  I kicked off Cotton Balls’s shoes and climbed out of the tent of clothes he and Spotted John had loaned me. Then I got into my running gear.

  “Are you going for a run?”

  “Yes.”

  What was I doing? That pain pill must have had some kind of truth serum in it or something. That must have been why I confessed to Spotted John and Cotton Balls about burying their goddamned sock in the hall palm.

  Think about peaches, think about peaches.

  Totally gross.

  My stomach hurt.

  “Can I come with you?”

  What was he saying? I couldn’t just allow the Abernathy to run with me. What if somebody saw us? What if Spotted John’s poison nice pills made me say yes?

  I had to get control.

  “Maybe next time.”

  I already had a hand on the doorknob, but then, cursing myself for apparently having no ability to ward off the politeness side effect of Spotted John’s goddamned pill, I had to turn around and grab my key off the desk.

  Wait. Lack of interest in sex????

  “Okay! Next time, then,” the Abernathy burbled. He pointed out the open window.

  Shit.

  Two girls were walking past our building, giggling because they’d been watching me undress. Whatever. Porno Ryan Dean was probably already at ten thousand hits and counting on Spotted John’s fucking website, anyway.

  And the Abernathy prattled on, “Oh! By the way, I noticed your clothes were hanging up in the tree out there. What were your clothes doing in a tree, Ryan Dean?”

  “Hiding from bears.”

  I needed to shut the hell up.

  The Abernathy was jiggling with joy over the fact that he’d engaged me in conversation. A quick Little-Sam TSE, and he went on, “Ha ha! You’re so funny, Ryan Dean! Anyway, Mr. Bream helped me get them down. I’m doing laundry right now, so I put them in with my stuff. I don’t mind. It’s no bother at all! I like doing laundry. Is there anything else you need to have washed, dried, and folded?”

  My clothes taking a bath with the Abernathy’s? So gross.

  “Uh, no thanks.”

  What was I doing? I had to get out of there before I actually got into a full-blown civil conversation with the boy with an ass of peach.

  “I gotta go, Sam.”

  I was a babbling fountain of idiotic niceties.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  IF I WASN’T SUCH A coward, I’d have punched myself in the face. But I managed to get out of Unit 113 before I let go any more unrestrained, pleasant chitchat with Sam Abernathy.

  I jogged off, away from the boys’ dorm on the trail along the lake.

  The rain felt like a stranger sneezed cold spit-mist on me, and I was feeling a little guilty (and spit on), thinking about how guilty Annie would make me feel for being so mean to Sam Abernathy, which would probably make him feel sad if he had any clue about how I felt about everything.

  That’s a lot of feeling going on there.

  Look: It’s not like the Abernathy was a bad guy. That’s what I said to myself, at least.

  What everyone—Sam Abernathy included—just couldn’t understand was the simple fact that Ryan Dean West was not going to make friends with anyone else this year. What’s the point in friendship? When bad things happen to your friends, it hurts worse than if it was your own heart breaking. So it was a matter of practicality. Dominic Cosentino obviously understood that. That’s why he treated me like a piece of shit, which was an entirely appropriate reaction to my own over-the-top-Sam-Abernathy-give-myself-an-excited-little-TSE-tug-and-let-me-be-your-best-pal idiocy. In the same way it wasn’t my task to help Sam Abernathy through the rough patch that was destined to be his freshman year at Pine Mountain, it also wasn’t Nico’s responsibility to help me get over what happened to his brother Joey.

  I got that, okay?

  The world would be so much better off if nobody cared for anybody, ever.

  Nico knew that. Lesson learned.

  I ran.

  When I got away from the main campus, I slipped off my shirt and left it hanging on a trail marker. I liked running in the rain without a shirt, no matter how cold it was—it was like taking a shower outside and letting the universe spit on me, which is something that the universe always seemed to get a kick out of. Headmaster Dude-with-the-unpronounceable-last-name invoked a new rule last semester: that boys could not go running without shirts on if we were anywhere near the campus. He said it was “inappropriate.” I’d like to see him run in his fucking Brooks Brothers suit and shiny loafers. What an idiot. He was most likely some kind of ghastly monster, I decided, who only ever showed skin from the cuff links down and from his collar stays up. His real skin was probably grotesquely pocked with pus-oozing boils and would blind any mortal human who gazed upon it.

  And I don’t know what happened, but somehow, something lured me toward the old abandoned O-Hall, which the school had closed down after Joey died, when they reintroduced all of us “bad” kids back to PM’s general population.

  O-Hall never did anything to reform me. I was living proof of its failure. I drank beer with Spotted John last night, and then I passed out on his dirty sofa bed, practically naked, with a girl of some tarnished history that obviously involved Cotton Balls’s affections and maybe multiple other suitors that I didn’t want to know the first thing about. What O-Hall did do to me, though, was make me realize how human we all are, how we all have weaknesses and little empty spots that are almost impossible to fill.

  The windows on O-Hall’s bottom floor—the one that had been constantly empty because it was the designated girls’ floor, and God knows girls never do anything bad—were all tightly boarded over with thick plywood. The upstairs windows had been left uncovered. I suppose the people in charge of shutting down O-Hall figured the only way someone might break in or vandalize the place would be through the ground floor.

  That was dumb.

  They could have asked an O-Hall survivor like me, or any one of the guys who graduated last year. We boys had no trouble climbing up and down the stacked logs of O-Hall’s walls if we wanted to get in or out of our rooms after lockdown.

  Dripping wet, and wearing nothing but a pair of nylon running shorts and my trail shoes, I went around back and stared up at my old window, half expecting to see some dim ghost of the person I was before all the bullshit of last year, looking down at the skinny pale kid who couldn’t sleep at night.

  Everything around O-Hall was wild and overgrown. No need to send out groundskeepers to maintain this old decrepit tomb of a building. I had to snake my way through brush and spruce saplings just to get to the spot where we boys used to climb down, next to the boarded-up, fogged windows of the never-used girls’ showers.

  My fingers remembered. My toes found their way into the familiar ladder-rung gaps between the logs.

  Ryan Dean West: dripping wet, practically naked; cat burglar.

  They hadn’t thought to secure the upper windows.

  It was a little difficult forcing my old window open from the outside. To be honest, my fingers slipped on the wet glass, and I nearly fell to what would certainly have been another pain-pill-requiring injury, but I managed to push the window up far enough for me to wriggle through. And never once did I think to myself, Hey, Ryan D
ean, what the fuck do you suppose you’re doing?

  It was as though some primal, unspoken urge had driven me to go back inside O-Hall.

  My room was the same as I’d left it that day they came and moved me and Chas Becker—my old roommate—back to the boys’ dorm. Neither one of us wanted to go back to O-Hall, and all the other boys had been gone that weekend, so their rooms would have been cleaned out later—if ever. The sheets on Chas’s and my bunk beds were still messed up, exactly how we’d left them that morning when we got out of them to help find Joey.

  A calendar from a Ford dealership in Los Angeles, where Chas would sometimes go with Megan, his girlfriend who used to make out with me for reasons I could never fully understand, still hung on the wall, open to November of last year. And there were things hidden between my mattress and the wall—an unopened FedEx mailer containing condoms and a pamphlet about how to have sex the first time that my neurotic and grossly concerned mother had sent me, and a Gatorade bottle with about three inches of piss in it that had turned the color of motor oil after seven thousand miles of hard driving.

  Who knew a guy’s piss turns black in a year?

  I was like Louis Fucking Pasteur when it came to pee in a plastic bottle.

  It made me feel like I was fourteen again. Not the pee, just being back in O-Hall, where, as bad as it all was, I wished I still lived. But I was in twelfth grade and fifteen now—Snack-Pack Senior—and fifteen-year-olds are way too mature to pee into Gatorade bottles, right?

  To be honest, I wanted to pee into the bottle, but I shuddered, thinking about the death cloud of gas that I would release into earth’s innocent atmosphere if I uncapped it. So I put my old nighttime urinal back in the space between the mattress and wall.

  “Maybe next time, pee bottle,” I said. “Maybe next time.”

  I looked inside our closet. I saw a sock and a pair of Chas Becker’s boxers rumpled up on the floor. I thought about giving the sock to Cotton Balls and Spotted John as a gesture of reparations, but decided not to, on account of having no pockets in my shorts to carry it home in.

  I tried the light switch. There was no reason for them to have turned off the electricity. The light came on. I opened my old door and went out into the hallway.

  I’ll admit that I was afraid. I always had the feeling O-Hall was haunted, and not just by the crazy old woman who’d lived downstairs and watched over the empty girls’ floor. And if O-Hall was going to pick up any new ghosts, well, it would definitely have one now.

  And I wasn’t even telling myself to turn around and leave, or calling myself an idiot loser for needing to walk down that hallway again. I could have done it with my eyes closed. To be honest, I think my eyes were closed, because the hallway light was turned off and I was so afraid of the dark there. Because it wasn’t just dark, it was abandoned building dark, which is something else altogether. And for some reason, empty buildings also generate cold like fucking refrigerators.

  Why does that always happen?

  I found the switch to the hall lights next to the entryway to the boys’ showers and toilets room. I ducked inside for a quick pee.

  Flush.

  Nice water pressure.

  Everything was still the same. Everything. There was even a pale blob of dried Crest toothpaste on the edge of the sink nearest the door—the one I usually had to use because I was the littlest guy in O-Hall—which made me everyone else’s bitch.

  That last morning I spent here, I brushed my teeth in front of that sink and looked at myself in this same mirror.

  I remembered everything that ever happened to me here, just like it had all only been a few minutes ago.

  A gust of wind peppered raindrops against the windows.

  Of course I went to Joey’s room. I had to.

  It was fossilized in time. Like my room, it was only partially cleaned out. It was almost as though there was some plan in the future to have a bonfire of O-Hall, to get rid of everything we’d left behind.

  The beds were perfectly made. Joey was always so organized and neat. I could never be like that. One of the desks—it would have belonged to Joey’s roommate, Kevin—sat with its drawers gapped, with crumpled papers and half-empty spiral notebooks scattered over the surface, but Joey’s was neatly squared; so tidy. There was a pen and a pencil, perfectly lined up, lying parallel beside a yellow legal pad and a torn paperback copy of Roget’s Thesaurus.

  Tucked inside the front flap of the thesaurus was a bent photograph of Joey’s mother, father, and brother. The photo was one of those coax-our-waiter-into-taking-this-for-us jobs, where the three of them sat together at a table. They all looked lighter and younger than the people I’d seen in the headmaster’s office a day earlier.

  Joey was a list maker. It was one of the things that made him such a good team captain—his sense of organization. There was a list of things he needed to do, on the top sheet of the legal pad. It choked me up a little to see Joey’s writing, and to think about the kid who had sat here at this desk, holding a pencil and drawing perfect little boxes to check off the things he needed to get done.

  □ Calc – Review worksheet. Page 62: 5, 31 Page 91: 6, 7, 28, 43, 46

  □ AP Econ – Markets. Graph problems 7, 8, 10, page 48–49

  □ Do laundry for Monday.

  □ TELL RYAN DEAN!!!

  What the fuck?

  Tell me what, Joey?

  You can’t just fucking do that to me.

  And yes, Mrs. Kurtz always gave us too much Calc homework.

  But what did you need to tell me?

  I must have stood over Joey’s desk staring at his list for several minutes, just listening to the rain and playing back in my head everything that happened on the last day I saw Joey. Maybe he did tell me what he wanted to. Maybe it was nothing important, like he wanted to tell me to stop acting like such an ass or something like that. But he wouldn’t have written it down in that case, because Joey used to always tell me to stop being such an ass. It was like instinct for Joey Cosentino.

  I ran my fingers over the letters and felt how the point of Joey’s pencil had furrowed the page.

  It made me very sad.

  I decided I was going to tear the sheet off and take it with me, no matter what—even if I had to wait for the rain to stop so I could carry his note back without getting it wet. And then I thought, what if I have to stay in O-Hall all night, waiting? That would mean serious trouble with the Abernathy for not coming home two nights in a row. I’d need to have a serious how-to-cover-your-roommate’s-ass discussion with the little worm.

  I found a rumpled school shirt, and a Pine Mountain necktie wadded up on the floor of Joey’s closet. I picked them up. They had to have belonged to Joey; and I wondered why anyone would have just left them there. And then I wondered why anyone wouldn’t have just left them there. His shirt would probably just about fit me too, and Joey wouldn’t mind. I decided I’d take his shirt and tie back with me too, but not the sack of dirty laundry someone had left in the back of the dark closet. I shook my head at the thought of even looking inside. That would be too weird.

  And just as I’d slipped Joey’s folded to-do list into the pocket on his shirt, I heard something moving around below me, on the lower floor of O-Hall. Something down there got knocked over, and then I heard a scuffling, scooting sound.

  No.

  This couldn’t really be happening, could it?

  It was a trip back through every haunted-house nightmare I’d ever had after being banished here to O-Hall, and why did these things only ever seem to happen to me?

  I shook it off. It was the rain or something, right? I rolled Joey’s clothes up and stuffed them inside his pillowcase—just like any half-naked cat burglar would do—and then I went back into the hall.

  I heard something moving down there again.

  I was all kinds of stupid that day. I’m convinced of it. I couldn’t stop my feet leading me along the creaking floorboards of the hallway toward the door
at the top of the stairwell that would take me down.

  I went in.

  Click! I turned on the light.

  Kuh-chunk! The door swung shut and latched behind me.

  Wait. I pushed back against the door. It had been locked from the boys’ floor side.

  The door was locked and I was stuck in the stairwell down to the girls’ floor.

  Where something was moving around on the other side of the door.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  I PANICKED. I COULDN’T BREATHE.

  The stairwell was a vacuum chamber and all the air was gone.

  Scritch scritch! went the thing on the other side of the door.

  I got dizzy. My knees buckled, and I went down.

  • • •

  I don’t know how long I was passed out on the floor at the bottom of the stairs. I woke up because I was shivering so hard, my right knee performed a thumping firing-squad drumroll on the floor.

  The upstairs door to the boys’ floor was locked, so, as terrible as it was, I knew that the only way I’d get out of O-Hall would be if I sucked it up and walked through the girls’ floor and out the front door.

  Easy, right? Well, assuming I wasn’t locked inside the stairwell from both sides.

  But something—or someone—was out there.

  I looked through the narrow window onto the hallway of the girls’ floor, but it was too dark to see anything with the entire lower level boarded up. So I held my breath and pressed an ear against the door.

  Nothing.

  Nothing except the voices inside my own head.

  RYAN DEAN WEST 2: So, are you planning on spending the night here, or what?

  RYAN DEAN WEST 1: Shut up. I don’t see you volunteering to go out there.

  RYAN DEAN WEST 2: Oh yeah, good one. You’re a mess, kid.

  RYAN DEAN WEST 1: What do you know about anything?

  RYAN DEAN WEST 2: I know enough to tell you that you need to get help, Ryan Dean. I know enough to say that sometimes you just can’t fix things on your own. And I know a few more things too.