by Andrew Smith
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.
CHAPTER EIGHT
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 a 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?”
“Go pee in the girls’ bathroom downstairs,” Joey reminded.
“Oh, yeah,” I said, “And sing, too.”
I don’t know exactly where I got the singing part from, but Chas, Joey, and Kevin weren’t about to stand in the way of my willingness to compound my idiocy.
“Come on,” Chas whispered, pushing me out the door. “And you better do it, ’cause we’re going to be following.”
“You guys are the best,” I said, and they all three whispered “Shhh!” as we made our way down the lightless hall to the stairwell.
And every step I took made me feel like a water balloon filled to the bursting point. I was convinced I would explode in a shower of pee and guts right there on the stairs. It hurt so much to move, but each foot forward brought me closer to relief.
I was sweating like a heroin smuggler at a border crossing when we cracked the door open onto the girl-less girls’ floor. I ice-skated in my socks down the dustless linoleum hallway. It felt nice under my feet, so nice I almost began laughing, but I wasn’t stupid enough to do that, yet. Chas, Joey, and Kevin made their way around the outside of the building. They instructed me to pull open the window once I’d gotten into the bathroom so they could help me get away if I needed to.
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br /> And I thought, no wonder I couldn’t remember my home phone number (but it still choked me up, nevertheless), because I drew a mental Ryan Dean West Brain-Capacity-Allocation Pie Chart, and it came out like this:
So there you go. It’s a miracle I didn’t forget to breathe.
I am such a loser.
I found the bathroom. When I got inside and shut the door, I reached over to flick on the lights, but the switch was on the opposite side of the door from the boys’ bathroom, and this gave me time to realize how stupid turning on the lights would actually have been.
But, drunk or not, at least I was smart enough to latch the door behind me.
And then I thought, Wow, this is a really nice bathroom, so clean and spotless, with nice clean curtains hanging across the row of shower stalls. It was so nice, I almost wanted to lie down on the cool, clean floor and take a nap. But I had to pee too bad. So I turned toward the wall opposite the showers and hurriedly unzipped.
The urinals were gone!
Oh, yeah.
So, standing there as I was, pulled halfway out of my pants, made me want to pee even worse. I literally almost began to cry. Then I heard a scraping at the window and ran over and unfastened the catches.
Chas lifted up the window and stuck his head inside.
My pants fell down around my ankles.
I pushed open a stall.
The goddamned toilet seat was down!
Too bad. I couldn’t slow down for such genteel considerations as raising a toilet seat (something for which I hadn’t been yelled at since I was about seven).
Sweet mother of God, it felt good to pee. And it wasn’t just peeing, it was something more: It was the God of Peeing, it was Zen archery, but with a stream of piss rather than a bow and arrow.
And it was so loud and musical sounding, which reminded me to start singing. Heck, I figured the stream wouldn’t likely slow down before dawn, anyway. So, while I am sure that the natural sound of Zen Peeing was, in itself, loud enough to roust Mrs. Singer, the girls’ floor resident counselor, from her sleep, my choice of song ensured the fact.
I began singing a rugby song called “Proper Ranger,” whose lyrics include some of the most tasteless imaginable descriptions of sex acts. And it doesn’t even rhyme very well, either, but some of those words just don’t have good rhyming matches, anyway. The thing about the song, though, is that if you are a rugby player and are present when another rugby player begins to sing it, you have to sing along . . . so, Chas, Joey, and Kevin all joined in at the appropriate time while I continued the liberation of my unstoppable torrent of pee.
And, Zen-like, everything came together at the end. I shook off, pulled my pants up (failing with the complexities of my zipper), the song finished (with words I won’t repeat here), and the very unhot Mrs. Singer began rattling the doorknob and trying to pound her way in.
“What are you doing in there?” she demanded through the door.
And I giggled, because I thought, That’s a dumb question. Who, within a hundred feet, door or not, couldn’t tell what I was doing in there?
Pound pound pound.
“Who’s in there?”
And Chas said, “Come on, Winger!”
And just as Chas and Kevin grabbed my wrists and pulled me through the window, I heard the exceedingly never-spent-a-fraction-of-a-minute-in-her-life-being-hot Mrs. Singer say through the door, “I am going to put a diarrhea spell on you.”
Well, I can’t be sure exactly, but it sounded like that was what she said to me.
I fell down, giggling, in a clump of ferns beneath the windowsill.
“Hey. Where are my shoes?” I asked. I studied my feet, where I had propped them up on the outside of the log-constructed O-Hall.
Yeah, I was ultrastupid.
“You weren’t wearing any, retard,” Chas whispered.
“Then why’d I come outside if I wasn’t wearing shoes?”
It was like I’d forgotten everything that had taken place in the past two hours and was willing to have a conversation about it so I could fill in the holes. I realized then that the Ryan Dean West Pie Chart of Brain Activity was an empty tin. Not even a crumb of crust left in that skull.
Thank God I had my teammates there to look after me.
Well, at least I had Chas, because Joey and Kevin had already climbed up the outer wall of O-Hall and squeezed back inside their window.
“Come on, Winger. We gotta go,” Chas said. He began climbing up the corner logs on the bottom floor and whispered over his shoulder, “I am not carrying you, so you better get moving now or your ass is toast.”
CHAPTER NINE
THE NEXT THING I CAN remember is thinking, What is that fucking noise?
Somehow, I had managed to get out of my clothes and under the sheets. So much for memory. And for a brief instant, a thought flashed of all those cheesy and predictable crime dramas where someone kills another someone and then doesn’t remember doing it. I thought I should check my hands for blood or something, but it felt like I’d left my arms in another room, in another state, or maybe on another planet.
Please make that goddamned noise go away.
The alarm clock was blaring. It was seven o’clock, the first day of school, and I was lying there twisted up in my bedding on the top bunk, alone in my O-Hall cell.
Chas was gone.
Maybe I killed Chas Becker.
The alarm clock would not shut up.
And when I sat up and tried to get my feet down off the bed, it felt like I left the inside part of my head, the invisible Ryan Dean West part, on the pillow next to me.
This wasn’t good.
I was almost about to start crying because the alarm clock wouldn’t leave me alone. I tried to remember what happened the night before, but everything seemed disjointed and out of sequence. I felt horrible. I somehow had convinced myself that everyone in the world had woken up to the news that Ryan Dean West had gotten drunk off one giant beer and had ruined his entire life in the span of about three hours.
By the time I could stand, it was 7:04. The alarm clock and my head were still buzzing.
Classes began in fifty-six minutes.
I finally got the alarm turned off, opened the door, and stumbled down the hallway toward the bathroom, wearing only my boxer shorts and one dirty pulled-down sock with bits of what looked like ferns on it, pie chart still empty, with no idea how I ended up like this. If I could have thought clearly enough at that moment to formulate a plan of action, I would certainly have killed myself on the spot.
I did not kill Chas Becker.
Chas was in the bathroom, wrapped in a towel, shaving. I saw him smirk at me in the mirror when I staggered through the door. I stood at the sink beside him, turned the water on cold, and held my face in front of the mirror with both of my hands propped on the tile countertop, elbows locked, like I was steadying myself on one of those godforsaken crab boats in the Bering Sea. And I don’t know why I turned the water on either, because I just stood there, looking horrified at my reflection in the mirror as Chas smirked and shaved and smirked and shaved.
“I think you can skip a shave today, Winger,” he said, and wiped some menthol-smelling shaving cream on my never-so-much-as-fuzzed cheek. And Chas just looked so normal, too, like he could do shit like that every night and it didn’t even affect him.
I suddenly felt very sick.
“Oooh, Winger partied too hard last night,” Chas said, and I heard some other voices laughing, but I really can’t say for sure who else was in there. Ghosts of dead teenage alcoholic former O-Hall inmates, probably. I pushed away from the sink, leaving the water running, and I thought, Why did I forget to put my face under that flow and drown myself? And then I thought, Oh yeah, because . . . I . . . need . . . a . . . toilet.
I stumbled past the row of shower stalls with their torn and moldy plastic curtains, and the bank of urinals opposite them, and I began to remember being in this place, but it was different, too.
I made it to a toilet stall and slammed the door shut. I hardly had time to pull my boxers down and sit, and that’s when it all came back to me, and I remembered Mrs. Singer’s cursing me.
A diarrhea spell.
You have got to be kidding me.
I knew it was just a weird coincidence—it had to be—but this really, really, sucked.
Welcome to the eleventh grade, loser.
As I stumbled out of the stall, my skin cold and sweaty, feeling like one of those eyeless white cave salamanders, Chas was there, still smirking, wiping his face, and watching me.
“Hey, asswing, you better hurry up if you want to have time to eat,” he said.
Asswing? That was a new one. Clever.
“Eat?”
“Yeah. You know. Breakfast. Eggs. Milk. Yogurt.”
Bastard. The yogurt part did it. Why the hell did he have to say yogurt?
I went back into the stall.
CHAPTER TEN
ALL THE BOYS IN O-HALL left before me. I’m sure they were enjoying their yogurt and talking about their classes, or about how Ryan Dean West got drunk last night and ruined his life.
Somehow, I managed to get myself dressed: gray socks, tan pants, white long-sleeved shirt, black and royal blue striped school tie, dark navy sweater vest, black shoes. And I thought, what a stupid waste of energy since period one was Conditioning 11M (that meant it was for eleventh-grade boys), and I’d just have to take all these stupid clothes off right away, but at PM you couldn’t walk anywhere on campus during the school day without being in the proper uniform.
I thought about going to see the doctor, because I had to make two more trips to the toilet before I was fully dressed, but I was afraid that the doctor would discover that I was a fourteen-year-old with booze in his system, and that was too scary for me to deal with. So I decided I’d have to be tough, like Annie told me, and suck it up, even if it felt like I was dying.