Winger: The Toilet World–Chapter 18

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.

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

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.

I also never cuss, except in writing, and occasionally during silent prayer, so excuse me up front, because I can already tell I'm going to use the entire dictionary of cusswords when I tell the story of what happened to me and my friends during my eleventh-grade year at Pine Mountain.

But it’s not only a prestigious rich kids school; it’s also for rich kids who get in too much trouble because they’re alone and ignored while their parents are off being congressmen or investment bankers or professional athletes.

Chas was a friendless jerk who navigated the seas of high school with his rudder fixed on a steady course of intimidation and cruelty.

I leaned forward and put my hands on my suitcase. "Should I go to the registrar?"

And there was Chas Becker, pushing the door wide and squeezing past Farrow as he hefted two canvas duffels that looked like the things a coroner would use to cart away bodies, and dropped them with a thud! in the middle of the floor.

And then Chas, all six-foot-four inches and Mohawk-stripe of hair pointing him forward, stepped toward the bed, loomed over me like some giant animated tree, and said, “But you’re sitting on my bed, Winger. Don’t ever sit on my bed. You get tops.”

Annie Altman was going into eleventh grade too, which meant she was two full years older than me, so, most people would think there couldn’t possibly be anything between us beyond a noticeable degree of friendship, even if I did think she was smoking hot in an alluring and mature...kind of way.

It kind of made me feel all flustered and choked up when she told me that I might have to take a few lumps in order to gain the respect of the other inmates so they’d learn right away not to mess with Ryan Dean West.

In the unvoiced and universal language of psychopaths, a flipped-down light switch is like one of those symbol-sign thingies that would show a silhouette stick figure strangling the skinny silhouette stick figure of a fourteen-year-old.

And I thought, God, he's already going to start with the extortion.

He put both of his hands on the edge of my bed, and at that moment I felt like a parakeet—but a tough, stand-up-for-yourself variety of parakeet—in a stare-down with a saltwater crocodile.

I don’t know if the choking or unconsciousness urge was stronger at that point, but I survived my first private, witness-free encounter with the one guy who I was convinced would end up trying his hardest to thoroughly ruin my life just before killing me sometime during my eleventh-grade year at Pine Mountain.

One of the things about rugby that's an inescapable tradition is that everyone on the team has to sing, and everyone also gets a nickname.

It was usually innocuous and embarrassing stuff, like the time they made Joey Cosentino run around the rugby pitch naked in the middle of the night, and then, when he snuck back into the room, they made him do it again because he accidentally ran counterclockwise, something the team never allowed; or the time they made Kevin Cantrell swim across Pine Mountain Lake in his boxers (also in the middle of the night).

So I set off, alone, already feeling weak and small and sorry for myself when I swore I wasn’t going to be any of those things this year, on the narrow and kind-of-Ansel-Adamsish trail along the lake toward Opportunity Hall, the leaking, dilapidated, and lonely two- story log building that at one time was the only housing structure on this entire campus.

“Not a mark on me,” I said. “I was scared about nothing. He was
kind of nice to me, in an edgy and predatory sort of way.”

“Aww,” she said. “What a cute boy.”
Okay, I’ll be honest. I think she actually said “little boy,” but it was so traumatizing to hear that I may have blocked it out.

If I just stopped there, turned around, and followed along with her, that would make me look pathetic and wimpy.

I had serious doubts about my ability to pull off the transition from little boy to something else, something less insignificant—if “less insignificant” is actually a combination of descriptors that doesn’t cause some kind of literary black hole.

My legs burned, but I had to get even with her somehow, to try and salvage the last day of summer, and the last wimpy shreds of my little-boy ego.

“It’s not easy getting all this going. Every day, all over the world, countless men endure the pain and humiliation of laser treatments and waxing to achieve a body like this. It really is a burden.” I flexed.

Not one of us had a girlfriend, and we all recognized how unattainable—and hot—Annie Altman was.

What if it stunted my growth?

I needed to pee so bad, I sat rocking back and forth in a near-catatonic state...

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.

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...

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).

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.

When I thought about it, as inevitably I did, stumbling down the corridor toward the mind-numbing experience o f Calculus, I figured out that most of the guys in O-Hall except for me (the cell-phone hacker), and three compulsive class ditchers, were in Opportunity Hall for fighting.

It just proved that everyone was right about Seanie being a stalker. Why would he be so obsessed as to find out exactly where I sat in my classes? He probably kept little stalker charts and notebooks on everyone he knew.

The top of the page had been decorated with a rainbow. Beneath it were two crudely drawn stick figures holding hands. Arrows pointed to each of them from identifying names: “Winger” on one side and “Joey” on the other.

Scarcely twenty-four hours had passed since my parents had abandoned me here, and already my life was spiraling out of control.

I figured there was a sort of predictable pattern to a football-player-versus-rugby-player exchange that went something like this: The football player fires a put-down he’d probably been thinking about all day; then the rugby player comes up with an even more-scathing comeback and laughs; then the football player, who can only think of one thing to say and nothing else, says something about wanting to fight and walks away.

And just as Joey was making a fist, Nick was circling behind him, and Casey was in the process of throwing the first punch, I launched myself, head up and shoulder down, right into Casey’s knees and wrapped my arms around his legs, driving him, crashing, to the ground.

Then I noticed my chest was covered in blood and my unbuttoned, once-white school uniform shirt was splattered with red.

I wished that I could also find “no better occupation than to look down into the garden” beneath my window, but I had, in such a short time, gotten myself so occupied with crap that I lay there convinced there was no way I would make it through my eleventh-grade year.

In true Ryan Dean West fashion, I drew a Venn diagram on the note, trying to explain to her something about myself, the little boy, hoping that maybe she would realize what I thought was so obvious about the people we deal with, who are all around us, everywhere and every day.