Winger: Chapters 19–41

“Ryan Dean, sometimes when boys take it upon themselves to look out for one another, there are unpleasant consequences.”

But I decided it was a good opportunity, early on in our life together, for me to see if I could actually climb out of bed without inspiring Chas to beat the crap out of me.

After not seeing her for two-and-a-half months over the summer, we’d already had two I’m-pissed-off-and-don’t-want-to-talk-to-you episodes, and that sucked.

And she was standing right there, inches away from me, in a black robe and her black hair tied back in a black scarf, looking like some kind of child-sacrificing Druid, or a bad illustration from an endless volume of Dickens; and for a moment, I was so startled, I just froze.

I couldn’t get comfortable, and I guess I was fidgeting a bit, convinced that Mrs. Singer had it in for me and was just slowly working on some weird method of killing me.

I had crossed over, tried to make myself so much the same as a guy like Chas Becker...as if those stupid behaviors could ever incite some magical evolution in the ape of Ryan Dean West and cause him to shed his tail and walk upright in Annie’s eyes.

As always, Annie looked totally hot, but so did Isabel in her rustic, more-facial-hair-than-Ryan-Dean-West-will-have-in-college kind of way (God! Why do I think that’s hot?).

It’s like jumping out of a plane. There’s no time-outs or do-overs, there’s just gravity. That, and lots of witnesses to see your chute collapse as your body plummets helplessly toward certain death.

It was a surreal comic of my life, and I pictured the worst possible outcome

After that, I didn’t have any idea what to say. I just sat there staring at her. I was so lost, I even thought about the Preamble to the Constitution. I, the people, am such a loser.

Yeah . . . in the weight room, we often have deep, philosophical conversations.

And the Megan part practically gave me an aneurysm when she put her ginger-lotion hand on my arm and said, with pleading and helpless eyes, “Will you help me, Ryan Dean? Please?”

So, thanks to Mrs. Kurtz’s facilitation, I had scored my second smoking-hot-girl date on just my second day of eleventh grade.

Well, to be absolutely honest, she actually just said, “Oh, hello. It’s you again,” but I wasn’t about to stand there and listen to her demonic incantations.

I imagined the ultrahot and impassioned Annie and Megan throwing a shower of blooms at my feet, and I’d pick one up, smell it, and clench it between my teeth.

“I always wear this stuff,” I said, trying to sound as confident and masculine as possible, considering the magnitude of my certain and fourteen-year-old wimposity.

But the thing is, everyone has that little part that’s outside the overlap of everyone else. And a lot of people zero in on that one little thing they can’t get over.

But I was still kind of afraid of Megan, and had no misconceptions as to who was holding the power in our quirky relationship.

One time, she even followed me out of class when I left for the bathroom, and we made out for about thirty nonstop and frenzied seconds in a drinking fountain alcove, and then she just left me there...

So of course it was next to impossible to concentrate at all on schoolwork while keeping meticulous tallies of my impure thoughts...

Just hearing her answer, so comfortably and honestly, caused yet another of my chronic blood-and-attention-migration episodes, and I nearly jerked my hand skyward for another high five with Seanie, but controlled the urge.

They were equal in size and strength, and Kevin just kept taking Chas down, inches before he could touch the ball into the circle, taunting Chas and pissing him off.

I don’t think I’d ever been so physically aggressive in my life, but all I could think about was JP and his smug I’m-taking-your-girlfriend-out announcement over lunch, and how Annie told me to get tough this year.

The physio was there, wrapping gauze and tape like a headband tightly around my pulsing head, over my left eye.

“You can’t get those sutures wet,” Coach said.
“They told me,” I answered. “Eighteen stitches.

If I’d gotten a concussion, I’d be off the roster for a long time.

And Coach M did not tolerate fighting among the team. He’d probably have to kick me off, and I probably deserved it.

Because once again, now that I was alone in the quiet beside the lake, all the anger and frustration over Annie and JP, and my possibly sitting out of the game, came swirling back through my aching head.

Chas appeared out of nowhere, standing right next to me like the tree I was about to be lynched from.

I squeaked like a doggie chew toy in Megan Renshaw’s unyielding pit bull teeth.

Images of my funeral again: both Annie and Megan looking so hot in black; Joey shaking his head woefully and thinking how he told me so; JP and Chas high-fiving each other in the back pew; Seanie installing a live-feed webcam in my undersize casket...

This was really going to be ugly, because I could quickly calculate the trajectory of his intended punch, and I estimated the point of impact would be somewhere between my tenth and eleventh stitches.

All I could do was hope my saddest possible stitched-up-lost-puppy-injury look might earn me some sympathy.

But that morning, our silence was ominous. Like a funeral.

My head, my back, my shoulders—I felt like a 142-pound sack of broken shards of glass.

I think the best thing for you to do to make yourself stronger and test your resolve is to make sure that we sleep as close to each other as possible this weekend.

Practice is always relaxed and fun the day before a game, especially in the rain. Coach would usually just talk about a game plan, then we’d play a fun little scrimmage, just so we could get all muddy.

The entire Ryan Dean West universe instantly collapsed to the size of a five-eighths-inch metal cleat stud, and everything I knew, everything I would ever know, got sucked into that pinpoint of agony.

And as I lay on my side, in the fetal position, hands clutching for what I could only imagine in my most horrific visions had been damaged beyond salvation, my teammates formed, for the second time in the past twenty-four hours, a mournful and morbidly fascinated circle around me.

And, all at once, I somehow instantly composed a haiku in my mind about how much I hated Seanie Flaherty, and, in a simultaneous flash of inspiration, derived a kind of mathematical, tautological formula about reality, that I could easily envision as a Venn diagram...