Winger: Chapters 42–63

It was like he was deaf or something, because he never showed the slightest expression even when the songs got completely vulgar.

So, a few minutes before kickoff, we would all take to our knees in a circle and put our arms around each other, and Kevin Cantrell would stand over us and give thanks for the day and for the other team that was there to play with us, and for being able to play the greatest sport that was ever created, and hope that everyone, even our opponents, would be safe and have fun.

Of course I was crushed, but I knew better than to say anything or try to plead with Coach. That’s just something you never do on the sideline of a game.

That’s how numbers work in rugby: a player doesn’t pick his number, his position on the team determines that, and it’s something that never gets messed with.

So it went that way, scoreless, for almost the entire thirty-five-minute half, and then finally JP got called on a dangerous tackle and Sacred Heart scored a penalty kick just as the half ended, to go up 3-0.

And unlike other sports, there are no substitutions where a player can go out and come back in, which, I think, is one of the reasons the football team hated us so much—because rugby players had to be in such better condition than players in just about any other sport.

I centered the ball right between the posts and put it down to score a try, and I did think about Annie as soon as I got to my feet. Seanie was our team’s kicker, and he scored the conversion, so PM went up 7-3.

During the ensuing and second awkward silence, I spend a moment seriously thinking about killing myself.

I just pinned him down and tried to not get his blood all over my dwindling supply of school shirts, and Chas caught up to us and kicked the kid twice in the ribs.

Seanie sat beside JP, but JP wasn’t talking. He just stared out the window, brooding, until he fell to sleep.

That Band-Aid, which had become a symbol of my life, was really starting to bug me.

Confronting Chas Becker with the truth was the surest way to get him to think I was lying.

Then I gave Seanie a dirty look and nonchalantly scratched the
bridge of my nose with my middle finger.

Megan got this testy and challenging look on her face—definitely the very, very bad policewoman look.

The TSA guy just placed my boarding pass on top of my thoroughly ransacked and inside-out school clothes and said, “Sorry, Mr. West."

I’m the part of your subconscious that actually (a) knows the right thing to do and (b) is not perverted.

“Tell us if we’re right. She says you are the smartest boy in the school, you’re a great athlete, and you made the varsity rugby team when you were in tenth grade. And she told us you are the best-looking boy at school too.”

Annie coughed again, no doubt choking on the thought of bringing a delinquent to Bainbridge Island for the weekend.

We drove up a long driveway through trees to the garage, and then walked a pathway through gardens that had been decorated with strange and beautiful metal and enamel sculp­tures of fish, animals, and native totems.

Annie must have realized what she was doing (unlike Pedro, she could control the involuntary impulse to conjugate with Ryan Dean West), because she immediately let go like my hand was a red-hot thing that gets . . . red . . . hot.

Annie must have realized what she was doing (unlike Pedro, she could control the involuntary impulse to conjugate with Ryan Dean West), because she immediately let go like my hand was a red-hot thing that gets . . . red . . . hot.

And why is it, I thought, that whenever boys consider such measures— despite their justifiability—we always get a bit scared, morose, and angsty?

“Wow,” I said, but my voice cracked like a kid who suddenly realized he was alone inside the bedroom of the girl he loved, which made sense, considering the oppressive reality of my surrounding conditions.

She moved past one o f the thick steel girders that supported the roof.

And there was no interruption from the visually abrasive Mrs. Singer; there was nothing in the entire universe except for me and Annie finally getting something over with that had been making us both crazy for so long.

I’m not really sure if I was handling the opportunity in the most advantageous manner.

All I knew was that I wished I’d grow another two inches by the next morning so we’d be required to do it over again, and maybe next go-round, I’d be all suave and debonair and stuff, and make witty comments instead of just gurgling like a goldfish on a linoleum floor.

All I knew was that I wished I’d grow another two inches by the next morning so we’d be required to do it over again, and maybe next go-round, I’d be all suave and debonair and stuff, and make witty comments instead of just gurgling like a goldfish on a linoleum floor.

And Doc Mom, being the compassionate therapist that she is, laughed until she had tears in her eyes (just like Annie does) and said that was one of the funniest stories she’d ever heard.

And the next morning when I woke up, it was drizzling rain, and I was so depressed about having to leave Bainbridge Island and fly back to Oregon later that day that I seriously felt like I could cry.

But just feeling the nylon of my running shorts against my shriveling skin, I guess, somehow reminded me that I had a plane to catch later that day, and Calculus homework, and I was supposed to be reading In Our Time and I’d been neglecting all that stuff because I was too busy thinking I was some kind of free and wild boy ever since Friday afternoon.

It was ironic that I’d read “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” the second story in the Hemingway book, because I thought it was all about how guys and girls don’t understand each other at all.

Unfortunately, it was a little too loud, and Annie wasn’t out of earshot on her watershopping trip, so she gave me the patented-Annie-Altman-that-will-never-happen-again look.

I envied Joey. He hadn’t shaved since Friday morning, and he had some pretty impressive stubble going.

No matter what Joey said, I wasn’t ever going to be able to stop thinking of Megan Renshaw as smoking hot, and in some ways she was more accessible to me than Annie.

Seeing her coming off the plane and realizing I was jealous of Chas did make me feel terrible about the whole situation.

But, for a two-hour car ride, my legs would be simultaneously touching the legs of Megan Renshaw and Annie Altman, and I fully believed that would precipitate the all-time lowest blood-pressure reading north of Ryan Dean Westworld’s metal-detector-tripping equator.

I think I actually began hyperventilating, creating my own microclimate in the backseat, where it was as humid as a rain forest in the Amazon.

I sneezed. I suddenly felt terrible. Not terrible because of how much of a loser I was, but terrible because it dawned on me exactly why I was so sweaty and my voice wasn’t working.

...a guy can hallucinate, can’t he?