Stand-Off

  To my friend and editor, David Gale

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THERE ARE A MILLION THINGS that almost caused Winger to never happen, which naturally would have prevented Stand-Off from ever reaching the hands of readers as well. Fuck you, million things.

  When Winger and I found a home at Simon & Schuster, Ryan Dean West and I had an awful lot of growing up to do. I still don’t know if I look at myself as a “real writer,” but I’m getting closer to that place, with much gratitude to all the people who have patiently supported and believed in my work along the way.

  And as far as patience and kindness are concerned, you’d be hard pressed to find a man with a larger capacity for these qualities than David Gale, my editor, to whom I dedicate this book. Thank you, David.

  Simon & Schuster’s offices are in one of those monstrously big Manhattan skyscrapers. It would take hundreds of pages to list all the people there who worked on Ryan Dean West’s team, but I am so grateful to every one of you. The first time I met Justin Chanda, just after he’d read Winger, he took me aside and told me how much he loved the book. That encouragement had such an impact on me, but it still didn’t make me quite feel like a “real writer.” Thank you, Justin. Lucy Ruth Cummins, who has designed all my covers at Simon & Schuster, is such a bright, glowing soul with an amazing power to give off smiles no matter what kind of mood you’re in. Thank you, Lucy, for just being you. And Liz Kossnar put so much work into Stand-Off for us, despite having to exercise her patience due to how slow I was in finally turning it in.

  But I had a lot of fun writing it. I’m going to miss all that private time I got to spend with Ryan Dean West, Nico, and Sam Abernathy, whom I now have to set free and allow to go off on their own.

  I also need to thank all the readers who fell in love with Winger. Talk about patience! It was a long haul between Winger and Stand-Off, and you managed to hang in there. I hope this is an adequate payoff for your efforts.

  As always, great thanks to my friend and agent Michael Bourret. I know I don’t bother you as much as I should, but I’m really working on being more clingy and high-maintenance. Hopefully, uncontrollable weeping will occur.

  And finally, I could never do any of this if my wife Jocelyn, son Trevin, and daughter Chiara ever refused to put up with me. I sometimes marvel at their tolerance, and I love them very much.

  amicus certus in re incerta temporum cernitur

  PART ONE:

  the abernathy

  PROLOGUE

  EVERYONE KEPT TELLING ME, “YOU need to draw again, Ryan Dean. You need to draw. . . .”

  So I did.

  I started drawing again in the summer before Annie and I went back to Pine Mountain for our senior year. The problem is, I’m pretty sure I didn’t draw what everyone expected.

  Let me explain.

  Annie Altman, the most beautiful and together girl on the planet, an undeniable five out of five Swiss Army knives on the Ryan Dean West If-You-Could-Only-Have-One-Thing-When-You’re-Stranded-with-Nothing-Not-Even-Your-Clothes-on-a-Deserted-Island-What-Would-It-Be Scale, happened to be on an island with me, but it wasn’t deserted, so decency laws required us at the very least to have our swimsuits on. And I didn’t have a Swiss Army knife either, which would have come in handy because neither one of us remembered to put any utensils in our picnic basket, so we had to eat my mom’s potato salad with our fingers, which—ugh!—I thought was kind of sexy when our fingers touched in the cold mayonnaisey mush. But at least I had Annie, and we both had our swimsuits, and it was August, on one of those rare crystal-clear windless afternoons in Boston Harbor.

  We spent the day at the beach on Spectacle Island, lying next to each other on a blanket in the sand. Naturally, I couldn’t help but think about how there was only one thin article of clothing on my body; and how Annie and I were so close, our hands and feet touched, and I could feel her electricity sending sparks right up through me.

  But I couldn’t help thinking about a lot of other things too: about going back to Pine Mountain in a week, about how tough last year had been on me, and about the likely impossibility of me surviving my senior year there.

  Annie put her hand on my belly and rubbed.

  “You have to know how crazy that makes me, Annie.”

  “I do?”

  “In about five seconds, I don’t think I’ll be held legally responsible for my actions.”

  Annie laughed. “Calm down, Ryan Dean. I was only trying to get the potato salad smell off my fingers.”

  “Oh. Nice. Ryan Dean West, fifteen-year-old human napkin.”

  Annie lived on Bainbridge Island, in Washington. It meant a lot that her parents trusted us enough to let her come to Boston to spend the last whole week of summer vacation with me before we had to report back to Pine Mountain Academy. But it wasn’t like anything was going to happen, right? Annie was seventeen, and so beautiful. And I was just a fifteen-year-old napkin-boy who couldn’t shake the feeling that something terrible was going to come out of nowhere and ruin everything for me again and again.

  Drawing, for me, was like Pine Mountain Academy: I wanted to go back to it, and I also didn’t want to go back.

  CHAPTER ONE

  OKAY. YOU KNOW HOW WHEN you’re a senior in high school, and you officially know absolutely everything about everything and no one can tell you different, but on the other hand, at the same time, you’re dumber than a poorly translated instruction manual for a spoon?

  Yeah. That was pretty much me, all at the same time, the only fifteen-year-old boy to ever be in twelfth grade at Pine Mountain Academy.

  When you’re a senior, you’re supposed to walk around with your chest out and your shoulders back because it’s like you own the place, right? I didn’t feel that way. In fact, from the first day I got back to Pine Mountain, I was quietly considering flunking out of all my classes so I wouldn’t have to move on with my life and be a sixteen-year-old grown-up.

  What a bunch of bullshit that would undoubtedly be.

  And, speaking of bullshit, the day I came back to Pine Mountain Academy to check in and register, I learned that I would be rooming—in a double-single room no less—with some random kid I didn’t even know. It had somehow failed to sink in to my soiled-napkin brain that my last year’s roommates, Chas Becker and Kevin Cantrell, had graduated from Pine Mountain and moved on to the fertile breeding grounds of adulthood, leaving me roommateless, condemned to a single-size room with two beds in it, and matched up with Joe Randomkid, whom I’d already pictured as some bloated, tobacco-chewing, overalls-wearing midwesterner who was missing half a finger from a lawn-mowing or wheat-threshing accident and owned a vast collection of ’70s porn mags (since we weren’t allowed to access the Internet at PM and look at real porn like most teenagers do).

  Not that I look at porn, like most normal teenagers. I’m not like that.

  But nine-and-a-half-fingered Joe Randomkid would be exactly like that, I decided.

  So by the time I turned the key on my all-new, 130-square-foot boys’ dorm prison cell with two twin beds, two coffin-size closets, and matching elementary-school-kid-style desks with identical 40-watt desk lamps, I already deeply hated Joe Randomkid and, at the same time, had no idea in the world who he was.

  Even before I fully opened the door on our bottom-floor-which-is-usually-only-reserved-for-freshmen dorm room, I had pretty much everything about Joe Randomkid all figured out.

  JOE RANDOMKID RUINS TWELFTH GRADE: A PLAY BY RYAN DEAN WEST

  SCENE: A very small ground-floor room in the boys’ dorm at Pine Mountain Academy, a prestigious prep school for future deviants and white-collar criminals, located in the Cascades of Oregon. joe randomkid, a chubby and pale redhead from Nebraska with a stalk of straw pinched between his lips, is lyi
ng with his hands behind his head, dressed in overalls (with no shirt underneath the bib) and work boots, on one of the two prison-size twin beds, as ryan dean west, a skinny, Bostonian, rugby-playing fifteen-year-old upperclassman, enters the room from the outer hallway.

  JOE RANDOMKID: Howdy! The name’s Joe. Joe Randomkid. I’m from Nebraska, and my pa’s a hog farmer. We have, I reckon, close to twenty-two-hundred hogs on the farm, give or take a few depending on how hungry me and my brothers are. I have ten brothers! And no sisters! Can you imagine that? Ten of them! Their names are Billy, Wayne, Charlie, Alvin, Edmund, Donny, Timothy, Michael, Eugene, and Barry, and then there’s me, Joe. How come I ain’t ever seen you around? Are you a new kid? I been here every year since ninth grade, but you look like you’re just a kid who can’t possibly be old enough to be in twelfth grade. What sport do you play? Me? I’m on the bowling team. Got a two-oh-four average, which is number one in the state in Nebraska and Oregon for twelfth-grade boys. I bet being all skinny like that, you’re on swim team or maybe gymnastics. Or do you cheer? Are you one of those boy cheerleaders? I don’t think there’s nothing wrong with that at all. Cheerleading’s probably more of a sport than NASCAR is anyhow. Who’s your favorite driver, by the way? Are you one of them ones who get to pick up the girls and spin them around over your head like that? If I ever did that, I couldn’t help but look up their skirts, am I right? Or do you not like girls and stuff? ’Cause if you don’t, that’s okay too. I realize it takes all kinds. All kinds. And maybe you’re from California, after all.

  RYAN DEAN WEST: (Ryan Dean West walks across the room and looks out the window.) Now I know why they put me on the ground floor.

  The End

  Mom and Dad had helped me move in this time. It was weird. All the other times they’d dropped me off at Pine Mountain, it was like they couldn’t possibly leave fast enough.

  Dad carried in my two plastic totes. One of them contained all my clothes and boy stuff—you know, deodorant and the razor Dad sent me last fall that was still as unnecessary as ever—and the other had school supplies, some brand new bedsheets, and a microwave oven, which I had no idea why they’d insisted I bring along. I lugged in the big canvas duffel bag filled with all my rugby gear that was soon to be packed away in my locker over at the sports complex.

  I wanted to play rugby again almost as much as I wanted to see Annie, whom I hadn’t seen since she left Boston for Seattle five days before.

  And—ugh!—Mom cried when she put my new sheets on the exceedingly gross, slept-on-countless-times-before, yellowing boys’ dorm twin-size fucking mattress, and I just stood there, helplessly giving my dad a what-the-fuck look. He shrugged.

  At home in Boston, I had a big bed. I’m not sure where my Boston bed fit in on the hierarchy of royalty—you know, queens and kings and such—but it was easily twice as big as a twin, if this thing even was an actual twin. It was probably a preemie or something—the afterbirth of a twin. So we’d had to stop at a department store in this little town called Bannock, which is about twenty minutes from Pine Mountain, to get some sheets, and the only ones they had that would fit my dorm bed following the incoming rush of PM brats were pink flannel and decorated with a winged unicorn who, according to the inscription beneath her glinting hooves, was named Princess Snugglewarm.

  Yeah. It was going to be a great year, wasn’t it?

  “Why are you crying, Mom? Don’t worry about the unicorns. We can hide them beneath the blanket. I checked. It only has Princess Snugglewarm on one side, so we can flip it over so it only looks a little gay,” I said.

  Mom sniffled. “Oh, Ryan Dean. It’s not that, baby. There’s only so many more times left in our lives when I’ll be able to put sheets on your bed and tuck you in.”

  This coming from the woman who wept when she bought me a box of condoms because she actually thought Annie and I were having sex—like that was ever going to happen—when I was fourteen.

  It was hopeless.

  And not only do horses with big fucking spikes coming out of their heads scare me, but I hate flannel sheets besides.

  CHAPTER TWO

  JOE RANDOMKID TURNED OUT TO be named Sam Abernathy.

  It had to be a fake name. Nobody in the world could possibly be named Sam Abernathy.

  I realized that every time I’d been dropped off for the start of school at Pine Mountain Academy, there came the predictable and awful dread of wanting my parents to just get the hell out of there so I could mope for a while in the quiet of my mold-and-disinfectant-smelling room. And each time, I’d wonder why in the name of hell I was here to begin with, and convince myself that I was not going to be able to make it through an entire school year on my own, alone.

  That’s what I was doing: lying on my little pink bed in my ID-photo school tie, button-down shirt, and creased slacks, moping and frightening myself with visions of a dreadful future here, when Sam Abernathy—well, to be honest, it was Sam and the entire fucking Abernathy clan—knocked on my dorm room’s door.

  And who knocks, anyway? You don’t knock on the door to your own dorm room. It wasn’t like they didn’t give Sam Abernathy a key to Princess Snugglewarm’s 130-square-foot empire.

  So, thinking it was someone else, and not my new roommate, Joe Randomkid, I ignored the knock and resumed my pout session.

  Thirty seconds later: knock knock knock!

  For just a minute, I thought that maybe it was Annie. But there was no way Annie Altman would ever break a rule like no-girls-allowed-in-the-boys’-dorm at Pine Mountain Academy, even if it would have been a highly combustible five out of five propane tanks in a campfire on the Ryan Dean West Scale of Hot Things You Are Never Supposed to Do.

  Ugh! I wanted to go home already, and I wanted Annie, too. And I felt like such a pathetic loser for forgetting to register my dorm preference and ending up in a ground-floor double with someone who undoubtedly was a match in every degree to my colossal loserdom.

  Knock knock knock!

  “Go away.”

  Through the door came a very soft voice that could easily have belonged to one of Princess Snugglewarm’s loyal subjects—maybe a royal eunuch or something.

  “Uh. But I’m supposed to live here.”

  “Then why the fuck are you knocking?”

  Okay. To be honest, I didn’t say “fuck.” I never cuss out loud. Well, I can’t say never, but, really, it’s like almost never. And it didn’t happen that day before the start of school as I lay on my less-than-twin-size Princess Snugglewarm bed, pouting and listening to Joe Randomkid, a.k.a. Sam Abernathy, timidly and patiently knocking on his own goddamned front door.

  Click. Squeak. Creak.

  The door cracked open, just about two inches. I saw a flash of a Pine Mountain necktie and an eyeball. It was human, I’m pretty sure. Then the door closed again, and I heard this:

  TIMID VOICE IN THE HALLWAY: He . . . he’s in bed.

  MAN’S VOICE IN THE HALLWAY: Maybe we should wait out here for a while.

  WOMAN’S VOICE IN THE HALLWAY: What’s he doing?

  TIMID VOICE IN THE HALLWAY: I don’t know. I didn’t really look. All I know is he’s in bed.

  LITTLE BOY’S VOICE IN THE HALLWAY: Is he naked?

  LITTLE GIRL’S VOICE IN THE HALLWAY: Eww. Boys are so gross.

  WOMAN’S VOICE IN THE HALLWAY: Maybe letting Sam room with a twelfth-grader, even if he is only fifteen, wasn’t such a good idea after all, Dave.

  MAN’S VOICE IN THE HALLWAY: Honey, why don’t you take Evie out to the car? The boys and I can wait here till Sam’s roommate wakes up or puts some clothes on or whatever.

  And, at precisely that moment, I was wondering if I could figure out a way to turn a microwave oven into a bomb.

  You can do that, right? If anyone would know how to turn a microwave oven into an explosive, it would be my friend Seanie Flaherty, assuming he was still my friend after the separation of summer vacation, and after the fights I’d gotten into last year with JP Tureau, who was Sean
ie’s roommate and my decidedly ex-friend.

  I pulled the door open.

  “I’m not naked, and I wasn’t asleep, and it’s your room, so I’m assuming you probably possess your very own key, which is why you will never be allowed to knock again.”

  I’ll admit I was a little edgy, and the Abernathy clan looked as though I’d slapped each one of them across the face with a dead cod or something. They were all so nice looking, like if they had wings, you would swear you were looking at a family of angels: father, mother, two angelic, big-eyed, blond-headed sons, one of whom was dressed in a perfect Pine Mountain boy’s uniform, and a little daughter who looked like the poster child for all things pure and scented of baby powder.

  Mr. Abernathy, being the brave cod-slapped angel that he was, forced a contrived smile at me and said, “Sam, this must be your roommate, Ryan.”

  To be honest, I didn’t know where to begin. Initially, I wanted to launch into a scolding tirade about my name not being goddamned Ryan, that it was Ryan Dean and I hated it when people took it upon themselves to assume the appropriateness of an abbreviation, but I was momentarily overcome by the realization that Sam Abernathy—Joe Randomkid—was only twelve years old.

  And he was going to be my roommate this year.

  Princess Snugglewarm, save me!

  CHAPTER THREE

  I FOUND OUT THAT THE idea behind pairing me up for the year with Sam Abernathy came from the headmaster himself, Mr. Lavoie, and the school psychologist, Mrs. Dvorak. The Abernathy Tabernacle Choir was concerned about having their supergenius kid start Pine Mountain at the tender age of twelve, so Mr. Lavoie and Mrs. Dvorak thought it would be a perfect plan to room the boy up with the only other person in the history of Pine Mountain Academy who’d ever done such a ridiculous thing: a really nice, comic-drawing, supersmart, rugby-player boy from Boston named Ryan Dean West, who was a senior, and only fifteen years old.