Winger by Andrew Smith

toilets in the locker room.
    “What did they do to you when you lost?” JP asked.
    I tried to remember, but it seemed so grainy and unclear, like those films of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon.
    “Wait,” Seanie said. “If Joey was there, maybe it’s something you should talk about, like, with your dad.”
    “You’re a freak, Seanie,” I said. “They made me go downstairs and pee in the girls’ floor bathroom. And sing. And there’s no girls there, except for that—eew—Mrs. Singer.”
    “She is so freakin’ hot,” Seanie said. “Did she look at your wiener?”
    I had to stop. I doubled over laughing. And Seanie still didn’t even crack a smile.
    “I locked her out. She was pissed off. The guys pulled me out the window.”
    “So then,” Seanie said, emotionless, “did Joey look at your wiener?”
    “That’s messed up,” I said. “I like Joey. And he’s a hell of a fly half.”
    “Joey’s cool,” JP added.
    And Seanie yelled up to the sky, “Universal takeback! I am sorry, Joey! I will never, ever make fun of your gayness again!”
    Of course Joey, who was a senior, wouldn’t have been anywhere near the class, anyway.
    We had reached the turnaround spot and were heading back to the gym.
    JP asked, “What song did you sing?”
    “Proper Ranger.”
    “Oh. Nice.”
    Then Seanie and JP started singing it, and I had to join in, and some of the guys ahead of us heard it too, and the ones on the rugby team were singing up there right with us. But I didn’t tell Seanie and JP about the diarrhea spell, because I didn’t believe it was anything more than a sick coincidence—karma, kind of. It served me right for being stupid enough to get drunk in the first place.
    And I didn’t tell them about seeing Mrs. Singer staring at me from behind the door when I left for school, either.

CHAPTER TWELVE
     
    BY THE TIME I MADE it to calculus, I felt like the hangover/diarrhea spell was losing strength, but now I realized that I desperately needed to go back to sleep too. The only real sleep I had gotten the night before was when I dozed off before the game even started.
    I have never slept during a class, though, and I was honestly afraid that if I did, two horrible things would happen. First, I would have a dream about that witch downstairs (I had now convinced myself, after two more stops at the toilet— I must be caving in! I must have lost 30 percent of my skinny-bitch-ass body weight —that Mrs. Singer was an honest-to-God witch); and, second, I would get an extension on my sentence in O-Hall. After the night before, I realized that I needed to get out of there before Chas succeeded, as my friends warned me, at turning me into an asshole.
    When I thought about it, as inevitably I did, stumbling down the corridor toward the mind-numbing experience of 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. Eight of twelve of us were fighters: five football players, and Kevin, Chas, and Joey.
    Of all the guys you’d think would never get into a fight, you’d haveto pick Joey. I never asked him about it, but I figured it had to have something to do with him sticking up for himself when another guy was trying to start some shit. Probably.
    And, because Advanced Calculus was pretty much the end of the math highway (unless you took Statistics, which I planned to take in twelfth grade), the class had only eight students in it. I was the last one through the door.
    There were so many empty desks. I was overwhelmed by the pressure of choosing where to sit. And every single person in the goddamned room, even Mrs. Kurtz, the teacher, who was actually kind of hot in a bespectacled-Lois-Lane kind of way, seemed to be watching the Ryan Dean West Show , aware of the internal dialogue taking place in my headachey-hangovery-diarrhea-dehydrated head:
     
    RYAN DEAN WEST 1 : Sit in the very back of the