I FELT TORN, BUT I was thankful that some reasonable shred of my command center restrained me from blurting out something as horrendously dorky as Hey! I do know you! You’re Joey Cosentino’s family, and Joey was my best friend in the world and he saved my ass so many times from doing stupid things like blurting out a ridiculous and self-serving info-dump about myself in front of decent and loving human beings, which is why I’m not actually saying this right now, but only imagining how stupid I would feel if I did!
Or something.
But I did want to say something to the Cosentinos. To be honest, I wanted to tell them a lot of things. I desperately wished an opening would present itself, and when it didn’t, when Mr. Cosentino held the administrative center’s door open to let his wife and son—Joey’s brother!—out of the office, I just sat there with my clipboard and unfilled-out complaint form that I suddenly could not possibly care any less about, much less recall, who Sam Abernathy even was, with my mouth hanging open and eyes glazed over, looking like a Pekingese who’d been left too long inside a car on a sweltering summer afternoon.
Click.
The door shut behind them. They were gone.
Headmaster Lavoie looked at me.
“Were you waiting to see me, son?” Headmaster Lavoie asked.
“Uh.”
I glanced at the blank form pinched to my clipboard.
“I’m writing a piece for the school newspaper,” I squeaked. “I was wondering how to pronounce your name, sir.”
Headmaster Lavoie laughed.
Mrs. Knudson laughed.
It was all so fucking funny, wasn’t it?
I handed the clipboard back to Mrs. Knudson, mumbling something about changing my mind and throwing in an abbreviated apology to both of them for wasting their time. And, fully embarrassed for all kinds of reasons, I ducked out of Headmaster Unpronounceable-secret-name’s office and followed the departing Cosentino family to the school’s parking lot.
Of course, I had no idea what I might say to them, only that I felt an urgent need to let them know who I was before they left, because I was certain I’d never have a chance to speak with Joey’s parents and brother again.
I couldn’t let that happen.
So I dashed out into the parking lot just as Mr. Cosentino was getting into the driver’s seat of what I guessed could only be a rental car—because it was a red minivan, and there was no way I could picture anybody in Joey’s family driving a red minivan. I waved my arm and said something dumb like “Excuse me! Mr. Cosentino? Excuse me! Wait up!”
Which caught Joey’s dad’s attention, stopping him at his open van door. And when he looked back, I can only assume this is what he saw: He saw me, Ryan Dean West, waving my hand over my head like a dork and looking at him with pleading eyes. Then he probably saw me cutting between one of the first rows of diagonally parked cars. The car I jogged past happened to be Seanie Flaherty’s black off-road vehicle (I know, right? Now that Seanie was a senior, not only could he drive a car, but he was allowed to keep his own car here at Pine Mountain, and actually go places—like home on the weekends, since his family lived in Beaverton, to visit his vast pornography collection), and I couldn’t help but notice all the inappropriate bumper stickers Seanie had all over the back window, like the one that read RUGBY, BECAUSE YOU’RE ALREADY DRUNK! And I thought, Man, if Headmaster Whatever-that-dude’s-human-name-is ever notices this, he’s going to make Seanie take it off.
And then Mr. Cosentino probably saw the waving, cutting-between-the-cars dorky dude hook the toe of his right foot square into one of those goddamned concrete-turd thingies that like Headmaster Lavoie’s last name no human being knows what to call them, and that also separate rows of parking spots, and then lurch forward like the waving, cutting-between-the-cars dorky dude was running away from a German trench in World War I and just caught a Mauser round squarely between his shoulder blades.
I went down.
And while I was noticing the smell of asphalt and considering the acidic sting of a certainly road-rashed knee, I could only imagine the Cosentino family having an in-van conversation that went something like this: