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you.”
    â€œI—”
    Here’s another thing about rugby that you might not know: Because the numbers determine the position assigned to a player, the jerseys come off and go back to the team at the end of every game, so getting one of the first fifteen (numbers sixteen to twenty-three are substitute players’ jerseys) was an important thing. Being moved around also meant you’d end up wearing a jersey that someone else had worn the last time it had been used in a game. Last year, after Kevin, one of our locks, was taken out of the season, Coach M didn’t let anyone else wear the number four jersey for the rest of theseason. And after Joey died, our replacement fly halves always wore the number twenty.
    But this was a new year, right? And things get put behind us, right?
    I stared out through the reinforced windows that looked from the coaches’ office onto the empty shower room, half expecting to see some dark dude wrapped in a cloak staring at me from behind a row of lockers.
    Coach M stood up and went to a bank of wire mesh shelves.
    I knew what he was doing. I seriously thought about leaving. Why was he doing this to me?
    â€œHere,” Coach M said. Then, very gently, he placed the number ten jersey on my lap.
    I picked it up and looked at it, turning it around. There was a grass stain over the right shoulder. It hadn’t been washed since the last time Joey wore it, which was on the day before Halloween last year.
    I could almost see Joey there in my hands. I could smell him in that jersey.
    I swallowed hard.
    Coach said, “You remember that last match Joey played? Against that team from California?”
    I looked back out at the empty locker room. It was so quiet in there, all I could hear was the splattering dribble where one of the showers hadn’tbeen turned off all the way. I was getting a little too choked up to be sitting here alone with Coach M, and all I could force myself to say was, “They were shitty, Coach.”
    â€œRyan Dean.” Coach M had a stern tone in his voice. We were never allowed to cuss in front of Coach M.
    â€œI apologize, Coach.” I handed the jersey back to him and said, “I can’t do this.”
    â€œNonsense,” Coach M told me. “It’s the best thing for you, and it’s the best thing for the team.”
    â€œSpotted John can do it,” I said.
    â€œAre you saying you’d like to play number eight?”
    I shook my head and bit my lip. Nothing could possibly be more ridiculous than asking me to play a position where you had to scare people and yell at them. Suddenly, dealing with a claustrophobe cooking-show addict didn’t seem so tough. I thought about leaving, just going back to my dorm room so I could pout and be alone and think about quitting everything again.
    â€œI’ll tell you what, Ryan Dean. If it makes a difference, and I believe it might, we won’t call you fly half. We’ll call you stand-off. I prefer the name for the number ten, anyway, because it really says what it is you do on the pitch—you stand off from the pack and you design the strategy for the squad to win.”
    Stand-off. I’d heard the name before. Old-school guys from the north used it instead of “fly half.” I couldn’t even think of “fly half”and not think of my friend Joey Cosentino, whose jersey I had just held in my hands.
    I stood up, a little wobbly.
    â€œI don’t know, Coach.”
    And I left it at that.

CHAPTER TWELVE
    I KNEW FOR CERTAIN I did not want to do it.
    But I was incapable of saying no to Coach M.
    So Ryan Dean West, fifteen-year-old Pine Mountain senior and human napkin, was trapped. And I walked away from the locker room in the dying light of evening while one of those heavy Pacific Northwest mists that is neither fog nor rain coated everything in gray. I could hear the sounds of all the kids gathering in the dining hall, and as I looked up at