Read Stand-Off for Free Online

right shin, and slid into bed. Okay, two things: First, our dorm room looked like a bomb had gone off, which made me feel strangely satisfied, and second, there was something to be said for flannel Princess Snugglewarm sheets, considering that I was going to bed inside a fucking meat locker.
    â€œIs it okay if I watch TV?” Sam’s little voice drifted across the wreckage.
    I rolled over and faced the wall. I was so not-tired, and I was convinced I would lie there for hours seething at the Abernathy.
    I waved a dismissive hand in the icy air between us.
    â€œAs long as you promise not to talk to me.”
    The silence—well, with the exception of something about roastingBrussels sprouts with cherries—lasted for a whopping fifteen seconds.
    â€œDon’t you have any pj’s?”
    I sighed. Fog. “This is high school. Grow up.”
    â€œOh. So, in high school boys don’t wear pajamas, and you also don’t brush your teeth before going to bed?”
    The only person I had ever punched in my life was JP Tureau. Sam Abernathy was pretty small, and, like I said, he was cute enough to be his own Internet meme, but I can’t begin to express how much I wanted to punch the kid at that moment. And Mom would be so mad at me if she knew I skipped brushing my teeth.
    I storm-limped across the room to the cabinet-size bathroom, which didn’t have a bath—unless you were the size of an Abernathy, in which case the sink would do.
    Brush. Spit. Rinse. Spit. Back to bed.
    Thank you, Sam Abernathy, for being my dental hygiene conscience.
    The program had moved on to something about making a roux. I had morbid thoughts of cooking the baby marsupial from Winnie the Pooh .
    â€œI have microwave popcorn.”
    NOOOO!!!!!
    I said nothing.
    Thirty seconds of silence, during which time my blood pressure elevated to Himalayan altitudes.
    â€œWould it be okay if I used your microwave oven, Ryan Dean?”
    But I endured.
    I lay there, refusing to speak to the Abernathy, listening to the psychedelic mix tape of microwave corn explosions layered over an explanation of Moroccan carrot ribbons with black lentils, steeling myself for what was undoubtedly going to be the longest night of my life.
    You know how when you’re lying there, thinking about methods you might use for falsifying your own disappearance and assuming a new identity, and you’re trying to not pay attention to the other person in the room who is responsible for your disappearance fantasy, so it is inevitably all you do—pay attention to that one thing that is giving you a severe fight or flight crisis? Yeah. That.
    So Sam Abernathy and his soccer ball pajamas stood on my half of the empire (Yeah . . . I’m like that: his half/my half. Deal with it.) and his little face lit up in pulses of golden light as his bag of microwave fucking popcorn spun around and around, just inches from my bare feet, which I had to stick over the end of my child-size goddamned bed.
    â€œThat looks like it hurts,” Sam Abernathy, obviously ogling my naked right shin, told me.
    That was creepy.
    I curled up into a fetal position beneath my unicorns so the Abernathy would stop examining me.
    Then he scampered back over to his bed and sat there in the glowof the Cooking Channel and played a dental symphony that sounded like a beaver clearing a forest while Sam Abernathy ate his popcorn.
    Okay. So, you know that moment when you’re just at the balancing point between consciousness (agony and awareness of the proximity of a masticating Abernathy) and sleep (pure unaware bliss), and you’re just about to fall, fall, fall . . .
    â€œI have really bad claustrophobia.”
    What the holy hell?
    I jerked back to the land of consciousness as Sam Abernathy padded across the room and cracked our door open a few inches, which allowed a shaft of the most-annoying-possible glaring incandescent hallway lightbulb light into