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our room.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œReally, really bad claustrophobia, Ryan Dean. That’s why I had the bathroom door and window open, and why I took the screen off. In case you were wondering.”
    I was not wondering.
    Why did he make me wonder?
    Chomp chomp.
    And the television said, “The worst crime you could possibly commit with a scallop is overcooking it.”
    Great.
    Just fucking great.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    I’LL ADMIT IT: I DO not like to get out of bed once I’m in it.
    But I didn’t need an alarm clock on that first day of twelfth grade. Who needs an alarm clock when you’re stuck in a refrigerator-size room with Sam Abernathy, and all night long you’ve had to try to sleep with your front door wide open while people—guys—pass by in the hallway and offer commentary like “Why are these assholes sleeping with their door open?” and “Hey, do you smell popcorn?”
    So I got up before sunrise. And I shut our door so I could undress and take a shower. I even shaved. I didn’t need to shave, there was just some keen sense of satisfaction I got from leaving my razor and shaving cream sitting out in the same bath—no, shower—shower room Sam Abernathy was going to use. And you couldn’t bring a change of clothes inside the shower room either, unless you wanted your school things to get soaked, not that there was enough space to actually get dressed in there to begin with.
    When I came out, naked and wrapped in a towel, Sam Abernathy had reopened our window.
    We were ultimately going to have to negotiate a claustrophobia treaty, but I wasn’t in the mood for talking to Sam Abernathy while I was freezing and naked and trying to get ready for school with anopen ground-floor window through which any passerby could watch the naked-Ryan-Dean-West-and-his-unstable-roommate show.
    Also, the Abernathy had straightened out our desks and picked up and folded my clothes again too. I concluded he was likely a claustrophobe with a neatness obsession. Ryan Dean West, child fucking psychologist. With just a sprinkle of pyromania and perhaps a shoe perversion, Sam Abernathy could potentially be the most insane twelve-year-old on the planet.
    I closed our window and lowered the blinds.
    â€œI need to get dressed,” I explained. “And it’s cold. And that’s exactly eight words more than I intended to say to you this month.”
    Sam Abernathy sat on his Mario Bros. bed in his soccer pajamas. He’d laid out his perfect little Pine Mountain first-day-of-school boy outfit neatly beside him.
    â€œI need to pee,” Sam Abernathy said.
    â€œSo?”
    I put on my socks and underwear.
    â€œI also need to take a shower.”
    â€œAgain. So?”
    And I realized my shirt and school pants looked pretty nice the way Sam had folded them.
    â€œWell, I can’t be inside the bathroom with the door closed. I would stop breathing, and nobody here would know they need to call an ambulance or start CPR. But if I leave the bathroom door open, then I won’tbe able to pee or take a shower because you’ll be in here watching me.”
    I thought about doing CPR on the Abernathy.
    No.
    The kid was squirming and his eyes were watering.
    What boy doesn’t know that look painfully well?
    â€œIt’s not a bathroom,” I pointed out.
    I tried to calculate how long I could take getting dressed so that the Abernathy’s bladder would explode, and if all this could happen in time for me to meet Annie and my friends for breakfast and still make it to my first class on time.
    â€œDude. Trust me. I am not going to watch you pee or take a shower.”
    Sam Abernathy rocked back and forth slightly, his knees clenched tightly together.
    And I kept telling myself, I am not going to be nice to him, I am not going to be nice to him .
    Then the Abernathy looked at me with his gigantic Internet-meme, basket-full-of-puppies eyes and said,