Stand-Off (32 page)

BUT I COULDN'T HATE HIM.
I just felt like such a loser.

Well. Thank God for GPS navigation.

When you don't actually drive, you just kind of take it for granted that you're going to end up where you're supposed to be. In my case, I didn't even know how to get out of the goddamned parking lot at Pine Mountain Academy, which meant finding something like an airport or the Pacific Fucking Ocean might prove to be impossible.

I also didn't know how to use the GPS in Seanie's dashboard.

So thank God for Annie Altman for so many reasons. She programmed in the address for the departures terminals at PDX.

After two trips around the parking lot—and confusing the living hell out of the seductive and friendly female voice coming from Seanie's GPS—I found the way out of the parking lot. It made me feel virile and manly.

That damned Nico Cosentino better start drinking soon or I was going to have to resort to extreme measures. Not that I had any extreme measures on my mind. But, what the hell? Come on, Nico!

Maybe I could subliminally get him to be thirsty, I thought.

I reached my hand back into the gap between the front seats. I
also drove two wheels into the soft shoulder of the road.

Driving sucks.

“Ryan Dean!” Annie said.

“No worries, Annie. I just wanted Nico to pass me a bottle of water. I'm thirsty!”

“What is
wrong
with you?” Annie asked.

“I just want to pull over and have sex and still make it to the airport in time for your flight, but Nico doesn't seem to be—air quotes
—
getting the message,” I answered.

Okay, to be honest, I didn't actually say that. What I did say was this: “I'm just thirsty is all. Lighten up, Annie.”

Annie grabbed the bottle when Nico handed one forward, saying, “Here. I'll open it for you, Mario Andretti.”

“Are you making fun of my middle name, Annie?” I said. (My middle name—one that I can't bear to confront—happens to be Mario).

Annie laughed and put her hand on my shoulder.

Damn, that was hot.

And the car, which kind of had a mind of its own, swerved into the opposite lane of the road leading away from Pine Mountain. I tried to get a grip on myself, but I was an overheated, gooey, gelatinous mess of driver's anxiety and sexual frustration, mixed in with an unhealthy dose of how-to-get-rid-of-the-body-in-the-backseat.

“Be careful, Ryan Dean,” Annie said. “You could get in a lot of trouble for driving without a license.”

“Nonsense.” I lied, “I have a Massachusetts learner's permit. And Massachusetts was a state way before Oregon was. That makes me, like, a hundred years old in driver's years.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Nico, the unthirsty, asked.

“Prepare to enter highway in eight-hundred feet,” the sexy GPS woman told me.

Now everything the GPS said sounded like
having sex
. I felt a bead of sweat trickle down the edge of my jaw.

I entered the highway. And I drained the bottle of water as Copilot Two strained to come up with a Plan B for the kid in the backseat. And every mile that clicked off on the Miles to Destination box, every minute that disappeared from the ETA panel, made me more and more despondent that my first great opportunity with Annie was withering away.

“So. You talked to Seanie this morning. He seemed a little weird to me,” Annie said. “He looked
different
.”

She must have noticed the same post-having-sex look on Seanie Flaherty as I'd noticed on Isabel Reyes.

“First of all,
seemed weird
? Seanie Flaherty? Preposterous! And of course he looks different,” I said. “He has a bald spot, a concussion, and eleven extremely gross stitches in the center of his scalp.”

“It wasn't that,” Annie said.

“Prepare to turn left in a quarter mile,” Sexy GPS woman told me.

Damn! We kept getting closer and closer to failure. I took another gulp of water and glanced at the camel in the backseat.

“I am prepared,” I said. And then I added, “Seanie came out to me last night, you know? I'm only saying that because he said he told you.”

“Oh. Maybe it's that, then. It's about time, though. Poor Seanie. He's been so tensed up for so long about it,” Annie said.

“Well, I'm happy for him. Finally,” I said.

“He told me, too,” Nico said.

I looked at him in the rearview mirror. Still no water. “That's kind of weird.”

“I think it was because of Joey. He wanted me to know how bad he felt for all the shitty stuff he'd ever said about my brother—just because he was afraid of his own feelings. I think a lot of guys are like that in high school, you know?”

I nodded. “Yeah. You're probably right, Nico. But it's good if Seanie feels better about himself, though. I can't help but wonder how his douche-bag roommate is handling the news.”

“Seanie told JP, too,” Annie said. “And JP wants to move out now.”

“What a total douche,” I said. “I wonder if JP would like to live with a superstraight dude who's a really good cook and appreciates fresh air? We could make a roomie swap work.”

Annie smiled and put her hand on my leg.

Ugh.

Then the worst imaginable thing happened. Somewhere after my second bottle of water (which failed to subliminally trigger a thirst response in
the alternate form of life in the backseat that is not dependent upon water
), Ryan Dean West, who had accumulated a sum total of twenty-seven miles of driving experience in his fifteen years of life, needed to pee.

And I needed to pee really, really bad.

Okay. So you know how sometimes, if you're a guy, because I'd have no idea if it's anything remotely similar for girls, you can be going along, not necessarily paying attention to anything because you're so consumed with thinking about having sex, and how everyone you know is apparently having sex whenever they want to with people who are probably not matches made in heaven for them, and then all of a sudden Copilot Two sends up a
Mayday! Mayday!
signal because the tanks are about to rupture and you need to find someplace—anyplace—to pee, like, ten seconds ago, and you're going,
How the hell did this creep up and blindside me all of a sudden?
but there's no possible way of getting around it and suppressing the urge, and—
God!
—for all the times my parents or grown-ups would say to me, “Just hold it, Ryan Dean,” like they were telling me something as la-dee-dah as “I like those shoes you're wearing,” because there is no “just” when it comes to
holding it
, and you know how when you're a little boy—let's say, like, Sam Abernathy's size on down—and you actually
do
hold it—literally—with your hand—those
same grown-ups will scowl at you and tell you not to touch your pee pee in public, or actually not to touch it
ever
, for that matter?

Yep.

“Oh my God!” I grabbed myself.

Annie apparently thought something else happened. She jerked her hand away from my leg and said, “Oh!”

No. No. No.

“No! I need to pee so bad!”

“Dude, you drank three bottles of water,” Nico pointed out.

Three? I'd lost count.

I really
should
hate Nico Cosentino.

I looked at the GPS and realized this was going to be one of the most disappointing days of my senior year. We were about twenty minutes away from PDX, in one of the last stretches of forested highway before reaching the endless housing developments of South Portland. My dreams were crushed. Well, maybe not the dream of finding a place to pee.

I pulled off the road and onto a dirt driveway that disappeared into the woods.

“Route recalculation,” Sexy GPS woman said. “Prepare to turn around in two hundred feet.”

“I just need to pee. I'll turn around after,” I told her.

“She's not real, bro,” Nico said from the backseat.

I put the Land Rover in park and barely managed to unhook my seat belt. And when I got out of the car and scanned the woods for just the right tree, Nico said, “I'll go with you. I need to pee too.”

And Annie said, “Boys are so gross. Will you two just please hurry up?”

“Turn back in two hundred feet,” Sexy GPS woman said.

Go to hell, Nico Cosentino. Just go to hell.

MISERABLE.

I dropped Annie off at her terminal and managed to get in about thirty seconds of frustrating tongue-in-mouth making out in front of one of those uniformed dudes on the curb who check in bags at the door and a drug-sniffing dog who paused to catch a whiff of the scent of my pee on my sneakers.

Whatever.

“I still don't understand the whole bring-the-condoms-to-the-airport thing, Ryan Dean.”

I felt myself turning red. “I was trying—hoping—to ditch Nico somewhere, so we could . . . you know, break in Seanie's backseat. It didn't work, quite obviously.”

“You were going to
abandon
Nico?”

“I would have come back for him. Eventually,” I said.

Annie smiled and blushed. “You'll have to plan more deviously in the future.”

I nodded. “Maybe Seanie will let me pick you up on Sunday. I can wear a disguise. That would be devious, right?”

Annie grabbed her bag and kissed me once more. “Too late for that. I already paid for a shuttle pickup before we left school. But
seeing you in a disguise would be hot. You can wear it on Sunday, when I get back. I love you, Ryan Dean.”

Nico got out of the back and moved up into the front seat.

I sighed. “I love you, Annie Altman.”

So yeah, like I said: miserable. And Sexy GPS woman informed me after Nico punched in his home address that Pacific City, an unincorporated beach community in Tillamook County, was more than two hours away, which meant I probably wouldn't get back to Pine Mountain until about midnight. I'd been driving really slow all day, and not just because I was trying to get Nico out of the goddamned car, but because I was pretty much terrified of driving.

So it was going to be a very rough, very long, and very sad day for me, riding alone in a car all the way to the Oregon Coast with a kid who didn't even like me.

We didn't talk at all for the first hour of the drive.

So when Nico finally said something, it startled me and the damned car swerved again.

“Sorry to disappoint you,” he said. “I'm really not very much like him, am I?”

“Who? Joey?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

I shook my head. “I think you're so much like him, it's . . . kind of weird.”

“I don't see it.”

I chewed my lip. I'll admit it: I was pissed off at Nico, and it had nothing to do with my plans with Annie.

“You know, I bet a lot of people tell you how much you remind them of Joey. That must really suck, and I'm sorry. And you might think I'm an ass—and that's not cussing—for saying this, but it doesn't really matter in the long run because it's not like we're friends or anything, but I just wonder how long a guy can go through life trying to be such an asshole to people and pushing everyone away—and that probably is cussing.”

No answer.

What could I expect, after all?

And then in the awkward silence that followed, I imagined Sam Abernathy—something that I never wanted to imagine again—saying pretty much the same exact thing to me.

And then I felt like shit.

“I'm sorry, Nico. I really wish I hadn't said that. It's not even any of my business what you decide to do.”

Nico didn't say anything. I looked/tried not to look at him in my peripheral vision and noticed he'd turned his chin toward the passenger window. And I looked/tried not to look at him as he wiped at his eye.

Okay. So you know how sometimes when someone drops a bomb on you and it makes you feel like absolute horseshit and you can tell
the other person is thinking,
Hey, is that dude actually going to CRY because of what I just said to him?
and then you get this terrible and sudden itch in your eye, so you rub it, and then you think,
Oh my God, I was only scratching my eye—please tell me the other person who just dropped a shit bomb on me does NOT think I am crying.

But I saw Nico's hand, and it was streaked a bit with wetness.

I also swerved onto the shoulder of the highway (goddammit!) and almost ran Seanie Flaherty's Land Rover into a roadside cheese stand. God! I felt so terrible!

“What the fuck?” Nico said. “Dude. You are really the shittiest driver I've ever seen.”

I put the car in park and sighed. “I've never driven once in my life until today.”

“You trying to kill me?”

“No. I . . . um . . . wanted to get some cheese.”

No response.

Who doesn't like cheese?

And then I said, “And I just want you to know, I'm really sorry, Nico. About everything that's happened in this past year. And I don't know what either of us can do to start to feel better, so getting some cheese is probably as good an idea as any. Right?”

Then I stuck my hand out for him again, thinking I was a dumbass for trying to shake hands with Dominic Cosentino no less than twice in the past twenty-four hours.

I watched Nico's Adam's apple piston-pump a swallow. And he rubbed his eyes again with the back of his hand. But he wouldn't look at me or take my hand.

So I said, “I don't know what the hell kind of rugger you are, Nico, but I'm holding my hand out, and we're not going to go anywhere, much less get some cheese, until you accept my apology.”

Nico looked at me. I could see his eyes were wet, which made me feel like I was going to cry too, but that would be impossible to live with: two teenage boys sitting here on the side of the road by a cheese stand, crying together.