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.
“Dude. You never give up, do you?” Nico said.
I shook my head. “I’ve given up before. Who hasn’t? I hate it, though, so I am definitely not going to give up now.”
I kept my hand open.
“Let’s get some cheese, bro.”
Nico took my hand and squeezed it hard—a real, good, rugger’s handshake.
But, God! I needed to get out of that car fast because of two things: One—I actually was about to start crying, and two—goddammit, I needed to pee again.
Stupid devious plan.
Okay, maybe three things: I also really wanted some cheese.
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
“HANG ON A SECOND,” I said. “It doesn’t look like there’s a place to pee here. I need to pee really bad. I’m going in the trees.”
“Dude, what is it with you and all that water?”
“I was trying to have sex with Annie,” I said.
Nico followed me through a barbed-wire fence and into the woods beside the road. Naturally, he stood one full tree’s length away. You know, when you’re a guy and you’re peeing, it’s all about location.
“Watching you drink three quarts of water turns her on?” Nico asked.
Okay. Actual tears did leak from the corners of my eyes when I opened the pee floodgates.
“Dude. No. It was supposed to be for you. There. Ahhhh.”
I zipped up.
“Sorry. Watching a dude drink water does nothing for me, bro,” Nico said.
So I explained the whole ridiculous scheme to Nico as we walked back through the damp and mossy woods. I was careful to explain the guidelines of consent and Mrs. Blyleven’s Condom Promise, and how Annie and I were both totally okay with that stuff. You know, just in case Nico, who was fourteen, needed some serious life advice from a senior boy. Who was fifteen.
Whatever.
And then Nico said, “Dude. I never go anywhere without condoms.”
“Even rugby practice?”
“Don’t be dumb.”
“You’re only fourteen.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? My mom and I had the Talk and she gave some to me starting in eighth grade.”
“Wow. Talking to your mom about stuff like using condoms is brutal.”
“It wasn’t so bad. But why didn’t you just ask me to leave you and Annie alone for a while?”
I pried apart the strands of barbed wire, and Nico wormed his way through.
“Because I’m a loser?” I said.
Nico held the wires for me.
“Well, sorry. It must be impossible to have sex at Pine Mountain.”
“Dude. I never want to think about having sex at Pine Mountain ever again,” I said.
“I guess you’re right. Besides, I’m hungry, bro, and cheese does sound pretty good right now.”
The stand was a small plywood shell with an electric generator and a sign over the flap-board front opening:
“Do you think it’s actual boob cheese?” Nico asked.
I shrugged. “All cheese comes from boobs, if you think about it.”
“That’s kind of gross.”
“Dude. This guy’s actual name is Jack Boob,” I said.
Nico nodded. “I’m more interested in seeing if he only has one eye.”
Jack Boob, the man who owned the cheese stand, did, in fact, only have one eye. Well, at least as far as I could tell he only had one eye, because he wore a green leather patch over the right one. And the most disconcerting thing about Jack Boob’s green eye patch was that it had been implanted with one of those big, fake, plastic doll’s eyes—with curly eyelashes and everything—and when he turned his head, the plastic eye would blink.
Super, super creepy.
Who would ever buy cheese from a dude who looked like Jack Boob?
Teenage boys who were very hungry would, I thought. The fact is, the best way to lure teenage boys to their death is to leave out plates of food. And, on the stand’s counter, there were samples of perfectly cut little cubes of One-Eyed Jack’s Boob Cheese lying out under spotless glass domes.
When we walked up to One-Eyed Jack’s Boob Cheese stand, Jack Boob (who kind of looked like a flounder) eyed us (which is a totally gross thing to say) with a look (which is another gross and awkward thing to say) that said he’d been expecting Nico and me. Of course, there was no way Jack Boob would have known us—well, unless maybe this was Nico’s favorite roadside destination in Tillamook County—because we were dressed as anonymous Oregonian teenagers. I wore my Pine Mountain Rugby Football Club warm-up jacket over a stretched-out, dingy, used-to-be-white Boston Red Sox T-shirt, and Nico still had on the hoodie I’d loaned him to sleep in.
“Are you two the Connelly boys?” Jack Boob asked.
I had to look away. The plastic eye bobbled up and down lustily.
“Yes,” Nico said. “That’s us!”
What the fuck?
I stopped in my tracks. “Dude. What the heck?” I whispered. “I don’t want to be one of the Connelly boys.”
Nico shook his head. “Bro. You are so uptight. I’m just messing around. Just relax for once and let’s get some Boob cheese from this guy. He has free samples.”
“But what if he’s been hired to murder the Connelly boys? What if the Connelly boys are supposed to do something gross, like give him a pedicure or something? Have you ever thought about that?”
“No. I haven’t. Not until just now, and I don’t ever want to think about that again either.”
Between the two of us, there were lots of things Nico Cosentino and I never wanted to think about again, including giving One-Eyed Jack Boob a pedicure in his cheese stand along the side of Old Woods Road.
One-Eyed Jack Boob squinted his one nonplastic eye at us as we got closer to the stand. The other eye half closed seductively.
Gross.
“You don’t look like Connelly boys,” he said. “Those Connelly boys have red hair.”
“Oh! Did you say ‘Connelly’?” I asked. “I thought you said hungry. Didn’t it sound like he said ‘hungry,’ NICO COSENTINO, whose name is not Connelly, so you don’t have to murder us, and neither one of us does pedicures, besides?”
Nico looked at me. “You’re insane.” Then he turned to Jack Boob and said, “So, is this actual boob cheese?”
“That’s my name. Jack Boob. So of course it’s Boob cheese. I also have Boob jerky and Boob juice for sale.”
No. No. No. No. No.
“Good thing his last name’s not Dick,” Nico said.
“Who would ever name a kid Jack Dick?” I asked.
Nico nodded thoughtfully.
“Do you two know the Connelly boys? They were supposed to be here three hours ago,
” Jack Boob said.
Why would we possibly know the Connelly boys?
“We just came for the cheese, weird old man,” I said. “So please stop talking to us and let us fucking eat.”
Okay, to be honest, I did not actually say that to Jack Boob. What I did say was this: “Well, I think I can speak for Nico when I say that we are both elated to not be the Connelly boys and also to not have red hair, but we really just stopped by here because I needed to pee and we’re both kind of hungry. For cheese.”
“Imagine that. Those Connelly boys are going to get fired before they start their first day on the job. Are you boys looking for work?” Jack Boob asked. “I’ve got openings for a coagulation-vat tender and a curd cutter. I pay eight-fifty an hour.”
“Well, as much as we both enjoy tending vats of stuff undergoing coagulation, we actually just stopped for some cheese,” Nico said.
“And a pee,” I added. “And maybe some Boob jerky.”
Jack Boob shook his head. “I just don’t understand kids these days. With all the opportunities there are in the cheese industry, nowadays all you boys just want to get into computer programming and video games. Where is that going to get us when the asteroids rain down from the skies or the supervolcanoes blow their tops? I’ll tell you where: nowhere. Then you’ll be wishing you knew how to make a decent wheel of cheese.”
“Or a spaceship to get us the heck out of here,” I said.
“What are you going to eat in space?” Jack Boob asked.
He was apparently a very lonely one-eyed man.
Nico pointed at one of the glass domes of cheese. “I’d be willing to eat this in outer space,” he said.
There was a little flag on a wooden skewer sticking up from the cheese under the dome. It said FREAKING GREAT FARMSTEAD GOAT.
And it was good goat cheese.
After we tried a few of Jack Boob’s samples, Nico and I purchased some Oregonian Kick-Your-Grandma’s-Ass Gruyère, White-Is-the-New-Orange Cheddar, and Freaking Great Farmstead Goat, along with some rounds of toasted bread and Boob Jerky, which, Jack Boob promised, was actually made from a cow.
“This is going to make me thirsty,” I said.
“Dude. Really? You’re not going to drink some more, are you?” Nico asked.
“What, exactly, is in Boob Juice?”
Jack Boob leaned over the counter and squinted conspiratorially while his plastic doll’s eye bobbed lazily. He whispered, “Don’t you know what Boob Juice is, sonny? HA HA HA HA!!!”
Good one, Mr. Boob.
Then he slapped the counter and said, “I’m just kidding, son. My Boob Juice is fresh-pressed unfiltered Oregon apple juice.”
“In that case, we’ll take two boobs. Uh. Boob Juices. Please.”
I paid One-Eyed Jack Boob for the things we bought, and Nico and I headed back to Seanie’s Land Rover. That’s when I noticed that an old Chevrolet Apache pickup had parked behind us, and two beefy teenagers with red hair were standing there, alternately looking at Seanie’s car and at me and Nico.
The Connelly boys had shown up for their Boob job.
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
THEY MUST HAVE BEEN TWINS. If they weren’t, it would mean that one of the Connelly boys actually tried to look like the other. I would have at least shaved a gap between my eyebrows. And they were hairy. They looked like they were maybe sixteen, but they already had gross wispy beards and probably weighed a quarter-ton combined.
I could tell just by looking at them they were football players.
I hate football players.
Also—and all teenage guys know this—there is an unspoken message you get from other boys sometimes, and it rings as loud as a sonar ping in a blind bat’s ears, when another dude is preparing to start shit with you. I’ve gotten that vibe before from maybe a half mile away, and it’s always been spot-on accurate.
So Nico held up too when he saw the Connelly boys standing beside Seanie’s car.
“Shoulda known some Pine Mountain rich-boy piece of shit not even old enough to grow pubes would be driving a car like this,” said Connelly on the left, who I only imagined was the coagulationvat twin.
And for a moment, I pictured hairless and peach-assed Sam Abernathy driving Seanie’s Land Rover, and then, for so very many reasons, I decided to add that to my Things-I-Never-Want-to-Think-About-Again List.
I also made a mental note to myself to never wear my Pine Mountain sweats when driving a borrowed Land Rover through the untamed wilds of western Oregon.
Curd Cutter Connelly nodded and scratched his balls.
What nice boys, entering the dignified cheese-making profession.
“Look, we don’t have any problems with you guys. We were just leaving,” I said.
Coagulation Vat Connelly looked at his brother and then spit on the driver’s door of Seanie’s car. “I’d sure like to sit in that. I never sat in one of those things before. I’m just wondering—did the car turn you gay, or were you already like that before your daddy bought it for you?”
Nico grabbed a bottle of Boob Juice from my hands, opened it, and took a long drink.
“This is good shit,” he said.
Then Curd Cutter Connelly said, “Yeah. I feel like sitting inside it too. And maybe taking a shit in the driver’s seat.”
Then both future cheese masters laughed. Coagulation Vat Connelly nodded enthusiastically. And I was terrified that I was, indeed, going to “fuck up” Seanie’s car, that Nico and I were about to get into a dreadfully mismatched fight, and that Curd Cutter Connelly really was determined to make poo on the driver’s seat.
Shit.
Nico calmly drank the entire bottle of Boob Juice. Then he wiped his mouth with the back of his (my) hoodie sleeve and stepped onto the macadam of the highway and yelled, “FUCK!” as he smashed the bottom half of the bottle onto the road.
It startled the Connelly boys, but not as much as what happened next. Nico stomped up to the nearest twin (Curd Cutter) and grabbed the bigger boy’s shirt at the collar, pushing him back against Seanie’s car.
Don’t dent it. Don’t dent it. Don’t dent it. For Christ’s sake DO NOT dent Seanie’s car!
Nico held the broken neck of the bottle in front of Curd Cutter’s face. He said, “I will dig your fucking eyeballs out and carry them home from here inside my underwear if you don’t back the fuck off right now.”
Coagulation Vat Connelly was stunned.
I was stunned.
Also, I fucking needed to pee again.
Coagulation Vat Connelly ran back to the pickup, and I thought, oh, God, he’s going to get a gun; he’s going to get a gun and kill us, and I totally blew my opportunity to have sex with Annie Altman on my final day with a pulse. But he didn’t get a gun. He started the truck and drove away.
“Wait! Wait, fucker! Wait!” Curd-Cutter-Who-Needed-to-Poo Connelly was practically in tears. I actually started to almost feel sorry for him.
Almost.
Nico let go of him, and the big redhead took off down the road after his brother.
So much for the teen unemployment rate in Oregon.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
“I THINK I ACTUALLY MAY have shit my pants,” Nico said.
“Dude. Put his eyeballs inside your underwear? That is so gross. I could have thought of a lot of places to put a dude’s eyeballs besides inside my underwear.”
We were back on the road, eating Boob cheese and Boob jerky, and sharing the only nonlethal remaining bottle of Boob Juice, which was really good. The GPS estimated we were fifteen minutes away from Nico’s house.
Nico said, “It was the first place besides my pocket I could think of. I didn’t want to put his eyeballs in my pocket, because it didn’t seem insane enough, so, you know . . . my underwear.”
“I just want to say one thing, Nico: Back there at the Boob stand, you said I was insane. Me. Ryan Dean West. But that was the most insane thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I seriously thought you were going to
stab that jerk in the eyeball.”
Nico smiled and nodded. “So did I.”
“Well, thanks for not stabbing him in the eye, and also thanks for getting us out of there with no scratches on us or on Seanie’s car.”
“No prob, bro.”
Then Nico did something that really surprised me. Well, not as much as breaking a bottle and digging out eyeballs and sticking them inside his underwear would surprise me, but surprising in any event. He stuck his hand out and we shook. I also swerved the goddamned car again.
“You’re a shitty driver,” he said.
“I got us here, didn’t I?”
“Well, this doesn’t mean I want to be friends, because I don’t. I just thought that was fun shit back there. And great cheese.”
“Whatever.”
Nico Cosentino could be such a jerk. And I decided that when I got back to Pine Mountain, I would start being nicer to Sam Abernathy, and that he was a good friend, which was something I needed. Gross. I was finally admitting to myself that I liked the little grub.
Nico pressed commands into the navigation unit, and Sexy GPS woman asked, “Are you certain you want to cancel my guidance?”
“What are you doing?” I said.
“I live here. I know where we are now,” Nico said.
I felt sad for Sexy GPS woman. I could really use some guidance. We both could.
Then Nico added, “Turn right up there, where that sign is.”
The sign said CAPE KIWANDA STATE NATURAL AREA.
I said, “We’re going to the beach?”
Nico answered, “Yeah. Kind of.”
Damn. It was getting late. I was already feeling anxious and scared about driving all the way back to Pine Mountain by myself and in the dark. I could already sense that icy and empty mood—the certainty that Nate was lurking around, just waiting for me to be alone and thinking about what a loser I was and how terrible Nico Cosentino made me feel about things.
Whatever. Once I got this over with and deposited Nico back at his parents’ home, I’d never have to see or think about him again.
Yeah, right.
We left our shoes and socks at the end of a long trail we followed over dunes of wet grass that ended at the expanse of sand connecting the land to the sea. It was cold, and the wind howled like an animal. We kept our hands deep inside our pockets.