The Great American Whatever

by Tim Federle

  These must be the lessons other kids get from their dads. Here is the lesson I got: When your wife turns forty, run for the hills and don’t take your shorts.

  “Maybe I should get a job at Loco this summer,” I start to say—it could be fun to make coffee all day—but Geoff’s big sister, Carly, appears at the end of the hallway, puts her hands on her hips, and openly examines our outfits. Carly herself looks as if she was standing outside an Urban Outfitters when a pipe bomb went off.

  “Jesus, bro,” she says, clucking at Geoff, “are you still getting dressed in the dark?” She’s majoring in Fashion Merchandising, if that helps.

  “Ha-ha, Carly,” Geoff goes, punching her shoulder harder than guys our age should. Carly’s always ripping on Geoff, but she loves the dude. Can’t blame her. I mean, the mustache alone gives Geoff a Make-A-Wish vibe that you have to kind of fall for, in a strictly platonic way.

  “At least Quinny-boy had the decency to dress in neutrals tonight,” Carly goes, bypassing Geoff and giving me a huge hug. My arms don’t know how to manage a hug anymore. “Wow,” Carly says, coughing, “neutrals and cologne, Quinn. Neutrals and cologne.”

  I pull back and lift my collar to smell myself. “Too much?”

  “No,” Carly says, running her hand over my head. “People will be too distracted by the hot new military man here to notice that he fell into a vat of Polo.”

  “Aw, whatevs.”

  “Seriously, Quinn: You look handsome as whoa. You look like a man.”

  Geoff disappears into the montage of bodies just beyond, and I feel my heart kick into gear. Call it little-brother syndrome. I’m desperate for my own independence and then can’t stand it when I get it.

  I decide I could use that beer. I look like a man. Men drink beer.

  “Come on,” Carly goes, taking my hand, “let’s get you a Sprite.”

  Great.

  She leads me into the living room, where some people are sitting on a picnic blanket in the corner and lighting up what I’m sure is a joint. I’ve never smoked one myself, not that I wouldn’t, necessarily. It’s just, when you’re third-tier at school, you don’t exactly hit the party rounds.

  But I’m not third-tier here. I’m no-tier. I’m nobody. It’s perfect.

  “It’s hot as balls in here,” some guy shouts from the couch.

  Carly hands me a 7UP (not Sprite—and yes, there’s a difference), and some girl goes, “I love this song,” and pulls up the “hot as balls” guy (temperature, not looks; like, definitely not my type) from the couch, and they start dancing around a little. The guy’s got moves, but the girl is all elbows and knees, and I find myself staring at these mystical college people in a way that might be bordering on stalker-ish if I’m not careful.

  “You look like a stalker, Quinn,” Geoff says, sneaking up and holding out a little plate of carrots.

  “Jesus,” I say, “are you off to feed a bunny or something?”

  Geoff laughs too hard (it wasn’t that great a line) and thrusts the plate at me. “No, dude, I just figured you probably hadn’t had any fruits and vegetables since, like, the holidays. I’ve seen your freezer.”

  I snort, but he isn’t wrong. My mom’s theory—which I fully endorse—is that fruits are best in a cobbler and vegetables are best in the ground. And yet—and yet!—I’ve got that crazy-skinny metabolism on my side. But calm down, because I don’t mean the ripped kind of skinny. The only six-pack I’ve got is a case of Sprite I keep in the back of my mini-fridge for special occasions.

  It’s still a full six-pack. It’s been a while since I’ve had a special occasion.

  “Play it again, Car!” the dancing girl calls over to Carly, who’s DJ’ing from her iPhone, and Geoff leans in and goes, “Isn’t it funny that college kids aren’t that much more mature than we are?”

  And here I’m thinking they look a full ten years older, and probably know to spritz only two pumps of cologne and not five. But I nod and go, “Yeah, I was just thinking that too.”

  “Song of the summer,” Geoff says, and I squinch up my face as he bops his head toward his sister. “This song,” Geoff says, explaining modern life to me as if I’m a recently thawed caveman. “Song of the summer.”

  “Oh, right,” I go. But I have no idea. Not a single one, not a clue. I am as clueless about current pop culture as my mom is about current health trends. I’m a classic film buff, which is just about everything about me that’s buff.

  I’m not proud of this, by the way. It’s just an is. Other things I’m not proud of that just are include:

  —When I hear recordings of me speaking, I’ve got a thicker Pittsburghese accent than I or probably anyone would like.

  —When the dentist asks me if I floss every day, I sort of chortle and go, “Ch’yah,” but I don’t, guys.

  —When I’m about to do something that makes me nervous, I imagine how the ideal screenplay version of events would play out. As in: I wish my life were a screenplay that I could write. Because if you leave it all up to fate, who knows how your movie’s going to turn out? So far mine’s a fairly standard coming-of-age LGBT genre film, with a somewhat macabre horror twist. But if it starts veering toward romantic comedy, somebody just murder me.

  Obviously I would have made Annabeth direct the film of my life. She was such a good director. She could get compelling performances out of our neighborhood dogs, and she did, no sweat. . . .

  Jesus, I’m sweating. I must look like such a high school brat, the only person here not holding a red cup. What’s with the red cups.

  The designated smoking window across the room is unoccupied, and I could use some breeze action, but before I make it over there, Carly pauses the music and shouts: “We’re going to the roof! There’s a surprise waiting there!”

  Big cheers.

  I scan the crowd for Geoff but don’t see him. Carly’s going, “Don’t kill each other on the way up, and don’t stomp, because our landlady will freak out on us,” but nobody’s listening. The whole world loves surprises. You tell a group of people they’re about to get a surprise, and watch out.

  “I hate surprises,” I say, to nobody, following the herd and touching my haircut.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  At the top of three more sets of stairs, I am heaving for breath and thinking that maybe “iron man” was stretching it as a character description for myself, earlier.

  Carly slams through a hulking metal door and a gush of wind makes the crowd go “Ahhhhh” in a big choral way. A couple of girls even throw on some harmony, and I’m thinking they must be theater majors, but I’m not thinking it for long—because despite the glare of the rooftop sun backlighting the Cathedral of Learning and a hundred miles of hills over our city’s three awkwardly named rivers, I spot Geoff immediately. In fact, it’s like the whole scene stops, in order to re-buffer. Geoff is standing dead center on the roof, holding maybe fifty colorful balloons.

  What the hell, right?

  “Okay, guys, so, listen up,” Carly says. “Everybody go to my baby brother and grab a single balloon and then just sort of like spread out.”

  Suddenly all I want to be is in college.

  I’m one of the last people to get to Geoff, and he hands me a pink balloon, and I go, “Come on, you know my favorite color is green,” which makes Geoff laugh, because he knows my least favorite color is green. Sometimes you see the easy sitcom laugh sitting there and you just have to snatch it up.

  He and I find a place in the corner. It’s a good thing the whole roof is bordered by a kind of old-fashioned guardrail, painted over with a billion layers of black. Enough of these undergrads are tipsy now that I’m glad I won’t have to watch some well-groomed drunk kid fall to his or her death tonight.

  NEW RULE: I only want to know one person per sixteen years who dies. So, watch out for falling pianos, thirty-two-year-old Quinn.

  Geoff’s sister stands on a crate and rallies the crowd to look at her. Whistling, clapping, the works.

&nb
sp; “So, this is something I used to do at the end of camp every year, and it’s amazing.”

  A few guys in khaki pants and these weirdly starched shirts start jovially pushing one another, hard enough that one of them falls into a girl, who spills beer all over her own tank top. I step forward to help the girl up, to grab the red cup she dropped, to rescue the situation, and it comes to me: Maybe instead of getting a job this summer, I’ll just be the superhero boy who rescues girls from finance majors.

  “Don’t let your balloon go yet!” Geoff goes, gripping my hand in his own strong fist. I don’t remember him being strong. This is the June where I’ve become “handsome as whoa” (not my words) and Geoff has become strong.

  “Now that we’ve all pulled ourselves together,” Carly goes, not so much shouting now as letting the audience come to her. (Classic technique. There is nothing more frightening than how charming and civilized Anthony Hopkins is in The Silence of the Lambs, which was shot here in Pittsburgh, not incidentally.) “Here’s the game: I want everyone to think of three things that happened this year that they wished had gone differently,” Carly says. And then: “They’re allowed to be really sad!”

  Oh.

  Geoff puts his hand on my shoulder, and I flinch it away, fast, like I’m deflecting a moth or a bee. And in the flinch I suddenly know what this is. This is for me. All of this.

  My mom must’ve known Geoff was going to take me out tonight, or else she would have put up a bigger fuss about me leaving her alone after dark. I’m not third-tier tonight. I’m not even first-tier. I’m the only tier.

  This makes me incredibly nervous.

  “Does everybody have three things they wish they could just let go of?” Carly says, and nobody says anything, which means they do. When nobody makes a single noise, it means they’ve never been concentrating harder on something. “On the count of three,” Carly goes, “I want everybody to let go of their balloons. Are you with me?”

  The crowd smiles so hard, you can actually feel the wind change course. I’ve learned to semi-believe in stuff like this. The butterfly effect that says if fifty people smile at once, the power of their acne-pocked cheeks can change the wind, if not the world. A wind that has suddenly appeared on this stifling night like the superhero I’d never actually get cast as, not this summer or any summer.

  “And after you let your balloon go,” Carly says—yup, she’s still talking!—“I want you to picture the number-one worst thing that happened to you this year, and I want you to watch it float away until you can’t see it anymore.” She pauses. “Everybody close your eyes. This is what we did at camp.” As if this last tidbit legitimizes the whole enterprise.

  “Close your eyes, Quinny,” Geoff says.

  And so I do, to humor him. And I earnestly try to think about the worst thing that happened to me this year. And, instead, I come up with a riddle: How terrible of a guy do you have to be if the worst thing you can think of isn’t that you lost your sister, but that you lost yourself?

  But then Carly goes, “One,” and by the time she gets to “three,” everybody’s saying it with her. Even I am caught up in the moment to such a degree that I dare myself to imagine this turning into a perfect screenplay sequence, just like I did in the old days.

  EXT. CARLY’S ROOF IN SQUIRREL HILL – NIGHT

  Quinn and the college kids let their balloons go, watching as they turn from fifty separate shapes into fifty little Skittles until, finally, the balloons become a single rubber star full of all the kids’ regrets from this past year.

  Quinn smiles. When was the last time he smiled so big? He’s just so relieved to watch his biggest demon float away into the sky -- so relieved to mark this moment as the one in which he can start over.

  The crowd cheers. Geoff high-5’s Quinn. Somebody else hands him a beer.

  QUINN

  Thanks!

  SEMI-CUTE COLLEGE GUY

  No problem, man! You’re gonna love it!

  Except, no. Not so much. Because real life doesn’t work like the movies—just ask Marilyn Monroe or James Dean. And so as everyone else around me does watch their balloons turn to Skittles, and then into forgotten regrets, I am instead looking three feet ahead at the black guardrail—at my balloon, flapping frantically, its pink string caught by the wind in the railing.

  The tipsy masses make their way downstairs, in ten seconds or ten minutes, I can’t tell. I’m just standing here, with Geoff next to me, staring at my almost comically stuck balloon. Almost comically.

  When I finally turn to leave for good, and head down to the street, I see something directly across from me on the other side of the roof. Apparently another person’s balloon, a green one, became tangled in the railing too.

  Another guy’s, actually.

  The sun is directly behind his head now, giving this guy the look of both the oldest and youngest person you’ve ever seen, his features the kind of ageless blur that Geoff’s mom paid good money to achieve at the plastic surgeon, after his dad cheated on her with both receptionists at the car dealership last October. Long story.

  “I’ll see you downstairs, Quinny,” Geoff whispers. “Don’t, like, read into the balloon thing. . . .” But his voice trails off. He dragged me here tonight. Geoff planned this out with Carly. He believes in signs and so I have to, too. Best friend law.

  “Okay, I’m coming,” I say, but then I don’t. I take my house keys out of my pocket and I step forward and I pop the pink balloon, BAM!, and watch it fall to my feet in a pathetic little zigzag.

  I whip around. The sun is almost set. The other guy is still here, though, and has turned from blurry edges to pencil-sharp lines—drawn to be my exact height and size, but with a confident smirk that says he’s never lost anything more than a round of cards.

  “Nice haircut,” he goes, grabbing the door and holding it for me before it slams shut.

  And suddenly I know exactly what my type is.

  CHAPTER SIX

  You okay in there, Quinny?”

  I’ve spent so much time swishing with Listerine that when I finally exit Carly’s bathroom, my tongue is basically tingling to the point of numbness. In immediate hindsight: not recommended.

  “We should hit the road,” Geoff says, crunching a red cup in his hand. I grab it from him and take a swig.

  “Ew,” I say, “it’s warm.” I hate warm Coke.

  “And even worse . . . ,” he goes. Jesus Christ. It’s warm Pepsi. Geoff knows how I feel about non-Coke products. “But Carly ran out to get more beer.”

  My eyes must flicker back to the living room, because Geoff breaks into his conspiracy grin and goes, “I can’t believe I’m the one trying to leave and you’re the one trying to stay. The King of the Loners reinvents himself.”

  “No, it’s just . . .”

  Say it, Quinn. Tell him you might have your first genuine crush. I am making up for all categories of lost time tonight. I was the last kid in my class to go through puberty. I want to see the roof guy naked. There, I said it.

  “. . . like . . .”

  “You haven’t been out of the house in six months,” Geoff says, for me, “and so you wanna go a little bananas tonight?”

  Relief. Close enough. “Exactly that.”

  “Well, then,” Geoff says, “let’s spike your 7UP with some vodka.”

  I don’t even know if 7UP and vodka go together, but we skip back to the living room like Girl Scouts on an important mission.

  “We’re baaaaaack,” a voice rings out from behind us, in the epic front hallway that thinks it’s a tunnel. Carly and the rooftop guy reappear together.

  And the rooftop guy, if anyone missed that.

  I stand up straight and try to smile in a way that seems “casual but approachable” (literally I’m directing myself), but the rooftop guy totally doesn’t notice me at all. Maybe he actually hated my haircut. Maybe he’s majoring in Irony. Worse: Maybe he’s straight.

  “Okay, so Amir had this idea for a game we can pla
y,” Carly goes, stepping past us and setting two six-packs of Iron City down on a coffee table that is fashioned, somewhat improbably, out of an old aquarium.

  But who has time for details. Rooftop guy has a name. Amir. Now, that’s a hell of a name. Strong, simple, super masculine. The very opposite of Quinn.

  The partygoers are scattering around me, hunting for scraps of paper. Geoff is waving his hands in my face. They smell like hummus. “Earth to Quinn,” he goes.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Have you ever played Celebrity?”

  “If I haven’t played it with you, no. So: no.”

  “It’s fun.”

  “Okay,” Carly says, “if you’re a native Pittsburgher, you’re on my team. And if you’re from out of town, you’re on Amir’s!”

  Shouting and uproar. The “hot as balls” guy from earlier (not my type; not my Amir, ha) announces he’s from Wheeling, West Virginia, so the out-of-town team “needs to come over here,” he goes, “because I’m not leaving the couch.” Instantly Amir’s team crashes onto the sofa in a tight pack: a group of wolves not bred in Pittsburgh.

  “Native Pittsburghers,” Carly says, adopting the longest, ugliest version of our local dialect that you can imagine, “let’s just sit by the TV.” (If you don’t know anyone from Pittsburgh, look it up on YouTube. You won’t believe it. Our accent sounds something like a parrot doing an impression of a fire alarm.)

  “Wait, the teams are uneven,” says a non-native. “You guys have two too many.”

  “Quinny’s not from Pittsburgh!” Geoff offers, unbelievably. “He’s from Cleveland.”

  “Uh, we moved down here when I was, like, one,” I say.

  But Carly holds up her hands and does a big “Rules are rules!” thing, and I am so frustrated because the last thing I want is to be on Amir’s team. I’m not ready to join forces. I don’t even know how to play this game.

  Geoff smiles at me like we’re in on the same running joke that is my life. We are not.

  I sit on the floor next to the couch. Somebody hands me five torn-up slips of notebook paper, and I go, “Thanks,” and when I’m sitting here long enough without doing anything, this girl literally furrows her brow like Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest and goes, “Can’t think of anyone?”