(Ryan’s mother would have said something, and it wouldn’t have been very nice.)
“Well, I won’t get in your way,” Avery’s mother said, getting in their way a little bit longer. “If you need anything, you know where I’ll be. There should be muffins in the kitchen—I think we have blueberry, maybe some carrot—or that might be bran. I’m not sure how you feel about bran, Ryan. Or about raisins—I think those have rai—”
“We’ve got it, Mom,” Avery interrupted. Ryan was amused to see him so exasperated by prolonged muffin talk.
Avery’s mother laughed, held up her hand in surrender.
“As I said, I’ll be in my office if you need anything.”
She shot Avery one last look—I love you even when you’re rude to me in front of your friend—and skedaddled.
Ryan could feel the wood floor through the hole in his sock. When Avery’s mother left the room, it was just the two of them and the sound of the snow outside. Ryan stepped away from the door and took up Avery’s old position at the window. The snow was now blowing in gusts that looked like clouds dissolving in the midst of a fight. The branches of the trees were beginning to bow and sway, as if beckoning the snow to fall even faster.
I’m lucky to have made it, Ryan thought.
Avery walked up behind him, and for a moment didn’t know where to put his hands. To have Ryan so close after spending so much time imagining him close…Gently, he moved his arm under Ryan’s arm, moved his hand across Ryan’s chest. Then he pressed his own chest against Ryan’s back, his chin peeking over Ryan’s shoulder so they could both look at the snow together.
Neither one of them said out loud how beautiful it was, but both of them thought it was quite beautiful.
Avery felt Ryan tense for a second, then realized why. Mrs. Parker from across the street was coming out of her house, as she had every twenty minutes for the past two hours, to spread salt on her path. It was the same motion she used to scatter bread crumbs for birds in the summertime.
She was not looking up, but Ryan was tensing at the idea of her looking up. Seeing them. Taking this moment that was theirs and making it into something else in her head.
Avery knew she wouldn’t care, might even find it sweet, to see the blue-haired boy and pink-haired boy entwined like journal and clasp. But there was no way for Ryan to know that. He was projecting his own neighbors onto her.
Instead of explaining this, Ryan turned. Avery loosened his grip, to allow another hold to form. Now they were face to face, moving back into the hallway, blocked from the outside by the door.
“I’ve missed you,” Ryan said.
Avery leaned in and kissed him. Once, but lingeringly.
“I’ve missed you, too.”
Ryan and Avery talked every day, and texted nearly every hour they were awake. They chatted for long spells each evening, a running commentary that rippled often into digression. But none of that could cure the missingness they felt; if anything, it made the missingness more acute. As Avery had put it to Ryan late one night, far after they were supposed to have gone to sleep: What we’re doing right now is watermelon-flavored. When we’re together, it’s watermelon. This had made sense to Ryan then, and it made even more sense to him now. Kissing Avery was watermelon. Having his arms around him was watermelon. Being able to see the look on his face as he talked was watermelon.
“What do you want to do?” Avery asked.
And Ryan thought, This. Watermelon.
Here, on the fifth date, another precious inkling of a truth about love: that there is a point you reach when it doesn’t really matter what you do, that the question of what to do becomes beside the point for long stretches. The answer reduces to the smallest, most important words:
You.
Here.
Us.
This.
All so easy to fit into the equally small word Now, and the slightly longer word Love.
But Ryan was sixteen. He didn’t realize that any of these small words were worthy answers, just as Avery didn’t know that it was alright to not have a plan for what to do next.
Not knowing what the answer should be, Ryan replied, “It’s your house. You lead the way.”
Had it been up to Avery, he would have stayed right there, kissing Ryan for a few minutes more. But there was always the risk that his mother would remember another flavor of muffin in the kitchen, and would return to tell them about it.
“How about my bedroom?” he proposed. Then, blushing, he felt compelled to add, “Not because it has a bed, but because it’s, uh, my room.”
Ryan smiled. “Sounds good.”
* * *
—
This is the geography of a house, at five in the afternoon on a fifth date:
In one room, a mother types. Every now and then, she stops to think about what she’s typing, but her thoughts rarely stray farther than that. In the kitchen, the refrigerator and the clock have a barely audible conversation. The garage waits like a sleeping whale; when a father comes home in an hour, it will open its mouth with a bellow that everyone else in the house will notice. For its part, the family room gently offers some spilled lamplight out into the growing night. The front hall is damp with footprints; a pair of sneakers waits by the door. In the hallway, two boys walk one after the other, both in socks, both looking at one another far more than they are looking at the walls, or their steps, or at anything lining the walls. Ahead of them, a bedroom waits for the flick of a switch to bring it to life. Beyond that, there’s another bedroom, currently resting. In the bathroom, a faucet drips, as if trying to imitate the precipitation outside. A toilet seat has been left up. Three toothbrushes stand at attention; since they aren’t speaking, we must assume they are listening to everything else that goes on in the house.
All of this is surrounded by snow. The roof is now covered. The car in the driveway is as white as the driveway. Were you looking from above, you would have to look closely to see a house at all.
But you are not looking from above.
* * *
—
Ryan had glimpsed Avery’s room the last time he’d been over, but now he had a chance to study it. The posters on the wall were of artists, not bands. The bookshelves had been arranged in stripes of color—blue then red then blue then red then green then red then green then yellow then green, and so on. The bed was in the corner, the room’s single window at its head.
Ryan walked over there and looked out. In a few minutes, it would be too dark to see the snow, but now it could still be traced and tracked. Avery joined him, and together they watched the snowflakes traveling like raindrops, punctuation marks to let them know where the gravity belonged.
Avery sat down on the floor, his back against the bed. Ryan followed, sat right next to him so their legs touched and their arms overlapped. It was weird, Avery thought, how this worked. When someone stared at you, you could feel so much like a body, with all your flaws blaring like bad advertisements. But when someone was next to you, when someone was as much of a body to you as you were to them, it became more comfortable, more valuable. Feeling Ryan’s skin and knowing that at the very same time Ryan was feeling his skin. Knowing they were different, but maybe the sensation of it was the same, just like breathing was the same, like a heartbeat was the same. Avery leaned into that. Felt.
“So how was your day?” Ryan asked, and for the next few minutes, they talked about school, about friends, about the snow first appearing in the sky. This was part of what they needed, too—to be like everyone else, to have the time to lean like this and recount the time since they’d last spoken. There were no revelations here, nothing out of the ordinary. There was just the ordinary being spelled out, the truth left between the letters. The most exciting part of their day had been anticipating this, being excited about this very thing.
“Is that a
yearbook?” Ryan asked, looking at the bottom of Avery’s bookshelf. He moved to pull it over.
“No!” Avery said. “No you don’t!”
Ryan made an exaggerated grab for it. Avery made an exaggerated tackle. Conceding with a playful lack of resistance, Ryan stretched out on the ground. Avery pinned him anyway.
This is where it can turn from playfulness. This is where heat can subsume warmth. But neither Ryan nor Avery wanted that—not now, not yet, not this early in the date. So instead they kept it playful—Avery leaning down for a kiss, then pulling back right at the moment their lips should have met. Laughing. Then going down for a real kiss, Ryan arching up to meet it.
Avery loosened his grip. They kissed some more. Ryan reached out, as if he were about to rustle Avery’s pink hair or trace the curve of his shoulder. But it was another fake-out—Ryan’s arm extended just long enough to get to the yearbook, to take it from the shelf.
Avery groaned, but did not fight it. Not even when Ryan sat up and started to thumb through. It was last year’s yearbook, and since Avery had been a sophomore, he hadn’t made much of an impression in its pages.
As Ryan thumbed through, Avery watched him do it, noticed small things he hadn’t noticed before—the places where Ryan’s blue hair was starting to revert to bleach, the Little Dipper of birthmarks on his arm. Ryan asked a few questions about a few of the people in the photos, and Avery answered when he could—his school was too big for him to know everyone, and he wasn’t attitudinally inclined to know everyone, anyway. He had his small pod of friends, and that was where he spent most of his time.
Ryan finally came to the page where Avery’s sophomore picture resided, part of the mosaic of stamp-sized malcontents forced by the class photographer into their frames. The photo was too small for Avery to really hate it, although the person in it already felt like a skin he’d shed.
“Nice haircut,” Ryan said, with no real meanness in the tease.
“I was experimenting!”
“With what?”
“Bad haircuts!”
It was a black-and-white photo (only upperclassmen got color), so you couldn’t really see the pathetic orange that Avery had occasioned for photo day—it was something that looked like marmalade when he’d been aiming for jack-o’-lantern. Pink had soon followed, and had stayed for longer than it usually did on a high school boy.
“I used to wear mine down to my shoulders,” Ryan confessed. “I was twelve or thirteen, and I thought it made me tough. Like, if I could have grown a beard then, I would’ve done that, too. I look back now and know it was camouflage—and not even good camouflage. My mother caught me flicking it back one day and asked me point-blank, ‘Why are you doing that?’ And I thought, Oh, right. The next time we went to the barber, she didn’t have to say a thing. I told him to cut it off, and he called out to the rest of the guys in the barbershop for a round of applause.”
“Do you miss it?” Avery asked.
Ryan snorted. “Not at all. Do you want to know what’s a bad combination? Long hair and a twelve-year-old boy. I probably could have wrung the grease out and bottled it, it was getting so gross.”
Avery instinctively itched his hair as Ryan talked about this. Ryan noticed and smiled.
“Sorry,” Ryan continued. “Gross. I know. But it’s my way of saying we’ve all got bad haircuts in our past. Or bad lack-of-haircuts.”
The garage opened its mouth at this point, filling the house with its call. Avery looked at the clock—it was a little early for his father to be home.
“They must’ve closed his office because of the snow,” he said to Ryan, acknowledging the noise. “It must be getting pretty bad out.”
They left the implications of this unsaid. If it was bad enough for Avery’s dad to leave early, it probably meant Ryan should be making an emergency exit. But Ryan decided he had no intention of doing that.
(It didn’t even occur to Avery that Ryan might have to leave early.)
“Boys!” Avery’s mother called out. “Dinner in a half hour!”
Avery hadn’t intended for them to have dinner with his parents. He’d thought they’d go out, even if it was just for Burger King. He stood up to look back out the window and saw that, yes, it would have to be an eating-in night. Their road was not on the priority list to be plowed, and by now it was hard to tell where the curb stopped and the road began. Ryan’s car was starting to look like an igloo; you couldn’t really tell if it was a car or a really big turtle underneath.
It still didn’t occur to Avery that Ryan might have to leave early. Or already lost his chance to leave early. Neither of them had listened to the forecast. For all they knew, the snow was about to stop.
“A half hour.” Ryan came over and whispered in Avery’s ear. “What can we do with a half hour?”
The answer?
His hands were on Avery’s hips.
The answer?
Kisses. Variations of kisses. Repetitions of kisses. Learning each other through kisses.
The answer?
Clothes staying on, because there were parents walking in the hall, because this wasn’t that, not yet. But just because clothes stayed on, it didn’t mean there weren’t bodies to be felt through fabric, skin to feel the pressure, feel the touch.
The answer?
It didn’t really matter what they did.
* * *
—
While Avery and Ryan had been oblivious to the coming snowstorm, Avery’s mother had prepared. There was food in the pantry, food in the refrigerator, and even candles and matches waiting on the kitchen counter, just in case the power went out. There was also the constant narration of the Weather Channel from the television in the family room, the entire storm looking like a single cloud marauding over a quarter of the country.
Ryan and Avery acted as one another’s mirrors, making sure all their clothing looked settled before heading to the kitchen. If Avery’s parents noticed anything was off, they didn’t say a word. Plus, Avery’s mother was busy with dinner and Avery’s father was busy with the weather. Since it was now dark out, the television acted as his window.
“There you are,” Avery’s mother said when they walked into the room, as if she hadn’t known where they were all along. “I think we need to have a talk. First off, I realized I didn’t ask you if you have any allergies or food restrictions, Ryan.”
“I’m good with whatever,” Ryan replied. There were about a hundred foods he hated, but he figured this wasn’t what she was asking. His position here was untested enough that he’d eat anything she made.
“Great. We’re having chicken, potatoes, and broccoli—I figured that wouldn’t be very controversial. The bigger issue is the snow. They’re saying the highways are a complete mess, and the storm’s not going to slow down until midnight at the earliest. So it’s looking like you’re going to have to spend the night here, Ryan. There’s no way I’m letting you drive home in this. I’d like to talk to your mother, if that’s okay. Explain what’s going on. I can’t imagine there’s going to be school tomorrow.”
Avery tried unsuccessfully to suppress a yip of joy, afraid that if the universe knew how pleased he was by this turn of events, it would send a sudden heat wave. Then he realized this was silly, and allowed his mom to take some satisfaction in the way he buzzed and beamed.
Ryan’s spirits, in the meantime, couldn’t bounce quite as high as Avery’s. He was sure that Avery’s mother was right, and that there was no feasible, safe way for him to get home. He even knew his parents would concede that. But there would still be the matter of why he’d come here in the first place, why he hadn’t turned back at the first glimmer of trouble. There wouldn’t be hell to pay so much as he’d get a much bigger weekly allowance of hell.
“I can just call her,” he told Avery’s mom. “Explain the situation.”
Sure enough, after Ryan called and told his mother what was up, and that what was supposed to be a date (he didn’t use the word date) had turned into a sleepover (he went nowhere near the word sleepover), she immediately asked to talk to Avery’s mother. As if the blizzard were some moon landing he was shooting on a soundstage, just to trick his parents so he could have a night of unrelenting sin.
Ryan had no idea what, if anything, Avery had told his mom about Ryan’s parents, but Avery’s mom upped the cheer factor in her voice by at least three whorls when she said, “Hi, there!” at the start of their conversation. Then there was a serious “Yes” and an empathetic “Oh, believe me, I understand.” After that—Ryan had no idea, because Avery’s mom walked out of the kitchen, and stayed out of the kitchen for another five minutes.
“Clearly, they’re arranging our marriage,” Avery commented in the interim.
“If I weren’t so terrified, I’d find that funny,” Ryan replied.
Avery’s father came into the kitchen, plucked a grape from the refrigerator, and popped it into his mouth.
“Smells good,” he said.
“We’ll be sure to pass that on to Mom,” Avery replied.
Avery’s father looked around. “Oh. Where is she?”
“Talking to Ryan’s mom. He’s staying tonight.”
“Good deal,” Avery’s father said. Then he turned to Ryan. “You don’t mind sleeping in the backyard, do you? We’ve got a great sleeping bag somewhere in the basement. I think it’s insulated.”
“Dad. Not cool.”
“Dad not trying to be cool.”
Avery’s mother returned to the kitchen. Avery thought she looked a little less carefree than she’d looked before. Ryan thought she looked like she’d just talked to his mother.
19 Love Songs Page 13
