Skylar’s parked his car so it’s blocking Avery’s. And it’s a truck, so it’s not like Avery can ram his way out. Instead Avery has to do a twenty-point turn and run over a sidewalk to make an escape. The whole time, Ryan seethes.

  “It’s all right,” Avery says.

  “No, it’s not,” Ryan snaps.

  Avery finishes the maneuvering and gets them out of the parking lot.

  “What’s next?” he asks.

  * * *

  —

  Ryan knows he needs to extricate himself from what just happened, needs to step outside of it and return to the day that he and Avery were having. But the rage he’s feeling is volcanic. If Avery weren’t here, he’d be going back there with a golf club of his own. He’d wait until they weren’t looking, and then he’d beat the hell out of them. Or at least that’s what he wants to tell himself. These scenarios are much clearer when they’re not actually happening.

  “Ryan?”

  Ryan hasn’t heard Avery’s question, and doesn’t realize that Avery needs to know where they’re going. He looks at his watch and realizes he told Alicia they’d drop by in about fifteen minutes.

  “Make a left,” he says.

  He knows he should explain more to Avery, tell him who those guys were. But how can he explain when he can’t understand it himself? He and Skylar used to play Little League together. They never had a single fight. But it’s like one day half the guys in his grade decided it was fun to pick on Ryan. He wasn’t even out then. Didn’t even have blue hair. He just didn’t want to be a part of their group, and that made him the group’s enemy. But never like this. Never like what just happened. That wasn’t taunting. That was an actual attack.

  Avery wants it to be okay, wants to pretend it didn’t happen. Ryan wants that, too. He’s already nostalgic for the way they were fifteen minutes ago. But what just happened with Skylar is too big to let go.

  * * *

  —

  Alicia senses something’s off as soon as Ryan and Avery sit down at their table at the Kindling Café. Ryan introduces Avery first, then Alicia, Dez, Flora, and Miles…but he doesn’t seem nearly as excited in person about having them all together as he was when he was texting. Alicia remembers Avery from the dance, but it’s not like they got to talk or anything—as soon as he and Ryan connected, everyone else turned into extras in the scene.

  This was supposed to be the chance for them to get to know each other. But Ryan isn’t smiling…he’s scowling. At first Alicia assumes it’s because the date hasn’t gone well, and Avery hasn’t measured up to what Ryan had hoped he would be. But she knows if this were the case, Ryan wouldn’t have brought him by at all. Also, there is a hope in Avery’s eyes as he meets Ryan’s friends. Avery wants this to work.

  Alicia sends Ryan to the counter for coffee, because coffee deprivation can be a serious cause of surly moods. He asks Avery what he’d like, which is a good sign, but then insists Avery not join him, which is a mixed signal. Once Ryan’s away from the table, Alicia asks Avery what they’ve done today, and he mentions pancakes and that abandoned mini-golf course, which wouldn’t have been in Alicia’s top twenty in terms of places to take a date. Avery says it was “wild” and then asks the rest of them what their favorite spots in town are. None of them can think of anything besides the café they’re sitting in, although Flora advocates for a playground at their old elementary school until Miles reminds her it was torn down as a health hazard a few months ago.

  “What’re you talking about?” Ryan asks when he gets back to the table.

  “Just telling embarrassing stories about you,” Alicia answers.

  This snaps Ryan out of his funk. At least for a second.

  “No fair! I leave for ten seconds…”

  “They weren’t really—” Avery begins, but Alicia shushes him.

  “Like, did Ryan tell you about his obsession with Pink?”

  “Whoa, you’re going there,” Dez says.

  Avery gestures up to his hair. “There’s nothing wrong with pink.”

  Alicia shakes her head. “I’m not talking the color. I’m talking the singer.”

  “C’mon,” Ryan says. Flora starts to hum “Raise Your Glass.”

  “Not that there’s anything wrong with the singer, either. I love her. But there’s love and then there’s…obsession. She’d already been having hit songs for, what, a decade, but Ryan acted like he’d discovered her.”

  Ryan turns to Avery. “We’re talking about sixth grade here.”

  “And part of seventh,” Alicia corrects. “You know how I know that?”

  Ryan clearly doesn’t. But Dez goes, “OH, shiiiiiiiit.”

  Alicia sees it hit Ryan. His nostrils flare in that way they do when he’s mad he doesn’t control the universe and the behavior of everyone around him.

  “Enough,” he says.

  Alicia turns so she’s facing Avery as much as possible and Ryan as little as possible. “Seventh grade. Auditions for the musical. To make it fun, the chorus teacher says we can use karaoke backing tracks from YouTube. We just can’t sing anything with sex or drugs or cursing in it. They say that to us about twenty times.”

  “Alicia, he doesn’t need to hear this.”

  Alicia holds up her hand. “I’m talking here. So, they make it so anyone who wants to sit in the audience can—almost like a talent show. And we all know Ryan’s going to do a Pink song because his locker is full of pictures of her and his notebook has her lyrics written all over it, the whole deal. There’s a reason you can’t get tattoos in seventh grade, right? Anyway, he even tells me he didn’t choose ‘Blow Me (One Last Kiss)’ because it drops a curse. So I’m guessing he’ll do ‘Raise Your Glass’ or one of the ballads. But no. He goes up there and he sings…”

  She leaves it open for Ryan to fill in. He doesn’t fill it in. So she finishes:

  “…‘U and Ur Hand.’ ”

  “He didn’t know what it was about,” Flora says.

  “Maybe he thought it was an Addams Family reference,” Miles adds generously. “We were auditioning for the Addams Family musical.”

  Avery laughs.

  Ryan does not.

  Fine, Alicia thinks, changing the topic to talk about the time before they could drive when Miles’s mom hit a mailbox after Miles freaked out over the radio station she was playing in the presence of his friends. While other people take up the thread, Alicia sees there’s still something between Avery and Ryan, in both senses—something they share, and also something getting in the way. She also notices that Flora and Miles are liking Avery, acting like Avery’s been a part of their group for a while. Dez is acting like he’s never seen a trans boy before, which is just stupid. Alicia makes a note to talk to him about that later.

  But first, it’s time to figure out what happened.

  It doesn’t take much prying. When there’s a pause in the storytelling, Alicia asks Ryan point-blank, “What happened to you two before you got here?”

  Ryan immediately looks at Avery, who says, “I only told them where we went.” Then Ryan sighs and explains that while they were at the golf course, Skyler and three of his assolytes came by and gave them shit. Everyone at the table’s immediately sympathetic, muttering an almost endless list of synonyms for the word jerk to describe Skylar’s crew.

  Alicia hopes this will calm Ryan down, but he’s still clutching his coffee cup so tight she’s surprised it doesn’t cave in.

  “I really should have done something,” he says. “Smashed up his truck. Called the police to report them trespassing. I mean, I guess it’s not too late.”

  Alicia has never been a fan of macho bullshit. In fact, she thinks that most of the world’s problems can be traced directly to macho bullshit. And she does not like hearing her best friend layering his own macho bullshit onto Skylar’s usual macho bullshit.

  “What do you mean, ‘it’s not too late’?” she asks.

  “I mean, it’s not like I don’t know where he lives.”

  Alicia nods, then says, “Ryan, I get that you’re mad. But I think you need to take it down a notch.”

  “Easy for you to say. You weren’t there. Right?” With this, he looks to Avery for confirmation.

  “I think you guys are much better company,” Avery says, in a way that lets Alicia know that he’s been trying to lead Ryan out of machobullshitopolis, too.

  Poor Avery, Alicia thinks. She wants to assure him that Ryan isn’t usually like this; only his parents and assholes like Skylar can set him off in this way. It’s not who he is at heart. It’s who he is when pushed.

  There’s also no real way to unwind him when he gets this coiled. You have to wait for the tension to ease, for the tangle to undo itself with time. So instead of challenging Ryan more or calling him on his macho bullshit in front of everyone else, which would only bring on the subset of macho bullshit known as defensiveness, Alicia asks Avery about his pink hair and how long he’s had it, and then asks more questions about life in Marigold. Ryan is still plotting in his mind; she can tell. And she wishes there was a way to pull him aside, to remind him what this day was supposed to be about.

  But that window doesn’t appear, and Dez is starting to get itchy to do something else. She can only hope that time has done its job, and that watching Avery getting along with his friends has tipped Ryan off to how he should be behaving.

  “What are you going to do now?” she asks him once the conversation’s hit an ebb.

  “I’m not sure,” Ryan says.

  But she can see it, clearly. The coil. It’s still there.

  * * *

  —

  “Is there anything you want to do?” Ryan asks when they get to Avery’s car.

  I want a do-over, Avery thinks. I want the last two hours back.

  “It’s your town,” he says.

  The funny-not-ha-ha thing is that two hours ago, he was nervous about meeting Ryan’s friends. But with the possible exception of Staring Dez, they were all pretty cool, and certainly welcoming.

  It’s Ryan who’s the problem.

  “Do you mind if we go back to Footer’s? I just want to drive past, to see if they’re still there.”

  Avery wants to say that, yes, he does mind. But what will that get him, really? He silently complies as Ryan tells him to turn left, to turn right.

  There it is again. The abandoned mini-golf course.

  The truck is gone.

  Avery can’t tell if Ryan is disappointed or relieved. Maybe both.

  “I think I know where they might be,” he says. He tells Avery to pull out and make a left.

  Avery makes it through two green lights. When a red light stops them at the third intersection and Ryan says to take another left, Avery decides he’s neither going to give in nor give up. He’s going to give Ryan one last chance.

  Instead of turning left, Avery shifts to the right lane and makes a right turn, pulling over into the parking lot of a law office.

  “What are you doing?” Ryan asks.

  If this is going to work, Avery knows, he has to be able to tell the truth.

  So he tells the truth.

  “You’re ruining it,” he says. “You have to stop now before you ruin it completely.”

  “Ruining it?” Ryan says. When he starts the first word, Avery can see he genuinely doesn’t understand what Avery means. But by the time he hits the question mark, he does. So before Avery can reply, he says, “Oh. Yeah.”

  “I want to get the day back,” Avery tells him.

  “I wasn’t the one who took it away,” Ryan flatly replies.

  I know that, Avery could say. They could get into a whole conversation about right and wrong, about fairness and anger. But Avery doesn’t owe Ryan that conversation. Not at this point. Not yet. No, Avery needs the coil to unwind itself. Because if it doesn’t this time, he knows it won’t for all the other times ahead.

  So all he says is “Please.” To Ryan. To the universe.

  The word hangs in the air, as if it’s been rung on a bell.

  Ryan hears it. He takes it in. Then he knocks the back of his head into the passenger seat’s headrest. After a few knocks, he turns and looks Avery in the eye.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “Truly, I’m sorry. I’m such a dick.”

  Better, Avery thinks.

  “It’s okay,” he says. “We haven’t passed the point of no return.”

  Ryan shakes his head. “Yeah, but I almost put us there, didn’t I?” His phone buzzes in his pocket, and he takes it out. When he sees the screen, he laughs. He shows it to Avery—a text from Alicia.

  You’re fucking this up, boy. Don’t be a dick.

  “Guess she liked you,” Ryan says.

  “I liked her,” Avery says. “All of them.”

  “Even Dez?”

  “Eighty percent.”

  Ryan nods. “Sounds about right. And where did I stand, two minutes ago?”

  “Forty percent? Thirty-seven?”

  “So what should we do? I want to get back up into the nineties.”

  Avery doesn’t know much of what there is to do in Kindling, but there is one place he’s sure will be better than here.

  “Let’s go get your aunt’s boat,” he says. “I want to head back to the water.”

  * * *

  —

  Ryan texts his aunt, who tells him to take the boat whenever he wants. It’s warm enough that the river isn’t touched by ice, but cold enough that there isn’t another boat in sight. Avery offers to paddle, but Ryan asks him if it’s okay if he paddles solo. He’s still wound up, and paddling will help. Avery says that’s fine.

  Even though the boat is the same and the river takes the same shape, gives the same path, it doesn’t feel the same as it did yesterday. Way back then, it felt like they were journeying into something together. Now it feels like they’ve already experienced some of the journey.

  “It just makes me so mad,” Ryan says. “The fact that they can be like that, and nothing will happen to them.”

  “I know,” Avery tells him. “It’s not fair at all.”

  “But it doesn’t have anything to do with us,” Ryan surprises Avery by saying next. He sounds as if he’s almost convinced himself it’s true, and saying it out loud will help solidify the conviction. “Nothing they say has anything to do with us.”

  “And now look what’s happened to them,” Avery ventures.

  Ryan’s confused. “What do you mean?”

  “We didn’t warn them about the thirteenth hole.”

  Now Ryan smiles. “Oh yeah. The thirteenth hole.”

  “The sharks…”

  “The bears…”

  “The piranha fountain…”

  “The pop-up chain saws…”

  “And that trapdoor, when you fall into a pit with no food, no water, and ‘U and Ur Hand’ playing over and over and over for days until you repent your full asshole life.”

  “I’m glad we didn’t warn them about the thirteenth hole.”

  “Me too.”

  “And, Avery?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry again. Anger’s its own trap, and I walked right into it when I should have been focusing on you instead.”

  “I understand.”

  They’re facing each other in the boat. Now Avery stretches out his legs so they touch Ryan’s like they did back in the pancake diner. Ryan leaves the paddle in the bottom of the canoe and leans forward so their hands can entwine and their lips can touch.

  I don’t want to mess this up, Ryan thinks.

  Avery thinks, I’m glad I didn’t leave.

  Ryan leans back and resumes his rowing. He rows now like someone with nothing to prove. There’s no rush. No need to be anywhere but the midst. He rows like someone who’s learned that the key to floating merrily, merrily is to proceed gently…gently…

  Where Do You Think You’re Going?

  (the eighth date)

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Ryan’s father asked as Ryan headed off to meet Avery for their date at the Greek restaurant. Ryan was turning the knob on the front door, ten seconds away from being gone.

  “I’m going out,” Ryan nonexplained.

  “Get back in here,” his father ordered.

  Ryan let go of the doorknob, faced his parents. He felt stupid because he still had his tie in his hand.

  “You said I wasn’t grounded,” he reminded them. “I made plans.”

  “What plans?” his mother asked. So this was going to be a tag-team effort.

  Is that any of your business? he wanted to reply. But where would that get him?

  Where would any answer get him?

  He decided to say, “I’m driving to Hollis to have dinner with my boyfriend.”

  He knew he was plunging deep into the gray area here. He knew his parents would ground him if he lied. But maybe they wouldn’t ground him for having a boyfriend.

  “No,” his father said.

  “What do you mean, no? That I can’t possibly have a boyfriend I’m meeting in Hollis?”

  “I mean, no, you can’t go.”

  Ryan was not going to abandon Avery, not for this reason.

  Trying to stay as calm as possible, he said, “Okay, it’s way too late for you to tell me that. When I was grounded, I followed those rules. When I was no longer grounded, I followed those rules. Which include me being able to go out on a Saturday night if I want.”

  Look at me, he wanted to say. I am wearing a button-down shirt. I polished my shoes. I tried for ten minutes to tie a tie, and now I’m holding it so I can try again in the truck. If you really look, you’ll see how much this means to me. You’ll see how serious I am.