Avery notices how he and Ryan are among the only solo couples around. Most of the other queerfolk are here in groups, setting up lawn chairs behind their cars as if it’s a cookout or a family reunion. Avery has had a couple of queer friends over the years, but never in the same constellation. It’s reassuring to him to know that such a sky is only a two-hour drive away from his home. He feels silly for thinking it, but it’s almost like the spaces he’s found online have come to life for the first time in a physical place. Which is also strangely reassuring.

  Ryan looks out into the crowd with a little less confidence. It feels like every queer person from a hundred miles around is here, so he’s started to wonder if he’s going to run into Isaiah, the one boy on the face of the earth who he’d legitimately be able to call an ex. Of course, the primary reason they stopped seeing each other was because Isaiah said he felt pretty sure he was straight, but Ryan has monitored Isaiah’s social media for long enough afterward to know that Isaiah’s actions don’t always anchor to this particular conviction. When he and Ryan were seeing each other, Isaiah would never have been caught dead watching a movie like You and Me, not even in private. But that was a year ago, and Ryan can’t help but wonder if the year has brought Isaiah closer to being the sort of person who would let himself be here.

  Avery notices Ryan scoping the crowd and asks, “See anyone you know?”

  Ryan slips his mind back to the boy he’s brought and answers, “Nope. I saw one girl who I think might have gone to my school—she was a senior when I was a freshman and was the first person I ever saw with a pink-triangle nose ring. But I’m not even sure it’s her.”

  They get in the popcorn line just as there’s an announcement that the movie will begin in ten minutes. The trio in front of them is arguing over whether popcorn at movie theaters is the most site-specific food in American culture.

  “What about hot dogs at ballparks?” one friend challenges.

  “Not even close. Hot dogs are eaten in plenty of other places. But I would guess that over ninety percent of the popcorn eaten in America is eaten at movie theaters, or in front of movies at home. No other foodstuff comes close.”

  Ryan smirks at Avery. No other foodstuff comes close. If Avery is excited about plunging into collegiate queerdom, Ryan is more skeptical; to him, college appears to be as full of poses as high school. They’re just different poses. Or maybe the same poses with a wider vocabulary. Ryan can’t tell. He’s also pretty sure that being skeptical of poses is a pose in itself, so it’s not as if he’s setting himself apart. Skepticism is just how his nervousness manifests itself.

  They get to the front of the line without having discussed what they want. After they caucus, Ryan orders a large bucket of bottered popcorn and two not-even-close-to-calorically-compensating Diet Cokes.

  As the concession stand worker (their age, forlorn) scoops the popcorn from its glass cage, Avery asks Ryan, “Did you say bottered popcorn?”

  Ryan smiles. “Yeah. That’s what my dad calls it. Because it’s not, y’know, butter. Battered popcorn sounds abusive and/or deep-fried. Bettered popcorn just isn’t true. And bittered popcorn isn’t what the taste buds want to experience.”

  “So bottered it is.”

  “Yup. Bottered it is.”

  Avery gestures to the concession stand worker, who is cursing at the soda dispenser. “They don’t look particularly bottered by your order.”

  “Wow. You went there.”

  There’s a brief skirmish when Ryan takes his wallet out before Avery can do the same. The popcorn is handed over, and Avery exclaims, “Ooh…it’s hot and bottered!”

  Ryan groans.

  “You started it,” Avery points out.

  “But how to end it?” Ryan ponders.

  “With kisses,” Avery says. “Always with kisses.”

  “Awwwww,” a college kid with mascara to spare says from behind them.

  Even though it’s well into twilight, Ryan can see Avery’s endearing self-consciousness. Were he not carrying a big bucket of popcorn, he’d take Avery’s hand back in his and parade to the truck. Let the world see us, he feels, and feels it so strongly, so naturally, that he doesn’t even realize he’s never felt it before.

  An announcement that the movie will begin in five minutes is greeted with a cheer. As Avery makes sure their popcorn and sodas don’t fall to the ground, Ryan retrieves the blankets he’s brought and fashions a cocoon in the back of the pickup. Avery hands over the concessions, then climbs in beside him. Their legs are covered, swaddled. Ryan raises his arm so Avery can lean in.

  This is new. Closeness. Warmth. The blurring of bodily borders. It’s never a perfect fit. There are always limbs that might go numb. Hair in the mouth. An unsureness of where to put one’s breath. Sweat that comes with the warmth. Especially in places that don’t usually sweat, like fingers. But the discomfort, the condensation, the awkwardness of appendages—these are all slight compared to the greater laws of togetherness. While Ryan and Avery are conscious of their smaller, graceless movements, they are conscious of them without truly feeling them. What they feel instead is the communion that occurs when the orbiting ends and they find themselves as the center, the convergence of not just their bodies, but their lives.

  It is not that everyone else at the drive-in disappears; they simply become less important. It is not that the night isn’t a little too cold and the back of the truck isn’t four pillows short of being plush; it’s simply that the accommodations are beside the point.

  While the Diet Cokes will each remain in their respective corners of the flatbed, the bucket of popcorn is pulled into the cocoon, spanning both boys’ laps. The welcome reel announces itself onto the screen, a parade of happy hot dogs shaking their buns, spritely sodas twirling their straws, and cavalries of ice cream cups thrusting plastic spoons aloft like proper majorettes. It’s the same opening that Ryan’s and Avery’s parents or even their grandparents might have seen on their own drive-in dates, so uncool it’s become cool again.

  Someone three cars over accidentally leans against a horn, and in response four other cars honk along. Avery laughs, while Ryan is glad he wasn’t the person who leaned on the horn in the first place.

  The movie begins, and there is another cheer, followed in a matter of seconds by complete silence. All that can be heard is the dialogue and the score, traveling across the air from the speakers hooked to the parking poles.

  When I found you, I wasn’t even sure I was me, the voice-over begins as one of the main characters runs into a hospital, asking for help for their frail grandmother. The young nurse is kind and professional, and about the same age as the grandchild. Once the grandmother is taken care of, the nurse and the grandchild keep talking.

  I was afraid that how you saw me would never compare to how I saw you.

  The grandmother is fine. She hadn’t eaten, felt faint. Before the grandchild leaves the hospital, they ask the nurse if the conversation the two of them have started can continue. That’s how the grandchild says it, that they want the conversation to continue. The nurse appreciates the way this is said, and the conversation continues. The next day, the two of them meet for coffee. The nurse is still in their uniform. The grandchild, who wants to be a photographer but works at the admissions desk of an unpopular museum, has worn a tie, thinking it will make a good impression. It is awkward at first, but then the two of them realize it’s only awkward because they want so much for something good to happen. They talk about this…and since they talk about it, something good happens.

  There is a reason the word you is longer than the word me. I will always feel that you contain more to know, more to learn.

  There are no gender origin stories. They do not draw the outlines of their histories and then erase these outlines in order to demonstrate the current shapes of their lives. They approach each other in the present tense.

  Ryan looks over to Avery, who is paying rapt attention. While Ryan is still reveling in the warmth of their cocoon, Avery has ventured out of it to step into the story. Ryan does not know Avery well enough to understand what the story means to him as he watches, but he can tell the connections between Avery and this story are not threads but veins. He is careful not to interrupt. Some boys would jostle, would try to make it about themselves, since it’s a fourth date and on a fourth date you always want to interrupt the programming with your own advertisements. But Ryan lets that go. Ryan lets Avery be somewhere else.

  Parts of you begin to define me. Parts of me begin to define you. We do not ask for this. It is the direction we grow when we’re together.

  The nurse meets the photographer’s family; the photographer’s mother is welcoming, the father curt. The photographer meets the nurse’s best friend, and enjoys her company greatly until it’s discovered that she and the nurse were once a couple. The photographer starts to feel uncomfortable around the best friend. The nurse thinks the photographer is overreacting. The photographer thinks the nurse is uncaring. They spiral.

  Once I have begun to define myself in terms of you, it hurts to discover that you are not as you’ve been defined for me. The great test is how we handle this adjustment.

  The photographer’s grandmother dies. Not from the earlier fainting spell. Something else. On the way home from the funeral, the nurse and the photographer take a detour into the woods. They need to walk in the dense shade. They want to talk about time. They need to be together with only the trees watching.

  Ryan needs to pee. He thought he could wait, and he wasn’t going to leave Avery in the middle of the funeral, but now that it’s over he whispers, “I’ll be right back.” Avery nods, understands. When Ryan crawls out of the cocoon, Avery leaves space for his return.

  Just as Ryan felt the intensity of the communal joy before, now he marvels at the communal silence. Everywhere he turns, he sees how the audience has fallen into the story, how they are reacting to it as if it were part of their own thoughts. It is the shared dream again, only this dream has been made visible.

  Ryan is the only person entering the gender-free bathroom. He prefers that phrase or all-gender to the hideous phrase gender-neutral, which makes it sound like the genders are at war with each other, and this bathroom is the demilitarized zone.

  The graffiti in his stall is not, alas, gender-free, or even gender-neutral, but Ryan appreciates that someone with a different-colored pen has trapped every slur or provocation within a speech bubble, and then has drawn a ridiculous cross-eyed pug to be the speaker. It contains the hate while still acknowledging it exists.

  When Ryan emerges from the stall, he finds someone standing in front of one of the two sinks, staring at the mirror as if it’s going to say something back. As Ryan gets closer, he realizes it’s the worker from behind the counter, who so miserably passed him a bucket of popcorn a short time ago, now taking the kind of deep breath that’s usually a side effect of tears. As Ryan nears to use the second sink, the worker’s shoulders get tense.

  Normally, Ryan wouldn’t say anything. He might even (heaven forbid) leave the bathroom without washing his hands. Not out of a lack of empathy, but out of the fear that anything he says will only make it worse for the person who is feeling the actual pain. It strikes Ryan that if Avery were here, he would most certainly ask what was wrong. Avery is clearly that kind of person—that better kind of person. So Ryan asks himself what words Avery would offer to a teenager crying at the sink beside him. When he gets the answer, he acts it out.

  “Is there anything I can do to help?” he asks gently.

  A shake of the head. “No. I’m sorry for being such a mess.”

  “These days, you should only apologize if you’re not a mess.”

  The concession worker lets out a staccato hmpf at that. As Ryan begins to wash his hands, he’s told, “It’s just that my ex is here. With some of his friends, who never really liked me. I sorta knew they’d want to see this movie, so I should’ve been prepared. And they didn’t even come in for popcorn or anything. But I saw them and it hurt me much more than I was expecting it to.”

  Ryan, who has no idea what this is like, nonetheless says, “God, I know what that’s like. But you get through it, right?”

  A look into the mirror. “Yeah, I get through it.”

  “If you give me his license plate number, I can go slash his tires.” (This is not, Ryan acknowledges, what Avery would say.)

  “Not necessary. But I appreciate the offer.”

  Ryan has finished washing his hands. He turns off the tap and looks around for something to dry them on.

  A laugh. “We haven’t had paper towels since Tuesday. Your best bet would be to grab some napkins on your way back to your car.”

  Now that Ryan has done what he needed to do, he realizes how close he is to the end of the conversation. The concession worker seems to be a little better than before…but who knows what will happen when Ryan leaves?

  “Good luck, then” is all he can think to say.

  This gets a smile. “Yeah, good luck to you, too.”

  Ryan stops off for napkins, because after the suggestion it seems even more wrong to dry his hands on his pants. Then, as he walks back to the truck, he looks at all the couples and friend groups again, lit by the world on the screen. They pay no attention to him, and because of this, he feels like a spirit walking among them. Good luck, he thinks to one couple curled together in a hatchback. Good luck, he thinks to four friends on a blanket. Good luck, he wishes a group of seven in a Toyota that should only fit five.

  Then he is back to his own truck, to the other half of the couple he is forming. To wish Avery good luck feels selfish, because Ryan is hoping that Avery’s good luck will naturally curve toward his own. But then, as he’s sliding back under the blankets, he thinks it anyway. Good luck. Avery breaks from the movie for a second to welcome him back, to resume their warmth. Then the story on the screen takes over again.

  I lost myself. But it was you I needed to find.

  After a brief time apart, the photographer goes to see the nurse, to apologize for the confusion they’ve felt. The nurse does not like how the photographer jumped away as soon as fear hit. It is clear the photographer is afraid again. But they do not run. Instead, together, they name the confusion. They try to transform the unknown into the known.

  Ryan is not surprised. Nothing he has read about the movie has led him to believe that this is a movie about a couple that doesn’t end up together. But Avery…Avery is quietly crying, is holding Ryan’s hand and squeezing it, as if he needs Ryan’s grounding to get through this storm.

  We reach the point when I cannot define me without you. When I’m asked who I am, no answer is complete without a mention of you.

  The nurse and the photographer are in a nightclub, ecstatically dancing among their people. As they dance, the drive-in is bathed in pinks and purples and glitterball flashes. A few people jump up from their perches and begin to sway and jangle along. Ryan plays a few notes with his fingers onto Avery’s arm.

  Then the scene switches, and now the photographer and the nurse are walking down a near-empty street after their night in the club. It’s not a pretty part of town. They are a burst of color in the shadows. The camera pulls back, watches them from a distance as they continue to dance and kiss in the middle of the street, where anyone out at three in the morning can see.

  Ryan starts to tense. Avery grips his hand tighter. They think they know what’s coming. Queerness, at this point in time, still means that you wait for tragedy to emerge from any dark corner, that you are sure that hate will inevitably be part of the narrative, that things have to get worse before they get better.

  But the photographer and the nurse continue to dance down the street. The camera rushes to catch up with them, to be there for a kiss that lasts and lasts and lasts. A kiss that ends in a smile and the continuation of a song. The dark corners have been empty all along. The only story here is the story of their love and how it came to be.

  Avery lets out a breath he didn’t even know he was holding. Ryan hugs him tighter. They both laugh at what they’d been expecting. They recognize each other in this laughter, in the way their breathing has become steady again. This time the smile comes before the kiss. But the kiss is there, as easy to find as the breathing.

  I am still learning about you. Which makes sense, since I am still learning about me.

  The movie doesn’t end with them dancing in the street. Instead it flashes forward ten years. The photographer and the nurse are asleep in bed, slightly entwined and slightly free. The camera holds on them for a full minute so you can really see them, so you can get a palpable sense of the comfort of their mornings together. Then they wake up. First the photographer, then the nurse. The photographer stretches, turns. The nurse’s eyes open. They look at each other, and the way they do, you can tell how much they love each other, how well they love each other. They’ve made it. They’ve won.

  Now it’s Ryan who tears up. The tenderness of the moment catches him by surprise. It is an illustration of something he’s never tried to picture. It is not something he can relate to, but it’s something he wants to relate to so badly that it’s breathtaking.

  Avery sees this play across Ryan’s face, a utopia made of people waking up to each other for a decade and still feeling whole. Avery feels it strongly, too. It’s far too much to contemplate on a fourth date, far too presumptuous to attempt to frame what they’ve found in these terms. But to feel it’s possible…that is a resonant chord, a view that’s become a vista. Avery squeezes Ryan’s hand again. This time to be the grounding. This time because it’s a stirring rather than a storm.