Very comfy, he types.

  The three dots take their time again. Ryan’s expecting a long paragraph to appear. But for over a minute, nothing does. And then there’s a single line:

  They look really good on you, followed by a winking emoji.

  Ryan chuckles. U think we should wear pajamas on our date?

  This time, Avery’s response is quick. Haha. Maybe.

  I can’t wait, Ryan tells Avery.

  * * *

  —

  Even though he could replay the conversation by reading it on his phone, Avery replays it in his head instead, after he and Ryan have gone back and forth saying goodnight and sweet dreams. If he replays it in his head, he can include all the stupid things he typed out and then deleted—What are you wearing under those pajamas? and Do you want to see MY pajamas? and I wish I was inside those pajamas. Trying to find a way to test if one thing could lead to another, even though there isn’t another spot he necessarily wants to arrive at. It’s Pope in his head, saying how every long-distance relationship has to have sex talk. He, Avery, doesn’t particularly want to have it. And Ryan doesn’t seem to want it, either. But shouldn’t two boyfriends lying in their own beds, texting last thing at night, want to get their pajamas off ? Isn’t that how it’s supposed to go?

  Sweet dreams, Ryan wished him. But something sour has gotten into the night, keeping Avery awake, trying to figure out its source.

  * * *

  —

  It would take intense torture techniques to force Ryan to tell his parents he’s going out on a date with Avery on Saturday night, but Aunt Caitlin gets the story out of him within two minutes.

  When he shows up at her door after school on Friday, he tells her hi and she responds by pulling him into a hug, a real hug. Inside this hug are the hours she wasn’t allowed to see him, all the words she wanted to say to her sister in protest, all the words she held back because she knew they could lead to something irreparable. And when Ryan hugs her back, he is telling her how glad he is to be here, how he will never hold his parents’ actions against her, how he wishes this hug with her was what home was like, this welcome. The past weeks are in this hug, and the past sixteen years are in this hug. Which is why, when it’s over, nothing more needs to be said, except, “Come in, come in.”

  Caitlin has set everything they need on her kitchen table: scissors, towels, dye, wide plastic bowl, brush, and comb. One of the kitchen chairs has its back to the table, facing the sink.

  Ryan sits down, and as soon as Caitlin asks him how things are going, he finds himself talking about Avery, updating her about their last clandestine meeting and the plans for Saturday night. She’s brushing out his hair, taking in its current shape before determining the shape it needs to be.

  “We’re boyfriends now,” Ryan tells her. Then he confesses, “But I’m not really sure what that means.”

  Caitlin smiles, takes a towel from the table, and wraps it loosely around Ryan’s neck, tucked over his collar.

  “What do you want it to mean?” she asks.

  “I don’t know. I guess I want it to mean we’re both serious about wanting to be together. That each time we see each other, we’re less like strangers, and that if it keeps going, we won’t be strangers at all.”

  Caitlin is glad she’s standing behind Ryan, glad he can’t see his words rise like flower buds in her heart. She has never heard him say anything like this, has always hoped he’d feel this way for someone.

  “That’s wonderful,” she says to him.

  “It’s scary!” Ryan replies, laughing.

  Caitlin puts her hand on his shoulder. “Oh, I know. The jitters are one of the less fortunate side effects of falling for someone. I like to think they’re there to keep you careful. Or maybe they make so much noise just so you appreciate it when they stop.”

  “Do they stop?”

  “They transform. Now hold still.”

  She takes up the scissors and starts to trim. She doesn’t need to ask Ryan what kind of cut he wants. She knows.

  Ryan sits in the chair and feels his aunt’s fingers pull and pick at different tufts, then the dry-grass snip of the scissors.

  “I’m not sure how much advice you want from your straight old aunt, who’s never managed to put a ring on it…but the best advice I can give is to always be respectful. At the start, it’s easy to fall into the trap of wanting to be impressive. But most people aren’t looking for impressive—they’re looking for respectful, someone who listens as well as they speak, someone who wants to understand the things they don’t understand, rather than assuming they know how it is from the start. Also, you have to be a good kisser. But don’t worry—bad kissers don’t make it to the seventh date. Not if Avery has any sense.”

  Ryan can feel himself blush. Caitlin’s giving him an opening here, if he wants to talk about kissing or anything else. And the truth is, he’d love to talk about it to someone, to make sure he’s not messing that part up, and that it makes sense that making out with Avery is so much better than making out with Isaiah was, because even though it was hot with Isaiah, there was always the nagging hitch of its meaninglessness. With Avery, it’s so much more meaningful, and that’s one of the things that’s scary and wonderful. He’d love to talk to someone about that. But he also doesn’t want to be the guy who talks to his aunt about kissing boys. So he keeps his mouth shut; his blush is the only public statement he’ll make on the matter.

  Caitlin doesn’t expect him to talk to her about it, even though she wishes he would. She’s sure any sex lecture her brother-in-law had with his son would have dodged like birds and stung like bees. The only way she can think to counteract this is to make sure Ryan knows about the heart part, that whatever he does should come from a place of affection, not need or obligation. Respectful is the best word she can find for it, but she also feels she’s emphasizing the bare minimum, not the full rush of it.

  She has the radio playing, and when a Fleetwood Mac song comes on, Ryan starts to sing along quietly. Caitlin keeps cutting his hair, but inside she’s marveling at the moment. This is what she wants to convey to her nephew, the way that people are at their most vivid when they’re completely unguarded, and that’s what love brings—the ability to be unguarded around someone else, and to treasure how unguarded they are in return. But she knows this is not the time to tell him that. She files it away for later, for when he’s not as open and needs to be.

  Ryan barely realizes he’s singing. The music is just another part of the comfort of the room. By the time Caitlin has finished the cut and is washing all the loose hairs out in the sink, preparing him for the bleach and the dye, he is feeling a serene blankness, so peaceful that all his thoughts can take a rest, all his worries lulled into hibernation.

  It’s only when he’s upright in the chair, waiting for the dye to set, that the conversation resumes. He tells her more about being grounded, about what it’s like to text with Avery late at night, what it’s like to have someone to wish goodnight. She tells him about her first serious high school boyfriend, Sam, and how each of them would always try to be the last voice the other heard before sleep, to the point that if her mom came into the room to ask her something after she’d already said goodnight to Sam, she’d have to call him back, to hear his goodnight again. There was even this one night—Caitlin can still remember staring up at the glow-in-the-dark constellations on her ceiling, feeling sleep pushing the phone from her ear. And Sam, instead of saying goodnight, said, “I’ll see you in my dreams.” Then he fell asleep—Caitlin could hear it right there on the phone, the shift of his breathing. Instead of hanging up, she fell asleep that way, too. And in the morning, she woke up and the connection had held. She said “Good morning” into the phone, and she could hear the smile in Sam’s voice when he said “Good morning” back.

  She tells Ryan all this, and he says it’s an awesome story. She doesn’t tell him she has no idea where Sam is now, or even if he saw her in his dreams that night, because there must have been a part of her, back then, that was afraid to ruin everything by asking.

  * * *

  —

  Miles away, play practice isn’t going well.

  Play practice is always hard on Friday afternoons—the thing you look forward to on weekdays becomes the thing standing in the way of your weekend. Avery knows this. He also knows there’s only so much you can do with a play like Don’t Forget Your Shoes!—a comedy that, if he’s being generous, was much funnier when it was written in 1936 than it is today. He once overheard Mr. Horslen, the drama teacher, tell Ms. Paskins, another English teacher, that the reason they were performing it was because the playwright had never bothered to renew the copyright, so it was free, and thus one of the most produced plays in American high schools. To the students, Mr. Horslen said that performing Don’t Forget Your Shoes! was a way to “demonstrate old tropes while at the same time questioning them.” From what Avery could tell, this meant that Liz Macy could play the spinster aunt as a proud lesbian without Mr. Horslen or anyone else getting upset.

  Today they are rehearsing a scene in which Pope, playing an easily flustered matron named Lavinia Stranglehold, is insisting that there is a ghost in her attic, and her great-nephew Lucius LeFevre is trying to prevent her from going up there to discover his secret fiancée, Betty Lou Templepot. Avery, playing Lucius’s brother Laurent (who also thinks that Betty Lou is his fiancée), and Liz, playing the lesbian aunt, are waiting in the wings; once a commotion is made, they will storm in to see what the commotion is all about.

  The problem, as it has been throughout rehearsals, is that Dennis Travers, who is playing Lucius LeFevre, has yet to comprehend that the play is a dated comedy. He is a senior, currently applying to colleges, and he seems to think that universities send recruiters to high school plays in the same way they’re sent to football games. So, it follows, if he wants to be taken seriously as an actor, he must take Lucius LeFevre very seriously. What are Lucius’s motivations? What did he eat for lunch? Has he ever really gotten over his parents’ death? (Mr. Horslen tried to point out that nowhere in Don’t Forget Your Shoes! does it say that Lucius’s parents are dead; he is merely visiting his great-aunt, not living there. In response, Dennis merely set his jaw, looked Mr. Horslen in the eye, and said, “Look…I just know.”)

  Pope’s understandable vamping as Lavinia and Dennis’s naturalistic rage as Lucius are making for quite a dog-day afternoon.

  Clocking the scene from stage right, Liz sighs and tells Avery, “I think we’re going to be here for a while.”

  Normally, Avery might suggest they run some lines, but at this point the performances are only a week away, and the lines are as embedded in his recall as they ever will be.

  “Got any big weekend plans?” he asks.

  “Honestly? There’s a lot of farmwork that needs to be done, so my brothers and I will probably be fixing fences. Very glamorous. How about you?”

  “I have a date on Saturday.”

  “Well, that sounds like more fun than my plans. I invited Hannah to come over and help, but I don’t think traipsing through cow shit with me and my brothers is her idea of a romantic time.”

  “Yeah, that’s not what Ryan and I have planned, either.”

  They talk a little more about what he and Ryan do have planned, all while Mr. Horslen is trying to tell Dennis not to deliver the line “But, Auntie, what if it’s the ghost of one of your ex-husbands? There are so very many!” in a “manner similar to Hamlet’s.”

  Avery and Liz aren’t friends, but they’re not not-friends, either. They have the basic queer bond, which is often enough to inspire confidences.

  After Liz has spoken approvingly of Avery’s Saturday-night restaurant choice, he feels bold enough to ask, “Do you think it’s strange to get to a seventh date without ever talking about sex?”

  Without a moment’s pause, Liz answers, “No.”

  “Not even a little?”

  “Not even a little.”

  “If I am to be the host to a ghost, the most I can propose is to offer it some roast!” Pope/Lavinia calls from the stage. This means their cue is near.

  “Do you want to be having sex?” Liz asks, her voice so neutral that she might as well be asking Avery if he wants some pretzels.

  “No. Not really.”

  “And has Ryan said anything about wanting to have sex?”

  “No.”

  “People who want to have sex don’t tend to be particularly subtle about it. That’s been my experience, and from what I’ve read, I think it’s a universal truth.”

  “But, Aunt Lavinia!” Dennis calls, with all the anguish of a thousand Parisian grad students. “Don’t go up there! It’s such an imposition!” For some reason, he puts the accent on the second syllable, so it comes out “im-PAHS-ition.” He’s been doing this for weeks. Nobody wants to tell him to correct it, since it’s the only humor he brings to the scene.

  Avery and Liz move into place, ready to step onstage after the next line.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Liz whispers. “The first dates are all practice. You’re allowed to stumble and search to get to the way it’s supposed to be.”

  “What are those…voices?” Dennis intones.

  “It’s only us!” Avery calls, stepping forward.

  * * *

  —

  Ryan and Avery don’t get to talk much that night. The reality of exam week is kicking in for Avery, and Ryan, whose exams are a different week, understands. They both wish they were in the same classes, in the same place.

  Ryan swears to Avery that at least some studying would get done. But maybe not a lot.

  * * *

  —

  Saturday arrives. Avery makes sure his studying is conspicuous, so his parents don’t give him any grief when it’s time for him to take off for dinner. He and Ryan talked about dressing up for the date, since it’s a Saturday night and all, so he’s got on a jacket and tie. (The jacket is forest green; the tie, Fanta orange.)

  There’s some traffic, but Avery still gets there first. They’ve chosen a Greek place called Parthenon, mostly because there’s a dish on the menu described as “flaming cheese.”

  The waitress is a woman with witch-black hair and magenta earrings. Seeing Avery’s tie, she asks, “Special occasion?”

  “A date,” he replies.

  “First date?”

  “Seventh.”

  She smiles. “Still counting them and still dressing up, eh? Bodes well.”

  The time for the date arrives and passes. Avery checks his phone. After ten minutes of checking, he sees the waitress giving him pitying looks. He texts Ryan to make sure he’s okay. Ryan answers by walking in the door.

  He’s not wearing a jacket or a tie, just a button-down shirt.

  There’s also something different about his hair. Avery can’t figure it out at first. Then he realizes: bluer.

  “I’m so sorry,” Ryan says as he sits down. “It was a total shit show. My parents didn’t want me to come. I told them that being ungrounded wasn’t a conditional thing, and that once they told me I wasn’t grounded, that meant I could make plans. I won’t give you all the details, but basically it ended with me shouting something like ‘You don’t know me at all!’ and then driving away. It’s so stupid.”

  “It’s okay. I haven’t been here long,” Avery assures him.

  “It’s not okay. But thanks for saying it is.” Ryan reaches into his back pocket and pulls something out. A wrapped-up gift? No, a rolled-up tie.

  “I swear, I was going to wear this,” Ryan says. “I tried putting it on, like, five different times at five different stoplights. I’m just not very good at it.”

  As if to prove his point, he tries to loop it around and make it take a proper shape. It ends up looking like two hands of a clock frozen at four-forty.

  “Goddammit,” Ryan says, and Avery can see where this is going. The fluster will only accelerate, feed on itself. So instead of sitting there watching Ryan curse and try again, he stands up and says, “Here, let me.” He walks behind Ryan, puts his hands on his shoulders, squeezing a greeting, then leans over and undoes the clock hands. He’s never done this before on anyone else, so he pretends it’s his body, his tie. He lets the head of the tie dangle lower than the tail, then begins its sinuous dance, around, around. Then he lifts it to Ryan’s neck, feels how Ryan holds his breath, smells Ryan’s shampoo. The dance pulls in, becomes a knot. Gently, Avery guides the tie along Ryan’s buttons. Then he tightens the grip.

  There.

  He folds Ryan’s collar back over. Taps him on the shoulder again, all done.

  Ryan remembers to breathe.

  Avery thinks about reaching out to touch Ryan’s hair, but it looks so inky, he feels his fingers may come away blue if they make contact. He sits back down and admires his handiwork. Ryan thanks him, and Avery waves the thanks away.

  “You look nice,” Avery says.

  “You look spectacular,” Ryan says.

  The waitress, who’s been watching it all with a smile, waits for a pause before bringing the menus.

  * * *

  —

  Once they’ve ordered, Avery and Ryan talk about everything they’ve seen, everyone they’ve talked to, everything they’ve done over the past few days. The temperature of their attentions has been consistently high enough that the need for explanation has begun to boil away. Avery doesn’t need to tell Ryan who Pope is, or why Dennis is such a menace. Ryan doesn’t need to conjure Aunt Caitlin’s house because Avery’s been there; he knows not only what it looks like, but also how it feels. They tell some hair-dye disaster stories—for a blue-haired boy and a pink-haired boy, it’s funny they haven’t had this conversation before. Ryan has always been blue. Avery has tried orange, purple, fire-engine red, but after he landed on pink, he didn’t feel the need for further experimentation. At least not for now.