“I’m really going to miss you too,” I tell him, swallowing against a sudden ache in my throat.
I’ve never had to say goodbye to Ren before. He, our friendship, is my anchor, has held me for as long as I can remember, and I’ve spent most of my life with the certainty that on any given day, if I want to see him, I can. Sure, there was the month he spent in Indonesia when his family went to meet his brother’s husband’s family, the semester I spent in Edinburgh. But I was always coming back to him, or him to me, and it strikes me now that while I’ve said goodbye to plenty of other people—friends, coworkers who opted to accept severance packages instead of relocating—actually saying goodbye to Ren hasn’t ever felt real.
I tuck my face against his chest, hang on to him a little tighter. Ren has a habit of holding steady when he suspects I’m struggling, and the truth is I still haven’t been able to shake the look in his eyes from earlier, the one I can tell he’s been fighting to keep in all night. Maybe he was right to be nervous. Maybe I’ve worked too hard to convince myself that I don’t need to be.Willwe still be us if we’re not in the same city? If I have a bad day here, I can go over to Ren’s place. If I need to talk to him, I can stop in at Sublimity. There’s never more than half an hour between us. Once I move, though, going over will become a phone call, one he might miss. We’ll have the weddings, but we won’t have Wednesday night dinners.
Sometimes Ren knows how I’m feeling before I do.
After a few more songs, Ren pulls us over to the line for the photo booth. I try to push aside the thought of leaving him, pay attention to the time we do have left instead. We rifle through the table of props, feather boas and oversize sunglasses, tiaras, and cutouts glued to the end of flimsy dowels, things likeCongrats, Clark and Claudia!andI do!
“Here,” I say, stretching up to plonk a captain’s hat on his head. I adjust it so it sits at an angle, framing him with my fingers. “You’re missing something.”
“A boat?” he asks as I comb through a box of scarves until I find a striped blue one, tiny lobsters dancing along the edge. “The ability to sail?”
“You could sail if you wanted to,” I say, tucking the silky fabric under his collar, knotting it above his tie. “You certainlylooklike you could sail.”
“Do you want me to learn how to sail, Joni?” Ren asks, head dipped toward me.
I link my elbow in his, lean my cheek against his arm. “I’ll be your first mate.”
“What, are we attempting to complete the first circumnavigation of the globe?”
“Boats still have crews,” I point out. “First mate is still a station on a ship.”
“Who knew you were so up on your nautical trivia,” Ren says as laughter bursts from the photo booth and it expels no fewer than seven people, like a clown car unloading.
It’s a tight fit inside, which makes the fact of the party before us even more impressive. After a minute of trying to arrange ourselves, Ren tugs me onto his lap, his arm wrapping around my waist to keep me from slipping off. He draws the curtain closed, the lights around the camera pinging on.
“Okay, what’s our plan?” I ask, shifting so I can sling my arm around his shoulders.
“We have to have a plan?”
I make a face at him. If this strip of photos is going to serve as a reminder of our last hurrah in Portland together, it needs to fully encompass our friendship.
“We’ve been in photo booths before. We didn’t have a plan then.”
“One. One photo booth,” I say. “And we were drunk, so it doesn’t count. I look like a mole rat in those pictures.”
“Two,” Ren says while I fix my hair in the warped mirror affixed to the wall.
“What?”
“Two photo booths,” he says. “The one you’re talking about, at that bar in college, and the one at the fair when we were sixteen.”
I look down at him. “The phantom photo booth.” We’d stumbled upon it, cotton candy in hand, just sitting in between the livestock pavilions like it was off-limits. We’d ducked inside, taken one strip of photos before it stopped accepting our money. When we’d tried to find it again later, to see if we could get any more pictures out of it, it was gone.
Someone bangs on the side of the present photo booth. “Are you done?” a voice slurs.
Ren leans forward and presses the button to trigger the countdown. “Just—look happy,” he says. He grins at the camera.
I reach up to remove an errant feather from my mouth as a series of beeps lets us know the first picture is impending.
“Iamhappy,” I say. “But this has to be perf—” The flash goes off,and I scramble to rearrange myself, sitting up straighter. Ren shifts underneath me, resting his other hand on my thigh to steady me, something unfamiliar vibrating through me at the contact.
“Just make a funny face,” he says.
“What funny face?”
“I don’t know. The funny face you make when you have two seconds until the flash goes off,” he says as fast as he can, so the words all blur together. I go with the most obvious option: holding up two fingers behind Ren’s head while he crosses his eyes at the camera.
