AllFreeNovel
Share Us
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.” Averynods, 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 orall-genderto the hideous phrasegender-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—thatbetterkind 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’renota mess.”
The concession worker lets out a staccatohmpfat 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.
