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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.
They are so caught within their conversation that they are both startled by a sudden explosion to the side of their shoulders. The waitress is lit with campfire glee as she lowers the flaming cheese onto their table. The smell of lighter fluid flourishes, then dissolves into a smoky lemon breeze. The Halloumi sizzles appreciatively.
Avery and Ryan both stare.
Once the waitress leaves, Ryan confesses, “I have no idea how to eat this.”
And Avery confesses, “Neither do I.”
These are confessions that the waitress has anticipated, so she returns with more bread for the table. She knows it’s often easier to accompany the cheese, the first time.
The cheese tastes of char and citrus on the surface, then a chewy tang underneath.
Ryan loves it. Avery is simply relieved they weren’t asked to eat it while it was still on fire, which is how he thought “flaming cheese” might be consumed.
Ryan turns the conversation back to the play. “I can’t wait to see it,” he says.
This is something he’s said before, but this time it’s not theoretical. Ryan asks which performance he should aim for; the Saturday matinee’s a no-go because of work, butFriday and Saturday nights are possible, and/or the Sunday matinee.
It’s Avery’s impulse to say,You really don’t have to.Because it’s not a great play. His role is hardly a lead. It’s a long way to drive.
But the thing is: He wants Ryan to see it, and he knows Ryan genuinely wants to be there after hearing about it for weeks. It makes Avery’s heart skip a beat to realize Ryan is so plugged into Avery’s story he gets electricity from it, too. Ryan wants to see Pope as Lavinia Stranglehold. He wants to see how Dennis is ruining the play. He wants to see Avery step far out of his comfort zone, tasked with making strangers laugh at lines written before his grandparents were born.
“Come Friday,” Avery says. “Even if it’ll make me more nervous.”
“Me being there will make you more nervous?” Ryan asks.
“Yes,” Avery answers without hesitation. Then he clarifies, “That’s a compliment, you know.”
Ryan smiles. “I know now.”
That smile. God, that smile. Avery feels he has to restrain himself from leaping over the once-flaming cheese to kiss that smile.
Oblivious, Ryan keeps eating. Between bites he says, “I’m not entirely convinced this is cheese. It feels more like an alien substance. Maybe something a manga character would eat. Or astronaut cheese. Only you wouldn’t want an open flame on a space station, I believe.”
He’s saying anything that comes to his head, and Avery wonders how he could unlock someone else so fully, in such a short amount of time.
Can we really talk about anything?he wonders. Which immediately makes him think about sex. Not the actual act. Those images don’t flash to him. But he remembers his conversation with Liz at the side of the stage. Ryan is now looking up Halloumi on his phone, reporting that it’s made from a mixture of goat’s and sheep’s milk, with a texture often described assqueaky. As he does this, he does not appear to be a boy overly concerned with sex.
But Avery has to admit to himself once again: He’s not sure.
“The wordHalloumiis trademarked by the government of Cyprus to prevent other countries from claiming it for their own cheese. Isn’t that wild? Switzerland must be like, damn, we should have thought about doing that!”
“Yeah. Totally.”
Now that talking about sex (not sex talk) is on Avery’s mind, he knows it’s not going to leave unless he brings it up. He doesn’t know how to approach the subject, so he grasps at whatever route in he can see, and makes up a conversation that never happened in order to steer in that direction.
“So,” he says, “speaking of weird things…my friend Pope was talking to me the other day, and they were talking about how everyone says people think about sex every seven seconds, and we were both like, that can’t possibly be true. Maybe as an average—like, someone thinks about sex foran hour straight and then doesn’t for the next six hours. But every seven seconds seems a little extreme, don’t you think?”
“I don’t think that statistic isscience,” Ryan responds. “It’s like some third grader’s older brother told him it happened every seven seconds, and that third grader told all the other third graders, and from there it spread to the whole world.”
“I know!” Avery says, trying to figure out how to continue to lead the conversation where he wants it to go. “It’s like everyone thinks sex is the point. But it’s not the point, is it?”
“Only if you want to make a baby,” Ryan says, forking more Halloumi into his mouth and chewing, chewing, chewing.
“I know, I know. But besides that. You know?”
