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Ryan walks over there and looks out. In a few minutes it will be too dark to see the snow, but now it can still be traced and tracked. Avery joins him, and together they watch the snowflakes fall like punctuation marks shaken from a sentence.
Avery sits down on the floor, his back against the bed. Ryan follows, sitting right next to him so their legs touch and their arms overlap. It’s weird, Avery thinks, how this works. When someone stares at you, you can feel so much like a body, with all your flaws obnoxiously blaring. Butwhen someone is next to you, when someone is as much of a body to you as you are to them, it becomes more comfortable, more valuable. Feeling Ryan’s skin and knowing that at the very same time Ryan is feeling his skin. Knowing they are different, but maybe the sensation of it is the same, just like breathing is the same, like a heartbeat is the same. Avery leans into that. Feels.
“So how was your day?” Ryan asks, and for the next few minutes they talk about school, about friends, about the snow first appearing in the sky. This is part of what they need, too—to be like everyone else, to have the time to lean like this and recount the time since they last spoke. There are no revelations here. The most exciting part of their day has been anticipating this, being excited about this very sharing.
“Is that a yearbook?” Ryan asks, looking at the bottom of Avery’s bookshelf. He moves to pull it over.
“No!” Avery says. “No you don’t!”
Ryan makes an exaggerated grab for it. Avery makes an exaggerated tackle. Conceding with a playful lack of resistance, Ryan stretches out on the floor. Avery pins him anyway.
This is where it can turn from playfulness. This is where heat can subsume warmth. But neither Ryan nor Avery wants that—not now, not yet, not this early in the date. So instead they keep it playful—Avery leaning down for a kiss, then pulling back right at the moment their lips should meet. Laughing. Then going down for a real kiss, Ryan arching up to meet it.
Avery loosens his grip. They kiss some more, conversationally. Ryan reaches out, as if he’s about to mess with Avery’s hair or trace the curve of his shoulder. But it’s another fake-out—Ryan’s arm extends just long enough to get to the yearbook, to take it from the shelf.
Avery groans, but doesn’t fight it. Not even when Ryan sits up and starts to thumb through. It’s last year’s yearbook, and since Avery was a sophomore then, he didn’t make much of an impression in its pages.
As Ryan thumbs through, Avery watches him do it, notices small things he hasn’t noticed before—the places where Ryan’s blue hair is starting to revert to bleach, the Little Dipper of birthmarks on his arm. Ryan asks a few questions about a few of the people in the photos, and Avery answers when he can—his school is too big for him to know everyone, and he isn’t attitudinally inclined to know everyone, anyway. He has his small pod of friends and all the kids he’s doing the school play with, and that’s where he spends most of his time.
Ryan finally comes to the page where Avery’s sophomore picture resides, part of the mosaic of stamp-sized malcontents forced by the class photographer into their frames. The photo is too small for Avery to really hate it, although the person in it already feels like a skin he’s shed.
“Nice haircut,” Ryan says, with no real meanness in the tease.
“I was experimenting!”
“With what?”
“Bad haircuts!”
It is a black-and-white photo (only upperclassmen got color), so you can’t really see the pathetic orange that Avery had occasioned for photo day—it was something that looked like marmalade when he’d been aiming for jack-o’-lantern. Pink had soon followed.
“I used to wear mine down to my shoulders,” Ryan confesses. “I was twelve or thirteen, and I thought it made metough. Like, if I could have grown a beard then, I would’ve done that, too. I look back now and know it was camouflage—and not even good camouflage. My mother caught me tossing it over my shoulder one day, total supermodel mimic, and asked me point-blank, ‘Why are you doing that?’ And I thought,Oh, right. The next time we went to the barber, she didn’t have to say a thing. I told him to cut it off, and he called out to the rest of the guys in the barbershop for a round of applause.”
“Do you miss it?” Avery asks.
Ryan snorts. “Not at all. I probably could have wrung the grease out and bottled it, it was getting so gross.”
Avery instinctively itches his hair. Ryan notices and smiles.
“Sorry,” Ryan continues. “I guess it’s my way of saying we’ve all got bad haircuts in our past. Or bad lack-of-haircuts.”
The garage opens its mouth at this point, filling the house with its call. Avery looks at the clock—it’s a little early for his father to be home.
“They must’ve closed his office because of the snow,” hesays to Ryan, acknowledging the noise. “It must be getting pretty bad out.”
They leave the implications of this unsaid. If it is bad enough for Avery’s dad to leave early, it probably means Ryan should be making an emergency exit. But Ryan decides he has no intention of doing that.
(It doesn’t even occur to Avery that Ryan might have to leave early.)
“Boys!” Avery’s mother calls out. “Half-hour warning for dinner!”
It wasn’t Avery’s plan for them to have dinner with his parents. He thought they’d go out, even if it was just Burger King. He stands up to look back out the window and sees that, yes, it’s going to be an eating-in night. Their road is not on the priority list to be plowed, and by now it’s hard to tell where the curb stops and the road begins. Ryan’s truck is starting to look like an igloo.
It still doesn’t occur to Avery that Ryan might have to leave early. Or has already lost his chance to leave early.
“A half hour,” Ryan comes over and whispers in Avery’s ear. “What can we do with a half hour?”
The answer?
