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“And no doubt a family he’s supporting by appearing on this sign.”
Ryan is hoping Mr. Hot Stack will be the only familiarface he finds inside the diner. As they wait for the hostess, he does a quick scan and is relieved to find it free of classmates or anyone else school-adjacent.
“All clear?” Avery asks once they’re seated.
Ryan likes how much this boy notices. “All clear. Just habit, I guess.”
“How many people are in your high school?”
“About four hundred. Yours?”
“Eighty.”
Ryan shakes his head. There would be no way to be invisible with only eighty people in the whole school. “You must stick out,” he says. “I mean, with the pink hair and all.”
Avery shoots him a look. “I bet you blend right in.”
“Trying to blend in would be like being put through a blender. I abstain.”
Avery finds this funny. “What did you just say?”
“I said, ‘I abstain.’ ”
“Is that what you say when all the popular kids try to get you to hang out with them? ‘I’m sorry, but I abstain from blending in. There are just too many perks to being a wallflower.’ ”
Ryan leans in, as if he’s sharing a secret. “Yup. That’s precisely what I say. But do they stop? No. The popular kids keep bugging me. Calling. Texting. Showing up on my doorstep. Begging like dogs. I’m embarrassed for them.”
“I know precisely how you feel.”
To emphasize his point, Avery squeezes Ryan’s hand. It’ssuch an openly lame excuse to touch him, and both of them smile in acknowledgment of this.
“Part of you is amused,” Avery says. “And part of you can’t believe this is happening.”
Ryan is startled to have Avery give his words back to him in this way, perfectly understood. “And in the Pancake Century Diner, of all places,” he observes.
With his free hand, Avery holds up the menu so it could be either him or Mr. Hot Stack replying. “Well,” he says, “itisthe Pancake Century, after all.”
The waitress comes to take their order. Ryan thinks about pulling his hand away, but there’s no indication that Avery’s hand is going anywhere. And since they both like this awkward position, he keeps it there until the food arrives.
—
Avery knows it’sa little silly for him to yell, “Ouch! Mrs. Hot Stack, what are they doing to meeeeee?!?” every time Ryan’s knife cuts into a pancake. He does it at least two more times than he should.
—
One more time,Ryan thinks,and I will definitely have to tell him to stop.
—
“Okay,” Avery sayswhen the meal is done. “What’s next?”
It’s a natural enough question to ask at the end of a meal.But it has the effect of shifting the weight of the day back onto Ryan’s shoulders. He’s not used to such responsibility. Of his friends, Ryan is not the one who usually decides what they’re going to do. And with Isaiah, they rarely met up outside Isaiah’s house. They never really had a date, not like this. They just did things. That felt different. There were times Ryan wanted it to be like this, but Isaiah never wanted that.
It’s not like there are many places in Kindling where you can do something you can’t do anywhere else. It’s McDonald’s McDonald’s McDonald’s. That’s what most of the kids are like, too. They have McDonald’s personalities. Ryan wants to reject that. He wants to scorn all the obvious paths that life offers teenagers here. It’s not that he thinks he’s better than everyone else. He just thinks that, unlike them, he’d be better somewhere else.
He directs Avery to Mr. Footer’s, the old relic of a miniature golf course on the outskirts of town, a neighborhood where not even warehouses bother to exist. The mini-golf course has been closed for years now, and no one else has bought the land, so it sits in its abandoned state, nearly postapocalyptic in its decay. There’s a lock on the gates, but the gates have undone themselves in places, making it easy to come and go. At night it’s a breeding ground for misdeeds, but during the day it’s graveyard quiet.
“Where exactly are you taking me?” Avery asks. Ryan has a flash of seeing the site through his eyes, and understands this might be a mistake. But he doesn’t want to turn back now.
