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Alicia turns so she’s facing Avery as much as possible and Ryan as little as possible. “Seventh grade. Auditions for the musical. To make it fun, the chorus teacher says we can usekaraoke backing tracks from YouTube. We just can’t sing anything with sex or drugs or cursing in it. They say that to us about twenty times.”
“Alicia, he doesn’t need to hear this.”
Alicia holds up her hand. “I’m talking here. So, they make it so anyone who wants to sit in the audience can—almost like a talent show. And we all know Ryan’s going to do a Pink song because his locker is full of pictures of her and his notebook has her lyrics written all over it, the whole deal. There’s a reason you can’t get tattoos in seventh grade, right? Anyway, he even tells me he didn’t choose ‘Blow Me (One Last Kiss)’ because it drops a curse. So I’m guessing he’ll do ‘Raise Your Glass’ or one of the ballads. But no. He goes up there and he sings…”
She leaves it open for Ryan to fill in. He doesn’t fill it in. So she finishes:
“…‘U and Ur Hand.’ ”
“He didn’t know what it was about,” Flora says.
“Maybe he thought it was an Addams Family reference,” Miles adds generously. “We were auditioning for the Addams Family musical.”
Avery laughs.
Ryan does not.
Fine,Alicia thinks, changing the topic to talk about the time before they could drive when Miles’s mom hit a mailbox after Miles freaked out over the radio station she was playing in the presence of his friends. While other people take up the thread, Alicia sees there’s still something between Averyand Ryan, in both senses—something they share, and also something getting in the way. She also notices that Flora and Miles are liking Avery, acting like Avery’s been a part of their group for a while. Dez is acting like he’s never seen a trans boy before, which is just stupid. Alicia makes a note to talk to him about that later.
But first, it’s time to figure out what happened.
It doesn’t take much prying. When there’s a pause in the storytelling, Alicia asks Ryan point-blank, “What happened to you two before you got here?”
Ryan immediately looks at Avery, who says, “I only told them where we went.” Then Ryan sighs and explains that while they were at the golf course, Skyler and three of his assolytes came by and gave them shit. Everyone at the table’s immediately sympathetic, muttering an almost endless list of synonyms for the wordjerkto describe Skylar’s crew.
Alicia hopes this will calm Ryan down, but he’s still clutching his coffee cup so tight she’s surprised it doesn’t cave in.
“I really should have done something,” he says. “Smashed up his truck. Called the police to report them trespassing. I mean, I guess it’s not too late.”
Alicia has never been a fan of macho bullshit. In fact, she thinks that most of the world’s problems can be traced directly to macho bullshit. And she does not like hearing her best friend layering his own macho bullshit onto Skylar’s usual macho bullshit.
“What do you mean, ‘it’s not too late’?” she asks.
“I mean, it’s not like I don’t know where he lives.”
Alicia nods, then says, “Ryan, I get that you’re mad. But I think you need to take it down a notch.”
“Easy for you to say. You weren’t there. Right?” With this, he looks to Avery for confirmation.
“I think you guys are much better company,” Avery says, in a way that lets Alicia know that he’s been trying to lead Ryan out of machobullshitopolis, too.
Poor Avery,Alicia thinks. She wants to assure him that Ryan isn’t usually like this; only his parents and assholes like Skylar can set him off in this way. It’s not who he is at heart. It’s who he is when pushed.
There’s also no real way to unwind him when he gets this coiled. You have to wait for the tension to ease, for the tangle to undo itself with time. So instead of challenging Ryan more or calling him on his macho bullshit in front of everyone else, which would only bring on the subset of macho bullshit known as defensiveness, Alicia asks Avery about his pink hair and how long he’s had it, and then asks more questions about life in Marigold. Ryan is still plotting in his mind; she can tell. And she wishes there was a way to pull him aside, to remind him what this day was supposed to be about.
But that window doesn’t appear, and Dez is starting to get itchy to do something else. She can only hope that time has done its job, and that watching Avery getting along with his friends has tipped Ryan off to how he should be behaving.
“What are you going to do now?” she asks him once the conversation’s hit an ebb.
“I’m not sure,” Ryan says.
But she can see it, clearly. The coil. It’s still there.
—
“Is there anythingyouwant to do?” Ryan asks when they get to Avery’s car.
I want a do-over,Avery thinks.I want the last two hours back.
