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He shakes the bouquet a little and it indeed looks like the flowers are clapping.
“I love them,” Avery says, then kisses Ryan sweetly.
“That was quite a performance,” Avery’s mom says.
“Yeah,” Avery replies, taking the snapdragons from Ryan and looking down at them. “That probably shouldn’t have happened.”
“What do you mean?” Ryan asks. “You were awesome. He deserved it.”
“Thanks for saying that,” Avery tells him. “But I kinda became the amateur he accused me of being.”
“He’ll live,” Avery’s dad says.
Avery’s mom changes the subject to the cast party, and Avery explains they’ll all be going over to Anna Anderson’s house, and that her parents will be there to “curtail any untoward shenanigans.” (This is a quote from the play.)
“Okay,” Avery’s mom says. “Just be home by eight. Ryanneeds to drive back tonight, and I don’t want him getting home too late.”
“We’ll be fine,” Avery assures her as the phrase “home too late” reverberates within Ryan like a game-show buzzer signaling that time is up.
Fortuitously, Hannah and Liz lean in then to send some Sapphiclet’s get goingvibes. Avery gives his snapdragons to his mother for safekeeping, and Liz, Hannah, Avery, and Ryan decide to pile into Hannah’s improbable choice of vehicle—a red 1990 Miata she tells Avery and Ryan she won in a bet. (She actually bought it used with a year’s worth of carefully saved babysitting money.) The backseat only has enough legroom for a small toddler or a medium-sized dachshund, so Ryan and Avery end up lying atop one another like they’ve been stacked in some romantic cargo ship. Avery assures Ryan their destination isn’t that far away.
Ryan expected Avery to be either exuberant or exhausted once the show was done, but instead he seems preoccupied. Ryan knows him enough now to have a suspicion why, but not enough to make an assumption. So it’s a question he asks—
“Are you still thinking about what happened with Dennis?”
“Yes.”
When you start dating, you feel like emotions are the roll of a six-sided die, and you read for the basics, react tothe elemental. But the more you talk, the more time you share, the more sides the die takes on, and while you know you’ll never master the response to every momentary roll, you do start to understand what the numbers mean. Ryan has never seen Avery like this, caught in the hinge of regret. He is sorry Avery is feeling this way, and at the same time, it helps him understand Avery a little bit more.
From the front seat, Liz says, “Don’t worry about it. He totally deserved it.”
Another roll, and the thirty-sided die becomes a forty-sided die. Avery doesn’t dig in, but he also doesn’t let Liz pull him out.
“In some ways, he did deserve it,” he says. “But in other ways, he didn’t.”
“He won’t be at the party, will he?” Hannah asks.
“I doubt it,” Liz replies. “I don’t think he liked any of us very much.”
And now he knows what you all thought of him,Ryan thinks, but doesn’t say out loud, because he knows it’s the last thing Avery wants to hear.
—
Pope has decidedto keep Lavinia Stranglehold’s makeup and wig on for the cast party; the disconcerting part is that they are not wearing their costume, but instead have found a muumuu covered in pictures of dancing cats. They welcome Ryan, Avery, Liz, and Hannah as if it were their own home, which it is not.
“Make yourselves comfortable…but not so comfortable that they’d need to dry-clean the cushions after,” Pope says. Then, somewhat to Avery’s horror, they wink at Ryan.
Ryan knew the cast party wasn’t going to be a rager, but he’s still amused by the scene he discovers inside: The refreshments andCongratulationsbanner would be at home at a fifth grader’s graduation party. There’s a “chip bar,” where Tostitos and Lay’s appear in their seemingly infinite varieties of dusting and shape. There is plenty of unjacked Coke and unscrewdrivered OJ. Pizza boxes wait like flattened lapdogs with eager mouths. A coffeemaker burbles at the edge of the beverage table, like the bad kid at the back of the bus.
Despite the lack of intoxicants, there’s a certain kind of intoxication in the air. Casting, rehearsals, performance—it has been a very small era, but it’s still the end of one.
Ryan still feels like part of the audience here. He might as well pull a chair to the corner of the living room and watch what unfolds. He expects Avery to jump into the fray and leave him behind—he would totally understand this course of action, because he is a guest, maybe even an interloper. The girl who played the baby is calling out to Avery from the sofa, patting the cushion beside her. The permission is sitting on Ryan’s lips.Just go ahead. I’ll stay here. Have fun.
But Avery doesn’t leave him, doesn’t step away even when he’s beckoned. Instead he leads Ryan over to the pizza, which is exactly where Ryan wants to go. They load slices onto paper plates that offer them congratulations in balloon lettering. Liz and Hannah follow, and when the four ofthem have gotten sodas as well, they leave the living room for an adjacent, quieter den, where two couches sit catty-corner to one another. Avery and Ryan take one and Liz and Hannah take the other.
It’s Hannah who says, “It’s like we’re on a double date!”
To which Liz adds, “Yeah—in someone else’s house.”
