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“Over here,” he says. He walks over to his bookshelf, where a pink plush unicorn is guarding the collected works of Beverly Cleary. “This is Gloria. And she was, without question, my best friend for a very long time. We were never apart for long. She used to be much brighter, but she’s mellowed. I guess we both have. My parents did not know what to make of my deep affection for her. They thought I could aim higher in the best friend department. There was no way for them to understand that I’d made her into the part of me that I needed to hear…even if it was in unicorn form. But, hey, my parents had to unlearn a lot of things. Which is just another way of saying they had to learn a lot of things. We all did. We all still do. You do. I do. We’re all really new at this.”
Ryan walks over to Avery, stands right in front of him.“I’m definitely new at this,” he says. He isn’t talking about what Avery is talking about. Instead he is saying that all those things can be unlearned and learned, but the really hard part, the really awkward and scary and wonderful part, is being in a room with someone you like and trying to find the right things to say, the right things to do with your body, the clearest signal to send to say that this means a lot, that this really means a lot.
Avery raises the unicorn so its horn touches Ryan’s nose. Ryan laughs.
“She approves,” Avery assures him.
—
We find someoneto love, and in finding that person, we find our own capability to love them.
Most of the time—no, all of the time—we have no idea what we are capable of.
—
Two boys kissingin a room.
One boy pausing to tell the story of the time he brought a unicorn to school.
The other boy talking about his own brush with unicorns, this one on a folder he had to keep hidden under his bed. When his parents found it, he told them it belonged to a girl from school, that she had used it to give him her part of a joint assignment. Which was true, but not the reason he’d kept it long after the assignment was done.
Both boys talking about unicorns and parents and erasers shaped like stars. Both boys debating whether there was really anything guilty about guilty pleasures. Both boys taking pleasure in deciding there was not.
Everyone here has forgotten about laundry, about bedtime, about snow.
—
Midnight is justanother minute, when you’re not looking at the clock.
—
It is Averywho yawns first, and the moment he starts, something is set off in Ryan, and he yawns, too.
They are leaning against Avery’s bed when this happens, but they know this is not the bed where they will end up. They promised. Plus, the bed in the family room is bigger.
Avery’s mother has put out a new toothbrush for Ryan, from her dentist-visit stash. This means Ryan and Avery can stand side by side at the bathroom sink, brushing and spitting together. This is a first for both of them, and they share the intimacy of it, the significance of such a quotidian joy. It’s no big deal, and that’s why it’s a big deal.
They do not talk about the sleeping arrangement; they simply go to the bed and arrange themselves for sleep. Ryan wasn’t sure this would happen; Avery wasn’t sure Ryan would want it. Their uncertainty shows, but so does their want, theiralmost existential want. They lie beside each other, but it isn’t like it was in the snow. There are layers between them, but the layers are thin. They lean in and kiss, and the longer they kiss, the more feverish it becomes. Kissing with their lips, yes, but also kissing with their hands, their skin, their whispers and their heat. Ryan reaches around Avery, pulls his body close, and Avery reaches around Ryan’s back and pulls his body close, too, and together they feel like they are fusing, feel like they are both two and one. No clothes need to be shed. No lines have to be crossed. This is everything, this closeness. This sensation of one another. This sense that touch can generate suchfeeling.
Then the slowdown. The lighter touches. The lying there and breathing. Wondering how the heartbeat can spread through so much of the body. Feeling the heat subside, but not entirely.
The drifting of voices and the approach of sleep. Avery watching Ryan fight it, blinking out and blinking back, and then coming unmoored again. Avery wishes him a goodnight. Ryan smiles, cuddles in. Wishes him a goodnight back. Then falls—the gentlest kind of fall.
Avery cannot slip into sleep as easily. Avery needs to think about this as it’s happening. Avery needs to understand it in order to enjoy it. So he watches Ryan through the blue-black darkness, watches as his chest rises and subsides, extraordinary machine.How did this happen?Avery asks himself.How is this possible?Because this is a room he knows well. His parents are asleep down the hall, allowing this. The snowkeeps falling outside, the sole reason Ryan is still here. All of it. This. You watch this person you are just getting to know, this person you want to tie possible futures onto, and suddenly the world is no longer a conspiracy of forces against you. There are good conspiracies, too; there are forces that will help you, that want you to find this remarkable form of personal peace, this four-letter universe of a word.
In Avery’s head, this all translates intoI really like youandI want this to workandI don’t believe thisandI want to believe thisandThis is real. This is real. This is real.
There is no way to fall asleep to such thoughts. You have to wait for them to slow. You have to wait for them to cool.
While you do, you watch the person across from you. And somehow, you watch yourself, too, and gasp at how everything seems to fit.
—
There is noway of knowing this, and no way of proving this, and there will certainly be no way to remember this, but the moment Avery falls asleep, the snowfall stops.
—
Just before dawn,Ryan hears tanks scraping through the streets. His first instinct is to think the alien invasion has begun…but then he hears the sound some more and realizes it isn’t tanks, it’s a snowplow.
