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“No, sir. You weren’t paying your way with your parents and you’re not going to pay your way with me. Your money is still your hard-earned money. Spend it on something besides room and board.”
Now Ryan is tearing up, which makes Avery tear up, too.
“Okay, okay,” Caitlin says, standing up and looking away before it’s three-for-three. “Go unpack your things. Last night while you were asleep, I cleaned out the small dresser by the washing machine. You can use that for now, until we can get you something bigger.”
Ryan and Avery retrieve the dresser, which used to hold sewing scraps and other odds and ends. It doesn’t quite fit in the den, near the couch, but Avery figures everyone’s willing to be a little odds-and-ends right now.
Ryan starts the unpacking with his duffel bag. The couch still has his sheets on it from when he slept there, made like it was a bed. Now, instead of moving things to the dresser or anywhere else, Ryan puts the contents of the duffel bag out on the sheet one by one, as if taking an inventory. His laptop, the cords. His charger. The unexplained notebooks. The books from his bedside table and his schoolbooks. A few pens Avery didn’t notice being thrown inside. Then some of the clothes that he consigned to the duffel instead of the black or green trash bags.
As he does this, Avery realizes he left behind the comfy flannel he put aside.
“Oh man,” he says out loud, and when Ryan asks him, “What?” he explains.
“That’s okay,” Ryan replies. “There’s something else I wanted to give you.”
He reaches in and pulls out a shirt so tightly rolled up that Avery didn’t even notice it when it was passed into his hands to put into the duffel.
“It’s my secret shirt,” Ryan says. “I always kept it in the back of my drawer.”
Avery has no idea what he’s going to find when he unrolls it; from the outside, it looks like a regular blue T-shirt. But once he opens it up and takes a look, he laughs at howobvious it is: On the front of the shirt, there’s a rainbow jumping from a cloud.
“I know, I know—it’s so corny. But picture this: I’m in sixth grade, and Mom and I are at Target. I’m bugging her to go to the toy section, like I always do, and I’ve worn her so far down that she tells me to go ahead, that she’ll meet me there after she’s done getting hairspray or dishwashing gloves or whatever. So I prance my way down the aisles, and along the way I see this shirt in with all the Star Wars shirts and the Pokémon shirts and—well, you know the kind of shirts they have at Target. And my first thought is that someone’s made a mistake, that this shirt should be in the girls’ section and not the guys’ section. I tell myself I should probably just move it back to the girls’ section, so I pick it up…and I realize, no, it’s a guy’s shirt. And I kinda like it. I’m not making the connection here between rainbow and gay, right? Not consciously. But that connection is inside somewhere, because I can’t put down the shirt. It’s a men’s extra small, so it can fit me. A little big, but it fits. But just as sure as I know it’s a shirt I need, I also know there’s no way in hell my mom is going to buy it for me. So I grab a couple other shirts along with it, and I go into the changing room. And while I’m in there—I’m not proud of this, but I’m notnotproud of it, either, you know? While I’m in there, I take off the shirt I’m wearing, put on the rainbow shirt, tuck it into my pants, and then put the original shirt on right over it. I button to the top button so you can’t see underneath. Then I walk back out and put the other shirts I brought in on theI’m-not-going-to-get-this rack, real smooth, so no one will be able to tell there’s one shirt missing. The shirt’s not nice enough to have one of those electronic sensors.
“I rush to the toy aisle, where my mom is already looking for me. Because she has the laser-stare thing down good, I figure she’ll spot what I’ve done right away. But she doesn’t! Not then, not when we’re checking out, not when we’re driving home. I’m wearing an extra shirt and she can’t even tell. It’s like, not only is the shirt invisible, but it makes me invisible in a very good way. That’s how it became my secret shirt. Every now and then I’d wear it under something else; it looked a lot like a Superman shirt I also had, so I think my parents assumed it was that shirt. I told my mom I wanted to do laundry as a chore, and she thought I was being a good son, but really it was so I could sneak in my secret shirt every now and then without her noticing. There were a few close calls, when she told me she’d help me fold, et cetera. But it’s stayed a secret all this time. Eventually, I didn’t fit into it anymore. But I still liked knowing it was there, keeping all my other shirts company.”
“Wow,” Avery says. “This is a very powerful shirt.”
“Yeah. And I guess what I’m saying is, I’d like you to have it. I think it will fit you. It won’t have to be a secret shirt anymore. It can just be a shirt that I love.”
Avery’s first reaction isOh, no, I can’t…and that’s exactly what he says, making to hand Ryan the shirt back. But Ryan won’t take it.
“Really,” he says. “It’s yours.”
Avery’s second reaction is to accept it, to accept it for what it is, for what it means. Accept all of it. And instead of pushing it away, be grateful.
“Thank you,” he tells Ryan. Then, “I just need you to hold it for a second.”
Ryan takes it, and Avery, right there in Caitlin’s den, takes off the shirt he is wearing, puts it down on the couch, takes the secret shirt from Ryan’s hands, and puts it on. It’s not a perfect fit, but Avery likes it even more for that, that it keeps some of Ryan’s shape.
“Nice,” Ryan says, taking in the sight of Avery in the shirt. He didn’t realize how much this would mean to him, too. When you wear a secret openly, it stops being a secret. It starts being something you can take pride in. It’s hokey for this particular shirt to make him feel that way, but he respects that his sixth-grade self wouldn’t find it hokey at all. His sixth-grade self would be scared and maybe a little ashamed and definitely a little intrigued by this turn in Ryan’s life. But most of all, at the most essential level, he would be astonished.
—
Aunt Caitlin doesn’tsee Ryan’s sixth-grade self as she walks into the room. At least not separately. When she sees Ryan now, she’s always seeing his younger selves and how they’ve all added up into this near-man. Which is its own astonishment, truth be told.
She’s come in to suggest they all go on an excursion. Sheclocks that Avery has changed his shirt, and that Ryan has just done something he wasn’t sure he could do. She knows this from a glance. But the rest of it is a mystery to her, and she is fine with it remaining a mystery. She wants Ryan to have mysteries under her roof, as long as they aren’t harmful ones. And this one is clearly the opposite of harmful. Risky, yes, in terms of how much Ryan is giving his heart. But not harmful.
“I thought,” she tells the two boys, “we’d go out and buy an actual sofa bed.”
—
Ryan and Averydon’t have to choose.
They can have the destination and the detours.
Neither of them expected to spend part of their afternoon at a place that proclaimed itself to be a “sofa emporium”—when they walk in, Avery asks Ryan, “Do you think the Emperor of Sofas is actually here today?!?” and both Ryan and Caitlin crack up. When the salesman asks Caitlin if these are her two sons, she says a simple no, and then when the salesman is out of hearing range mutters, “Wrong on so. Many. Levels,” which cracks the boys up again.
Ryan hasn’t forgotten where he’s just been or what he’s just done. He’s aware of what kind of check his parents must have given Caitlin if she’s in the position to get a new sofa bed. But he decides not to swim in those currents. He decides to swim instead on the surface, in the sunlight. The salesman has given them free rein to try out whatever bedthey’d like, so Ryan and Avery are hopping from one to the next, giving each a rating of one to five stars. Sometimes the mattresses are too thin; sometimes Ryan and Avery can feel the bars beneath, like they’re in a bear trap waiting to spring rather than a place for dreaming. Those get one star.
