“Nice award,” I manage to say, when Kieth bounds over and helps himself to my last sip of pop.
“Stupid award,” he says, and he goes to kiss my cheek just as I sneeze.
After I’ve recovered (because it became a series of four sneezes; aren’t I irresistible?), Kieth cups my hip and pulls me in and goes, “Did you forget to take your allergy meds again, young man?” Like he’s my mom or something.
Except, I did forget them. And I love that he’s worried about me. It is so nice to be worried about. It is maybe the best thing about being in a relationship: that you can share the heavy load of being alive.
“My allergy meds make me jittery,” I say, looking away and concentrating all my energy into not sneezing on him. “I’ll survive.”
A bell rings and the overhead lights flash on-off, on-off, on. The air buzzes for a second—that fluorescent lamp sound—and it’s time for the cast to get back into their wigs and prep for their next show. Party’s over.
Pizza’s untouched.
I grab a handful of Pringles and refill my pop, but they’re out of ice. I’m hunting for the metaphor when Kieth says, “You know I flirt with everyone, right?” He’s leading me to the stage door now, and I guess he can tell it isn’t just my allergies that are acting up. “Boys, girls. It’s not personal.”
“Maybe it’s not personal to you.”
“Mat—”
“It’s fine. Of course I know you flirt with everyone.” I step out onto the baking concrete. “You’re a theater person.” Man, if I thought it was hot inside, I was incorrect, because the sun is going all-in on the bet that it can send me into senior year with a sunburn.
“Hey.” Kieth jiggles my shoulder with his hand. “At least we never have to become that.” He points at the concrete path, just past the fake trees whose vinyl leaves shimmer with moisture. “Ya know?”
I do know, because we spot them at the same time: a pair of classic number ones. This middle-aged couple walking side by side but out of tempo, looking overheated and just plain … used to each other.
“Yeah, I guess,” I say quietly.
I should admit that Kieth was totally up front about not wanting to call us a couple. Or an anything. It was all me. “Can we just not do labels this summer?” he asked, in a way that wasn’t really asking, roughly one week into dating. “Can we just have fun?” Days later, when he mentioned that it might be hyper-mature to name our breakup day ahead of time—to save us “the awkwardness” of some big final goodbye—my heart actually lifted. At least a breakup signaled an end to something real.
I almost sneeze again. “Gotta go,” I say, shaking Kieth’s hand off my shoulder. “A bunch of number threes are loitering outside my booth.”
* * *
A multitude of people and yet solitude.
I read it again: “A multitude of people and yet solitude.” It’s a quote from my book, underlined and circled in light-blue pen. I didn’t underline or circle it. It came premarked, purchased from a used bookstore bin for fifty whole cents. Probably some other kid had to read A Tale of Two Cities for AP summer English, and probably his teacher made him circle important quotes. I wonder if I have good teachers. My teachers don’t make us do that.
I keep putting the book aside to appear attentive whenever a group passes my souvenir stand. But they never stop today. They coast right on by me, most of them pausing only to whap the swinging Ye Olde Funnel Cakes sign.
A multitude of people and yet solitude.
And so, this time when I go head-down, I dare myself to dive into the prose and push through. For longer than two sentences. Without checking my phone. Strangely, it works—I get, like, enchanted by a series of Dickens paragraphs that are actually short and, believe it or not, readable. Some of them are even kinda funny. And so I am taken by utter surprise—I am every synonym for startled—when I feel a hot exhale on my cheeks followed by the signature scent of Kieth’s off-brand spearmint gum.
“What are you doing?” I ask, but he’s already flipping up the wooden bar and grabbing my hand. They’re almost at the end of their show, and he’s wearing his space suit costume. I know what he’s doing.
“Come on!” he says, giddy, almost violent with intent.
I go floppy, but Kieth is strong—a quality I’d always found supremely hot until this very moment—as he drags me across the bumpy Maine Street courtyard, past the wall of gum wads, and down through the amphitheater audience.
I am the only guy he has chosen to dance his solo with all summer.
This hits me as we motor past aisle after aisle of girls, sitting stadium style under gauzy strips of circus tent ceiling. The music rumbles so much louder inside the amphitheater.
I am the only guy all summer, and I am in a fog of panic.
“Just go with it!” Kieth says, right as we reach the lip of the stage. Right as his entire cast motions for me to join them up there, and the audience (twenty people, tops) lets out a tired version of a cheer.
I never “just go” with anything. I study on weekends for tests that aren’t happening until Wednesday. I plan out dinners for the week with Mom (on a spreadsheet). I take a half million selfies before posting the most chill-looking one. And even then I usually delete it.
Somehow, though, I am now standing center stage on a rickety riser that feels so much less solid than it looks from my booth. And, like, the way Kieth’s lip is glistening under the lights, and the way his eyes are midperformance jittery, and the way the synthesized guitar sound is blaring us into another dimension … I don’t know. I close my eyes, and kind of bounce up and down, and indeed try to just go with it.
Pretend it’s your wedding, I chant like a mantra. Pretend he’s your husband. Like I’m marrying an astronaut and this is our first dance.
Except that when I open my eyes again, shaken by rowdy laughter from the audience, my astronaut isn’t even dancing with me. Kieth is way off to the side. He’s grinning a new kind of grin, either smug or self-satisfied. He never lets people dance alone—if anything, he dances hardest when he’s got competition next to him—and when I look out at the crowd, it’s those number four punks from earlier who are laughing. Hard. And pointing. And I am so sweaty and disoriented that I genuinely don’t know if I’m in on the joke or if I am the joke.
I flip around and instinctively reach for my fly, but before I can even check it, Kieth turns me back to face the audience. And as he holds up this microphone to my mouth, the embarrassment and confusion of, well, everything, smacks me like a bird against a window. The way he wouldn’t even introduce me to his cast today, let alone invite me to go see a movie with them this summer—and now he’s making me stumble around in front of them, by myself, like some kind of Hollywood chimpanzee. Whether my fly is down or not, I feel completely unzipped.
“And what,” Kieth says, his voice booming from surround sound speakers, “is your name, sir?”
“You know my fucking name,” I say, pushing his microphone away, hard, and definitely not taking the mandatory bow. I leap off the stage and race two steps at a time up the amphitheater aisle, toward the exit. But I pause at the top to crouch into the faces of those firecracker punks. And this time I yell “Boom!” And they aren’t laughing anymore.
“that was seriously uncool,” I text Kieth, as I’m limp-jogging away to my booth, not five seconds later, to throw down my CLOSED sign and hide. And get mad.
When I’m mad at Kieth, I love him less.
* * *
It takes three tries, but I get Mom on the phone.
“Hi, hon. Is everything okay?”
“Kind of sort of.” But my voice is already betraying me. It does this thing where it cries before my eyes do. Annoying.
“Aw, honey, what happened? Are you all right?”
The exit music from the amphitheater blasts so forcefully that the cobblestones shudder beneath my sneakers. I pivot and beeline toward the all-pastel Kiddie Land, where at least I won’t be the only person crying. (N
o toddler escapes Kiddie Land without at least one breakdown. It is so much less stressful to work souvenirs.)
“I don’t want to get into it. I mean, I’m not technically hurt or anything. Other than, you know.”
“Breakup day,” Mom says. Have I mentioned she’s the best?
“Wait, am I catching you in the middle of a shift?” I ask, suddenly aware she could be prepping for a procedure.
“Yes, but it’s nice to have a breather. Today has been a nonstop car accident.”
I come upon this concessions stand that’s been out of commission all summer on account of a broken cotton candy dispenser. When a machine breaks at Wish-a-World, it doesn’t get repaired. It just sort of sits there in the sun, rusting in the weather, becoming a kind of monument to itself. “Mom … do you think I’ll, like, meet somebody legitimately amazing someday?”
I know she can’t read the future, but it sometimes helps to just feed your mom what you want to hear said back to you.
“Of course you will! You’re so handsome and smart. You’re so young.”
“You’re just saying that because you’re my mom.”
“Well, yeah, but it’s true. I know I can’t prove it to you, but it’s true.”
In the relative quiet behind the abandoned cotton candy booth, I can make out the steady beeps and squeaky wheels of Mom’s hospital. There is some comfort in knowing that her opinion of me comes from a somewhat objective medical background. I think she had to sign some kind of oath as a nurse, stating she’d never lie to a patient.
“Hon?” she says, after I sink to my butt to sit on the curb. I suppose you’d say I’m fully crying now.
“Yes?” I manage.
“How can I make you feel better?”
“Maybe you can just listen to me cry for ten more seconds and then tell me to man up.”
So she does. She listens to me cry for ten seconds, maybe even twenty, maybe even a minute, and then she goes, “Hon?”
“Yeah? Time to man up?”
“No. I think there’s nothing more manly than showing your emotions. That’s going to really serve you well, in the long ru—”
“You know, the thing is,” I say, basically choking at this point. I turn it into a cackle so I don’t freak her out. “I don’t even think Kieth is the right fit for me. I’m just sort of, like, in general upset.”
“He’s not the all-time most considerate boy,” Mom says. “That’s for sure.” It’s so rare to hear her judge somebody, anybody, that I relish and hang on to it as another guy might relish and hang on to the last quarter of a football game.
And yet I am still a blubbering idiot.
I look up to see a boy holding his dad’s hand. The boy is eight, maybe even nine—older than I would have ever been to be holding my dad’s hand in public. (Dad and I are close, but affection isn’t our specialty; respect is.) In the kid’s other hand, he is managing both a Wish-a-World balloon and an extravagantly overloaded ice cream cone. We’re talking three scoops. It’s all too much. He’s just a kid, not a ninja or a magician. The ice cream rolls off the top, and the dad lunges—like a superhero in pleated shorts—and he almost catches it, but he doesn’t. The ice cream falls to the asphalt, practically in slo-mo in this heat, and splatters an ugly green splatter.
My dad would have caught it.
“Matty-love?” Mom asks. “Did you hear what I said? Should I not have said that about Kieth being inconsiderate?” Beeps, squeaks, so much happening on her end. “Do you want to just cry some more?”
I wait for it, for the kid with the empty cone to burst into tears. But he doesn’t. He tilts his head curiously at the mess, as if watching a caterpillar morph into a butterfly. And then he looks up at his dad and goes, “Can I get another one?”
And when his dad says, “Of course you can,” I realize it’s time to stop crying.
* * *
By now the sky is fully purple, because this part of Pittsburgh never gets totally black, even at 11:15 p.m. Cricket wings and cicada chirps make the air pulse in a sonic way. I had wanted to be home by this hour. To take off early and to block Kieth from being able to text me. To pull into my driveway and find that Mom’s shift ended at nine, and hope she’d thought to make me corn fritters, my favorite thing when I feel like crap. They are literally the greasiest. The grease soaks up your feelings.
But I just couldn’t do it.
“You’re alive,” Kieth says, when he finds me in the parking lot on the front hood of Dad’s rusted-out Honda, trying to knock out another chapter of Dickens. It seemed like a good pose to be in, something cool but detached. But I don’t know.
“I’m alive.” I’m folding and refolding Kieth’s jean jacket in my lap. I had it marked on my calendar to bring it back to him, and to have Mom wash it first. I managed the first part, but I didn’t have her wash it. I guess I wanted to smell him on the ride to work, one more time.
“You totally disappeared,” he says. “And now the day’s over.”
Kieth’s older than me, but he looks like a kid right now.
“Why did you pull me up on stage?” I steady my voice. “You know that I have, like, off-the-charts stage fright.”
Accidentally, I begin to slide down the hood, but Kieth catches me by a shin and holds me there, teetering off the car like the world’s most low-stakes trapeze act.
“My jacket,” he says, like he’s psyched to see an old friend. “I forgot I gave it to you.”
Because he forgets everything is why. I am so not going to miss him.
“Why did you pull me up on stage?” I ask again.
“I saw the look on your face when I didn’t say your name at the wrap party. It threw me off. So I thought, I don’t know—I thought it would be, like, sweet and memorable or something. Or bold. To pull you on stage. To push you outside of your comfort zone.”
“On breakup day, you want to dance with me in public.” I stare at the Milky Way. During one of my obsessive nerd phases, when I never left the house, I memorized every major constellation I could see from my window. “Of course I’d be stupid enough to be surprised. Of course I’d be lame enough to—”
“Matt, you know it kills me when you talk down about yourself. So, please, just, st—”
“Okay, okay, got it. I’ll stop.”
I set the jacket and the book on my car, and when I look back at Kieth, he’s digging around in this big cardboard box under his arm, which is full of all his junk from the dressing room. He removes a neon-blue sheet of paper and hands it to me.
“What is this?”
“Read it.”
I flip it over.
“The Best Boyfriend award,” it says—exactly like the flimsy awards they gave out five hours ago—with “Matty Vukovich” written below, in Kieth’s autograph. (The guy practices his signature on everything. His cursive is probably prettier than your grandma’s.)
“What does this mean?” I say, too excitedly. I slide off the hood and land on my feet. The gravel coughs. My ankle still aches from jumping off the stage, but it’s like my blood is carbonated. “What is this?”
“It just means you were the best catch I ever caught,” Kieth says.
I drop the award to my side. “That sounds pretty past tense.”
“Matt. It’s breakup day. It’s a tribute to how sensitive you are. I was actually gonna give it to you at the summer-end awards thing—I made it for you last night, and everything—but I chickened out. All those people.”
“All that hugging.”
He holds up his free hand, as if to show me he’s not carrying a pistol. “I guess I was afraid the award would make you, like, cry.”
A few cars take off around us, kicking up pebbles and fumes. Music blares from Devil Isle, the sixteen-plus section of the park. The whole place was supposed to close at eleven tonight, but it seems they’re struggling to get everybody out.
“Well, thanks,” I say, looking back at the award. Maybe I’ll adopt a parakeet, just so I can line the
bottom of a cage with it. “I’m not sure how I’m your best boyfriend ever if you’re breaking up with me…”
Kieth takes my hand. He does the quiet-voice thing, rare for an actor, where I have to lean in to hear him. “We’re breaking up with each other, Matt. We agreed to this. It’s the right thing. I’m going away, and—”
I press the printout against his face. It crinkles around his big (beautiful, perfect) nose. He laughs. “Quiet,” I say. “I know. I get it.”
He doesn’t want to cheat on me. That’s why, by the way. He’s going to arrive at his conservatory and be surrounded by (beautiful, perfect) theater boys, and he doesn’t want to cheat on me. And he’s known this since the beginning of the summer. Since the beginning of our no-labels showmance.
I slide the Best Boyfriend award through the crack at the top of my window and it falls like a giant feather onto the front seat. I plant my hands on my hips and wait for Kieth to talk. It works.
“I mean, listen. I could make a list of all the reasons why you’re the best.”
“Could you?”
“You aren’t afraid to make eye contact,” he says, right away. “That was a first for me. Every other guy I dated was afraid to make eye contact.”
“That’s funny. I didn’t know that about myself.” I’m about to change topics so that I won’t have to watch him immediately run out of all the supposed reasons why I am the best whatever ever.
But, remarkably, he isn’t done.
“You have amazing parents, is another thing. And I love your big feet. And the last guy I dated pressured me to drink all the time, and you and I never even drank together, once. And I didn’t miss it at all.”
I hate beer. I hate beer, and I love that Kieth’s list about me is kind of endless.
“And you take your work seriously, Matty, which is a big turn-on.” Now his nose is running. Like, a lot. But it isn’t gross. “Do you want me to keep going?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” He takes a deep breath. “You aren’t afraid to have real conversations about life—it’s like you’re thirty years old sometimes—and that freaked me out. But I was getting used to it. I mean, basically you’ve raised the bar for anyone else I’m ever going to meet.”