“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. (No 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?”