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.”