The fewer connections you have to the world, the easier it is to leave.
We need to turn back to Harry and Craig. We need to see them standing there. The day is getting warmer, and as a result, their bodies seem to give off more heat. We watch Craig’s hand press against Harry’s back, and we remember the miraculous feel of skin. Such a thing to miss. Touching his chest and feeling the heartbeat beneath. Touching his back and feeling his spine. Breath against our necks. The chill of pulling away. The furnace of wrapping together.
Twenty-seven hours and five minutes is a long time to kiss. So is twenty-seven hours and six minutes. Harry and Craig are conscious of everything going on around them. The sea of faces keeps altering itself, updating itself. The music runs from song to song. Mykal has become the self-designated cheerleader—if the supporters grow too quiet, he gives them a rise. After football practice ended, there was an additional buzz of dissent—not all the players, but some. But these dissenters soon grew bored. There’s not much to watch when it’s two boys kissing. You have to be devoted to stay.
Tariq’s consciousness is warping under sleeplessness. He starts muttering Walt Whitman to keep himself going, to keep his thoughts in sequence. Smita hears him and starts to do it, too. When Mykal hears this, he turns it into a cheer.
We two boys together clinging!
One the other never leaving!
Power enjoying!
Elbows stretching!
Fingers clutching!
Arm’d and fearless!
Eating!
Drinking!
Sleeping!
Loving!
Harry and Craig hold on to each other. Each of them, in his own thoughts, in his own way, wonders, How long can you hold on to a body?
We want to tell them, A long time. They are young. They don’t understand. It is natural for another body to become as yours as your own. It is natural to have that connection, that familiarity. We are ever-regenerating beings, but we always keep the same approximation, and in this way we can be known. And held.
Hold on to his body, we want to tell each of them. And then, Hold on to your own.
Harry coughs. Craig takes it. He doesn’t even flinch.
Neil sits next to Peter as Peter plays video games. Peter plays video games, but is mostly aware of sitting next to Neil.
Peter doesn’t know what to say, so he leans. Only a few inches, but now their shoulders are touching. Now they are in some simple way together.
Avery is happy to meet Ryan’s friends, but also a little at sea. It’s not that Ryan doesn’t introduce them, but once he does, it’s like he’s checked out of the conversation. His mind is still back in the mini-golf place. He is still stewing in his own helpless anger.
Ryan’s best friend, Alicia, senses something is off. Avery wants to tell her, It wasn’t me. I swear it wasn’t me. But she must sense this, too, because she is extra welcoming to Avery, trying to tell him funny Ryan-growing-up stories to make him feel less isolated. In fact, of the four friends that are sitting around the table in the coffeehouse, only one of them—Dez—seems to be studying Avery a little too hard, trying to figure out what’s under Avery’s shirt.
Finally, Ryan tells them what happened—not every detail, but the general gist of it. Avery is relieved, figuring that this will allow Ryan to release it, get over it. Certainly, everyone’s sympathetic, muttering an almost endless list of synonyms for the word ass**le to describe Skylar and the other guys.
But it’s not enough for Ryan to turn it into a story. At the end he says, “I really should have done something. Smashed up his car. Called the police to report them trespassing. Something. I mean, I guess it’s not too late.”
“What do you mean, ‘it’s not too late’?” Alicia asks, in a way that Avery doesn’t feel he can.
“I mean, it’s not like I don’t know where he lives.”
Alicia nods. But then she says, “Ryan, I get that you’re mad. But I think you need to take it down a notch.”
“Easy for you to say. You weren’t there. Right?” With this, he looks at Avery.
Avery doesn’t know exactly what he’s being asked. The question appears to be whether or not Alicia was there, and they all know the answer to that. Ryan wants something more from him.
“I think you guys are much better company,” Avery says, winning points from everyone but Ryan.
We see how unsatisfied Ryan is with this. With Avery. With Alicia. With all of them for not sharing his rage. We know this feeling well. There were times we were subsumed within our rage—it didn’t feel like something we created, but something that was outside of us, all around us, closing in. After so many years of denying our rage, denying our anger, it was powerful to acknowledge it, to allow it to fuel us, to harness the rage into outrage, taking the thing that felt outside of us and then shooting it back out from the inside.
Part of the use of anger is this acknowledgment, this harnessing. But the other part—the part that was sometimes hardest for us, especially in our pain—is the matter of aim. That is, sometimes the power of anger is so intense that you will shoot it everywhere. Even when, in truth, you should only ever shoot your anger at the people you are truly angry at, the people who truly deserve your rage. Ryan, so fixated on his hatred of Skylar, doesn’t even realize that he’s letting the hatred spill over, scattershot.
Alicia asks Avery about his pink hair and how long he’s had it, then asks more questions about life in Marigold. Really, what she wants is for Avery to go to the restroom or outside to make a phone call, so she can get Ryan alone and tell him to remember what this day was supposed to be about, to remember how excited he was when he asked her to gather people to meet this boy who’d fallen into his life. But Avery doesn’t leave the table, and Ryan goes unwarned by his best friend.
“What are you going to do now?” she asks when the conversation has run its course.
“I’m not sure,” Ryan says. But she can see it, clearly. His mind is still stamped with the word revenge.
Neil knows what Peter is doing, leaning his shoulder in like that. He knows what Peter is saying. He doesn’t move away. But he still doesn’t tell Peter what happened, and still doesn’t understand why.
Cooper leaves McDonald’s. Walks back into the world. Waits for night to fall.
Craig looks around the crowd for his family and doesn’t see them.
Harry tries to focus on the texts and emails coming in, all the posts. He barely has the strength to hold his phone, but he types as many answers as he can, trying to lose himself in words, trying to pass the time in words.
Harry’s father watches his son and feels something enormous inside of him. His own father would have never understood what he was seeing, what he was feeling. His own father would have had more than a few things to say about this. But his own father was not, in many ways, worthy of his grandson, just as Harry’s father is feeling, in many ways, unworthy of his son. What he feels is more than pride. Here, he thinks, is the meaning of everything. Right here in front of him. His child.
Tom, standing right next to Mr. Ramirez, wishes we were there to see it.
We are right here, we tell him.
We are right
here.
“Is there anything you want to do?” Ryan asks when they get to Avery’s car.
I want a do-over, Avery thinks. I want the last two hours back.
Craig sees the look on Tariq’s face before he sees his own phone in Tariq’s hand. For the past few hours, Craig’s let Harry be the texter, let Harry be the person saying thank you to the inexplicable thousands who’ve been tuning in. But Tariq’s expression lets him know this isn’t about that. This is something else.
Tariq hands over the phone. It’s a message from his brother Kevin.
Went for a drive. Good luck.
That’s all. That’s it.
His family isn’t coming.
His family. Isn’t. Coming.
At some point in the night his father must have decided. It had to have been his father.
They’ve left. They won’t be back until it’s over.
Craig feels like his skin has been ripped off from the inside. He feels that all of these people watching, all of these people can see what’s happened, can see everything that’s never going to happen. No reunion. No cheering section. Nothing.
The tears fall even before he thinks about them. Of all the things his body is doing, this is the one that makes the most sense. When you are sad, it makes sense for the body to want your eyes to clear quickly.
Harry still doesn’t know what’s happening, although he has a feeling he knows. Craig gestures to Tariq to share the message with Harry, and Harry’s fears are confirmed. Now Smita and Mrs. Ramirez are also coming over, seeing something’s wrong.
The crowd cheers louder, calls out the boys’ names. Hundreds of voices calling out the name that Craig’s parents gave him. It all sounds meaningless to him.
Something comes over Tariq. He can’t stop himself from doing it. He tells Rachel to watch the computers, watch the feed, and he bolts through the crowd. This is the first time he’s been away from Craig and Harry, this is the first time he’s taken a break, and he doesn’t know where the energy is coming from, but once he’s through the press of people, he’s sprinting like a gold medalist through his town. His breathing is heavy and all his old wounds feel like they’re on the verge of opening, but he powers through that, pushes himself until he’s on Craig’s street, in Craig’s driveway, running up Craig’s front walk. Then he’s pounding at the door—really pounding—yelling at them to come out, shouting that he knows they’re in there, pleading with them to be there, to come with him, to not be this stupid, to not make this mistake. “He needs you,” he tells them. “He needs you,” he says over and over again, until his hand grows too tired of pounding and his lungs grow too tired of yelling.
The house creaks and settles, as if to tell Tariq of its own abandonment. The sun blinks under a cloud. There’s not a word of response, because there’s no one around to craft one.
Tariq does not cry. He does not bother the house any further. He wanted to be the one to make the wrong thing right, as so many of us do. That he’s failed is almost beside the point. In the rush of everything when it’s over, he will probably forget to tell Craig that he tried this, that he did this.
We tell him it was a nice try. As he walks back to the school, we try to walk beside him. We want him to feel he has company.
Craig realizes how much he was waiting for them, now that he’s not waiting for them anymore.
He is also surprised to find their absence is not going to make him drown.
Harry is trying to be there for Craig. Trying so hard. Just when it feels like there can’t be anything new to say in the kiss, he tries to say this. And Craig hears it. Craig starts tracing something on his back. At first Harry thinks it’s a P, or a lowercase e. But it doubles on itself—a heart.
Harry responds with an exclamation point.
“You are not alone,” he says, his mouth still on Craig’s.
“What?” Craig asks.
“You are not alone,” Harry says again.
And this time Craig hears it.
Neil leaves Peter’s side, walks over to Peter’s computer. The two boys are still on there, kissing. Neil leans in, tries to get a sense of their thoughts. He makes it full screen, but that only makes them blurrier.
“We should go there,” he finds himself saying. “Do you think your mom will give us a ride?”
“I just want to drive past,” Ryan says. “To see if they’re still there.”
Avery wants to refuse. But instead he silently complies as Ryan tells him to turn left, to turn right.
There it is again. The abandoned mini golf.
The truck is gone.
Avery can’t tell if Ryan is disappointed or relieved. Maybe both.