Ryan and avery, p.1
Ryan and Avery, page 1
Also by David Levithan
Boy Meets Boy
The Realm of Possibility
Are We There Yet?
The Full Spectrum (edited with Billy Merrell)
Marly’s Ghost (illustrated by Brian Selznick)
Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist (written with Rachel Cohn)
Wide Awake
Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List (written with Rachel Cohn)
How They Met, and Other Stories
The Likely Story series (written as David Van Etten, with David Ozanich and Chris Van Etten)
Love Is the Higher Law
Will Grayson, Will Grayson (written with John Green)
Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares (written with Rachel Cohn)
The Lover’s Dictionary
Every You, Every Me (with photographs by Jonathan Farmer)
Every Day
Invisibility (written with Andrea Cremer)
Two Boys Kissing
Another Day
Hold Me Closer: The Tiny Cooper Story
You Know Me Well (written with Nina LaCour)
Sam & Ilsa’s Last Hurrah (written with Rachel Cohn)
Someday
19 Love Songs
Mind the Gap, Dash & Lily (written with Rachel Cohn)
The Mysterious Disappearance of Aidan S. (as told to his brother)
Take Me With You When You Go (written with Jennifer Niven)
Answers in the Pages
This Is a Borzoi Book Published by Alfred A. Knopf
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2023 by David Levithan
Cover art copyright © 2023 by Sarah Maxwell
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
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ISBN 9780399553097 (trade) — ISBN 9780399553103 (lib. bdg.) — ebook ISBN 9780399553110 — ISBN 9780593710036 (international ed.)
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Contents
Cover
Also by David Levithan
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Snow Day
Grounded
Opening Night at the Drive-in
Practice
The Abandoned Course
Where Do You Think You’re Going?
River, Be My Friend
The Cast Party
Welcome to the Ocean
Derivation
Acknowledgments
_144870803_
To Noah, the reader who suggested I write this
and
To Andrew, who loves a queer love story
Snow Day
(the fifth date)
On the day of Avery and Ryan’s fifth date, it snows.
This is not out of the ordinary—it snows a lot in the towns where they live. But this is the first snowfall, and that always occasions a certain amount of surprise. Winter is no longer deniable, even though there are still some leaves that refuse to abdicate from the trees. The days have already been shortening, a minute or two of sunlight leaking away each evening, but that isn’t as noticeable as the sudden shift to snow.
If Avery and Ryan lived in the same town, the snow wouldn’t have much impact on their date. Their progress toward each other would be a measure slower, a measure more thoughtful, but everything would go as planned. As it happens, Ryan is driving to Avery. They might have met midway, but for them there is nothing midway, nor is there anything, really, within a fifty-mile radius. A pair of movie theaters. A few diners. A mall that has seen better days. A Walmart where you were sure to bump into at least three people you didn’t want to see while out on a date. Places you could hang out, but you wouldn’t necessarily want to, at least not for a special occasion. And at this point, for Avery and Ryan, each date is a special occasion.
They met at a dance—a gay prom—the blue-haired boy (Ryan) and the pink-haired boy (Avery) spotting one another and filling one another’s minds with music and color, shyness and an inexplicable but powerful urge to overcome shyness. It has progressed at a pace neither Ryan nor Avery has any reference point for. Are they going fast? Slow? The speed limit? Ryan has now met Avery’s parents; Avery has yet to meet Ryan’s parents, but at least he knows the reason has nothing to do with him and everything to do with the fact that Ryan’s parents aren’t quite ready for their blue-haired son to bring home a pink-haired boyfriend (or a boyfriend with any other hair color, for that matter).
Avery’s parents have always been understanding—even before he realized he was a boy and should be recognized by the world as a boy. When he shared this truth with them, they didn’t dismiss it or try to persuade him otherwise. And when Ryan appeared in Avery’s life, and Avery let him appear in his parents’ lives as well, they were nothing short of welcoming. Avery isn’t particularly surprised by this, even if it still feels like he’s sharing a new chapter with them as it’s being written, and he’s a little nervous about how they’ll read it. Ryan, meanwhile, is unfamiliar with this level of acceptance. He doesn’t know how to act around anyone’s parents, because his own are so negating.
Ryan does not check the weather forecast as he grabs his keys and leaves his house. There might have been murmurs about snow at school, but Ryan has learned to tune out all murmuring when he’s there; most murmurs are nastier and less important than the weather report. When the first flakes hit his windshield, it’s so gradual that it looks as if small, translucent spiders are dropping from the sky, filaments in their wake. It’s only when he’s ten minutes from Avery’s house that the wipers need to be turned on and the truck needs to slow. The snowflakes have begun to crowd the sky, and Ryan can’t help but smile at the way something solid can materialize from air, as if it has been summoned by a gentle spell.
He feels he already knows the route by heart…but sometimes the heart makes wrong turns. He could call Avery to ask for directions, but he chooses to rely on his phone’s navigational skills instead, since he wants Avery to believe he can find his way from memory. (On the fifth date, you are always looking for ways to prove the path to the sixth, seventh, and eighth.)
Avery is waiting by his window, so he is aware of the snow, too. It isn’t so dense that his delight needs to skid and swerve into worry. No, as he watches the downward drift, he doesn’t picture Ryan in any wreck, or even imagine Ryan forced to turn back home. Instead he feels that elemental wonder that comes from seeing the world so casually altered, the transfixing sensation of watching something so intricately patternless fall.
When Ryan’s pickup appears within the snowfall, Avery’s heart becomes the opposite of snowfall—that strange, windblown moment when you look and see the snow is actually drifting upward. Snowrise. When Avery sees Ryan pulling into his driveway, his heart is snowrise.
He is trying to guard this heart of his, but the guards are distracted. He is trying to cage his excitement, but he keeps leaving the door unlatched. He knows it is dangerous to like someone so much.
There is nervousness, too. Avery has control of his room, but he doesn’t have control over the whole house. His mother likes to hang up family pictures, and as a result there are lots of photos of Avery as a kid, Avery before everything was known, Avery before everything was understood. His mother had been very clear about this: It would hurt more to erase the past. Better, she said, to come to peace with it. There was no reason to hide it, no reason to disown the child Avery had been. Avery thought it was much more complicated than this, but at the same time, his parents had been so cool with everything else that he didn’t think it would be fair to tell them to take down all the photographs of the time before. In some of the photographs, Avery looks very happy. On some of those days, he was. On others, not as much. Only Avery has access to the feelings that lived underneath. Even when he was just a kid.
He certainly can’t ask his parents to take down the photos now, just because Ryan is coming over. He knows it isn’t worth it to try to curate his past, to try to present it to Ryan as if it had been otherwise. One of the most exciting and intimidating things about Ryan is the fact that Avery wants to tell him the truth. This is what they’ve recognized in ea
This makes Ryan anxious, too, but it’s an anxiety he’s willing to navigate, the same way he’s willing to step into the snow and walk through the wind in order to get inside. He can see Avery in the window as he pulls into the driveway, can see his pink hair and the lamp right next to him, the way it beacons out on such a dimming day. Ryan once heard the phrase Leave a light on for me and thought it was one of the most romantic requests ever made. He liked the idea that when you fall in love with someone, the other person becomes your lighthouse keeper, even if it means staying up all night, even if it means staring out into the darkness until the darkness assumes the shape of your love and comes back to you.
Ryan turns off the truck and almost immediately the windshield is covered. He turns off the headlights and for a moment there is the sincere silence of an entirely natural world. Even though his lighthouse keeper waits, he sits for a few seconds and listens to the music of the snow, to the slight tintinnabulation of snowflakes conversing with glass. He opens the door and lets his sneaker sink into the sparse accumulation that covers the driveway. The cold immediately attaches itself to his ears, his fingers. He races up the steps, inaugural footprints marking his trail. When he gets to the door, it is already open. When he gets to the door, he finds Avery in a blue sweater, Avery smiling as if Ryan’s arrival is the greatest gift a boy could ever want.
They stop and look at each other. A little more snow falls on Ryan’s shoulder and dusts his hair. He doesn’t notice. Not until he is inside and Avery is brushing it off, using it as an excuse for immediate touch, a welcome that starts at the top of Ryan’s head and works its way to the side of his face and down his neck.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” Avery says.
“And I’m so glad to be here,” Ryan answers.
Avery, having been inside the past couple of hours, has no idea how warm his house is, how it feels to Ryan as if cookies are being baked a few feet away. It is the kind of warmth you want to nestle into.
There are footsteps from another room, Avery’s mother calling out, “Is he here?” Ryan stomps his shoes on the mat, takes off his coat, and hands it to Avery, who hangs it on a doorknob to dangle until it is dry enough for the closet. Avery’s mother appears from her home office, welcoming Ryan and asking him about his drive. Ryan isn’t used to this kind of chitchat from a parent—maybe his father would have given him an “Is the truck driving okay?” but he wouldn’t have wanted to know anything beyond that. For Avery’s mother, it seems like the chitchat is meant as an entryway into more conversations, more topics.
She asks Ryan to leave his sneakers by the door, but she makes it feel like a favor rather than a command. Ryan complies, then worries he is broadcasting the hole in the heel of his left sock. If Avery’s mother notices, she doesn’t say anything.
(Ryan’s mother would have said something, and it wouldn’t have been very nice.)
“Well, I won’t get in your way,” Avery’s mother promises, getting in their way a little bit longer. “If you need anything, you know where I’ll be. There should be muffins in the kitchen. I think we have blueberry, maybe some carrot—or that might be bran. I’m not sure how you feel about bran, Ryan. Or about raisins—I think those have rai—”
“We’ve got it, Mom,” Avery interrupts. Ryan is amused to see him so exasperated by prolonged muffin talk.
Avery’s mother laughs, holds up her hand in surrender.
“As I said, I’ll be in my office if you need anything.”
She shoots Avery one last look—I love you even when you’re rude to me in front of your friend—and skedaddles.
When Avery’s mother leaves the room, Ryan steps away from the door and takes up Avery’s old position at the window. The snow is now blowing in gusts, clouds dissolving in the midst of a fight. The branches of the trees are beginning to bow and sway, as if beckoning the snow to fall even faster.
I’m lucky to have made it, Ryan thinks.
Avery walks up behind him, and for a moment doesn’t know where to put his hands. To have Ryan so close after spending so much time imagining him close…Gently, he moves his arm under Ryan’s arm, moves his hand across Ryan’s chest. Then he presses his own chest against Ryan’s back, peeking over Ryan’s shoulder so they can look at the snow together.
Neither one of them says out loud how beautiful it is, but both of them think it is quite beautiful.
Avery feels Ryan tense for a second, then realizes why. Mrs. Parker from across the street is coming out of her house, as she has every twenty minutes for the past two hours, to spread salt on her path. It is the same motion she uses to scatter seed for birds in the summertime.
She is not looking up, but Ryan is tensing at the idea of her looking up. Seeing them. Taking this moment that is theirs and making it into something else in her head.
Avery knows she wouldn’t care, might even find it sweet, to see the blue-haired boy and the pink-haired boy entwined like journal and clasp. But there is no way for Ryan to know that.
Ryan turns. Avery loosens his grip, to allow another hold to form. Now they are face to face, moving back into the hallway, blocked from the outside by the door.
“I’ve missed you,” Ryan says.
Avery leans in and kisses him. Once, but lingeringly.
“I’ve missed you, too.”
Ryan and Avery talk every day, and text nearly every hour they’re awake and allowed to have phones out. They chat for long spells each evening, a running commentary that often ripples into digression. But none of that can cure the missingness they’ve felt; if anything, it makes the missingness more acute. As Avery put it to Ryan late one night, long after they were supposed to have gone to sleep: What we’re doing right now is watermelon-flavored. When we’re together, it’s watermelon. This made sense to Ryan then, and it makes even more sense to him now. Kissing Avery is watermelon. Having his arms around him is watermelon. Being able to see the look on his face as he talks is watermelon.
“What do you want to do?” Avery asks.
And Ryan thinks, This. Watermelon.
Here, in the fifth date, another precious inkling of a truth about love: That there is a point you reach when it doesn’t really matter what you do, that the question of what to do becomes beside the point for long stretches. The answer reduces to the smallest, most important words:
You.
Here.
Us.
This.
All so easy to fit into the equally small word Now, and the slightly longer word Love.
But Ryan is sixteen. He doesn’t realize that any of these small words are worthy answers, just as Avery at the same age doesn’t know it’s alright to not have a plan for what to do next.
Not knowing what the answer should be, Ryan replies, “It’s your house. You lead the way.”
Avery would love to stay right here, kissing Ryan for a few minutes more. But there is always the risk that his mother will remember another flavor of muffin in the kitchen, and will return to tell them about it.
“How about my bedroom?” he proposes. Then, blushing, he feels compelled to add, “Not because it has a bed, but because it’s, uh, my room.”
Ryan smiles. “Sounds good.”
* * *
—
This is the geography of a house, at five in the afternoon on a fifth date:
In one room, a mother types. Every now and then, she stops to think about what she’s typing, but her thoughts rarely stray farther than that. In the kitchen, the refrigerator and the clock have a barely audible conversation. The garage waits like a sleeping whale; when a father comes home in an hour, it will open its mouth with a bellow that everyone else in the house will notice. For its part, the family room gently offers some spilled lamplight to the growing night. The front hall is damp with footprints; a pair of sneakers waits by the door. In the hallway, two boys walk single file, both in socks, both looking at one another far more than they are looking at their steps or anything lining the walls. Ahead of them, a bedroom waits for the flick of a switch to bring it to life. Beyond that, there’s another bedroom, currently resting. In the bathroom, a faucet drips, as if trying to imitate the precipitation outside. A toilet seat has been left up. Three toothbrushes stand at attention; since they aren’t speaking, we must assume they are listening to everything else that goes on in the house.
