The Great American Whatever

by Tim Federle

  “The pizza is probably the safest,” I go, watching Amir’s face for the subtlest clues.

  “Hmm,” he goes, “I had a lot of pizza for dinner last night.”

  “Oh, no way.”

  “Way.”

  The guy two spaces in front of us is ordering the amount of food you’d stock up on for Thanksgiving, so I’m picturing how Mom might react if I ever brought Amir home for a holiday when I feel my butt light up like a Christmas tree, and realize Amir’s hand is pressed into my lower back.

  He’s moving me up in line, but I pretend he’s actually just dying to touch me.

  The Thanksgiving guy departs with a teeming tray, and this little boy in front of us gets into an argument with his big sister about funnel cakes. Amir picks up on the thread with: “So, do you have any siblings?” and the question is so terrible and unexpected that I stare fuzzy eyed at the chalkboard menu as if it might turn into an old screenplay I can simply recite from.

  “Uh, what?” I say.

  “Do you have any siblings?”

  I dare myself to look at him, and despite how hard I try to appear neutral, I must not succeed, because he throws his hands up and laughs and goes, “Wow, touchy subject! There’s no right answer! I’m an only child myself.”

  Oh my God, he doesn’t know. Carly didn’t tell him.

  I had imagined I’d be pissed at Carly for revealing all sorts of stuff about me to Amir, but I guess not. I guess she didn’t tell him about December twentieth, the only interesting thing about me, anymore.

  “Oh,” I say.

  “People always pity me for being an only child,” Amir says, scratching his neck. I catch a glimpse of his armpit hair and it is black and without flaw. “But I love it.”

  He steps forward as the little kids in front of us teeter away with their own funnel cakes, their faces streaked with the tracks of drying tears. “How about you?” he goes.

  But we’re at the counter. “Can I take your order?” Thank God we are at the counter.

  Somehow I murmur: “Burger and a large Coke, no ice,” and Amir orders a cheeseburger without the bun, on “extra lettuce,” and then he says to me, again, like he’s the third Hardy Boy out to solve the mystery of my broken spirit: “You’re avoiding this question. . . .”

  I’m not sure if he pays or if I pay, only that we find a seat in the shade. I can’t look at him, so I take such a big bite of burger that it makes Amir laugh. I would fill my mouth with moths and bees right now if it meant not having to speak.

  When I finally swallow, after watching Amir negotiate his plastic fork around the lettuce, as if, with enough prodding, it might morph into something actually edible, like onion rings, I say to him, “I’m an only child, too,” just like that.

  And saying it makes it real.

  “Hey,” he says, holding up his bottle of water, “to not having annoying siblings!” I toast him with my Coke and swallow away the acid in my throat.

  I just—I need to see if he actually likes me. I refuse to be his pity project. And so I am an only child now too, which is a version of the truth.

  Geoff and Carly find us. Geoff is holding three corn dogs, and they look kind of amazing, and somehow Carly has tracked down a salad—which, at Kennywood, is approaching a “story of Easter” level of miraculous—and I’m instantly fine. With Geoff here I know my place. I’ll be the guy who just makes comments from the sidelines, Donald O’Connor in Singin’ in the Rain, even though I can’t really dance. Let Geoff be Gene Kelly. (Famous Pittsburgher, by the way.)

  We make fun of Amir for not ordering a bun, and he finally gives in to the rest of humanity and takes a chomp out of Geoff’s third corn dog, and Carly calls us all brutes and spouts off some crap about how “the only reason meat tastes good” is because at the last minute, “animals are frightened” and release “a certain kind of enzyme” that adds to the flavor, and during this entire impassioned speech, Geoff begins a low moo that grows loud enough to attract the attention of the funnel-cake siblings, and what I’m getting at is that we’re restored. That I’m okay again. That Amir is knocking his shin into my shin from across the rusty table, and that it’s nice.

  “Man, that’s sad,” he whispers. We’ve been carrying on about how Geoff’s manager, Venessa, made him shave off his mustache, and so the laughing spills over when we turn around to see what Amir’s looking at.

  It’s a lady and her family. The lady kind of looks like my mom.

  “I honestly can’t believe the way some people let themselves go,” Amir says. “It sorta gives me the willies.”

  I stand up right away and say, “I have to go to the bathroom,” and I’m probably just as surprised as anyone when I do.

  But you know by now what I never do in front of other people.

  And so when I’ve got my feet hiked up on the seat of this dirty bathroom stall, I let the tears come—harder than the funnel-cake siblings’, harder than the scared girl who ran out of the Racer line earlier, harder than how Geoff and my mom cried in our kitchen yesterday. Or was it the day before?

  I guess I just didn’t expect to find out that Amir is not, in fact, 100 percent ideal, this early on. Ha. How incredibly me. Too controlling. Too sensitive. Always just a little too.

  I go to the mirrors. “Stop,” I say at my reflection, which is tattooed and scratched with graffiti. “Stop,” I say again, and this time I listen to the talking face that used to look like Quinn Roberts—the guy voted “cutest weirdo” in an unofficial poll conducted by the girls in middle school—and I stop crying, for him. For the cutest weirdo, and maybe the least likely to succeed now, too.

  One little detour before rejoining my trio in the picnic area: “I really like your earrings,” I say to the lady at the table, because she’s got cool earrings on. I really do like them.

  She sneers at me the way you do when your whole life is about being noticed for the wrong thing, and she doesn’t say thank you, I think because she thinks I’m making fun of her, which I’m not.

  I stand here long enough that the lady’s husband, skinny just like my dad was, goes, “You have a problem?” But the lady puts up her hand to him and goes, “It’s okay,” because she must realize it is. That teenage boys who make fun of big ladies never stand around afterward, like I’m doing right now. Believe me, they ring your doorbell and they call your mom terrible names and then they run and they run, and they never dare to look back. And I hate them, and I’ve memorized their faces.

  “Thank you,” she says, touching one of the earrings. “My daughter made them for me.”

  When I get back to our table in the shade, which is somehow not in the shade anymore, Amir looks flat-out mortified, his brown face glowing pinker than a poker. I guess he didn’t really notice my mom standing on our front steps when he picked me up this morning. I guess some people don’t see everything. I guess Geoff and Carly told him about her, and me, while I was in the bathroom. And I wonder what else.

  “Come on,” I say. “Let’s hit some more rides.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Our clothes are still damp from the log flume as we pull onto my street just before midnight. My fake glasses are fogged up and kind of smudgy, too. How do people manage to keep glasses clean all day?

  “Okay, before you get out of my car,” Amir says, turning down NPR, “you have to pass one round of Trivia.” I like that he listens to NPR.

  “Oh, boy,” Carly goes, “the rare Trivia counterattack.”

  All I want is to be dead asleep.

  “All right,” I say, when it seems like Amir isn’t kidding. I’m on the side of the car that doesn’t open, anyway. So I’m kind of trapped, I mean.

  “Name the horror franchise that was shot in Pittsburgh in the sixties,” Amir says, “and was originally titled Monster Movie.”

  He’s looking at me in the rearview mirror and I’m not looking away, which is something.

  “Whoa!” Geoff goes, thumping his hands against the dashboard. “This dude
brought it, Quinn.”

  “No,” I say. “It’s too easy, Amir. It’s literally insulting. Carly probably knows the answer.”

  “Uh, I don’t,” she goes.

  “Scoot,” I say to her, and she opens her door and I hop out to the curb, which is still radiating such warmth that I actually look up, to make sure I’m not standing beneath a heat lamp of some sort. I’m not. We don’t even have streetlights, ha.

  Amir gets out and walks me to my mailbox, two feet away, which is kind of sweet.

  “Quinn doesn’t know the an-swer,” he goes in this sing-song way.

  “Quinn does, actually,” I say, not in a sing-song way. “But that is some third-grade-level movie trivia you’re rocking, and it’s beneath me.” I am terrible at flirting. I open the mailbox and then I shut it. “So, I should probably get inside.”

  “You’re pretty smart.”

  I roll my eyes.

  “You are,” he goes. “I can’t believe somebody so not ugly is allowed to be so smart. Frankly, I can’t believe you’re in high school.”

  “Neither can I,” I say. “I can’t believe high school is even legal, as a concept.”

  Yes, good line. Good line, Quinn. He’s laughing.

  “How do you know about movies shot in Pittsburgh, anyway?” I say. It’s just unusual that anyone else who’s even remotely cute and under the age of sixty would know this stuff.

  “I took a horror film elective at Pitt this year,” Amir goes, rolling his eyes just like I did. Nice to know that even college students are filling time with a good eye roll.

  “Why the eye roll?” I go. “I’d kill to take a film course instead of, like, calculus. That sounds so fun.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s it for electives for a while. My parents want me to buckle down next year. That’s their term. ‘Buckle down.’ And ‘pick a major.’ ”

  Amir’s face lights up bright and slick. It’s my porch light, flashing on-off-on-off-on. I feel my ribs contract. I’m on the verge of being turned into a pumpkin.

  “I have to get inside,” I say.

  “Okay,” he says. “Oh—I wanted to send you that photo from Noah’s Ark. You look uh-dorable in it.”

  Nice. I’ve advanced from “not ugly.”

  We took this selfie outside one of Kennywood’s oldest attractions. Geoff insisted we all pose like animals. Geoff picked a flamingo (and he’s the straight one), Carly picked a peacock, Amir was a wolf, and I picked a sloth.

  “Sounds good,” I say, wondering if Mom is watching us from the front window. Knowing she is, actually. In retaliation, I dig my foot into the dirt, like I’m playing shortstop. Like I’m a regular local guy.

  “What I meant,” Amir says, “is do you have a phone number where I could text you the photo? I’ll do it right now.”

  He reaches for his pocket, but: “Oh,” I say, “I have to get a new phone. My old one is, like, busted.” Pause. Like, you can hear actual crickets chirping out of tempo from the trees. “I dropped it in the toilet, I mean.”

  “Awkward,” Amir says, and Mom flashes the lights again, and I say, “I’m gonna go. Thanks for the ride today.”

  “Hey, cutie,” he goes, when I’m halfway up our crumbly cement stairs. I’m seeing them like I’ve never seen them before and I hate them. I bet stairs don’t crumble in Dallas. I bet they’re made of, like, granite. “Do you have any plans this weekend, other than for your birthday?”

  I don’t have plans for my birthday.

  It would probably seem cool to say, Yeah, that I’ve got lots of plans—lots of plans, lots of dates, lots of demand. But “no” is all I can say, “I don’t have any plans,” because apparently saying I dropped my phone in the toilet used up all my lies for the night.

  “Maybe we could, like, hang out tomorrow night or something?” Amir says. “I leave town next week.”

  My face does this extremely complicated thing from the old days known as smiling, and I go, “Okay.” Okay.

  Amir leaves my mailbox and opens the driver’s side door and says, “There’s a foreign film festival in Shadyside. I’ll find you online and send you the info and you can see what you think.”

  I catch Geoff looking up from his phone, and I can tell he wants to laugh so hard about two gay dudes who are indeed going to go see a foreign film, and even though I hate reading at movies, I think maybe this isn’t an awful idea.

  “Okay,” I say again, but actually: Amir isn’t going to find me online. I deactivated all my profiles three months ago. I was tired of getting tagged in #tributes. I was tired of the banal poetry and misappropriated quotes that people would add my name to and, worse, Annabeth’s. “This made me miss @annabeth_roberts17,” some second-tier girl from school would say, tagging Annabeth in a ludicrous Eleanor Roosevelt quote written in, like, Comic Sans, and laid over a very fake-looking rainbow, as if @annabeth_roberts17 even liked rainbows. You know what Annabeth Roberts, seventeen, liked? Gray skies.

  “So, next time I see you,” Amir says, after I realize I’ve been standing here zoning out for, oh, ever, “you better know the answer to my Triv—”

  “Night of the Living Dead,” I say. And then: “And it was originally called Monster Flick, not Monster Movie.”

  He smiles. “You are so damn smart. Unfair. Blessed with hotness and smartness. You have the perfect life.” And he gets into the car, and Carly turns to me and bops her eyebrows, and Geoff flashes a peace sign at me (that’s new), and I’m standing on our crumbly steps when I hear the front door click open and the low, throaty, phlegmy voice behind me appearing right on cue: “Who was that?”

  “Nobody,” I say to Mom, trying not to actually float by her. “Carly’s new boyfriend.”

  Oh, never mind: I didn’t use up all my lies tonight. Or maybe it’s past midnight, and the lie meter has clicked over to tomorrow morning. More as this story develops.

  “Hmm,” Mom says, or at least I think she does. I’m too busy bounding up the stairs to switch on my laptop, to fire up ye olde wireless, to debate about reactivating my old accounts and rejoining the night of the living teenagers.

  But the wireless isn’t picking up. Our power may have gone out today—there was some weather in the area.

  So I totally restart my computer, which I haven’t actually done in ages. Since before, probably. And that means the first app that opens is my cloud storage, and that means the first thing I see when my computer screen flickers to life again is my Q & A folder, stacked with all our old movies, organized by genre, date, and length—each and every one shot in Pittsburgh. Our very own kind of monster flicks.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  And sometimes you wake up at seven in the morning because somebody is humming. What the actual fuck.

  I slide my laptop off my belly and head to where my new air conditioner should be, and when I look outside: Tiffany and Ricky’s mom is in their yard, humming and weeding at seven in the morning, like this is some kind of David Lynch movie.

  Let me describe the Devlins’ house to you: exact same construction as ours, but theirs was the one that you went to on Halloween to get the full-size candy bars. Ours was the one you skipped, because Mom literally handed out dimes, from our animal-cracker barrel in the pantry.

  God, it’s early. And yet: I slip my mesh shorts on over my lucky boxers and I go outside and cross the street, and when Mrs. Devlin doesn’t notice me, I clear my throat, like you’d do in a comedy.

  “Oh, my gosh,” she says, turning around and holding up one of those little hand-shovel things like she’s Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. “Quinn, you snuck up on me!”

  “Sorry, Mrs. Devlin.”

  “Are you okay?” She stands up slowly. By now you’d think she would have lowered the weaponlike shovel. “You look so—Lord, you’re a man.”

  “Um. It happens. If you’re lucky!”

  Weird laugh. “I love the glasses.”

  “Thank you,” I say, touching the frames. They are really heavy. Like, I actually
feel a little pain in my nose bridge, which is saying something because I’ve always felt that my nose is a little too big for my face. I’m delicate where I should be strong and I’m strong where I should be delicate. New theory.

  “Should I let Tiffany know you’re here?” Mrs. Devlin says, brushing clumps of dirt off an apron sort of thing. “She’s asleep, but I’m sure she’d love to see you. It’s been forever.”

  I should mention to you that Tiffany goes to boarding school now. She sort of cracked in eighth grade, the taunting about her sixth toe sending her over the edge the same year Ricky sold his first screenplay for like a million dollars (seriously). And so Tiffany got some kind of elective foot surgery to remove the toe, and then Ricky paid for her to go away to Michigan, to this school where you ride horses all day and they don’t give you grades.

  “Oh, don’t worry about waking her up,” I say. “It’s super early. I bet she was out late last night doing things those wacky kids like to do.”

  Mrs. Devlin does the adult version of laughing at a teenager’s joke, which sounds like heat pipes being turned on for the first time after a long summer. All our summers are long. Same with our winters. “Tiff’s boyfriend visited, from Michigan, so we all went to South Hills Village for dinner. It was fun. There’s a new seafood place that’s pretty goo—”

  “Her boyfriend?” I say, as if a high school girl with a boyfriend is such an earthshaking statistic.

  “Yeah, they met at school.”

  It’s just, Tiffany was always younger than Annabeth. And Annabeth never got to have a boyfriend. Doesn’t seem right.

  “He’s a lovely young man.”

  “Is he inside?” I say, gesturing wildly as if they allowed a convict into the house. My brain can’t keep up with the math that a six-toed girl has a lovely young man visiting her from Michigan and my sister is in an urn.

  “No, no,” Mrs. Devlin says. “We put him up for the night. He’s at the Hilton on McMurray Road.”

  “That’s cool,” I say, like an idiot.