Summer Days and Summer Nights (25 page)

“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.”

He doesn't want to cheat on me. That's why, by the way. He's going to arrive at his conservatory and be surrounded by (beautiful, perfect) theater boys, and he doesn't want to cheat on me. And he's known this since the beginning of the summer. Since the beginning of our no-labels showmance.

I slide the Best Boyfriend award through the crack at the top of my window and it falls like a giant feather onto the front seat. I plant my hands on my hips and wait for Kieth to talk. It works.

“I mean, listen. I could make a list of all the reasons
why
you're the best.”

“Could you?”

“You aren't afraid to make eye contact,” he says, right away. “That was a first for me. Every other guy I dated was afraid to make eye contact.”

“That's funny. I didn't know that about myself.” I'm about to change topics so that I won't have to watch him immediately run out of all the supposed reasons why I am the best whatever ever.

But, remarkably, he isn't done.

“You have amazing parents, is another thing. And I love your big feet. And the last guy I dated pressured me to drink all the time, and you and I never even drank together, once. And I didn't miss it at all.”

I hate beer. I hate beer, and I love that Kieth's list about me is kind of endless.

“And you take your work seriously, Matty, which is a big turn-on.” Now his nose is running. Like, a lot. But it isn't gross. “Do you want me to keep going?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” He takes a deep breath. “You aren't afraid to have real conversations about life—it's like you're thirty years old sometimes—and that freaked me out. But I was getting used to it. I mean, basically you've raised the bar for anyone else I'm ever going to meet.”

I shift around on the big feet that he apparently loves, but I don't say anything.

“So, in a unanimous vote of one,” he says, “you get the Best Boyfriend award. Which beats the Flirtiest Guy in any race, every time.”

I look back at the car, because otherwise I'll try to get him to kiss me. And, as a joke, I guess—thinking it might lighten the mood—I grab
A Tale of Two Cities
off the hood. “Well, I have something for you, too,” I say, stalling and half turning away from Kieth. I covertly tear out a random page and then hand it to him as if it is a deep and poignant present. “Here.”

But Kieth studies the page like it's a treasure map, and when he looks back up, his eyes are rain clouds. The weather has finally arrived.

“There is prodigious strength in sorrow and despair,” he says.

I'm not sure why, but he says it again. And then again, like he's memorizing something. Forever an actor. Then I realize, duh, he's reading from the book. He holds up the page for me to see, and those words—“There is prodigious strength in sorrow and despair”—are circled three times in light-blue pen.

“That is beautiful, Matty,” Kieth says, now all-out crying. I'm talking
me
-level tears. It is both impressive and disconcerting. All summer long I've wanted him to lose it, just once, and now I'm like
Wait, you're stealing my routine
. “Thanks, seriously.”

Holy Buddha. He thinks
I
underlined it. And had the page all picked out to give to him, like it's a real gift.

“I've been too hard on you for being emotional.” He waves the page around, laughing at himself, wiping his nose across his arms. They are lean and long, punctuated only by this turquoise-bead bracelet that I won for him at the arcade, that he wasn't supposed to wear during the show—but that he never took off, ever.

I remain quiet.

“There's nothing weak about crying, you're right. I'm sorry I gave you crap for that. I'm gonna frame this quote for my dorm, maybe.”

Come on, roller coasters. Come on, distant screaming crowds. Now isn't the moment for silence, but even Pennsylvania's infamous cicadas have shut up.

“Can you just
not
be the sweetest guy of all time today?” I finally say. “I've been waiting for this since June.”

It's not fair. With him coming down and me tearing up, we have evened out. We are together, at last, a matching level of emotion. Just in time to say good-bye.

The box under Kieth's arm shifts—
ca-chunk
—the sound of lipstick and mouthwash and a weird, lone Adidas soccer sandal. The whole thing nearly topples from his grip, so I reach to help him. We lower the box to the ground and I notice a glimmering wedge of foil shining from on top of his otherwise dull belongings.

“You want that?” he asks, just when I'm back in love.

“What is it?”

“Pizza, from the awards party. Left over. I lost my appetite. You should take it.”

Well,
dammit
.

I pick the pizza wedge up and am about to launch into an “I am lactose intolerant, and you know that! I told you that on our first
and
second dates!” speech, when Kieth pulls me into a hug.

He smells like the jean jacket smell I've come to associate with the concept of “boyfriend.” Boyfriends smell like Tide detergent and Degree deodorant and a little bit of sweat and a little bit of Aveda and a little bit just Kieth. But maybe I'm all wrong. Maybe that isn't the boyfriend smell.

“Having you out there every day made it so easy to perform this summer,” he says. We're still hugging.
Theater
people. “Like, it gave me an incentive to give it my all. Nobody else in my cast had that.”

Kieth pulls away. I don't know what to say back. My heart throbs. My ankle throbs. I hope none of this will hurt so much once he's in a different time zone.

“Good luck,” I say, “at school.”

“You're supposed to say ‘break a leg.' It's bad luck to say good luck.” His lip trembles. His face is red. I really am the best boyfriend he ever had. I get to own that.

Both of us go to kiss each other, and so neither one of us does.

“Jinx,” I say. A schoolyard joke for myself.

“I should probably take off.” Kieth picks the box back up. “I've got this early flight, and I'm already annoyed because—”

“You're sitting on the aisle, but you're pissed the seat won't recline because it's in front of an exit row.”

He smiles and nods. “You remember everything. It's freaky.”

You remember nothing,
I'm thinking,
it's annoying
.

But I just say, “Get outta here.”

And he does.

He glances at my dad's Honda, pauses for a sec, and then disappears between two vintage VW Bugs. I am somehow reminded of when Stacy Hoffner, my best friend in third grade, moved away to Youngstown, Ohio. We were going to be best friends forever, and then we weren't. I was going to have a hole in my heart for all time, and then I didn't. I moved on—even if some part of me stayed scarred by Stacy leaving me. But the thing about scars is that, as much as they knot you up, they can make you stronger, too. Collect enough scars and you get a whole extra layer of skin, for free.

I wave at the back of Kieth's head, though I might just be seeing things at this point.

Yeah. He's gone.

But when I turn to get inside the car, Kieth's jean jacket is still on the hood, next to my book, set a foot apart like an old couple. I take out my phone to text him “
you forgot something!!
” And right as I'm about to hit Send, his own message dings in.

“Keep the jacket,”
it says.
“it was cuter on u anyway
”

And against all odds, I'm smiling.

I fold the book and the pizza wedge inside the jacket and slide into the front seat, where my butt crunches into something foreign. It's the damn
Best Boyfriend
award. I uncrumple it and place it on the passenger side, and then it's all too quiet in here. Quiet in that loud way. So, when I turn on the car and this old-school song comes on the radio, I let it play. Let it
blast,
even, like Dad's car is the amphitheater inside the park. Except that in here I'm safe.

It's a decent song, as sixties songs go. At least it isn't a knockoff. And not to be the grandchild of hippies but, like a trance, the optimistic thrum of the acoustic guitar sort of hypnotizes me into reaching over, to rip open the foil, and—I guess for old times' sake—take a giant, careless bite out of the forbidden pizza.

It's more delicious than a memory can possibly live up to.

See, a memory doesn't remember the way the congealed tomato sauce comes back to life when you bite into it. The way the greasy crust tastes like sleepovers and inside jokes and curfews. The way the cheese holds it all together.

It's going to make my stomach hurt, but it's worth it. It's pizza. What is life without the occasional risk of pizza?

After I demolish the slice, I switch on my lights, shift into drive, and—without even thinking twice—reach across the seat, pick up the Best Boyfriend award, and use the back of it to wipe off my mouth. Then I'm outtie, past the state's second-tallest roller coaster and onto the familiar country road. Two songs later, I merge extra-smooth onto the parkway. Usually I suck at yielding, but tonight I nail it, winding the bend toward the underpass, licking my lips into a guilty pizza grin, and holding my breath when I go through the mountain tunnel that always takes me back home.

 

“There must have been some kind of mistake,” I said.

My clock—one of the old digitals with the red block numbers—read 2:07 a.m. It was so dark outside I couldn't see the front walk.