The Great American Whatever (10 page)

Keep it shorter, Quinn. Nail the punch lines today and let Geoff do the speeches.

“Two roller-coaster cars
race
each other,” Carly says to Amir, as if this clarifies anything. She's wearing these extremely uncomfortable-looking gladiator boot-sandals.

“I think I get the concept,” Amir says. “I had this stepuncle who raced cars.”

“Oh, no way,” I say, as if this is a clever catchphrase, which it's not.

“Way,” he goes.

His outfit today, by the way: Literally who cares. You should see his hair. It is a little too long and it is so moppy and cute.

We get in the back of the Racer line, and suddenly the fact that we're not walking makes me antsy. I'm pretty good at making nervous conversation when there are other senses being occupied, but standing and talking while making eye contact always feels so formal to me, like we're parents on the edge of a playground when the truth is we're still kids ourselves.

“So, where are you from, Amir?” Geoff finally goes.

“Dallas,” Amir says. “But I'm not actually
from
there. I grew up all over. Basically anywhere that an Iranian-American gay kid wouldn't feel comfortable.”

Silence. Geoff's looking at me and goes, “Like,
where
else?”

Always dangerous when a straight boy has to feed
you
the dialogue. But see, what I'm wanting to do is just list every movie ever shot in Dallas. There are some classics. . . .

“Maryland . . . Virginia,” Amir says, “a bunch of one-traffic-light towns.”

“Cool,” Geoff goes.

“Trivia,” I say, suddenly and with finality. This is a game I play with Geoff in which I say “Trivia” and he groans because he never knows a-n-y of my trivia.

We move up in line.

“Trivia?” Amir goes. Geoff is groaning. Called it.

“Name a film that was primarily shot in both Dallas and Pittsburgh,” I say.

Carly is giving me the exact look she gave me after I told her I wet one of her sleeping bags (when I was seven, relax).

“Okay,” Amir goes, playing along because he's wonderful, “is it a movie that obviously takes place in either Dallas or Pittsburgh?”

“Good question,” I'm starting to say, when Geoff jumps in and goes, “
Wrong
, you're not allowed to ask questions in Trivia.” I could kill him. Carly whaps him upside the head and goes, “Don't act like yourself today, G-force.”

“I'm breaking all the rules,” Amir says, pinching the fabric of his salmon-pink shorts. “Parking on the wrong side of the lot, asking questions during Quinn's famous games. . . .”

Is this flirting? If this isn't flirting, this is what flirting should be redefined as. What could this master flirter even
see
in me?

“No,” I say, “this film does not take place in either Dallas or Pittsburgh.” I look at Geoff. “Excellent question. New rule: You're allowed to ask questions during Trivia as long as they're intelligible. Geoff, this rules you out.”

Carly giggles but Amir doesn't, and I picture how sweet he was during Celebrity and suddenly wonder if I'm too big of a jagoff for him. Isn't everybody from Texas warm spirited and polite? You have to work really hard to be polite when you're me—the son of a categorically large woman—because the glares that people used to give her, when she'd leave our house, would turn even the biggest saint in Pittsburgh ice hearted. Even in this heat.

“Man, it's hot,” Carly says. We're almost at the front of the line. A nearby rando has just won a dirty-looking teddy bear, and the guy's girlfriend is toting the thing around with a degree of pride non-Pittsburghers would typically reserve for finishing a medical degree a year early.

“Can you give us another clue?” Amir says.

“Okay,” I say, looking away because his eyes are so pretty, “the main special effect that the film is known for was created by the same guy who masterminded John Carpenter's
The Thing
.”

You can practically hear the three of them blinking, but still, Amir smiles. I'll describe his smile to you: perfect.

“Wow,” he goes, “okay. . . .”

Dammit, I'm losing him.

“Oh!” I say, thumping my hand on a garbage can lid that is so immediately scalding that I pull it away but act as if nothing has happened. “The film was originally rated X.”

“X?” Geoff says.

“That's, like, vintage NC-17,” Amir says, which is nice. We're finally up to the front, one ride away from racing. “Usually for graphic sex.”

The phrase
graphic sex
should give me another boner, but it doesn't, not at all. The phrase
graphic sex
just reminds me I don't yet know how to have even ungraphic sex. There isn't a scene from the screenplay of my life so far that would even get flagged as PG-13.

We're up. Thank God.

“Okay, pick your cars,” says the kid manning the Racer. When we were little, the employees here seemed
so
old. . . .

“Go with Quinny, Amir,” Carly says. “His car always wins.”

Bless her.

And so we climb in, and just as the train is pulling out of the station, Amir goes:

“Okay, one more clue and then I give up.”

“It was shot in the eighties,” I say, “it's about robots and, like, crime; it won the Oscar for sound. . . . I mean, if I give you any more clues, I'm just going to have to say—”

The Racer rings its signature starting bell, its brakes hiss off, and Amir and I lock eyes and go, “
RoboCop
,” with identical intonations and delivery and timing, and we bust into howls as our red car cranks around the first bend and
click-click-clicks
up the first mini-incline. Here we go.

“Yes,” I say, “
RoboCop
for the gold.” As if I've ever given out medals during Trivia. All new rules today.

Geoff and I catch sight of each other from across the tracks, something we've done on this ride for more than a decade, and I wait for him to do the mock-competitive fist-punch he always does, but instead he does this big cheesy smile like I've come back from the dead for one night only.

“Oh, gosh,” I hear Amir say, not in a way that's cinematic at all but rather small and novelistic. That's when I realize he's pressing the full weight of his knee into mine, and that I can feel his soft leg hair Velcro-ing into mine. That he really is freaked out by roller coasters, just like in my screenplay version of this day.

“Close your eyes,” I yell. “It'll go faster.”

In fact, it's the fastest version of this ride I've ever been on. I spend the whole time watching Amir, his head rigid and locked, his eyes squinted into dots, Pittsburgh whirring by behind him like a blender that's full of something brown and green and occasionally blinking with tiny lights. It hurts my neck to look at him this way, and I don't even care. Frankly, I appreciate it. To be feeling anything again means I might still have a pulse. I missed my annual physical recently, so it's a legitimate question.

We whiz around the final bend. We pull back into the station. The Racer bell rings again, and I glance across the platform and watch as Geoff and Carly's car zooms ahead of ours at the very last moment, pulling into the station first, as it never has before in all my years of coming to Kennywood. My luck changed, or rearranged.

Their car is a fit of celebratory shouts.

“Suckers!”
Geoff's saying, pulling up his lap bar.

“Come on,” I say, tapping Amir's shoulder. “We're here. You survived.”

“Did we win?” he says. He stands up. He opens his eyes and looks either hopeful or dazed. I'm going to say hopeful.

“Definitely,” I say.

• • •

Five hours in and Geoff and Carly are off “scouting for corn dogs.” But they're not scouting for corn dogs, not really, because Carly is a devout vegetarian. They're leaving me and Amir to find lunch on our own. This makes me nervous.

“So what's good here?” Amir says. We've been standing, silent, in a kind of epic outdoor food court line.

“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.