The Road to Amazing (4 page)

This was so typically Gunnar. Min may
have been planning a trip to Mars, but Gunnar was already living on
his own little planet. Back when I'd been living with him and Min,
this might have annoyed me a little, but now I felt nothing but
affection for them both.

"I've missed you guys so much!" I
said.

"I know," Min said. "We've missed you
too. Why in the world did you and Kevin have to move to Los
Angeles?"

"It's working!" Gunnar said, meaning
the broccoli. "No, wait, that's just the reflection off the bag of
chips."

"Hey," Nate said, "did you guys know
there are stairs down to the beach?"

Nate was standing over in the doorway
out to the deck. To be honest, I'd been sort of glad when he'd
wandered away from the conversation. But I guess I had sort of been
leaving both him and Ruby out, and that made me feel
guilty.

Ruby immediately perked up.
"Really?"

"Yeah," Nate said. "You wanna check it
out?"

"You kidding? I'm so
there!"

"But first," Nate said, approaching
the kitchen and grabbing a beer, "one for the road."

As he turned away, he flipped the
bottle in the air — casually, but pretty darn expertly.

"Oh!" Ruby said. "Like Tom
Cruise in
Cocktail
!"

He did it again, and it was all very
impressive, not to mention light-hearted and carefree, but of
course the only thing I could think of was "damage
deposit."

Soon they thundered off to explore the
beach.

The rest of us were silent after that.
I felt a little less guilty about leaving Nate and Ruby out of the
conversation after the deal with the beer bottle. But I didn't want
Min to know that.

"Ruby seems great," I said to
Min.

Min smiled and dipped a chip in some
guacamole.

"It's funny though," I went on, "and
please don't take this the wrong way, because I love you like
Lifesavers, but she seems a little different from you."

Right on cue, Ruby and Nate shrieked
somewhere out on the steps down to the beach — a fun shriek, not
like they were falling off a cliff.

"If by 'different,'" Min
said, "you mean 'pretty much my complete opposite in every way,'
you're right. She's either going to be the love of my life, or I'm
making the biggest
mistake
of my life. Either way, it should be
interesting."

The four of us sipped and
crunched.

"Nate seems great too," Min said, and
Gunnar nodded, but I didn't.

"He's a really good guy,"
Kevin said. He bent down to search for something in the lower
kitchen shelves. "I met him my freshman year, but we didn't become
roommates until later. He's sort of an 'in the moment' guy, which
is why it's so funny he went on to become a doctor. But he was the
perfect college friend." He rattled the pots, frustrated.
"
Really?
The
money we're spending and there aren't any pizza pans?"

"What about cookie sheets?" I said,
pointing.

"They're not big enough," he
said.

"It's okay, we'll make 'em fit."
Honestly, I was a little annoyed Kevin was being so pissy about the
pans, especially in front of our friends. I guess he was feeling
stressed.

Gunnar lifted his glass. "I want to
make a toast," he said. "To Kevin and Russ."

"What?" I said, surprised. Gunnar was
the kind of guy who tried to turn broccoli blue, not the kind of
guy who made wedding toasts.

"Russ," he said, "you may not remember
this, but I was there the first time you met Kevin."

"You were
not
," I said. Gunnar was
strange, but he wasn't so strange that he'd be lurking in the
bushes spying on two guys in a park in the middle of the night. Was
he?

"You couldn't have been there," Kevin
said. "Russel and I were alone."

"What?" Gunnar said. "No, the whole
class was there."

Everyone looked at him
blankly.

"It was the seventh grade," Gunnar
said. "In middle school? Kevin transferred in from another
district."

I let myself relax. Gunnar was right.
That was the first day I'd ever seen Kevin, even if I didn't
actually talk to him until weeks, or maybe even years,
later.

Kevin smiled, relaxing at last. "I
remember that. I was so nervous."

"I don't believe it," I said. "You
didn't look nervous at all."

Gunnar nodded, basically agreeing with
me. "The teacher asked you to tell the class something about
yourself, and you said, 'My name is Kevin Land, and I'm going to be
an astronaut.'"

Kevin blushed. "I
did
not
! Oh, God,
that sounds like such a little kid thing to say. And I
was
nervous. I was
terrified."

"It didn't seem that way," Gunnar
said. "You totally sold it."

"It's not too late," I said to Kevin.
"Maybe Min can get you on the first ship to Mars."

"I'm serious," she said. "It's not
going to happen."

"I remember now," Kevin said. "I had
just done this camp thing at Cape Canaveral."

"And did you see sparks?" Min asked
Gunnar. "Did you know Russel and Kevin were destined to be
together?"

"You didn't even know I was gay back
then," I said to Gunnar. "Or did you?"

"I knew you were different. That's why
I liked you."

This made me smile. I'd
liked Gunnar the first time I met him, in the fourth grade, for
exactly the same reason. I'd tried hard to hide my weirdness from
my classmates, and Gunnar had too, but it never worked: he
was
too
different.

"What did you think?" Min asked me,
meaning about Kevin.

I had to think back. When it came to
Kevin, there was a lot in my brain to untangle. But I did have a
vague memory of the whole encounter.

"I knew he'd be the most popular boy
in class," I said. "Which he was."

"I was
not
," Kevin said, wrestling with the
plastic wrap on one of the take-and-bake pizzas.

I didn't dignify his denial with a
response. "I think the whole class knew, just from the way he
looked, the way he stood," I said. "Even Jim Madsen, the most
popular guy in class until then. I think he took one look at Kevin
and said, 'Well, that's it, I'm done.'"

Kevin kept blushing.

"Did you think he was hot?" Gunnar
asked.

"Probably," I said. "Everyone thought
he was hot."

Kevin glanced at me. "I remember what
I thought of you."

"You do
not
. I'm sure you didn't
even notice me."

"Are you kidding? That hair? I noticed
you right away. And I thought you were adorable."

(I have red hair — more auburn,
really.)

Now I blushed.

"We've gone over all this before,"
Kevin said. "Why do you think I teased you?"

This made me smile. In high school,
Kevin had sometimes stolen my underwear in the locker room and
thrown it around to the other jocks. If anyone had tried to tell me
then that he'd been doing it because he had a crush on me, because
he was trying to get close to me, it would have blown my
mind.

"I wonder if our eyes met," I
said.

"What?" Kevin asked.

"That first day. You say you noticed
me, and I know I noticed you. I wonder what we looked like
together. Wouldn't you kill to go back in time and see?"

Kevin's face softened, and he had sort
of a dreamy smile. "Yeah." Remember when I said he seemed sort of
pissy? That was long gone by now.

Meanwhile, the picture in my mind of
Kevin back in the seventh grade was becoming clearer and clearer.
He was wearing a blue shirt and jeans. He'd recently gotten a
haircut — or maybe he always kept his hair that neatly trimmed.
Yes, I thought he was hot.

And now I've ended up with
him
, I said to myself.

Gunnar lifted his glass again. "To
Russ and Kevin," he said, "and to destiny!"

Who in the world wouldn't drink to
that?

But once we'd finished toasting, Kevin
turned his attention back to the pizza — which unfortunately,
really was too big for the cookie sheet.

"God
damn
it!" he said, frustrated again,
and that's when I took over and made the executive call to cook the
pizzas directly on the oven rack.

CHAPTER THREE

Forty or so minutes later, the
doorbell rang again, which meant that the next ferry must have
finally arrived on the island. I answered the door.

"Vernie!" I said, grinning like a kid
getting a triple-scoop ice cream cone.

It was my friend Vernie Rose, a
seventy-four year old woman, carrying an overnight bag. Vernie was
even shorter than Min, but wider at the hips, with silver hair that
was cut in sort of a bowl. She wore diamond cat-rim glasses, but it
was her eyes that were doing most of the sparkling.

Vernie was a retired screenwriter —
she had once even been nominated for an Oscar (for a short film she
wrote). We'd met a few years earlier, and now she was my
screenwriting mentor. When it came time for Kevin and me to figure
out who we wanted to spend the whole wedding weekend with us, I
knew right away I wanted Vernie.

She stepped inside, looking around the
house. "Nice place," she said. "Where's the booze?"

I laughed. "How was the ferry
ride?"

"Horrible. I'm too old for this shit.
But I'm pleased as punch to be here. But first I need to spend a
penny."

I knew that meant she needed to use
the bathroom, so I pointed out the way.

When she got back, she said, "You
thought I was kidding about the booze, didn't you?"

But I'd totally known that was coming,
so I pulled a glass of wine out from behind my back.

"Oh, you're gooood!" she said, taking
the glass. "I knew there was a reason I liked you."

Right then, the doorbell rang one last
time, and I opened it.

"Otto!" I said.

"Russel!" he said, and we actually did
hug.

I'd met Otto years ago when were both
sixteen and counselors at a summer camp. We'd even dated for a few
months after that, but that was all long over. Now he was an actor
living in Los Angeles, which was where I'd reconnected with him the
year before. But Otto was a burn survivor. When he was seven years
old, he got into some gasoline and matches, and now he had a big
burn on his shoulder and one-half of his face. Over the years, he'd
had some corrective surgery. Plus, he was a pretty good-looking guy
to begin with, even more so now that he'd grown into his
looks.

Still, for a long time,
he'd struggled, because it was hard enough being an unknown actor
even without big scars on your face. But earlier that year, he'd
landed a role on a network sitcom called
Hammered
, about this guy, Mike
Hammer, and his friends living in a college dorm. Otto played
Dustin, one of Mike's dorm-mates, who also happened to have scars
on his face.

Truthfully, except for Otto, the show
wasn't that special. I mean, it was mostly about guys trying to get
laid, and dealt with issues like "the friend zone," and fuck
buddies, and how for some Millennials, porn is supposedly better
than real sex — comedy themes that were completely tapped out five
years ago.

Still, it was incredible
watching someone I knew on television. Better still, when the show
had debuted in early June, Dustin had quickly become the break-out
character. It's not every day that someone with scars on their face
gets cast in a sitcom. It was a little like Laverne Cox on
Orange is the New Black
being the first transgender actress playing a transgender
character on an actual TV program.

The one problem with all this was that
ever since Otto had become famous, I hadn't seen very much of him.
I didn't hold it against him — I could only imagine how busy he
was. But we'd gotten pretty close before that, and I missed
him.

"Otto Digmore!" Vernie said before I
could even introduce them (they'd never met either).

"Vernie Rose," Otto said.

"I've heard so much about you," they
both said to each other at exactly the same time.

"Otto!" said Min, behind
us.

"Min!" Otto said. Gunnar
stepped into view too. "
Gunnar!
"

The three of them ran together and
hugged like one of them had been shipwrecked on an island for six
years — even Min who, like me, was not a hugger. Min and Gunnar had
known Otto at summer camp too, and the three of them hadn't seen
each other since way back then.