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“‘I’m leaving you,’” Tyler says, tilting his head from side to side in mocking, but too drained to make his voice high-pitched to mimic the person he’s supposed to be mocking. His eyes are dead. He’s fueled on energy drinks and hopelessness. “And I… screamed.” Tyler keeps his head down as he picks the excess ham from his sandwich. He waves a bee from his face, and when it returns, he tosses it the ham.
Josh watches the bee land on the scraps, pause, and fly away. “What did you scream at her?” he asks. “Because that matters.”
“When I say I screamed, I mean I screamed. It was like a”—Tyler uses both of his hands to demonstrate a flower blooming—“but with a lot more crying and embarrassment.”
“Shouldn’t she be used to that?” teases Josh, taking a bite from his own sandwich. It’s a little soggy. He puts it down immediately and sits on his hands.
Tyler bends his neck again. “Shut up, man.”
It’s just the two of them out here, too stupid to sit outside for lunch when the bees are buzzing like they are now. There’s a hive nearby. Josh sees it every day on his commute to school, almost always running late due to Tyler’s insistence to carpool and his perchance to sleeping in, requesting Josh drop by the gas station for a Red Bull, and absolute refusal to let them leave Josh’s car until they’ve listened to at least two of each of their favorite songs. This morning, Tyler was more somber than yesterday, but their routine stayed the same with no mishaps, so Josh didn’t know how to bring up the slight shift he felt once Tyler climbed into his car. But Tyler brought it up as soon as they grabbed their lunch and sat outside to eat.
Josh wants to reach over and touch Tyler. He doesn’t. “It’s going to be okay,” he says. “There’s more fish in the ocean.”
“Sea.”
“What?”
Tyler’s smiling, and Josh doesn’t know why. He’s holding his sandwich in two hands, elbows on the table, one eye closed from the sunlight, and he’s smiling at Josh and telling him, “The saying is ‘There are other fish in the sea.’”
“Oh,” Josh says. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I meant.”
Tyler takes a bite. He talks with his mouth full. “She also told me she wanted to stay friends and all that. She said, like”—Tyler licks mayo off his thumb—“she knew my heart wasn’t…” Tyler shakes his head. His nose is a pink color, twitching when he sniffs. “I need a new prom date.”
Josh sips at his milk.
Tyler kicks Josh under the table. “I said, I need a new prom date.”
Josh looks at him.
Smiling again, his other eye closed now, and his hands carefully folded in front of him so politely and patiently, Tyler keeps his lips pressed into that smile. His lips twitch with his nose. He wants to laugh. Josh can read it all over him.
And then, he realizes.
Setting down his milk carton, Josh turns his finger to himself, pointing at his chest, angled up his nose. “Me? Are you asking me to be your prom date?”
“I know it’s not anything fancy, but…” Tyler shrugs. He glances down, at his sandwich and the mayo leaking out, and Josh glances down at his own sandwich. The bee is loitering. Its wings flutter. “I like you, Josh,” Tyler whispers, “and she knew that. She wished me the best. She said that, that… that we’d look cute together.”
A gentle tap of his shoe into Tyler’s shin, Josh says, “We would look pretty cute wearing matching crowns.”
Tyler whistles. “Getting pretty confident, huh?”
And now, Josh reaches over and touches Tyler. He holds Tyler’s hand, squeezes it lightly. He smiles, and Tyler smiles back. “Hey, we’re cute. Come on.”
Tyler kisses Josh’s knuckles, his lips pink and chapped and curved upward into a permanent grin. “We’re cute.”