“I DON’T GET IT,” David says.
It’s Saturday, and we’re sitting in the back of the movie theater waiting for the trailers to start. Ethan and Ivy are two rows ahead of us. He wanted to sit far away from us. She wanted to sit right next to me. This was the compromise.
“What don’t you get?” I ask, tilting the popcorn bag toward David so he can help himself. We got one for us to share and one for them to share. Ethan paid for theirs, and I paid for ours.
“You and Ivy both did something to your hair, right? It looks different.”
“We just highlighted it a little bit.”
David wipes his fingers on a napkin. “Why?”
“Why not? It’s fun to change things up.”
“And it has nothing to do with the general belief that blondes are more attractive than brunettes?”
“I don’t care what other people think. I just do it for fun.”
“Okay, putting aside that that’s just a lie, what about Ivy?”
“It wasn’t a lie!”
“You care about what other people think. Everyone does. Why did Ivy do it? Was it her idea?”
“Stuff like that doesn’t occur to her.”
“Right,” David says, digging into the bag. “So it was your idea.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
He tosses popcorn into his mouth. “Hey, if you want to impose your own advertising-driven ideas about beauty on your sister, that’s your right.”
“Thank you. Your permission means the world to me. And I think she looks pretty cute.”
“Your sister always looks cute. She didn’t need blonder hair for that.” His tone changes as he lowers his voice. “Ethan has a major crush on her, you know. He talks about her all the time. I hope she feels the same way.”
It’s confusing—?one second he’s caustically berating me for being superficial, and the next he’s soberly confiding in me.
“Do you think she likes him?” he asks.
“She was definitely excited about going to a movie tonight. But I can’t tell whether it’s because she likes him or just the idea of going out.”
He takes a drag on his soda straw before saying, “It must be rough for her to have a sister like you.”
“What does that mean?”
“You know.”
“No, I don’t.”
He flaps his hand impatiently. “You have crazy good social skills—?the whole world wants to hang out with you. It wouldn’t be easy to be your sibling even if she weren’t on the spectrum. But she is. So it’s worse than not easy. It’s got to be painful.”
“Yeah, well, it’s probably rough on Ethan being your brother.”
“I’m not nearly as social as you.”
“Oh, I know,” I say airily. “I just meant because you can be such an enormous pain in the ass.”
He looks at me, a little stunned, I think, and I brace myself for his return volley. I figure he’ll shoot to kill. But he surprises me. “Yeah, you’re right,” he says. “And the sad thing is, as big a jerk as I am, I’m Ethan’s best relative.”
“I was just joking!” I’d been pleased by my insult but then he had to go and be nice about it and ruin my fun.
“No, you weren’t. And that’s fine. I know I can be a—”
The lights dim, and he stops before he can tell me what he can be. I have some guesses though.
We meet up with the other two in the lobby after the movie.
“What’d you think?” I ask.
Ethan says, “It was really good!” just as Ivy says, “I didn’t like it.”
“Why didn’t you like it?” he asks her, a little anxiously.
“It was stupid.” She moves away from him, closer to me.
“No, it wasn’t,” Ethan says, appealing to David, who says diplomatically, “It was a little stupid, but I liked it anyway.”
Ivy and I go to the bathroom together and join the long line of women who drank too much soda during the movie.
I glance at her. Her lips are moving, and I can tell she’s whispering to herself, even though I can’t hear her with the hand dryers blasting away. “Everything okay?” I ask.
“I don’t know.”
“Something happen?”
“Ethan put his hand on me.”
My voice gets tight. “What do you mean, ‘on you’? What part of you?”
She gestures with her right hand at her left shoulder. “Here.”
“Oh, that’s okay. He was just trying to put his arm around you. As long as he wasn’t trying to cop a feel . . .”
“What’s that?”
“You know . . . like, trying to grab your boob.”
The middle-aged woman in front of me turns around at that. I gaze at her blandly, and she quickly swivels back.
“That would be bad?” Ivy says. “If he tried to do that?”
“Only if you don’t want him to. It’s fine if you want him to.”
The woman ahead twists again, pretending to look past us—?but she’s clearly spying on us.
“He didn’t do that,” Ivy says. “I wouldn’t have liked it if he had, but he didn’t.”
“But he did try to put his arm over your shoulder?”
“Yeah. I pushed it away.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” She sounds confused and maybe even a little upset, but I can’t tell whether it’s because of what happened or because I’m trying to get her to tell me how she feels about what happened.
“The first time a guy tries to put his arm around you is always strange,” I say.
The woman ahead of us goes into a stall with one last curious backwards glance.
“Do you like it when James puts his arm around you?” Ivy asks.
“Of course. You know that.”
“Did you like it the first time?”
“I think I made the first move, actually. You should probably ask James how he felt about it.”
“That would be weird.” She hesitates. “I don’t want to be alone with Ethan again tonight.”
“Okay. We’ll all get something to eat together and then we’ll go home.”
She nods and then a stall frees up, and I push her toward it.
As soon as we rejoin the boys in the lobby, Ethan says to Ivy, “It’s okay if you didn’t like the movie. You don’t have to like it because I did.”
“Yeah, I didn’t.”