Ryan was still thinking about the mortgage notice that night at work, scrolling through the admissions requirements for D1 hockey schools in between sprinkling cheese onto chili dogs and dumping handfuls of frozen onion rings into the fryer. Since the previous summer, he’d been working at Walter’s, a hot dog hut on Route 117, where he took orders and ran the grill and brought the trash out at the end of the night. Walter himself had played football in high school and was easygoing about Ryan’s practices and games and stuff, which made it a good gig even if he did wind up smelling faintly of cured pork products all the time.
“Did you know we sell vegan hot dogs now?” Nate asked, coming out of the walk-in looking alarmed, his Walter’s baseball cap slightly askew. Nate was Ryan’s partner in food service; he was a little dweeby in a Marvel Universe kind of way, but Ryan liked him. Nate was good company. Plus, if anyone ever held a gun to his head and demanded he recite the special powers of every single X-Man in alphabetical order, he’d be safe. “There’s, like, a thousand of them in the freezer.”
Ryan shrugged. “Maybe Walter got a deal.”
“Better have been some deal,” Nate said. “We’ll be in our forties before he unloads them all.”
Walter’s was a lot quieter in the winter, when it was too cold for people to sit at the picnic tables on the concrete patio outside, so mostly he and Nate hung around and talked shit and dropped weird stuff in the fryer to see what would happen. Tonight, for instance, they’d had exactly three customers since Ryan had gotten here, so he felt pretty confident cleaning out the milkshake machine—the most dreaded task of any shift at Walter’s—even though it was still twenty minutes to close. He was just setting the jug of sanitizing solution back on the shelf when a station wagon pulled into the parking lot.
“Damn,” Nate said, shaking his head sadly. “Foiled.”
“If they ask for a milkshake I’m telling them it’s broken,” Ryan said immediately. “No way am I cleaning it twice in one night.”
He watched as a girl hopped out of the passenger side of the wagon and trotted across the patio toward the order window. She was wearing jeans and big glasses and a parka with one of those fake fur hoods on it, her dark hair up in a massive bun at the top of her head. “Oh,” Nate said, sliding the window open. “That’s Chelsea. Hey, Chelsea!” he called, waving cheerfully. “How are you?”
“Hey, Nate.” The girl, Chelsea, smiled. She went to their school, Ryan knew, though he didn’t think they’d ever had any classes together. Ryan was not exactly on what one would call an accelerated track. “Are you guys open?”
“Definitely,” Ryan heard himself say, sticking his hand right out through the window to shake hers. “I’m Ryan.”
The girl smirked. “I know who you are, Ryan.”
“Oh.” Ryan blushed. God, he blushed. Ryan never blushed. But something about the way Chelsea was looking at him made him feel like he was wildly out of his depth. “Okay. Well.” He looked back at her for a moment, smiled his most charming smile. All of a sudden his head didn’t hurt at all. “Can I get you a milkshake?”
RYAN
“Do you know Chelsea Rosen?” Ryan asked Gabby the next day, plunking his lunch tray down next to hers in the cafeteria.
“Did you seriously get three pork chops?” Gabby said instead of answering. This was the first year they’d had the same lunch period, and Ryan thought they were both kind of getting used to it: they still only ate with each other about half the time, since she refused to come sit with his friends and sometimes spent the entire period in the library reading about the Tudors. Still, he was always glad when he spied her wispy blond ponytail across the cafeteria, for the chance to pick her brain about what to get his mom for her birthday or a new show he’d seen on TV. They didn’t hang out alone as much—or hang out as much, period—since she’d started dating Shay. It wasn’t that Ryan was jealous or anything like that. He’d put his dumb crush on Gabby to bed as quick as humanly possible—or had tried to, at least. He didn’t begrudge her her girlfriend. He just missed her sometimes.
“Chelsea Rosen is in my gym class, but I don’t really know her. I try never to make eye contact with anyone in gym,” Gabby continued now, unwrapping her wheat-bread turkey sandwich. “I think she works at Arcade World.” She raised her eyebrows. “Why?”
Ryan shrugged, tucking that piece of information into his back pocket for later use. “No reason. She came by Walter’s last night. She seemed nice.”
“Sure,” Gabby said, rolling her eyes like she thought nice was probably a euphemism. She was always super dismissive of the other girls in his life, which sometimes felt a little unfair to Ryan. It wasn’t like she wanted to be dating him herself, clearly. But she also never seemed to think particularly highly of girls who did.
In any case, Ryan didn’t take the bait. “You wanna do something tonight?” he asked instead, digging into his mashed potatoes. He didn’t get why everybody always said school lunch was disgusting. “I’ve got a game, but after that? Go bowling?”
“I can’t,” Gabby said. “Shay’s got a cello thing. Her teacher is this super-fancy old guy who lives in a big mansion in Katonah, and every December he has all his best students come for a recital and then a reception.”
Well, that sounded horrible. Still: “You want company?” Ryan heard himself ask. He’d go to some nerdy concert, if that’s what she was doing. After all, it wasn’t exactly like he’d started hanging out with her because of the super-fun activities she was always getting up to. Their entire friendship was built around playing Monopoly. “I’ll tag along.”
“You want to come?” Gabby looked like he’d suggested accompanying her to the gynecologist. “I mean, sure, if you want, but it’s not really your bag.”
That annoyed him a little. “Why?” Ryan asked, popping the top on his Mountain Dew. “Because I’m a moron and you’re erudite?”
“What?” Gabby said quickly, shaking her head. “No, stop. That’s not what I meant. Of course you’re not a moron.”
“I know I’m not,” Ryan said. “I just used erudite in a sentence.” It had been the word of the day on the app he’d downloaded, which sent a push notification to his phone every morning. He wasn’t entirely sure he’d pronounced it correctly. Still, it bugged him, the idea that Gabby thought there were certain things he automatically wouldn’t like or appreciate. He felt like she thought it more now that she was with Shay.
“You did, it’s true.” Gabby was smiling now. “Okay,” she said after a moment, reaching across the table and breaking off half of his chocolate chip cookie. “Yeah, come along. It’ll be fun.”
RYAN