Six blissfully sleepless nights later, Merritt sat on a lawn chair behind Happy Golden Fortune watching the crew set up to film Lei-Ling’s food truck. The converted Slipstream RV looked like a hippie’s UFO. Lei-Ling had covered it in a paisley of pink and gold. The words DUMPLING HAPPINESS IS NOW covered one side in psychedelic script. Gold wands protruded from the sides, each sporting a lumpy papier-mâché ball.
“Do they have faces?” Merritt asked Iliana, who was sitting in another lawn chair.
“They’re dumplings.”
That didn’t answer the question.
The Slipstream was also topped with solar panels and attached to four bicycles.
“She really built that?” Merritt asked.
“Yep,” Iliana said. To Lei-Ling she called out, “You need a hand, Honey Bear?”
Honey Bear. That’s what love did to people. Iliana—with the tattoo of a broken heart, a sinking ship, and a skeleton in a top hat—was now one half of Pinyin and Honey Bear.
“Do we really have to bike it to the Elysium? Can’t you tow it?” Merritt asked.
“It’s carbon neutral. You can’t tow carbon neutral. It defeats the purpose.”
Alistair arrived in one of the many cars Avery and Alistair appeared to have access to. Lei-Ling knelt on top of the Slipstream.
“Yeah, Alistair!” she called out.
Alistair was so tall, his head cleared the top of the RV. Merritt had thought Iliana and Lei-Ling were an odd couple. Alistair and Lei-Ling looked like one of those photographs of the world’s tallest man and smallest woman.
Lei-Ling examined her solar panels. “We need to tilt these up a little bit. We’re past midsummer. The sun’s shifting.”
“Fourteen days left,” Alistair said.
Past midsummer, Merritt thought. The sun had shifted, and soon it would be going down for the winter. She had fourteen days with Avery, and every single person on King & Crown seemed determined to remind her.
Lei-Ling stood up. “I’m going to jump. You have to catch me.”
Lei-Ling managed to be full of fawning adoration and self-assurance at the same time, as though she and Alistair were simultaneously fan and star and brother and sister. She jumped off the top of the Slipstream. Alistair caught her effortlessly. Lei-Ling giggled.
“I love her,” Iliana said dreamily. “She saw the plans for the food cart online. Then she took out the engine block, put in the solar power, built the kitchen, and hooked up the bikes.”
If the whole thing didn’t explode in a dumpling-shaped ball of grease fire, Merritt was going to be grudgingly impressed.
“When her folks can afford to hire another waitress, she’s going to rent a spot in one of those food cart villages.”
“She could park it at Hellenic Hardware,” Merritt said.
Avery made Merritt feel generous. At night she gave herself to Merritt so fully and made love to her so unreservedly. Then they would lie in bed and talk, meandering through fifteen years of memories. Like a scrapbook opening between them, they talked about their classmates, old gossip, the breakups, the late-night adventures, and all the Vale Academy traditions. None of it was important, but all the memories felt magical, like Merritt had woken up next to Avery to find they had dreamed the same dream.
The other women Merritt had dated said she never talked. You’re like a stone. She had tried, but there was just so much silence inside her, and they had never listened carefully. After every accusation—I never know what you’re thinking—she wondered if they couldn’t have made a little bit more space for her. Did they really want to know? But with Avery, every conversation flowed into the next. Everything Avery said reminded Merritt of some small, true thing she had never told anyone. Avery seemed to hold each of Merritt’s thoughts in her hands, as reverently as she had held the lovers’ locket. When did you first notice? she might ask. Did anyone talk to you? How did you find your way back home? Or even, Why don’t you cook kale if you like it?
“Really?” Iliana’s face opened in an enormous smile. “You’d let Lei-Ling park in front of the shop?”
Merritt would probably regret this decision. “Absolutely.”
Iliana put her hand on the arm of Merritt’s lawn chair, broaching a serious subject. “Are you sure I can’t tell Lei-Ling about you and Avery? She would absolutely die!”
“You haven’t told her?”
“You asked me not to.”
“You’re a good friend, you know that?”
“The best.” Iliana tipped her chair back. “I can hide a one-night stand. How can I hide you dating Avery Crown?”
“She’s not my girlfriend. She’s leaving.”
“Come on.”
“We might see each other sometime after she’s gone. I don’t know. Maybe she’ll fly back here occasionally. You know it won’t work.”
“I know that love changes everything.” Iliana watched Lei-Ling polish a spot on the window of the Slipstream. “You have to make it work.”
“Long-distance relationships never work.”
“It’s not long distance if you’re rich. She could buy an airplane. Get married. Go in drag so no one knows you’re a girl. With Lei-Ling—” Iliana launched into their origin story. The punch line was hope.
It wouldn’t work in the real world, Merritt had said to Avery, but Avery was living in her real world.
Now the crew was setting up cameras in the middle of the block so they could catch the dumpling truck as it pulled out. Alistair wandered over, looking like a larger-than-life Ken doll.
“Take a walk with me, Merritt. They’re having trouble with sound from the road.”
Merritt patted Iliana on the shoulder. She and Alistair set off down Eighty-Second Avenue. He tucked Merritt’s hand in the crook of his elbow, as though he were the lord of the manor and they were walking up the steps to the ball, not past Pussy Cats Lingerie Modeling. It felt unnatural.
“I haven’t seen much of Avery,” Alistair said.
Merritt said nothing. Avery had slipped out of bed around five a.m. I have to “wake up” in the hotel. Merritt had thought the crew knew. Avery had laughed. Single and closeted lesbian is not the same as I-overslept-with-my-hot-lesbian-lover. I could ruin everything. It was only after Avery left that Merritt really thought about the words.
“She’s happy,” Alistair said. “I haven’t seen her like this. She’s dated a little bit, but you’re special. She’s taking risks.”
Happy. Special. I could ruin everything.
Alistair gazed down the road. “Eighteen to thirty-two. That’s the target demographic for all shows, except for kids’ shows, and the target advertising market for those are parents, and they’re eighteen to thirty-two. Avery is thirty-three.”
“I know,” Merritt said. “We just went to our reunion.”
“She’s old.”
“We’re not old.”
“You’re not old. You sell gramophones. But TV is like mining. You wear out early.”
He was older than Avery, and for the first time Merritt saw it. His makeup was heavier than hers. In the bright sun she could see where it had sunk into the lines around his eyes.
“I always knew she’d meet someone special. I knew I’d be jealous, but I wanted that for her. She’s my best friend. But you…you’re a kale-eating lesbian. You’re a hummus and Indigo Girls lesbian. You probably went to the LP concert without a bra.”
Merritt tried to remember. Maybe. She considered pointing that she never quite got to kale, but kale was not the real point of this conversation.
“She dates about once every three years,” Alistair went on. “She picks girls who are as closeted as she is. She won’t even do bisexuals or indie actresses. She has to know her lovers have just as much to lose. She kind of hates them because they do. And then there you are. You’ve got your shop and your friends. You walk down to the gay bar. She’s a sucker for that. She thinks it’s authentic. But you could ruin her career. You could ruin the only thing she’s ever done. It’s not even like your shop. If your shop burns down, there are more old doorknobs. There’s no other King and Crown for her.”
This is actually my life, Merritt thought incredulously. If she had only known two months ago that she’d be sleeping with Avery Crown, or that she’d be walking down Eighty-Second Avenue, getting scolded by Alistair King, she might have been ecstatic, or she might have left town. Two inflated tube men waved frantically in front of a used-car dealership. That was how she felt: bounding up and then crashing into the ground.
“Avery is standing on the edge of a cliff.”
Alistair had dropped his Alistair King act. His voice lowered an octave. His posture stiffened, and he grew taller and bigger. Merritt released his arm.
“I hope that’s enough to make you careful because you care about her,” Alistair went on. “I see the way you look for her. I’m asexual, but I’m not blind. Other people don’t see it because they’re not looking, but when they start looking…You know that video with the guy in the gorilla suit? You’re supposed to count the basketballs, and the first time you pay so much attention to the balls, you don’t see the gorilla guy.”
“I’m the guy in the gorilla suit?”
Now she was sleeping with Avery Crown and walking down Eighty-Second Avenue being compared to a man in a gorilla suit.
“Avery is a good person,” Alistair said.
“I know.”
They walked past Beyond Beauty Salon and the hundredth auto-parts shop on Eighty-Second.
“You don’t lose anything,” Alistair said. “You need to think about what that means and what could happen.”
It was like watching a friendly dog suddenly turn fierce. Gone was Alistair’s wide cartoony smile. Gone were the skip and swish in his step that said, If I weren’t with Avery, you’d think I was the gayest, gayest gay boy in the world.
Merritt did not like thinly veiled threats. Who did? But Merritt realized she liked Alistair making them. Avery had said they were like family. Now Alistair was the older brother, taking a questionable suitor out for a long, hard talk.
“Is it that bad to be a lesbian on TV?” Merritt asked.
“It’s bad to betray your viewers’ trust.”
They passed an empty playground. Tetherball chains clanged against their poles.
“Do you hate me?” Merritt asked.
“I should.”
Alistair took up too much space on the sidewalk. Merritt kept edging onto the dried grass and cracked cement lots that lined the street.
“Whatever you do to Avery, you do to me,” he said.
That was not technically true, but like the kale, Merritt did not clarify the point.
“And the crew. They don’t have families most of them. We’re family. They’ve passed that up so they could have this. And you…you get a few weeks of fun. At what expense?”
My heart. My peaceful life, Merritt thought. The hope that someone would love me enough to stay.
Alistair was about to start in again.
“I want you to hate me,” Merritt said.
Alistair slowed his stride.
“I want Avery to have a friend who loves her most of all,” Merritt said. “Back in the day, I thought it was going to be me, and it wasn’t. But I want her to have a friend who hates anyone who could hurt her.”
“You care about her. So leave her.”
“She’s leaving me,” Merritt said.
“I know. Of course she is. I mean, will you leave her alone this summer? We’ve basically got two weeks left. If you back off now, she gets out okay.”
Merritt stopped. Traffic rushed by in a spray of dust and exhaust. A bus braked loudly. Some wilted riders stepped inside. There was a right choice. There had been ever since she’d walked into the Vale reunion. No, I won’t sleep with you. No, I won’t sleep with you again. (Wasn’t that how good choices went? They were hard to make the first time.) Now the good choice was, Yes, I’ll leave Avery alone. What were a few days in a prolonged one-night stand?
They were everything.
“No,” Merritt said.
Alistair glared at her. She held her ground, her eyes never wavering from his.
“I want to be with her for fourteen more days.” I want to be with her…forever. “I’ll be careful, but I won’t make decisions for her. And you shouldn’t have talked to me like this. You’re her friend. You said she was happy. How can you go behind her back and tell me to leave?”
Alistair’s eyes seemed to bore into her soul.
Finally, he nodded grudgingly. A little bit of the cute, paint-can Alistair crept back into his face. “I’m trying to hate you,” he said, “but I know you’re right.”
With that, he turned on his heel and walked back to the set too fast for Merritt to keep up without jogging.