Oh my God . . . was it Ken?”
I laughed, but he didn’t blink.
“So it wasn’t Ken,” he said.
“No.”
“Wait, okay, I’m gonna be cool. So . . . how do you feel about it?”
“I am . . . perhaps exploring the notion of becoming gay.”
He slapped me on the wrist. “You are so funny. Now who was it? Come on. Was it somebody I know?”
My eyes flicked to the corner, and Henry turned to see Dave and Mari coming back. As the two sat down, Hen gave me a huge, gape-jawed expression, then mouthed a word I couldn’t make out.
Dave sat down next to me and Mari sat next to Hen. “Ssssssssoooooooo,” Hen said. “How’s the smoothie?”
“What’s going on?” Mari said.
“Hen and I were talking about some personal stuff.” I shrugged.
He rolled his eyes. “Mari,” he said. “You and Dave, an item or no?”
“Uhh, what?”
“Dave,” Hen said. “What’re your intentions toward this nice lady here?”
My friend bowed his shoulders inward, shrinking away from us. “Errr . . .”
“Nandan,” Hen said. “You’re the instigator of this caper. What say you?”
“Uhhh . . . ,” I said.
Mari mouthed a question: Caper?
“Typical,” Hen said. “No follow-through. And now there’s only silence.”
“Well I think they have to answer for themselves,” I said.
“You two”—Henry snapped his fingers—“you both like video games, yes?”
Mari was red. “Yeah. Sure.”
“Good. There’s a GameStop.” He pointed. “Go to the GameStop. Hold hands. Decide if you like each other. If you don’t, that’s totally fine. But if you do, please kiss before coming back, so you can put us out of our misery.”
Dave looked at him.
I shrugged. “Sounds good to me.”
Now all the heads turned to Mari, and she hopped up, her eyes laughing, and put out a hand. “Come on. I guess those are the orders.”
Once she was gone, I said, “See, that’s the kind of thing I couldn’t ever do.”
“What’re you talking about?” he said. “I don’t see why straight guys can’t be awesome. Y’all just choose not to be.”
“No, from me that’d be creepy or weird.”
“What’s weird is you and Dave hooked up!” he said. “That’s mind-blowing.”
“Yeah. I don’t know. I was drunk.”
“Was he drunk?”
“No.” I shook my head. “But he wasn’t very into it.”
“He said that?”
“No, but afterward it got weird. And he said that hooking up with guys wasn’t even on his radar.”
Hen let out a long sigh. “The straight guys. We can have them for a night, but no more.”
“Yeah . . . ,” I said. “I guess.”
“You,” Hen said. “I would not have guessed you. I’d have thought Ken maybe. Or Niko.”
“Niko! You know him?”
“Of course. Everybody knows Niko.”
“I need to meet him.”
Henry can’t keep it serious for long, so we laughed and made fun of Niko and ourselves. And right at the moment when he reached forward to touch the back of my hand, I looked at Avani and witnessed one of the most awesome things I’d ever beheld—I saw the force of Hen and me, laughing and connecting, pull her back toward us. The motion was slow and unwilling, she was like an iron ball wobbling between two powerful magnets, but all of a sudden she said goodbye to the girls and made her way back to us.
She came back. “Sorry, guys. Some Holy Redeemer girls I hadn’t seen in a while. Rachel was telling an incredible story—”
“We were talking about Niko Diamandis!” Without thinking, I dropped that into the conversation before Hen could ask about the incredible story. Hen filled her in, and when she tried to redirect the conversation to herself—she said her friend Rachel was dating a guy who—
“See!” I interrupted. “Not everybody has heard of Niko.”
“Well, of course Avani hasn’t,” Hen said. “She’s such a princess.”
“Hey.”
“It’s not an insult, it’s a descriptor. You’re a very pretty princess, don’t worry. It’s just that you wouldn’t ever go for a guy who wears a fanny pack.”
“Eww, who would?”
“Only like half the school, honey.”
“‘Honey,’ that’s bold,” I said. “I’ve never heard you call someone ‘honey.’”
“I feel very called-out right now,” Hen said. “I’m allowed to test-drive some new expressions once in a while.”
That wasn’t the end. The conversation was intense and nerve-racking. I didn’t have a second to think: I was operating solely by instinct, rushing in to stop Avani from going off on some self-absorbed tangent that would kill Hen’s brief and partial interest in her. But finally the moment approached for the movie, and I saw Avani look at her phone, and I knew that she was about to