okay?” Henry said. “We’re train enthusiasts.”
“No. You’re kidding. Really?”
All my amusement went completely over Kendall’s head. He seemed to have some trouble judging the intonations of my voice, and finally he interrupted, “Are you making fun of us?”
“Well . . . I . . . I don’t know.”
“I thought these were your friends, Henry,” he said.
“Oh my God,” I said. “I wasn’t making fun. You’re train enthusiasts. I’m sorry. That’s an unusual hobby. We’re not used to thinking of Hen that way.”
“It’s a passion.”
Kendall was completely without humor. Dave took over at this point, and he diverted Kendall onto the topic of trains, where he discoursed volubly. After a few minutes of this, Henry joined in. He wasn’t so much into the engineering side of it—he cared a lot more about the urban-planning side. And he had a substantial interest in buses as well.
Dave had no small amount of interest in public transport himself, and he tried to talk about ferries, only to be rebuked by Kendall, who said, “Ferries are inefficient.”
“Oh—okay.”
“The data are clear on this point.”
If there’s one thing I knew about the world, it was that I could never have a conversation with someone who said “the data are” instead of “the data is.” But Dave didn’t have this problem, because now he tried to defend his beloved ferries, and then the conversation got heated and voices were raised, but when Henry got a text message that they had to leave, Kendall seemed genuinely unhappy to go.
“This was excellent.” He gave Dave an effusive goodbye. “We should connect online. What is your screen name?” he asked.
“Uhh, for what service?” Dave said.
“For all of them. You don’t use the same one for all of them? I’m kenpop.”
“Err, I’ll find you,” Dave said.
Kendall said a brief goodbye to me too, but he did not offer to connect online.
When that experience was over, I slumped on the couch and had a brief moment of terror, thinking Dave was gonna tell me what a great guy Kendall was, but instead he shook his head.
“That was a lot,” he said. “But you made them so comfortable. Avani could never have done that.”
I waved a hand at him, but the compliment was welcome, and when he clambered onto the couch next to me, I almost wanted to put an arm around him. Knowing that this would be our very last evening together actually made me miss him, and for a second I thought about unbreaking up. But I told myself no, I’d played around enough with his heart.
When we pulled into Dave’s driveway, I said, “This’ll be short, right?” I said.
His parents had organized a little party to take pictures and see us off.
“Nope,” he said. “It’s gonna be so long and so awkward.”
“You’re really not helping.”
His house was a cacophony of light and sound. There were old people everywhere, reaching for my hand, and I gave Dave a shell-shocked look, but he was shaking hands too.
His dad clapped me on the shoulder and made me pose for photographs. I stood there, my brain vibrating softly, but they didn’t seem to need anything except for me to stand still for numerous pictures.
They told us to eat, and when I said I wasn’t hungry they ignored me and put a plate in front of me. I tried to eat some of the cupcakes first, but these were snatched cruelly away, and I was told to sample all kinds of Chinese snacks that were taken from little foil packages and put on tiny porcelain dishes.
Intermixed with the grandparents and the four uncles and their wives were a bunch of younger kids—Dave’s cousins—who looked at us shyly. One girl came up and jabbed me in the stomach and giggled when I made a face at her.
My mom made an entrance a half hour later and was immediately swarmed by Dave’s parents, who called us back and made us stand for pictures with what felt like every possible combination of him and me and his relatives and my mom.
Then I was back in the car with Dave, waving goodbye to his family. I felt moderately pepped up. Not completely lost, anyway.
“Hey,” I said. “What do you say we just skip homecoming?”
“Nope,” Dave said. “We aren’t doing that. Besides, you promised Hen.”
“But, but, but . . .”
“There are kids in this world who can’t afford even one homecoming ticket, and you want us to let two go to waste?”
I snorted. “Okay, but can we leave early if it’s