Wyn had warned me that his parents wouldn’t let us share a room, even though we live together back in the city. In some ways, they’re eccentric and freethinking, and in others, they’re surprisingly traditional.
Later, while his parents finish washing the dishes, Wyn takes me to his room to settle in. For hours he lets me go through his stuff, picking things up, asking questions, while he acts as the docent for this museum dedicated to my favorite subject.
I hold things up; he tells me about them. I’m gluttonous for all these bits of him.
Plastic MVP trophies from his soccer days; washed-out disposable-camera shots of him as a teenager, surrounded by girls with the sperm-shaped eyebrows and bleached-to-death hair of our youth. Pictures of him with friends at football games, their faces painted, and walking in summer parades, and even, in a couple of cases, at the rodeo.
Every time I point to someone, he tells me her name （most of his friends, it seems, were girls）， how they met, where she is now. “You keep in touch with all these people?”
“It’s a small town,” he says. “We were all friends, and so were our parents. I hear stuff through the grapevine. Some of them try to sell me multi-level marketing smoothies on occasion.”
At my request, he shows me all the girls he’s kissed, and the ones who came for the summer and broke his heart before heading home.
I stop on a framed professional photo of him on his dresser and snort in delight. “You were prom king? And you never mentioned it?”
Wyn peers over my shoulder. In the photograph, he wears a black suit and crooked plastic crown, his arms wrapped around the waist of a pretty brunette in a silver minidress and matching tiara. The backdrop behind them reads BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY over a sparkling skyline that somehow contains both the Empire State Building and Seattle’s Space Needle.
Wyn groans. “I swear to you that’s not even normally in here. Pretty sure my mom put it out for the occasion.”
“Oh? She wanted to make me jealous of your teenage flame?” I tease.
He rubs his forehead. His cheeks go adorably pink. “She thinks she’s showing me off.”
“I can’t believe I’ve known you for like three and a half years and you never mentioned you were prom king.”
“Yes, my finest accomplishment.” He shakes his head. “So embarrassing.”
“What are you talking about?” I face him. “How is this embarrassing? When I was this age, I still had braces and a pixie cut that made me look like I’d been electrocuted. Meanwhile, you were crowned prom king while on a date with a teen model.”
I lift the picture, offering him cold, hard evidence.
He returns the frame to the dresser. “I wouldn’t expect you to know this as a former teen brainiac and current brilliant medical student, but prom king is the consolation prize they give guys they think have already peaked and probably will be staying in town to be a spokesman for the local car dealerships.”
“Hold on, let me write this down.” I start to turn. He pulls me back, winding his arms around my ribs.
“See, you don’t know this because everyone in your town expected big things of you,” he says, grinning.
“I didn’t know this,” I reply, “because I went to a four-thousand-student school where no one knew my name and because I’ve never followed car-dealership culture very closely.”
“Ah,” he says. “Your first mistake.”
“Wyndham Connor,” I say. “Don’t you think this whole theory of yours is a teensy bit . . . narcissistic?”
His smile splits open, and my heart follows suit. “Because I think car dealerships would use me as a spokesperson? They’ve done it with like eighty percent of the town’s prom kings.”
“Not that,” I say. “The idea that all your classmates voted you prom king . . . because they felt sorry for you.”
He shrugs.
I wrap my arms around his neck. “Yeah, that was probably it.” I kiss him and he pulls me closer, lifting me up and into him as if to absorb me. “Surely it had nothing to do with how hot and kind and funny you are. It was sheer pity.” I kiss him again, deeper.
“And that?” he asks.
“Extreme pity.” I grab his ass. “This too.”
“Wow. Being a washed-up former golden boy isn’t so bad after all.”
Someone knocks on the doorframe. I pull back, but Wyn’s arms stay around me as he angles his head toward the hall.
His parents stand at the door, smiling, Gloria’s head resting on Hank’s shoulder.
“We’re headed to bed, you two,” Hank says.
“You need anything?” Gloria asks.
Wyn shakes his head. “Just saying good night.”
Gloria’s eyes shrink when she smiles, like Wyn’s. “Sleep tight.”
When they’re gone, Wyn walks me back against the dresser and we make out for a handful of minutes before he kisses the top of my head and leaves my room.
For the next four days in Montana, we barely do anything. We go cross-country skiing once, eat twice at an all-day pancake house that Wyn’s parents describe as “a haunt for old silver tails like us,” and take nightly walks with the whole family through the snow. We bundle up like astronauts, and Hank insists we wear headband lamps so we don’t “get hit by cars or attacked by wild animals” in the solid black of a Montana night.
Mostly, though, we lounge around the fireplace, an endless supply of food and drink cycling through the room. In the mornings, Hank makes each of us individual pour-over coffees, a process that takes so long that by the time he finishes the last one, we’re all ready for our second cups, and he lunges to his feet, without anyone asking, to start all over again.
“Dad, we’re fine with the Keurig,” Wyn tries to reason.
His dad wrinkles his nose and shuffles in his flannel slippers toward the kitchen. “That stuff’s for emergencies, not for guests.”
Most meals are casseroles. Hank doesn’t have the same affinity for food that he has for drinks, and Gloria’s cooking leaves me feeling like a walking balloon after every meal.
After dinner our second night in town, Lou and Michael lie on their backs on the rug, groaning and massaging their tummies.
“Mom, you and Dad need to consider eating, like, even a single vegetable per week,” Lou says.
To which Gloria replies, “Potatoes are a vegetable.”
“No,” Michael, Lou, and Wyn all say in unison.
Vegetables or not, the potatoes at least are helpful for soaking up the bourbons and scotches Hank lines up at their old wooden dining table for us to sample every night.
“Dad’s the Beverage King,” Michael says to me.
“I see why you gravitated toward Parth when you got to Mattingly,” I tell Wyn.
“That’s not why I gravitated toward Parth.” Wyn hauls me against him as he nestles back into the squashy couch. “I gravitated toward Parth because he had the prettiest friends.”
Lou snorts from where she lies on the rug in front of the hearth. “Thank you, Harriet, for saving him from himself.”
“I think you have too high an opinion of me,” I tell her. “I also befriended Parth for his hot friends.”