The Great American Whatever by Tim Federle

tell him about December twentieth, the only interesting thing about me, anymore.
    â€œOh,” I say.
    â€œPeople always pity me for being an only child,” Amir says, scratching his neck. I catch a glimpse of his armpit hair and it is black and without flaw. “But I love it.”
    He steps forward as the little kids in front of us teeter away with their own funnel cakes, their faces streaked with the tracks of drying tears. “How about you?” he goes.
    But we’re at the counter. “Can I take your order?” Thank God we are at the counter.
    Somehow I murmur: “Burger and a large Coke, no ice,” and Amir orders a cheeseburger without the bun, on “extra lettuce,” and then he says to me, again, like he’s the third Hardy Boy out to solve the mystery of my broken spirit: “You’re avoiding this question. . . .”
    I’m not sure if he pays or if I pay, only that we find a seat in the shade. I can’t look at him, so I take such a big bite of burger that it makes Amir laugh. I would fill my mouth with moths and bees right now if it meant not having to speak.
    When I finally swallow, after watching Amir negotiate his plastic fork around the lettuce, as if, with enough prodding, it might morph into something actually edible, like onion rings, I say to him, “I’m an only child, too,” just like that.
    And saying it makes it real.
    â€œHey,” he says, holding up his bottle of water, “to not having annoying siblings!” I toast him with my Coke and swallow away the acid in my throat.
    I just—I need to see if he actually likes me. I refuse to be his pity project. And so I am an only child now too, which is a version of the truth.
    Geoff and Carly find us. Geoff is holding three corn dogs, and they look kind of amazing, and somehow Carly has tracked down a salad—which, at Kennywood, is approaching a “story of Easter” level of miraculous—and I’m instantly fine. With Geoff here I know my place. I’ll be the guy who just makes comments from the sidelines, Donald O’Connor in Singin’ in the Rain , even though I can’t really dance. Let Geoff be Gene Kelly. (Famous Pittsburgher, by the way.)
    We make fun of Amir for not ordering a bun, and he finally gives in to the rest of humanity and takes a chomp out of Geoff’s third corn dog, and Carly calls us all brutes and spouts off some crap about how “the only reason meat tastes good” is because at the last minute, “animals are frightened” and release “a certain kind of enzyme” that adds to the flavor, and during this entire impassioned speech, Geoff begins a low moo that grows loud enough to attract the attention of the funnel-cake siblings, and what I’m getting at is that we’re restored. That I’m okay again. That Amir is knocking his shin into my shin from across the rusty table, and that it’s nice.
    â€œMan, that’s sad,” he whispers. We’ve been carrying on about how Geoff’s manager, Venessa, made him shave off his mustache, and so the laughing spills over when we turn around to see what Amir’s looking at.
    It’s a lady and her family. The lady kind of looks like my mom.
    â€œI honestly can’t believe the way some people let themselves go ,” Amir says. “It sorta gives me the willies.”
    I stand up right away and say, “I have to go to the bathroom,” and I’m probably just as surprised as anyone when I do.
    But you know by now what I never do in front of other people.
    And so when I’ve got my feet hiked up on the seat of this dirty bathroom stall, I let the tears come—harder than the funnel-cake siblings’, harder than the scared girl who ran out of the Racer line earlier, harder than how Geoff and my mom cried in our kitchen yesterday. Or was it the day before?
    I guess I just didn’t expect to find out that