Page 99 of The New Place

“So who proposed?” Dan asks. “Tell us everything.”

Cheryl clasps her hands together. “I want to hear too.”

Abbot doesn’t have an answer to the look Ned darts his way. They should have discussed this. Of course people will want a story to all this excitement, one that will appease the thrill their families have for the news.

“Well,” Ned says. “We um…”

Abbot flounders too. A proposal? He’s never thought concretely about it. Has Ned? No, he’s as upended as Abbot is, and if he’s nursed secret fantasies of proposing, he clearly doesn’t have any scenarios ready at hand. It was practical, Abbot imagines saying. It was the only thing to do. Which he and Ned know, but they’ll be asked for this story again and again and surely they need an answer.

And they won’t ever have a real proposal, not with how things have gone. But can’t they invent something, at least? A fiction to go with their fiction, so Dan and Cheryl and everyone but them can live in a world where events happened as they should have?

“Earlier today,” Abbot says, a good-enough place to start. But what? They looked at a house when they can’t even agree about living together, and between a call about Baxter’s bloodwork and Ned’s job talk, they realized they’d been backed into announcing an engagement?

It should have been so much better than that. Ned deserves better, certainly.

“Having Liesl in town to celebrate with us, it seemed like the right time,” he says slowly, which is its own knot to untangle because he was to take her to Portland this weekend, and Ned was intending to stay here with Peggy, and here they’ve gone and gotten engaged, a proposal that didn’t happen pretending to be crowded between meetings and phone calls on a workday.

Though perhaps that’s just it. Meeting at a university, their lives lived together in the rhythm of semesters and school breaks, of midterms and finals and fresh syllabuses and new class rosters. Comparing conversations with their advisees, reading each other’s journal articles, emailing Ned a paper he’ll find interesting and seeing one in return in his inbox.

“We were getting some work done,” Abbot says, the image growing clearer in his mind as he talks. “And I plotted a Kruskal-Wallis test on the predicted outcomes of happiness if he were to say yes.”

“I love that,” Dan says. “Kruskal—what was it? It’s perfect.”

“It’s a distribution-free nonparametric statistical test, which can be used if the criteria for an ANOVA aren’t met.”

Ned nudges him.

Quickly he adds, “A joke, if you will.”

“Of course it is,” Dan says.

“Don’t worry. I had to ask that too,” Ned says, picking up the thread.

“Do you have it?” Cheryl asks. “Is it something you can print out? We ought to keep it.”

No, Abbot doesn’t have it, because it exists only in this story. But he could. It’d be easy enough to create, as if he really had planned this all along.

And perhaps he might have. Already he’s thinking of ideas, possibilities coming to him like he’s uncorked the potential of a proposal and they’re spilling forth. The Jumbotron at Fenway, horrifically public for Abbot, but probably perfect for Ned. Getting Pat to write on a takeout cup from the cafe and going for a walk with Ned, eager for him to notice. Somehow bringing Peggy in on the plan, and even Liesl, all of them anxious and excited together. Or something for just the two of them, a quiet dinner and then getting down on one knee beside Ned at the table, telling him he’ll do everything he can to make his life the happiest possible.

Abbot leans against him, pressing his forehead to his temple for a moment, needing to gather himself.

“We can keep the whatever-whatever test,” Ned says, “But nobody’s ever asking me to explain it, okay? That’s why I’ve got this guy.”

Abbot gets a squeeze around his waist and he nods. He’ll explain statistics to Ned for the rest of their lives, if Ned will let him.

“And are you two exchanging anything?” Cheryl asks. “Rings?”

Ned looks at his hand. Abbot feels the bareness of his own.

“No,” Ned says.

“Yes,” Abbot says.

They look at each other.

“Not right now,” Ned says and Abbot nods. Yes, later. They’ll talk about it at some point. Along with the host of other things they should discuss, like exactly how far this charade will carry them, and what they’ll do when everyone starts asking for a wedding date.

Choose one, he thinks, his excitement a torrent.