99 Days (11 page)

My mom’s in New York for a meeting with her editor and a stop at
Good Morning America
to hawk the
Driftwood
paperback, so Gabe brings over a pizza from the shop and we put an Indiana Jones marathon on cable. I haven’t seen him since the other night at the Donnelly party. We haven’t been alone in nearly a week.

“You sure you wanna watch this?” he asks me, settling back into the man-eating leather couch and grinning around his slice of pepperoni. We kissed for half an hour in my kitchen when he got here, my hands fisted in his wavy, tangly hair and the capable press of his warm mouth on mine. Gabe really,
really
knows how to kiss. He ducked his head to get to my collarbone and sternum, and I tried to push Patrick out of my mind as best I could,
I don’t like you with my brother.
I keep remembering the other night on my lawn. “There’s not, like, a documentary about juicing or the soil content of West Africa you were hoping to catch instead?”

“Already seen both of those, thanks,” I tell him cheerfully. I dressed up a bit before he came over, skinny jeans and a scoop-neck tank top, two thin gold bracelets on my wrist. With Patrick, I only ever wore my usual ripped denim and flannels, but there’s something about hanging out with Gabe that makes me feel like I should dress the part. It’s kind of nice, making the effort. “There’s a thing about killer whales at SeaWorld I’ve been meaning to get to, though.”

“Dork.” Gabe swings his free arm around my shoulders and pulls me close in the half dark, just one Tiffany table lamp casting a warm glow across the room. Then, turning to face me: “So, hey, how’d it go with my brother the other night?” he asks, frowning just a little. “In the car, I mean. I’m sorry; I totally threw you under the bus there, huh? I didn’t realize how smashed I was till I was really smashed.”

“No, no,” I protest, “it was fine.” I pause, feeling careful and not totally sure why. “We had kind of a good talk, actually.”

“Oh, yeah?” Gabe grins, fingers tracing the strap of my tank top over and over. “I knew he’d mellow out eventually.”

“I—yeah.” I don’t know if I’d describe what happened the other night as Patrick mellowing out, but I’m not sure exactly how to explain that to Gabe—or if I even want to. “Yeah,” I finish lamely.

Gabe doesn’t seem to notice my hesitation, thank goodness; instead he kisses me again, licks his way into my mouth until I’m gasping. I’ve never kissed a guy and had it be like this. His hand is warm and heavy on my waist—I’ve been nervous about letting him see any part of me that isn’t normally covered by my clothes, how soft and doughy my body still feels in spite of all the running I’ve been doing, but when he tugs my shirt up it’s so slow and easy and I’m so distracted that I almost don’t even notice until it’s already happened. His fingertips set off tiny firecrackers all across my skin. “Jesus,” I mutter against his lips, breathing hard enough that I’m almost embarrassed, my chest moving with the quickness of it.

“That okay?” Gabe asks.

I nod, liking that he’s asking. I smell salt and his old woodsy soap. Over his shoulder Indy’s outrunning the boulder, the swell of the old familiar music: “This is the good part,” I murmur quietly, then close my eyes so he’ll kiss me again.

Connie’s outside the pizza place turning the flowers in their pots when I show up the following afternoon, the sun yellow and beating on my back. “Hi, Molly,” she says when she sees me, looking surprised: For the most part, I’ve steered clear of the shop all summer. The butterflies in my chest thrum their papery wings.

“Hi, Con,” I say.

“Hi, Molly,” she says again, expression neutral as the paint on the walls in a hospital. “Gabe’s not here.”

I nod, trying to mirror the bland look on her face. Of course I already know the Donnelly boys work opposite shifts now, that they spend as little time together as humanly possible. That they hardly even speak, and it’s my fault. “I just came for some pizza.”

A slice of sausage and pepper is my cover, maybe, but I find the brother I’m looking for in his sauce-speckled apron behind the counter, scattering cheese on a wheel of raw dough. Patrick likes assembling pies, or at the very least he used to. He used to say it made him feel calm. “Hey,” I say softly, not wanting to startle him; the shop’s pretty empty at this hour, just the jabber of a little kid playing Ms. Pac-Man in the corner and the sibilant hum of the lite music station over the loudspeaker. Then, stupidly and a beat too late: “Buddy.”

Patrick rolls his eyes at me. “Hey, pal,” he says, the corners of his mouth twitching: It’s not a smile, not really, but it’s as close as I’ve gotten with him since I’ve been back. He looks even more like his dad than he used to. I grin like a reflex. “How’s it going?”

“Oh, you know.” I shrug, hands in my pockets. “The usual. Kicking ass, fiending pizza.”

“Uh-huh.” Patrick smirks. He used to tease me for this exact thing when we were together, how when I get nervous sometimes I’ll just get cornier and cornier until someone finally stops me. He looks at me. He waits.

I make a face: He’s not going to make it easy, then, this
being friends
thing. I guess it’s not his job to make it easy. I try again. “You’re coming to Falling Star, yeah?” I ask. It starts in a few days, the Catskills’ exquisitely lame take on Burning Man: a bunch of teenagers camping in the mountains, all the weed you could possibly smoke and somebody’s brother’s fratty band playing the same three O.A.R. songs over and over. We went two summers ago, though, a whole bunch of us, just for the day—it was after me and Gabe but before the book came out, and I remember feeling happy, just for the space of one sunny afternoon. “You and Tess, I mean?”

Patrick nods, finishing up with the cheese and sliding the pie into the oven. He’s a little shorter than his brother, and ropier. He leans the paddle against the wall. “Looks that way, yeah. She wants to check it out.”

“Okay, well. Me too. So”—I shrug awkwardly—“I guess I’ll see you there, then.”

This time Patrick really does smile—at how hard I’m floundering, probably, but I’ll take what I can get.

“Hey,” Tess says the next morning at work, finding me in the hallway outside the dining room as I’m readjusting the old black-and-white photos of Star Lake that Fabian for some reason loves to reach up and tilt askew. “This is probably a stupid question, but . . . what do people
wear
at Falling Star?”

I smile. “Like, do you need to pack bell-bottoms and macramé?” I ask her, standing back a bit to see if the frame is level. “Nah, you’re probably good. Unless you wanna join the love-in; then there’s a special dress code.”

“For the orgy, right.” Tess laughs. “I was thinking more, like, just shorts and stuff, right? I mean, it’s just camping; I don’t need a dress or anything?”

“I mean, I definitely will not be wearing a dress,” I assure her. “If you ask Imogen I dress kind of like a dude, though, so . . . she might be a better person to ask.”

“Shut up, you always look cool. Okay,” she says, before I can react to the compliment. “Thanks, Molly.” She starts to go, then turns around at the last second, pivoting on the hardwood in her lifeguard flip-flops. “Listen,” she says, “it doesn’t have to be, like, weird or anything, does it?” She gestures vaguely, as if the
it
in question is possibly the whole world. “Like, all of us going, I mean?”

“No, not at all,” I assure her, though I can’t actually imagine how it could possibly be anything
but
that. I wonder if Patrick told her about us on the lawn the other night. I wonder if it’s weird that I didn’t tell Gabe. “Of course not.”

“Okay, good.” Tess nods. “I’m sorry we didn’t get to hang out more at the party,” she says then. “I know Julia hasn’t exactly rolled out the welcome wagon.” She looks hesitant, like she’s not sure if she’s crossing a line here, but before I can say anything she presses on. “Anyway, I’m glad you’re going.”

I look at Tess’s freckly face, open and expectant; it’s impossible to hate this girl, truly. God help me, I want to be her friend. “I’m glad you’re going, too.”

Handsome Jay isn’t coming up to Falling Star until tomorrow, so Gabe and Imogen and I all carpool into the mountains, a winding drive that takes just over an hour and a half. I’m worried the trip is going to be hugely awkward—I’m worried this whole weekend is going to be hugely awkward, truthfully, that the whole thing is going to feel like some extended blast-from-the-past double-date nightmare with everyone I know there to witness the carnage—but Gabe and Imogen are both talkers, and she’s hardly even settled herself into the backseat of the station wagon before they’re engaged in a cheerful debate about the new Kanye West album. After that they move on to the lech-y driver’s ed teacher at the high school and a gross new sandwich place near French Roast that Gabe keeps calling “Baloney Heaven”; I let out a breath and lean my head back against the seat, happy to listen to them talk.

“So, Handsome Jay is working today?” I ask Imogen, turning around to glance at her in the backseat. She’s wearing a vintage-looking scarf as if she’s Elizabeth Taylor in some old movie, dark sunglasses obscuring half her face. She’s too glam for camping, but she’s always loved doing it, ever since we were little kids tucked into a fort on her living room rug. She was the one who got us started coming to Falling Star to begin with.

“Uh-huh,” she says now, sighing dramatically, then, peering at me over the tops of her lenses: “Don’t you
make
the schedule at that place, P.S.?”

“Not the kitchen one!” I defend myself. “Just the front desk and stuff.”

“Sure, sure,” Imogen says, smirking. She leans forward a bit, nods at the bag of Red Vines I’ve got in the console. “Pass those back, would you?”

“
Mm-hmm.
How’s that going, anyway?” I ask, once she’s pulled a handful of licorice from the package, snapping the end off one of the strips with her molars. “You and Handsome Jay.”

“It’s going
goooooood
,” Imogen says, laughing a little. “He took me to Sage the other night, actually.”

“Fancy!” I crow. Sage is the only white-tablecloth place in Star Lake other than the dining room of the Lodge. My mom used to take me on my birthday, just the two of us, but going with a guy is an entirely different thing.

“Right?” Imogen says. “I know it’s totally just a fling, we’re both out of here at the end of the summer, but, like—I
like
him.” She glances at Gabe, wrinkles her nose a little. “Sorry,” she says, “is this enormously boring to you?”

“No, no.” Gabe shakes his head, sincere. “Floor’s all yours.”

Imogen grins. “Well, in
that
case,” she says, and dives in. I reach over and squeeze Gabe’s knee, dumbly proud of how easy things seem between them.

It’s almost . . . normal.

Imogen’s chatting happily about Jay’s family, his dad who likes to paint. Suddenly, I remember running into her before homeroom the morning after I slept with Gabe—how I hadn’t talked to Patrick or my mom or anyone else yet, how I’d been walking around in a soup-thick fog all morning and the sight of her smiling at me across the hallway, her flowered dress and her cork-heeled shoes, was enough to have me swallowing back tears. “Morning, sunshine,” Imogen said brightly. She never carried a backpack. She didn’t think it was ladylike. “What’s up?”

Don’t be nice to me
, I wanted to tell her.
Don’t be nice to me, I’m awful, I don’t deserve it, I did the worst thing I could possibly do.
For one moment I wanted to tell Imogen everything, to pour it all out regardless of the mess it would make, to stand back and stare at the horribleness of it like the world’s ugliest piece of art.

Then I realized I never wanted to tell anyone ever.

“Nothing,” I called back, shaking my head resolutely. “Morning.”

Now we stop for gas at a grimy station off the side of the highway, cars rushing by packed with suitcases and camping gear. It’s high summer, vacation time. It’s hot. “Can I tell you something?” Imogen asks me, both of us waiting in line for the questionable bathroom. “You seem, like, really happy.”

“I do?” I blink at that, surprised—it’s the first time anyone’s described me that way since I got back here. It’s the first time anyone’s described me that way in more than a year. Hearing it feels oddly incorrect, like someone pronouncing your name wrong.

Imogen laughs. “Yeah,” she says. “You do. That so hard to believe?”

“I—no, actually. I guess not.” I glance at Gabe, who’s pumping gas across the blacktop. He catches me looking and grins. I think of his goofy stories, the interested way he chats with every last person in town; I think of how he knows my ugly parts and likes me anyway, how he’s not perpetually disappointed by the person I turned out to be. I’m still nervous about this weekend—ugh, actually just thinking about meeting up with Patrick and Tess makes my stomach flip unpleasantly—but out here in the middle of nowhere with Gabe and Imogen, I’m really glad I said I’d come.

The gas pump shuts off with a noisy
thunk
. “I am happy,” I tell Imogen, tipping my face up toward the sunshine.

Falling Star’s in full swing by the following afternoon, the whole campsite crowded with people. The air is thick with the smell of weed and sunscreen and grill smoke, girls in bikinis lounging on the rocks and the constant clang of a dreadlocked white boy strumming away on a guitar. Imogen and I made totally undrinkable coffee over the campfire this morning, then gave up, got in Gabe’s station wagon, and drove twenty minutes to the nearest town. I brought a cup back for him, waving it under his nose where he was still sleeping inside the tent we’re sharing. “You’re my fucking hero,” he told me, and I laughed.

Now we’re clustered around a couple of the picnic tables eating chips and playing poker with handfuls of crumpled one-dollar bills—me and Gabe and Imogen, Kelsey and Steve, who wandered over from their campsite down the way, and Handsome Jay, who drove up after his breakfast shift at the Lodge this morning. Even Patrick and Tess are playing, Tess’s red hair braided into a heavy-looking skein hanging over one shoulder. She looks like something out of an Anthropologie catalog, rustic and effortless. I pick at my cuticles and sip at my water bottle, trying not to notice Patrick’s hand on her knee. They showed up last night, the two of them ambling over to the campfire. Tess hugged me hello while Patrick hung back in the shadows: “Hey,” I said to him, making a point of it. After all, we said we’d try and be friends, didn’t we?

Patrick just looked at me, even. “Hey, yourself,” he said, so quietly no one but me could hear.

Now Gabe lays down three tens, which is a winner, all of us grumbling good-naturedly as we toss our cards onto the rough wooden table. “Thank you, thank you,” he says grandly, reaching for the pot with silly, exaggerated movements.

“Oh, no, wait, hold up, though,” Imogen says, pointing, just before Jay reaches out to clear the deck. “Patrick’s got a full house, right?”

Patrick looks up at that, then down at the table, surprised—he’s been playing with half a mind, no question, lost in Patrickland while the rest of us hang out here on Earth. Then he smiles. “Oh, hey, no shit, yeah I do.” He reaches for the cash, but his brother stops him.

“Wait a second,” Gabe says, shaking his head a little. “Isn’t that how we play, though: You don’t notice, you don’t take the pot?”

Patrick makes a face like,
nice try
. “I don’t think so, dude.”

Gabe frowns. “I’m just saying, you’re hardly even playing, you needed somebody else to tell you that you even won—”

“Yeah, okay, but I did win,” Patrick says, the faintest hint of an edge creeping into his voice, the kind you wouldn’t even notice if you hadn’t known him pretty much forever. I’ve known him pretty much forever, though. I shift my weight, not liking the trajectory here.

So has Gabe: “Dude, it’s, like, twenty bucks we’re talking about,” he says now, shaking his head like Patrick’s being stupid.

“Dude, it’s, like, my twenty bucks.”

Shit. Patrick mimics his tone
exactly
, which I know from when we were kids is one of the fastest ways to get under Gabe’s skin. Sure enough: “Why are you being such a dick about this?” Gabe asks, eyes narrowing.

“Why am
I
being a dick?” he asks, sounding pissed about a whole lot more than twenty bucks in George Washingtons. I wince. “
You didn’t win
, bro. I know it contradicts your whole entire understanding of the universe, but—”

“It contradicts my understanding of the universe to be a little bitch about everything, yes,” Gabe interrupts.

“You wanna talk about who’s being a little b—”

“I left my sunglasses in the car,” I announce suddenly, standing up so fast I almost turn over the table. “I’m going to go get ’em.”

“Molly,” Gabe starts, sounding more irritated than I’m used to. “You don’t have to—”

“No, no, I’ll be right back.” It’s bailing, I know it is, just like I always do, but sitting there listening to them argue feels like trying to hold still while centipedes crawl all over my naked body. I can’t do it; I don’t have the stomach. I gotta, gotta go.

“You want company?” Imogen asks me.

“Nope, I’m good.”

I take off at a pretty quick clip, but the raised voices have already caught Julia’s attention; I pass by right as she’s getting up off the old Donnelly camp blanket, where she’s been reading magazines with Elizabeth Reese. “Did you just start
another
fight between my brothers?” she demands, shaking her head like she honestly can’t believe me. “Seriously?”

“I—no,” I defend myself. “Jesus, Julia. They’re into it over a stupid game, I don’t know.”

“Uh-huh,” she says, brushing by me. “Sure they are.”

On my way to the lot I see Jake and Annie from the Lodge, who’ve got a complicated setup involving a generator—Jake’s an Eagle Scout, I remember vaguely. He works behind the reception desk, so I see him more than I see Annie, who’s a lifeguard. “Hey, Molly,” Jake calls. “You want a beer?”

For a second I almost accept, but as soon as the words are out of his mouth Annie’s shooting him a look that could peel the sap right off a pine tree, so I shake my head awkwardly.
I swear I’m not after your boyfriend
, I want to say.

Instead I get my sunglasses out of the station wagon and sit on the bumper for a minute, trying to take deep breaths and calm down a little. In my logical brain I know this one wasn’t really my fault, not entirely—Patrick and Gabe were never super-close, even before everything happened. When we were kids it was fine, regular brother stuff, but once Chuck died it was like they swerved sharply in opposite directions or something, like they were never quite traveling in the same car after that. Gabe’s personality, his gregariousness, got bigger and more exaggerated, like if he was surrounded by his friends 24/7 then it meant he never had to be alone. Meanwhile, Patrick did exactly the opposite: He didn’t want anything to do with anybody who hadn’t known Chuck well enough to have a nickname, didn’t want to go out or hang out or do much at all besides sit in the barn or his bedroom with me, the two of us wrapped up in our own private Idaho. Julia would drop in and watch movies with us sometimes, but for the most part it felt like other people just didn’t understand what was happening: “His
dad
died,” I protested when Imogen complained about how often I’d blown her off lately.

“Yeah, a year ago,” she countered.

I didn’t know how to reply to that. I’d always known how Patrick’s aloofness sometimes played to the outside world. It didn’t look that way to me, though—after all, Patrick was my person, my other half. I never felt stuck or cut off or like there was other stuff I’d rather be doing, never felt like there was anyplace else I’d rather be.

At least, not until the moment it did.

*

It was a few weeks after my meeting with the Bristol recruiter in the guidance office, April of sophomore year—I’d gotten another email from her a couple of days before:
Just wanted to say again how nice it was speaking with you
. I’d written back, asking a few more questions. I hadn’t brought it up with Patrick again, but the idea was still itching at me like the tag at the neck of a cheap cotton T-shirt, like walking around with a tiny shard of glass in my shoe. It was weird, feeling like I had something to say that he didn’t want to hear about. That had never happened to me before.

I tried to push it out of my mind, though, which felt easier now as Patrick kissed a trail down the side of my neck, both of us sprawled on the couch in the family room at the Donnellys’, killing time before that night’s baseball game at school. We were the only two people in the house. His warm fingers traced the pattern of my rib cage, trailed down over my still-flat stomach, fussed tentatively with the button on my jeans. I breathed in. In spite of how long we’d been dating we’d never gone much further than this, and every inch of new skin he touched felt scary-amazing, icy hot. “What do you think?” he muttered into my ear, so quiet. “You wanna go upstairs?”

I did, truly—I wanted him to keep doing exactly what he was doing, wanted his familiar face and body and the rumpled T-shirt sheets on his bed. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I do, let me just.” I took a deep breath, my head swimming. Were we really about to do what I thought we were maybe, possibly, probably about to do? “Let me just pee first, okay?”

Patrick laughed. “Sure.” He stood up off the couch, adjusted himself a little. Took my hand and pulled me to my feet. “You got Chapstick?”

“Ha, why, too much kissing?” I grinned. “In my backpack, yeah.”

“Smartass.”

“You love me,” I called over my shoulder, confident in the fact that he did, that he always would; when I got back a minute later, though, his darkened face threw me into sudden doubt. “What’s this?” he asked me, holding up a sheet of printer paper.

Shit. It was my email exchange with the recruiter, the paper he’d clearly found in my backpack—I’d printed it out at school earlier, intending to show it to my mom that weekend.

I took a deep breath. “Patrick—”

“Are you going?” he asked, zero to totally pissed in 3.5 seconds. “To Arizona?”

“No!” I said, wanting to calm him down as fast as possible—wanting to get back to how everything had felt a minute ago, safe and exciting both. “Probably not, I mean, I just wanted—”

“
Probably
not?”

“I don’t know!” I said. “I was going to talk to you about it, I
wanted
to talk to you about it, I just—”

“Thought you’d lie to me about it for a week instead?”

“Hey, kids,” Gabe said just then, pausing in the doorway to the family room, rapping twice on the frame like he knew he was interrupting something but wanted to give us a heads-up that he was there. “You almost ready to go?”

“Oh, crap, what time is it?” I looked up at Gabe, then at the clock on the cable box, blushing at the idea he’d heard us fighting. He was supposed to give us a ride to the baseball game. I’d totally lost track of time. “We gotta go, huh?”

“Got some time,” Gabe assured me. He was a senior that year, would be graduating in a month. “Game’s not till seven.”

I looked from him to Patrick’s stony expression, back again. “I know, but I told Imogen we’d go early.” Sports weren’t a huge deal at our school, but our baseball team was in the playoffs and it was a Friday game, a night one that we’d been talking about all week. Julia was cheering, and Annie had made a bunch of banners with the art club; we had plans to go for pancakes at the diner afterward. It felt like a long time since I’d hung out with everyone, a weird ache I’d started to notice, like my friends felt far even though they were right where they’d always been. Like some secret part of me was already getting ready to leave. I took a deep breath, looked back at Patrick, putting my hand on his wrist like a peace offering. Tried to ask him telepathically:
Please, please can we just table this for now?
“Come on,” I said, out loud. “Let’s get ready.”

“What if we skipped it?” Patrick said, standing frozen in place with his arms crossed. It was still cool out and he was wearing this lightweight hoodie I loved, gray and hundred-wash soft.

“Skipped it?” I repeated. “Why would we skip it?”

“I don’t know.” Patrick glanced at his brother, shook his head. “You don’t think it sounds lame?”

“Not really,” I said, “no. I kind of wanna go, actually.”

“I . . . kind of really wanna stay here.”

“Whoa, dissent in the ranks,” Gabe teased from the doorway. “All right, you guys figure it out. I’m gonna change my shirt. Train leaves the station in five minutes.”

I perched on the arm of the couch to face him. “I’m sorry, okay? I’m not going anywhere, I promise. I was being dumb, I should have told you I was thinking about it. But I’m not even thinking about it anymore.”

I thought that would fix things, that we’d get back to having a fun, normal night, but Patrick sighed. “I think it’s lame,” he said, ignoring what I’d said about Bristol, like we’d moved onto a different conversation entirely. “I just think it’s so boring and fake, to go hang out with a bunch of people I don’t even like and cheer for a baseball team I literally could not care less about. I don’t feel like going.”

“They’re our
friends
,” I countered. “Since when do you not like our friends?”

“I like our friends fine,” Patrick said, shaking his head. “I don’t know.” He sat back down then and picked the remote up off the couch, flicking through the channels. “Look, that show about the pit bulls and the criminals is coming on. How can you possibly say no to a show about pit bulls and criminals?”

“Paaatrick,”
I said, laughing a little uneasily—he was kidding but also not, I could tell, wanted me to ditch our friends and the baseball game and stay here.

To ditch
Bristol
and stay here, too.

God, it felt so suffocating all of a sudden, the idea of spending the rest of the night watching whatever five-year-old episode of
How I Met Your Mother
came on next, the air inside the house close and stale. We’d spent any number of Fridays like that, just the two of us, and it had never, ever bothered me, but all of a sudden it made me want to scream.

Gabe turned up in the doorway again then, jacket on and car keys rattling inside his hand. “You guys figure your shit out?” He looked back and forth between us, undoubtedly the twin faces of two people who had emphatically
not
. He made a face like,
definitely
not getting in the middle of
that
. “I can just take you over, Molly, if my brother’s being a pain in the ass about it.”

“Screw you,” Patrick muttered.

“No,” I said, “he’s not—”

“Just go,” Patrick said to me harshly. “Seriously, you wanna go with Gabe, go with Gabe. I’m not your warden.”

“I—” I put one foot back down on the floor, uncertain. We were supposed to meet Imogen in ten. “Come on, Patrick, don’t—”

“Jesus Christ, Molly, can you not make a federal fucking case out of it?” Patrick huffed out an irritated breath. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

That made me mad, that he’d talk to me that way in front of his brother. That he’d talk to me that way at
all
. I felt my cheeks heat up, embarrassed and pissed. This was me and
Patrick
, was the thing here—we were a unit, a package deal, us on one side of the road and everybody else on the other. We never, ever fought in public.