99 Days (15 page)

Gabe’s still in the shower when I come by to pick him up for dinner and Julia’s prowling around the downstairs of the house like a hungry tiger at the Catskill Game Farm, so I creep outside to the back of the farmhouse and sit in a lawn chair to wait. Connie’s roses are lush and sprawling in the summer heat, their heavy heads fat and drooping like Penn’s sleepy kids at the end of the day. The vegetable garden is bright with still-green tomatoes, slowly ripening summer squash.

I squint at the barn at the far edge of the property, its peeling paint and crooked doorways. The roof seems like it’s close to caving in. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to look at the sloping roof and not remember the first time Patrick kissed me, bundled up in heavy-duty sleeping bags in the loft that’s never been used for anything but storage and sleepovers. It was fall, too cold to be camping, but that was right after Chuck died and nobody was keeping much of an eye on Patrick to begin with: Gabe ran all over Star Lake with every girl in the sophomore class, it seemed like, and Julia had one disciplinary notice sent home after another. Patrick was quiet, though, flying under the radar.

Patrick had me.

It was October, the smell of things decaying, being absorbed back into the earth. The wind snuck underneath the floorboards, through the hairline seams in the walls—we weren’t talking, both of us paging through Chuck’s old
National Geographic
s like a couple of nerds, but we were pressed together without even meaning to be, the instinct to get close to wherever it’s warm. I could feel his ribs move in and out as he breathed.

“Listen to this,” I said distractedly, the bag of Red Vines crinkling as I rolled over to face him—it was an article about a tortoise called Lonesome George, the very last one of his species. When I looked up at Patrick, Patrick was already looking at me.

Emily Green would have been surprised by what happened next, probably. She would have been prettily baffled, would have never seen this coming, but the truth is of course I had: for weeks and months and maybe years, like if you’d put your ear to the ground on the day that Patrick and I met you would have been able to hear this heading toward us, a rumble from miles and miles away. I’d listened. I’d been paying attention. And when his mouth pressed against mine I wasn’t shocked.

It wasn’t a long kiss; it wasn’t a make-out; just barely a press like,
there you are
.
There you are
, I thought, looking at him in the glow of the cage light hanging on the wall, the camping lantern that had been his dad’s along with the magazines.

There you are.

*

“Hey,” Gabe says now, side door clattering shut behind him as he crosses the patio in shorts and a button-down. He smells like soap and water, clean and new, and just like that all my memories of Patrick evaporate like steam off a damp hot sidewalk. That was then, I remind myself. This is now. “Sorry about that. I just had the craziest phone call.”

“Dial a date?” I ask cheerfully.

“Oh, you’re a comedian.” Gabe offers one big hand to pull me to my feet. “No, so Notre Dame does this program with a bunch of different hospitals, right? Like a semester abroad, I guess, but for premed people and you change bedpans or whatever instead of drinking your face off in Prague. Anyway, I applied in the spring and they wait-listed me, but I guess some kid just dropped out, and there’s a spot open at MGH.”

I blink at him as I reach for the handle on the passenger side of Volvo, baked warm by an afternoon in the sun. “MGH?” I ask, trying to suss out the acronym. “Is that . . .?”

“Massachusetts General Hospital, yeah,” Gabe says, raising his eyebrows across the roof. “In Boston.”

“Really?” I ask, taken aback—but not, I realize, necessarily in a bad way. “You could be in Boston in the fall?”

“Oh, you’re freaking out now,” Gabe says, laughing as he turns the key in the ignition. “You’re all,
shit
, I was planning to use this kid for his body all summer and then never talk to him again, what the hell am I gonna do now?”

That makes me laugh, too. “I would love to have you changing bedpans in my new home city. Boston bedpans, I hear, are the best in the land.”

“That’s what you hear, huh?” Gabe’s still grinning. “It’s not definite or anything yet. I gotta drive up there in a couple of days, have the interview. I guess it’s between me and one other guy.”

I nod and let myself picture it for a minute—Gabe and me walking through Boston Common, hanging out and listening to the buskers at Faneuil Hall. It’s not what I’d pictured when I sent in my acceptance last April. But I like the way it feels. “You’ll get it,” I decide, smiling out the windshield. “You’ll see.”

There are two texts on my phone when I wake up the following morning, two chimes in a row dragging me out of restless sleep. One’s from Gabe, who decided at the last minute to make an actual trip of it and is going to take a few days to visit school friends on his way back from his interview:
I’ll miss you, Molly Barlow. Will tell Boston you say hi.

The second text is from Patrick:
run tomorrow?

I stare at the screen for a moment, the messages stacked one on top of the other like some cruel joke at the hands of the universe.

Then I turn it off and go back to sleep.

I meet up with Patrick again the following morning; it’s easier to keep up with him than it was last time, the rhythmic thud of rubber on earth and the breath steady in and out of my lungs. We’re halfway around the lake when Patrick stops cold.

“I was trying not to lose you,” he says suddenly, and from the tone in his voice I know he’s been thinking about it for longer than since we started this run. “That’s why I was such a dick about Bristol. I was trying not to lose you.” He shakes his head. Then, before I can rub two wits together: “But I lost you anyway.”

“You didn’t,” I blurt, fast and immediate like I think I’m on
Family Feud
. I’m breathing hard, from the run or from something else. “You didn’t lose me, I’m right here, I—”

“Mols.” Patrick screws up his face a bit, like,
It’s me, please cut the crap
. “You moved all the way across the country to get away, you know? And now you date my damn brother.” He scrubs a hand through his curly hair. “That’s a thing I knew, too, not for nothing. That he liked you. He liked you for a long time.”

I blink. I think of what Gabe said at Knights of Columbus, that he’d thought about me on the Ferris wheel. “You did?”

Patrick shrugs his broad shoulders, rolls his storm-gray eyes. “Everybody knew,” he says.

“I didn’t.”

“Yeah.” He glances out at the lake, back at me, out at the lake again. “I know. And I didn’t want you to find out.”

“Why?”

Patrick lets out a breath. “Trying to stave off the inevitable, I guess. I don’t know.” He sounds annoyed that I’m making him talk about it, like he’s not the one who brought it up to begin with. “But Gabe’s Gabe.”

“What does that mean, ‘Gabe’s Gabe’?” I ask, although I already kind of know what Patrick’s getting at. Probably if I was smart I wouldn’t push.

“Molly—” Patrick breaks off, irritated. It’s humid today, and his tan skin is damp with perspiration. He’s standing so close I can feel the heat. “I don’t know. Forget it. Can we just go?”

Did you think I wouldn’t want you if I knew I could have your brother?
I want to ask him.
Did you worry I was settling for second best?
“Talk to me,” I prod him. “Whatever else happened, you used to be able to talk to me.”

“I used to be able to do a lot of things,” Patrick snaps, a flash of temper. “Can you leave it?”

“No!” I exclaim. It feels like we’re tossing a ball back and forth, like Hot Potato, like neither one of us wants to be the one left holding it when it explodes. I bailed on coffee with Imogen to come here. I still haven’t told Gabe what’s going on. “Tell me.” Then, when he doesn’t answer:
“Patrick.”

“Mols.”
Patrick’s eyes are darker than I’ve ever seen them, that fleck in the iris like the North Star. “Let it go, okay?”

Things get weirdly quiet then, the trees and the lake and how empty it is out here, no tourists or anyone to see. Patrick’s face is tipped down close to mine. He wants to kiss me, I can tell he does, both of us standing here practically panting. He wants to kiss me so, so bad.

I know because I want to kiss him, too.

“We should go,” Patrick says, shaking his head and turning away from me. He takes off so fast I lose my breath.

Tess calls early the next morning—an actual phone call, not just a text, so I fish my phone out of my pocket with the tips of two wet fingers: One of the dishwashers at the Lodge broke overnight and flooded half the kitchen, so it’s kind of an all-hands-on-deck situation. “Hey,” I tell her, wedging the skinny phone uncomfortably between my ear and my shoulder and dunking some coffee cups in the first basin of the three-bay sink. A wet towel squelches under my feet. “Are you here?”

“No,” Tess tells me. “I’m supposed to be on at noon, but I don’t think I can come.”

“Okay,” I say slowly. Something in her voice doesn’t sound right. I glance across the kitchen at Jay, who’s working on some scrambled eggs for the breakfast buffet. “You sick?”

“Patrick broke up with me.”

I freeze where I’m standing, two hands in the sudsy water like I’m aiming to start the second flood of the day, enough water to sweep the whole Lodge out into the lake. A low, nauseated chill swoops through my gut, my brain pinging out in a hundred different directions.

Patrick broke up with her.

“Oh my God,” I manage finally, the first coherent thought I manage to put together being that I need to act normal here, and the second being that there’s no reason for me to feel one way or another, beyond the fact that Patrick and Tess are my friends. I’m not allowed to be invested. I’m
definitely
not allowed to be so immediately, physically
relieved
. “Are you okay?”

“I—yeah. No. I don’t—” Tess breaks off. “I’m sorry, it’s totally weird that I’m calling you, I just figured maybe you could tell Penn for me.” Another pause. “I mean, that’s not even totally true, I just kind of wanted to talk to you about it, you know? Since you—” She stops again. “Sorry.”

“Since I’m also somebody who’s been dumped by Patrick Donnelly?” I supply, hoping if I can kid around about it Tess won’t guess at the taste of my heart pulsing at the back of my mouth, thick and coppery. I think of yesterday on the trail with Patrick, the weird, charged, electrical moment that passed between us.

Tess is laughing a little, this phlegmy, snotty sound like she’s been crying. “Yeah,” she admits. “I guess that’s why.”

The urge to hang up and call Patrick feels like trying to hold back a cough: to hear his side of the story and make sure everything’s okay with him. I try to think quickly. “You want me to call Imogen? We’ll do a girls’ night tomorrow? We’ll go to Crow Bar or something. I’ll try really hard not to get anything thrown on me this time.”

“Yeah?” Tess says, sounding hopeful. “You want to? I mean, you don’t have plans with Gabe or something?”

The sound of Gabe’s name is startling: For a second I forgot he existed entirely, let alone that we’re together. God, what’s
wrong
with me? My heart is rattling away inside my chest like a shopping cart with a bum wheel. “No,” I tell Tess, trying to keep my voice even. “No, he’s in Boston for an interview. We’ll go just the three of us; it’ll be fun.”

“Okay,” Tess says, sounding a little less wobbly than she did at the start of this conversation. I feel wobbly in the freaking extreme. “Crow Bar, then. Nineish?”

I promise her I’ll be there and plunge two more glasses into the soapy water. I leave my phone in the freezer for the rest of the day.

I don’t think I’ve ever done a proper girls’ night, but Imogen’s an old pro, the smell of steam and burning as she flatirons my hair and a bottle of Apple Pucker she pulled from her purse like Mary Poppins, witchy green and syrupy like melted-down lollipops. Her mom’s away at a women’s retreat in Hudson. Nobody dresses up to go to Crow Bar, but Imogen insists we should anyway, pulling dress upon lacy dress from the depths of her walk-in closet while Tess and I watch from the bed, calling out our myriad opinions like something out of a chick flick montage. It feels like the kind of pregame Emily Green would have with her girlfriends, not me with my cat-lady tendencies and long queue full of documentaries about baseball and the history of salt. It’s nice.

“Okay,” Imogen says, shimmying into a black halter that makes her look even more like a pinup girl than normal. I’ve got a stretchy skirt and a silky tank top, the closest I’ve gotten to a dress since seventh grade—I wasn’t exactly in a position to go to prom. “Thoughts?”

“Do it,” Tess says cheerfully. She’s all smiles and spice tonight, brassy, but her alabaster face was a little puffy when she got here, her already short fingernails bitten down to painful-looking stubs. She still hasn’t said what the fight was about, if there even was a fight to begin with. I haven’t asked. “Your ass looks great in it. And I wanna go out.”

“Well, you best chug that delicious beverage, then,” I tell her, nodding at her mostly full juice glass of Apple Pucker with a grimace. I like sweet things, but three sips of this stuff and my teeth feel like they’re wearing sweaters. “Bottoms up. Go on, it’s right up your alley, it’s made of produce and everything.”

“Basically a health food.” Tess nods resolutely. “To getting dumped by Patrick Donnelly,” she says, holding it up for a toast.

“To getting dumped by Patrick Donnelly,” I echo, clinking. My laugh sounds strange and hollow, though: The truth is I feel dishonest, this pestering nag at the back of my brain like I’m telling whopper after whopper just by showing up here and being with them. I haven’t heard from Patrick since our run the other morning, but suddenly he’s closer than he’s been in a year and a half.

Tess downs her schnapps and makes a truly hilarious gross-out face, like she just took a swig of human vomit chased with kerosene. “Let’s do this,” she orders as she hops off Imogen’s bed, teetering a little as she lands. She yanks at the short hem of her emerald-green dress, frowning. “I always feel like a drag queen in heels,” she mutters.

“You realize we’re gonna look like hookers at Crow Bar,” I point out, then: “Drag queen hookers,” we say at the same time.

“Oh, you’re very funny,” Imogen says, rolling her eyes at both of us. “Shut up for a second; I’ll call a cab.”

*

At Crow Bar we order shots of fireball whiskey and drop them in glasses of hard cider, a trick Gabe taught me that tastes like apple pie: “Apples are the theme of the night,” Imogen observes. “Abraham Lincoln would be so pleased.” Then, off our blank stares: “You know, cause of the apple tree?” she asks, looking back and forth between us. “He couldn’t cut it down? Or he cut it down and couldn’t lie about it?”

“It was a cherry tree,” I say at the same time Tess points out, “It was George Washington.”

All three of us find this hysterical, for some reason, clustered around a table in the far back near the jukebox, doubled over giggling. “Are we dancing?” Tess asks when the music changes over to the Whitney Houston we plugged in with our fistfuls of quarters. “I’m pretty sure I was promised dancing in my time of need.”

“Oh, we’re dancing.” Imogen grabs me by my wrist and pulls me into the crowd.

I laugh as I thread through the crush along with them, shaking my hair and letting Tess twirl me around, Imogen singing along like we’re still in her room and not technically underage in a bar full of people. I feel like I’m having two separate nights, though, like I’m only half-present: The urge to check in with Patrick is constant and physical, like an itch on the bottom of your foot when you can’t take your shoes off, or a tickle at the back of your throat.

We head to the bathroom after another round, snaking through the crowd one after another. “How you doing?” Imogen asks Tess, bumping their shoulders together as we wait in the long line. It smells like a sewer. “You hanging in?”

Tess sighs. “Yeah, I’m fine,” she says. “I just feel so
stupid
.” She leans across the puddle-filled counter and peers at herself in the cloudy mirror, wiping away the mascara that’s migrated down underneath her lash line. “At least I didn’t sleep with him, I guess.”

“You didn’t?” I blurt immediately, then cringe. God, how desperate do I sound right now? How gross is it that I care so much if they did or they didn’t? Patrick and I never had sex—in a lot of ways our relationship reset when we broke up and got back together, and we were only just headed in that direction again when the article came out at the end of junior year. I was terrified I’d give myself away somehow, that if we did it he’d be able to tell I’d done it before. To his credit, Patrick never pushed. “I mean, not that it’s any of my business, sorry.”

“Uh-uh.” Tess seems unbothered, both by my question and by the fact that we’re having this conversation in full earshot of, like, six other women. Possibly she’s a little drunk. “I mean, I would have, honestly, but, like . . . He didn’t want to. Which, what eighteen-year-old boy in the universe doesn’t want to have sex? I’m a pretty girl! I should have known something was weird.”

“Maybe his penis is broken,” Imogen volunteers helpfully. “Or, like, got accidentally lasered off in a childhood accident.”

Tess cracks up. “Laser dick,” she says over the sound of a toilet flushing, then heads for the open stall. “That’s definitely what the problem was.”

Imogen and Tess head to the bar, and I weave my way back to our table in the corner and people-watch for a while. I glance at the beer clock on the far wall. I’m digging through my purse for some Chapstick when I feel the buzz of my phone against the back of my hand, the screen lighting up with Patrick’s name.

Hey
, is all his text message says.

Shit. I look around like I’m expecting to get caught with contraband. I can see Tess and Imogen leaning over the bar, laughing about something. It’s the closest I’ve come in a year to having friends.

Hey yourself
, I key in, chewing my lip like I’m aiming to amputate it. Then:
you okay?

I’m not expecting to hear back right away, that’s for certain. I remember how long it took him to respond after the camping trip, how far we are from the perpetual back-and-forth of a few years ago, our lives one long conversation. It’s entirely possible he won’t text me back at all. Which is why I’m so surprised when my bag buzzes again less than ten seconds later:

fine
, Patrick says, just the one short syllable. Then, a few beats after that:
you doing anything right now?

I take a deep breath, watching Tess and Imogen make their way back through the crowd in my direction, both of them giggling. Imogen waves like we haven’t seen each other in years.

I glance down at my phone again, back up at the two of them.

no
, I key in quickly.
What’s up?