99 Days (19 page)

Gabe’s the only one home when I come to pick him up for a double date with Kelsey and Steve the next evening: “In here,” he calls when I rap my knuckles against the screen door. His bedroom’s off the kitchen, a smallish afterthought of a space that used to be the servants’ quarters a hundred years ago when the farm had horses and pigs and cows to milk. Gabe got it when he turned thirteen, on account of he was the oldest.

“Hey,” I tell him cautiously, leaning against the doorway: It’s the same as I remember it, the blue-and-green plaid bedspread, the pine dresser—everything almost preternaturally neat for a teenage boy, like maybe nobody even lives here. Patrick’s room was always a disaster.

“Hey,” Gabe says, pulling a frayed gray polo over his head. I haven’t been in here all summer—haven’t been in here at all since everything first happened between us, actually, the night in May of sophomore year when Patrick dumped me.

I remember stumbling down the back staircase and into the kitchen, physically disoriented—it felt like a canyon had opened up between us, like in some old cartoon where a crack appears in the earth and the ground breaks apart all in the space of five seconds. Like strolling blithely off a cliff and not noticing until you look down. I stood there in a numb haze, barely registering the sound of the side door slamming shut, then the rev of the Bronco’s noisy engine as Patrick took off.

I didn’t realize I was crying until I saw Gabe.

“Hey, Molly Barlow,” he said, glancing at me once and then again more closely; he was making a turkey sandwich at the beat-up butcher block counter, twin slices of bread already laid out on a plate. His graduation was in a week and a half. “What’s wrong?”

I shook my head. “No, nothing,” I said, wiping my face and thinking for a minute of claiming allergies before realizing he’d never believe me and that it didn’t really matter anyway. It was, after all, just Gabe. “Had a fight with your brother, we’ll work it out, it’s fine.”

“
You
people, had another fight?” Gabe put the knife down and licked mustard off his thumb. He looked genuinely surprised. “What the hell, huh? Like, are the rivers turning to blood?”

“Shut up.” I laughed a little, sniffled. “I mean, kind of. It’s the same fight, I don’t know.”

“About boarding school?” Gabe asked, then hesitated. “I mean, sorry, I’m not trying to crawl up your ass or anything.”

“No, no,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s fine.”

“Okay,” Gabe said, crossing the kitchen to stand beside me at the sink. This close he was taller than I’d realized, my head just about level with his sternum. It was rare for us to be alone. “So . . . what?”

And I told him.

I told Gabe everything, about the recruiter and about Bristol, how all of a sudden Patrick and I had started speaking different languages out of nowhere like the freaking Tower of Babel or the French tapes Connie liked to listen to while she weeded her garden. How I didn’t know how to say anything to him anymore, didn’t know how to make him hear me. How I felt more alone than I’d ever, ever felt. “I didn’t even
want
to go to freaking Tempe at first,” I finished. “What’s in Tempe? Nothing. But I just. I just wanted to
talk
. And instead he, like . . .
broke up with me
.”

Gabe listened wordlessly, arms crossed and blue eyes focused. When I was finished, wrung out like a washcloth, he sighed.

“Look,” he said finally. “You know my brother. You know him better than anybody else, maybe. You know how he is. He gets something in his head and that’s the end of it, you know? He’s a fucking donkey. He decides something’s not good for somebody—especially him—and that’s it. And you moving across the country, even for something awesome, even if it was something you really wanted to do? Definitely wouldn’t be good for him.” Gabe stopped then, just for a beat, and then he said it. “And I mean. For what it’s worth, Molly Barlow? It wouldn’t be so good for me, either.”

I stared at him for a second, not comprehending. “I—”

Right away, Gabe shook his head. “Forget it,” he said, looking shyer than I’d ever seen him—actually blushing, like he couldn’t believe what he’d said. “That was out of line, you’re my brother’s—”

“I’m not anyone’s,” I blurted. God, that was the problem, wasn’t it—like Patrick and I were one person, one soul or brain or
whatever
living in two bodies, so that whatever either one of us did had to be decided by committee. It felt suffocating, all of a sudden, or maybe it had felt suffocating for a long time and I’d just never noticed:
You’re my brother’s
. Like Patrick owned me. Like if he didn’t like something that meant I couldn’t do it, period. Bristol or anything else. “I’m mine, I mean. I don’t belong to—”

“No, of course, I know that.” Gabe shook his head. “You’re his girlfriend, I meant. Or, you were, I guess. Look, this is getting messed up. I just meant—”

“I know what you meant,” I told him, realizing in that moment that I did, just from the way he was looking at me. I glanced at the short hallway that led to his small, neat bedroom. I felt reckless and brave.

“Molly,” Gabe said, and his voice was so quiet. Down near the pocket of my denim shorts his fingertips brushed mine. His eyes had flecks of brown in them I noticed. I’d never been close enough to tell. When he ducked his head down to kiss me, his mouth was plush and friendly and warm.

“Holy shit,” I said, pulling back a minute or twenty later; my thoughts were careening everywhere, Gabe’s hands creeping up under my T-shirt right there in the kitchen of his house. I had never known that before, that having my stomach touched was a thing that could feel that good. I had never known I was this kind of person. “Okay, we should—” God, this was wrong, it wasn’t supposed to happen like this; it was supposed to be me and Patrick, a perfect moment right out of one of my mother’s dumb books. Not like this. Already I’d come too far to ever go back. “
Holy shit
, Gabe.”

“You want to stop?” he asked, a little breathless. His lips looked very red. “We can stop, fuck, we should probably . . .” He trailed off, nervous and almost panicky. I’d never seen Gabe anything less than sure. “What do we do?”

I looked one more time toward his bedroom, back up the stairs to where I’d left Patrick what seemed like a lifetime ago. Everything felt inevitable all of a sudden, a book that had already been written. I shook my head. “Let’s go,” I muttered softly. Gabe nodded, took my hand.

The next day it storms, which matches the state of my humid brain almost exactly; I wake up early to the wicked flash of lightning, to thunder so noisy I feel it rumble in my bones. There’s no way I’m getting back to sleep, so I drag the quilt off my bed and head down to the living room, opening every window I pass to the hissing gush of rain. The trees rustle uneasily under the force of it, the green smell of water and the brown smell of mud.

Petrichor
is the word for the scent of rain as it hits the blacktop. Patrick taught me that, a really long time ago.

I jab at the coffeemaker until it brews and take my mug into the living room with no real plan other than to sit there and listen to the rain, to let it wash me clean if there’s any conceivable way. I’ve felt like crying since the moment I opened my eyes. I settle myself onto the big leather couch, blow on the coffee until it’s cool enough to drink without scalding the inside of my body. There’s a copy of
Driftwood
sitting with a stack of magazines on the table, a curling Post-it marking the place my mom reads from when she does events at libraries and bookstores.

I glance over my shoulder at the doorway, which is empty. Vita snores quietly on the rug. I’m alone here, just me and the book my mother wrote about me, the mystery words I’ve never been able to look at for more than a few seconds at a time. I’ve skimmed paragraphs here and there, with the guilty, shameful feeling of looking at something illicit and dirty.

Now I take a deep breath, pick it up, and read.

It’s
good
is the worst part of everything; in my head it was hackneyed and nasty, like a cheap daytime soap on the page. The truth is it’s . . . kind of compelling. I get why it did so well. The boys aren’t Patrick or Gabe, not exactly, and while reading about Emily Green makes me supremely, squirmingly uncomfortable, I have to admit I’m rooting for her stupid coin-flipping self by the time I near the end.

I’m almost finished, turning the pages faster and faster, and the rain long since calmed to a steady drizzle when I hear the creak of the floorboards behind me: There’s my mom in the doorway with Oscar, and I am unmistakably caught.

“Morning,” is all she says, though, setting the dog down on the floor so he can trot over to where I’m curled under the blanket, toenails clicking on the floor. She looks from me to her book and back again, her face impassive. “You been up awhile?”

Long enough to read the best seller you penned about my love life
, I think, but for the first time I can’t bring myself to get worked up about it. “For a bit,” I say. “Yeah.”

My mom nods. “You want more coffee?”

I almost tell her something else then. I
want
to tell her something else—that reading this book was like spending three hours with her, that I miss her, that she’s talented and even if I don’t forgive her I’m still proud that she’s my mom. The cover feels like it’s gone hot inside my hands.

“Coffee would be great,” I finally tell her, and smile. My mom nods at me slowly, smiles back.

Once she’s gone I dig around in the couch cushions for a moment, come up with a fistful of crumbs but also exactly what I’m after—a tarnished, gummy nickel, cool and heavy in the palm of my hand. I squeeze it tightly for a moment, like I can give it special powers that way, like I can infuse a whole year’s worth of questions into the metal.

Then I flip.

I’m down in the kitchen feeding Oscar his expensive, locally produced kibble when my phone starts buzzing in my pocket. When I fish it out I’ve got a new Facebook notification:
Julia Donnelly has tagged you in a photo
.

I tense, a low, greasy roll of dread rumbling through me before I can quell it, like too much questionable not-quite-Mexican food from the dining hall at Bristol. Julia did this a lot before I left: tagging pictures of me with bad angles that made it look like I had a double chin, ones with my eyes closed where I was making a stupid face. Once she posted a picture of a literal pig with my name on it. I’m not sure which of her brothers finally made her take it down. We’re friendly again now, sure—at least, I
think
we’re friendly—but as I click
VIEW POST
I flinch anyway, that feeling like the moment between when you stub your toe and when the pain hits. I’m sure this is going to hurt.

Which is why I’m surprised when I see what she’s tagged this morning, that it’s not a porn star with my face Photoshopped in or a blown-out close-up of me with a bad breakout. What she’s posted is a throwback shot—the same one that’s shoved in my desk drawer at this very moment, that I pulled off the bulletin board when I got back to Star Lake: the four of us, Gabe and Patrick and Julia and me, sitting in the hayloft, Patrick’s arm wrapped tight around my rib cage. No mean caption, no cartoon penis drawn helpfully on my face. Just us, how we used to be. Before.

I look at our faces in the photo, grinning and silly. I smile at the screen in reply.

I’m looping the lake early the following morning, legs burning and swallowing giant mouthfuls of air, when I spy a familiar figure heading in the opposite direction. “We gotta stop meeting like this,” I tell him as he slows to greet me, and Patrick raises his eyebrows.

“It’s early,” he says, and it is, still—the sky just getting light around the edges, all that smudgy pink and gray. It’s going to be nice out today. I can hear the waking calls of the birds up in the pine trees.

“Uh-huh.” I nod as he falls in step beside me, him doubling back in the direction he came from. The back of my warm, damp hand brushes his for a moment before he takes it, lacing his fingers through mine.

“Patrick,” I tell him, low and warning. It occurs to me that possibly we aren’t meeting here by chance.

Patrick ignores me. “You know what we haven’t done yet?” he asks instead, grinning like a little kid with a secret.

“I can think of a lot of things,” I retort without thinking, and Patrick tilts his head like,
Fair enough
, before inclining it toward the placid surface of the lake, morning-tranquil and empty. Right away I pick up what he’s putting down.

“No way.” It’s a thing we used to joke about constantly, half-kidding and half-serious—both of us testing each other’s boundaries or something, both of us feeling it out. Neither one of us ever called the bluff. “I’m not skinny-dipping in this lake with you right now.”

“Why not?”

“Because we’re not on
Dawson’s Creek
! Like, to start with.”

“And to end with?”

“Shut up.”

“You don’t have to take everything off,” he tells me.

“Oh, how generous of you,” I snap, and Patrick wrinkles his pretty nose.

“You know that’s not what I meant,” he says, a flash of flinty anger in his deep gray eyes. “I’m not some gross guy who wants to—” He breaks off.

Get naked with his brother’s girlfriend?
I almost supply. Not like we’re not both thinking it. On top of which Patrick is that guy, clearly. He’s exactly that guy.

And I guess I’m exactly that girl.

He can feel me considering it, he knows me that well; we’ve stopped moving entirely, standing here beside somebody’s rotting old dock. There’s not a soul here to stop us. There’s not a soul here to know. “Mols,” Patrick says, and his voice is so quiet. “Get in the water with me.”

I look at him for a moment. Then I sigh.

“I’m not losing all my clothes right now,” I tell him firmly.

“Noted.” Patrick nods.

“And neither are you.”

That makes him laugh. “Noted.”

We don’t talk a whole lot as we pull our various clothes off, my shorts and tank top and Patrick’s T-shirt hitting the weathered wood of the dock in a cascade of quiet swishing. All I want in the world is to stare. My heart is thudding away inside my chest, the animal build of anticipation, the feeling of finishing what we started before everything crumbled away like wet sand. I swallow a breath down, trying not to shiver. Goose bumps prickle up and down my arms. When I glance up I see Patrick’s staring back at me, watching, curious and overt.

“Sorry,” he mutters when I catch him, rolling his eyes a bit.

“S’okay,” I reply, gazing back at him evenly, both of us standing there in our underwear. It occurs to me that this is the first time since I got back from Bristol that I don’t feel self-conscious about how I might look.

You can stare
, I want to say to Patrick.
It’s fine, it’s me; I promise you can look.

He shrugs, rubbing at his neck a little, looking out at the chilly black water. “You ready?” he asks.

“Uh-huh.” I clear my throat, swallow once. “If you are.”

“Yeah, Mols,” Patrick says. “I’m ready.”

We jump.

It’s exhilarating, hurtling through the air like that—the sensation of flying just for a second, the chilly morning air buffeting my skin. We smash through the placid surface of the lake like twin explosions.

“Holy
shit
,” Patrick swears once we’ve surfaced—it’s freezing, he’s not wrong about that, the cold sharp and immediate and aching. He barks out a frigid-sounding laugh. “Whose fucking idea was this again?”

“Some dummy’s, certainly,” I tell him, voice shaking a bit with the force of my shivering. I swim a few strokes toward the center, splashing around to try and warm up. Patrick turns a fast somersault, flecks of water sticking to his eyelashes. His bare collarbone juts in a way that makes me want to trace it with one gentle finger. I wonder what would happen if I did. I can feel my chest moving underneath the surface of the water. God, it is so, so cold.

“Now what?” I ask, a little breathless.

“I don’t know,” Patrick says, water dripping from his hair and skimming over his cheekbones, and puts his surprising mouth on mine.

It’s a good kiss. God, it’s the
best
kiss, it’s the kiss I’ve been waiting for all summer and maybe my whole life, Patrick’s warm mouth and the slickness of his wet shoulders sliding under my palms, his neck and the damp hair at the base of his skull. Every inch of my skin feels like it’s on fire, the prickle and pop of nerve endings coming to life all over my body. I swear I can hear the steady hum of my blood inside my veins.

“Hi,” Patrick mumbles against my jaw, licking at the pulse point just underneath it. I can feel the mossy floor of the lake underneath my toes. He’s fumbling for the band of my sports bra, my arms coming up to help him as he peels the whole soaking thing off, the water cold and black and all the warm places where he’s pressed against me. My legs come up like a reflex to wrap around his waist.

“Hi,” I tell him quietly, and kiss him again.

It goes on for a long time out there in the murky water, nobody around to stop or see us, his solid body and his hands carding through my wet, tangled hair. Patrick pulls back for a moment to look at me, intentional. For a second he only just stares. “Mols,” he says, in this voice like I’m a precious thing, in a voice like I’m rare.
“Molly.”

I shake my head, blushing even as the water feels like it’s getting colder, how I’m freezing and burning up all over the place. “Patrick.”

“I meant it, what I said that day it was raining,” he murmurs, swallowing audibly. “About you being beautiful. I know you weren’t fishing. But you are.”

I get my hands on his face and kiss him again then, not wanting to think about anything but this moment, like the sound of our own quick breathing can keep everything else at bay. Still, though, I can’t keep myself from asking again: “What are we doing?” His mouth tastes like water, the zing of this morning’s Colgate behind his teeth. “Huh? Patrick? You gotta tell me here, what are we—”

“I don’t
know
,” Patrick tells me, urgent, more vulnerable than he’s sounded all summer long. His face is so close I can see his eye freckle, that dark fleck I’ve always thought of as just mine. Like you could get into his soul that way. “I don’t
know
. We’re going different places, aren’t we? You’re going to Boston with my brother.”

“I’m not—” I begin to protest, but Patrick cuts me off.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says, his hands wandering, me arching into his touch before I can stop myself. “It’s still here, isn’t it? Between you and me. I loved you, Molly, I
love
—”

Patrick catches himself just then, doesn’t finish. I wrap my arms around his neck and hold on.