99 Days (22 page)

I wake up in the camper’s tiny bed the next morning and find Gabe rummaging through Ryan’s mini fridge, the kind you’d find tucked under a lofted bed in a college dorm. Pale yellow sunlight trickles through the tiny windows, making kaleidoscope patterns on the rug. “Hi,” I say around a yawn, rolling over onto my side to see him more clearly, his tan unblemished skin and the T-shirt he slept in. “Whatcha doing?”

“Scoping out the breakfast situation,” Gabe tells me, smiling at my presumably sleepy expression. “There’s eggs. And, like, gross instant coffee. Or we could drive into town and go to French Roast, if you want.”

I look at him for a beat longer, a package of questionable Kraft Singles in one hand and his easy morning grin. Last night’s
I love you
echoes inside my head like the refrain of my favorite new song. I take a deep breath.

“I don’t,” I tell him, reaching my hand out across the tiny camper. “Come back here.”

Gabe doesn’t move for a second, head cocked to the side and his face a quiet question. “Okay,” he says after a moment, and laces his fingers through mine. He gets both knees up on the narrow mattress, hair falling across his forehead as he gazes down at me. “You sure?” he asks, barely more than a murmur. I look up at him in wonder, and I nod.

Imogen’s art show is a roaring success, French Roast packed to bursting with friends and strangers alike: She pushed this event
hard
on Twitter and Instagram, put up fliers in every shop in town, and it paid off in a crazy, crazy way. Nearly everywhere I look I spy pieces with little red
SOLD
stickers on them, the collages and the brush script, the series of the lake in the fading light. A lot of people love Imogen: It’s a trip watching her make the rounds and talk to everyone, Handsome Jay’s arm slung casually around her shoulders. I’m proud of her.

“She’s good, huh?” Gabe asks me, in front of a line drawing of Tess in profile, her expression mysterious and wry. He’s right—it’s a gorgeous piece, the texture of her braid just right and the rich way the ink’s soaked into the thick paper. I can hardly do more than mumble my vague agreement, though, because just then the door to French Roast opens and Tess herself walks in, Patrick’s long fingers hooked through the belt loop on her jeans. He catches my eye for a moment, and stares.

I swallow. It’s the first time I’ve seen him since the awful night in my bedroom, both of us beaten to wreckage like ships—we’ve avoided each other carefully, orbiting around each other in our little social circle like magnets with repelling poles.

“What’s his problem?” Gabe asks, following my sight line to Patrick’s stony expression.

I shrug, turning purposefully away. I’m surprised he can’t smell it on me, the sweaty sheen of guilt coating my skin. “I dunno.”

“Deep existential angst no layman could understand,” Gabe diagnoses. “You want food?”

I don’t. It seems like it should be easy to get lost in the crowd milling around in the coffee shop, the big tables of pastries and drinks and so many things to look at and people to chat to, but instead from the moment Patrick turns up it feels like he and I are the only two people in here, this weird animal awareness of him no matter where he goes. He’s tracking me, too; I can tell he is, can feel his gaze on my body like a constant, low-grade hum. I stick close by Gabe’s side and try not to look.

Afterward there’s a party at Handsome Jay’s tiny apartment, all of us crammed onto couches and in his little galley kitchen, a fridge full of Bud Light and a few cheap bottles of liquor on the counter. I step over Jake and Annie, who are making out on the futon, and mix myself a vodka cranberry that’s mostly juice.

When I see Patrick duck out onto Jay’s balcony, I glance over my shoulder to make sure Gabe and Tess are both distracted before I follow. “I
am
a champion of the world,” Imogen is saying, holding up her beer bottle with a giggle in a tipsy toast to her own success. Tess clinks, and they both take long gulps.

Patrick’s leaning over the railing staring out at the patchy woods beside the apartment complex, a bunch of anemic-looking pine trees ringing the economy-filled parking lot. “Got a minute?” I ask quietly.

Patrick shrugs. “It’s a free country, I guess,” he tells me, which is a thing we used to tell each other real snotty-like when we were little. Then he sighs. “What do you want, Mols?” he asks, and he sounds so tired of me. “I mean it, what could you possibly want from me?”

He’s drunk, I can tell by the way his gaze is slightly slow to focus. Not exactly ideal conditions for a resolution, but I have to try anyway. I have to see if I can get this out.

“Look, will you talk to me for a second?” I ask him, still trying to keep my voice low—the party’s noisy inside the apartment, but the sliding door’s still open a bit. I feel like I’ve spent this whole entire summer worried someone’s going to overhear. “The summer’s almost done, you know? And I don’t—I
love
you, and I care about you, and I don’t want—”

“You love me, and you care about me.” Patrick snorts. “Okay.”

“I do!” I protest, stung by the dismissal. “Why the hell else would I have done what I did with you all summer, huh? Why would I have risked hurting Gabe like that—?”

“I don’t know; why did you do it last time?” Patrick demands. “Because you like the attention. That’s what it is with you. You’re a poison, you want—”

“Can you keep your voice down?” I hiss, but it’s too late—here’s Tess sliding the glass door all the way open, fresh beer in her hand.

“Everything okay out here?” she asks.

And Gabe on her heels: “What’s going on?” he asks.

Patrick focuses his reply on his brother: “Why don’t you ask your girlfriend?” he suggests nastily. “And while you’re at it, why don’t you ask her what the fuck else she’s been doing, the whole time she’s been fucking you?”

I freeze in total horror. Patrick moves to shove his way past us all. Gabe grabs his arm to keep him from going, though, and just like that Patrick whirls on him, his fist connecting with the side of Gabe’s face with a sick crack like something out of a movie. Tess screams. Gabe hits back. And I do the only thing I can think of, the only thing I’ve ever been any good at in my whole entire life:

I run.

I can’t—

I didn’t mean—

Oh God oh God oh God

Overnight it’s like something heavy and poisonous bursts open inside me, a cyst or a tumor: I wake up sobbing into the mattress, and I can’t for the breathing life of me stop.

I ruined everything; I destroyed it.

You’re a poison.

dirty slut.

I lie there for a while, curled in a ball and wracked with it like some stupid Shakespearean tragedy character, crazy Ophelia eating her own hair, but eventually crying that hard makes me feel grossly like I’m going to barf, so I force myself into the bathroom, which is where my mom finds me when she comes upstairs what could be minutes or hours later, I’m not sure.

“What’s wrong?” she asks urgently, flying through the doorway and dropping right down onto the tile beside me, getting her arms around my shoulders and squeezing tight. She smells like sandalwood, her flowy cardigan soft and cool against my damp, blotchy skin. “Molly, babe, what happened? What’s wrong?”

I blink at her through my tears, surprised: Even back before communication went solidly to crap in our house, the two of us weren’t really huggers. It’s basically the sum total of the physical contact we’ve had all summer and right now it only makes me cry more, way too hard to answer her with words. My breath is this awful shuddering wheeze, this feeling of being physically crushed like how they used to kill witches in Massachusetts, slabs of rock piled one after another on my chest. I feel like I’m running a marathon I haven’t trained for at all.

“Molly, babe,” she says again, warm breath at my temple. It’s like some weird dormant instinct is taking over for her, stroking through my hair and rubbing my back like I can’t remember her doing since I was really, really little. “
Shh.
You’re okay,” she promises. “I’m here; your mom’s here. You’re okay.”

Your mom’s here. You’re okay.

It’s the same thing she said the night I told her about Gabe, I remember suddenly—me breaking down and coming to her in her office, the feeling like I was the last person on Earth. I used to think that was what set this whole awful game of dominoes in motion to begin with, that none of this would have happened if she hadn’t gone and used me like she did.

Now? I’m not so sure.

We must think of it at the same time, though, because my mom draws back and shakes her head. “You don’t have to tell me,” she promises quietly, and it sounds like an absolution. “We can just sit here. You don’t.”

So that’s what we do, the two Barlow women, on the floor beside the bathtub, the tile cool and clean. Eventually, the tears stop coming. Neither one of us says a word.

I drag my sad, sluggish self downstairs for a run the next morning, the fog rolling off the lake like clouds of milky chowder. I’ve barely made it out the door when I freeze.

It’s not eggs this time, coating my mother’s house all slick and sludge-slimy.

It’s toilet paper.

Toilet paper that got rained on overnight.

I sit right down on the lawn when I see it, rolls upon rolls of super-absorbent two-ply soaked through and clinging to the shingles and shutters and gingerbread scrollwork in mushy, sodden clumps. It’s clogging all the gutters. It’s hanging from the trees.

“Well,” my mother says, sipping her coffee; she came outside when she heard my laughter through the open window, a deranged cackle that didn’t sound anything like my normal laugh. I sobbed once as she stepped through the front door to investigate, then pulled it together. The wet grass is seeping through my shorts. “You have to give her points for narrative consistency, I suppose.”

“Mom,”
I snap, and this time she softens. She offers a hand to help me up. “You can call Alex,” I tell her miserably. “You can call Alex to fix it this time. I give up.”

My mom looks at me with something like compassion, her slim hands surprisingly strong. “You know what you gotta decide when you’re a writer?” she asks when I’m standing, damp green grass sticking to the backs of my legs.

“Whether or not to turn your teenage daughter’s sex life into a best seller?” I reply. It’s an instinct, but a vestigial one, and my mom can tell. She rolls her eyes, but kindly, still holding on to both my hands.

“Which stories to tie up at the ending, Molly,” she tells me. “And which ones you have to let go.”

I look at her for a moment, at this woman who chose me eighteen years ago. Who raised me and broke me and just lifted me off the ground. “Can I ask you something?” I begin, feeling stupid and embarrassed but also like this is a vital piece of information, something I should have known long before today. “What’s your favorite flower?”

My mom looks surprised—that I’m asking, I guess, or maybe that I care. “My favorite—lilies, I guess. I like lilies.”

I nod slowly. “Lilies,” I repeat, like it’s a word I’ve never heard before. “Okay.”

I find Tess hosing off the rubber lounge chairs in the morning, a dozen of them lined up like soldiers in the sunshine along the pool deck. I have to force myself down the stairs from the porch. Up close she looks terrible, face swollen and shiny and tender from crying, a zit sprouting on one cheek. Her hair is lank and greasy. I think I probably look way worse.

“Hey,” I say, one hand up in an awkward wave like it’s the beginning of the summer all over again, like she’s a stranger I’m vaguely afraid of. Like I’m a stranger she probably hates. “Can I talk to you a sec?”

I’m not far off: Tess looks at me for a moment, something like wonder passing over her puffy, distorted features. “No,” she says.

“Tess—”

“Don’t, Molly,” she interrupts, shaking her head at me. She drags the hose across the concrete, begins to wind it up. “I mean it. I don’t want to hear it, I really can’t.”

“I’m so sorry,” I try anyway. “Tess, seriously, please just listen for a sec—”

“You listen for a sec!” she explodes. It’s the first time I’ve heard her raise her voice all summer. “I was nice to you when nobody else was, do you get that? Everyone said to watch out for you, but I liked you, so I didn’t care.” She shakes her head, eyes filling. I feel like the worst person in the world. “Is that why you were friends with me to begin with?” she asks me, voice high and brittle. “To, like, misdirect?”

“No!” I exclaim. “No, I swear. I liked you, too, right away. You’ve been such a good friend to me this summer, and I—”

“Thought you’d pay me back by screwing around with my boyfriend?” she asks.

“I—” I break off, helpless, glancing around like an instinct to see if anyone has heard her, like I did when I first found Julia’s note on my car. I’m ashamed of myself, truly. It’s inexcusable, what I did to Tess.

“Please leave,” Tess tells me, trying unsuccessfully to undo a stubborn kink in the hose. “Seriously. Just—if you ever wanted to do something in your life that wasn’t selfish. I mean it. Please, please leave.”

Back in June, I watched a documentary about ghost hearts, which doctors prep for transplant by scrubbing all the cells until all that’s left is connective tissue, empty and white and bloodless. I don’t know why I’m thinking about that right now.

“Of course,” I say finally, nodding ever so slightly. I turn around and get out of her way.

I sit in bed with my arms wrapped tight around my knees and watch a documentary about Mary Shelley, who kept her husband’s heart in her dresser drawer for years after he died. I cry for a while. I hide.

I haven’t heard a word from Gabe or Patrick—not that I was expecting to, I guess, but there’s a small part of me that held out hope Gabe would reply to one of the thousand
I’m so sorry
texts I’ve sent him. I’ve called, but he hasn’t picked up. Late last night I gathered up all my courage and drove out to Ryan’s camper, where Imogen told me he’s staying, but even though the station wagon was parked in the clearing nobody answered my knocks on the door. I sat there for hours, in the cold and the dark, waiting and waiting, but he never came. Now I type his name into the search bar on Facebook, stare at his tan, smiling face.

I friend Roommate Roisin while I’m on there, then lose an hour snooping idly through a bunch of her photo albums.
Raisin has a super hot boyfriend!
I’d text Tess, if I thought Tess ever wanted to hear from me again in this lifetime. Instead I keep clicking: Roisin and her softball team in Savannah, Roisin in a prom dress last May. She looks well adjusted and popular and nice and friendly.

I wouldn’t want a thing to do with me if I were her.