99 Days (3 page)

“I’m sorry, are you
smiling
?” my mom asks the following morning, looking at me incredulously across the kitchen island.

I grin into my coffee cup and don’t reply.

I wake up early in the morning with a long-lost, instantly identifiable itch in my body; I lie there under the duvet for a while, waiting to see if it will pass. The sun spills yellow through the window. The air smells cool and Star Lake–wet. I snooze for ten minutes. I reassess.

Nope. Still there.

Finally, I get out of bed and pull an old, ratty pair of leggings out of the bottom dresser drawer, wincing when I realize how tight the waistband is now, cutting into the soft, mushy skin of my midsection. I grimace and set about untying the knots in the laces of my sneakers that are literally a full year old.

I’ll probably drop dead after a quarter mile, wind up lying there like a fat, flattened raccoon on the side of the road.

But I want to run.

My mom’s drinking coffee in the breakfast nook when I come downstairs but—wisely—decides not to comment on my sudden emergence from the third-floor tower, watching wordlessly as I clip Oscar’s leather leash onto his collar. “Be easy on him, will you?” is all she says, probably the first time she’s asked anyone to be easy on anyone else in her entire life. “He doesn’t get much exercise.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I mutter, sticking my headphones into my ears and making for the back door. I wave at Alex, who’s trimming the rhododendrons, and head down the driveway toward the street. “Neither do I.”

I ran track all through middle and the first three years of high school; sophomore year Bristol tried to recruit me for their track team, which is how I found out about them to begin with. By the time I actually went to Tempe after everything happened, though—the longest, fastest run of my whole life—I was finished. I spent senior year parked on the bleachers, mostly motionless. Now I feel like a pale, doughy Tin Man, creaking stiffly back to life.

I make my way along the rocky bike path that’s parallel to Route 4, which eventually narrows and becomes Star Lake Road. Patrick and I used to run this route all the time—when it was warm like this but also in the winter, the edges of the lake frozen over and snow coating the delicate-looking branches of the pine tree overhead. He got a bright green pullover for Christmas sophomore year and I remember watching him as we hoofed it through the drab gray landscape, standing out like some exotic bird. I watched him all the time, his fast elegant body—Patrick and I were both serious enough runners back then, I suppose, but mostly our treks around the lake were an excuse to be alone. We’d been dating since the previous fall, but everything still felt new and exciting and secret-amazing, like nobody had ever lived it before us.

“Gabe told me he and Sophie Tabor went skinny-dipping out here in the fall,” he told me when we were done with the loop one afternoon, his bare hand reaching for my gloved one.

I tucked both our hands into the pocket of my jacket to get warm. “They did?” I asked, distracted by the feeling of having him so close. Then I wrinkled my nose. “Don’t you think
skinny-dipping
is a gross phrase? There’s something about it that’s, like, off-putting to me. Like
moist
.”

“Or
panties
.”

“Don’t say
panties
,” I ordered.

“Sorry.” Patrick grinned at me, bumping his shoulder against mine as we followed the frozen curve of the lake. A weak halo of sunlight peeked through the winter clouds. “We should try it, though.”

“What?” I asked blankly. Then: “Skinny-dipping?” I looked at the hard crust of snow covering the ground, then back at him. “We should, huh?”

“Well, not now,” Patrick clarified, squeezing my hand inside my pocket. “I’d like to get to graduation without my junk freezing off, thank you. But when it gets warmer, yeah. We should.”

I looked over at him in the chilly white light, intrigued and curious; a shiver skittered through me. So far all we’d done was kiss. “This summer,” I agreed, and popped up onto my toes to peck the corner of his mouth.

Patrick turned his head and caught my face between two hands. “Love you,” he said quietly, and I smiled.

“Love you back.”

I don’t know if it’s the memory or the physical exertion that knocks the wind out of me, but either way it’s less than one wheezy mile before Oscar and I have to stop and walk a bit. The roads are woodsy and winding back here, only an occasional car rolling by. The trees make a canopy over the blacktop, but still I’m sweating inside my V-neck T-shirt; the morning air’s beginning to warm. When we pass the turnoff for the Star Lake Lodge, I tug the leash on a whim, making my way down the familiar gravel pathway toward the clearing where the old resort slouches, the Catskills in the distance and the lake itself glittering at their feet.

I worked at the rumpled Lodge for three full summers before I left here, handing towels out lakeside and manning the register at the tiny gift shop off the lobby—a lot of people from school did, waiting tables in the dining room or teaching swim classes at the pool. Patrick and Julia would come visit between their shifts at the pizza place; even Imogen temped here for a few months sophomore year, when French Roast was closed for renovations. It was fun in a shabby kind of way, all faded cabbage-rose carpet and an old-fashioned elevator that hadn’t worked since before I was born. The whole place was perpetually on the verge of closing, and it looks like that’s exactly what finally happened: The main parking lot is deserted, and the front lawn is speckled with goose poop. The rocking chairs on the sagging front porch sway creepily in the breeze coming off the water. There’s a light on inside, though, and when I try the main door it swings wide open into the empty lobby, full of the same faded, floral-print furniture I remember.

I’m about to turn around and get out of here—it’s spooky, how abandoned this place seems—when a little boy in light-up sneakers darts through the lobby like something out of
The
freaking
Shining
, bouncing off one of the brocade sofas before careening away down the hallway that leads to the dining room. I gasp out loud.

“Fabian! Fabian, what did I
just
say to you about running in here?” A tall, thirtyish woman in skinny jeans and an NYPD T-shirt strides into the lobby, stopping short when she finds me hovering in the doorway like a lurking freak. “Oh. Are you the new assistant?” she asks me, glancing over her shoulder toward the hallway Fabian ran down. She sounds irritated. A riot of tight, springy curls surrounds her face. “You’re late.”

“Oh, no.” I shake my head, embarrassed. It was weird of me to come in here. I don’t know what I keep doing since I got back, showing up one place after another where I’m not wanted. It’s like my new hobby. “I’m sorry; I used to work here. I didn’t realize you were closed.”

“Reopening this summer,” the woman tells me. “Under new management. We were supposed to open Memorial Day, but that was a fantasy if ever I’ve had one.” I watch her take in my sweaty clothes and sneakers, my damp ponytail, my blotchy red face. “What did you do?”

For one insane second, I think she’s talking about Gabe and Patrick—that’s how knee-jerk the guilt is, like even this total stranger can smell it on me—but then I realize she means when I worked here, and I explain.

“Really,” she says, looking interested. “Well, we’re hiring. Personal assistant to the new owner. Actually, we hired one, but she’s late, and here you are. I’m gonna take that as a sign. That’s a thing I do now, I take signs. It makes my kids really nervous.”

I smile, I can’t help it. I definitely wasn’t looking for a job—especially not one where it’s entirely possible I’ll run into a whole glut of people who hate me—but there’s something about this lady that’s winning, that kindles the same lick of anticipation I felt when I ran into Gabe at the gas station the other day. “Who’s the new owner?” I ask.

The woman grins back, bright and wry like she’s got a secret and really likes to share it, and she’s glad that I’m here so she can. “Me.” She sticks one smooth brown hand out and shakes mine, confident. “Pennsylvania Jones. Call me Penn. Can you start tomorrow?”

My first shift as Penn’s assistant consists mostly of locating and compiling the fourteen hundred to-do lists she’s made and then lost all over the entire property, scribbled on cocktail napkins at the bar and taped to the stainless steel fridge in the kitchen. I find one that just says
CHLORINE
scrawled on the activities chalkboard by the pool. By the time I’m pretty sure I’m found them all I’ve filled seven pages of old Star Lake Lodge stationery, back and front.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Penn says when I knock on her office door and hand them over, her desk buried under a jumble of purchase orders and receipts. There’s a trace of New York City in her exasperated voice. She and her kids—six-year-old Fabian plus a little girl named Desi who can’t be more than four and said not one word the entire time I was in the room—moved here from Brooklyn last spring, she told me this morning. She didn’t say anything about their dad, and I didn’t ask. “Okay. I’ll look at these after the staff meeting, all right? Come on, I told everyone two in the lobby. I meant to get donuts. Did I say that to you, or did it just languish in my brain all day?”

“You told me,” I promise, following her out the door of the office and down the dim, wood-paneled hallway. “I ran out and picked them up at lunch.”

“Oh, you’re good,” Penn says, but I’m not quite listening anymore, frozen in the tall arched doorway to the lobby. A couple dozen people are crammed onto the chairs and couches around the big stone fireplace, faces so familiar that for a moment I literally can’t move—Elizabeth Reese, who was student council secretary three years running; Jake and Annie, who I’ve known since pre-K and who have been dating just about that long. She nudges him when she notices me, her immaculately tweezed eyebrows crawling clear up to her hairline. She makes a big show of turning away.

I think of the note on my windshield—
dirty slut
—and feel my skin prickle hotly, imagining everyone here somehow saw it, too, or wrote it or is thinking it even if they didn’t do either of those things. This is what it was like before I left. Julia once called my house phone and left a message, pretending to be from Planned Parenthood saying my STD test had come back positive, and I remember being grateful to her when it happened because at least nobody witnessed that one but my mom. I deserved it, maybe, the way everybody seemed to turn on me as soon as the book and the article came out, like I had some kind of social disease that was catching. But that doesn’t mean I want to go through it again.

If Penn notices people noticing me—and they are: a restless kind of weight shifting, a girl from my junior English class whispering something behind her hand—she doesn’t let on. “Did everybody get a donut?” she begins.

It’s a fast meeting,
welcome to the new Lodge
and how to use the ancient time clock. I look around to see who else is here. There’s a middle-aged chef and his younger, friendlier sous, who I met this morning as they were prepping the kitchen, and the housekeepers who’ve been airing the guest rooms, the old windows flung open wide. A trio of Julia’s cheerleading friends are perched on the leather sofa all in a row like birds on a wire, three identical French braids draped over their skinny shoulders. I work to keep my spine straight as I stand there in the corner, not to wither like an undernourished plant at their triplicate expressions of casual disdain: The one on the left looks right at me and mouths, very clearly, the word
skank
. I cross my armst, feeling totally, grossly naked. I want to slither right out of my skin.

Afterward, I take my donut outside to the back porch overlooking the lake, picking at the sprinkles and trying to pull myself together. There’s a girl about my age in shorts and sneakers hosing down the lounge chairs, her red hair in a messy bun up on top of her head—she startles when she sees me, alarm painted all over her face. “Crap,” she says, checking her watch and looking back up at me, pale eyebrows furrowing. “Did I just miss the meeting? I totally just missed the meeting, didn’t I.
Crap
.”

“I—yeah,” I tell her apologetically. “It’s probably okay, though. And I think there’s still donuts left.”

“Well, in that case,” she says, dropping the hose and climbing the steps to the porch, holding her hand out. Her skin is alabaster pale underneath the pink flush of sunburn. “I’m Tess,” she says. “Head lifeguard, or I guess I will be once there’s anybody to swim here. For now I’m just a hose wench.” She wrinkles her nose. “Sorry, that sounded a lot less filthy in my head. Did you just start?”

I laugh out loud—the first time all day, and the sound is sort of startling to me, unfamiliar. “First shift,” I tell her. “Well, sort of. I’m Molly, I’m Penn’s assistant.” I explain how I used to work here, that I moved away and I’m just back for the summer. I take a big, self-conscious bite of my donut when I’m through.

Tess nods. “That’s why I didn’t recognize you, then,” she says. “I’ve only lived here, like, a year. I came in as a senior.” She gestures at my donut. “Are there really more of those inside?”

“There are,” I promise, opening the flimsy screen door and following Tess back into the cool, dark lodge. “Bear claws, even.”

Tess snorts. “I’ve got that going for me, at least,” she says as we head through the old-fashioned dining room, hung with half a dozen dusty brass chandeliers. “I don’t know if I thought this was going to be glamorous or something, working at a hotel? My boyfriend’s gone for the summer, though, so I was basically like, ‘Give me all the hours you can, I’ll just work all the time and have no social life.’”

“That’s pretty much my plan, too,” I agree, glancing around for Julia’s coven of nasty friends and leaving out the part where the whole
no social life
thing isn’t exactly a choice. I like Tess already; the last thing I want to do is identify myself—or worse, have somebody
else
identify me—as her friendly neighborhood adulteress and family-ruiner. “Where’s your boyfriend?” I ask instead.

The lobby’s cleared out by the time we get back there; Tess picks a glazed chocolate donut out of the box and takes a bite. “He’s in Colorado,” she tells me with her mouth full, reaching for a napkin and swallowing. “Sorry, I’m rude. He’s doing some volunteer firefighter thing. I think he saw a Lifetime movie about smoke jumpers or something. I don’t even know.”

She’s joking, but I don’t laugh this time; my heart is somewhere in the general vicinity of the faded dining room carpet. Whatever’s replaced it is cold and slimy and wet inside my chest.

He didn’t see a Lifetime movie
, I think dully.
He’s wanted to fight fires since we were little kids.

“Is your boyfriend—” I start, then break off, unable to say it. She can’t—there’s no way. There’s no
way
. “I mean, what’s his—?”

Tess smiles at me, easy and careless. There’s a bit of donut glaze on her upper lip. “Patrick Donnelly?” she says, the affection palpable in her voice, the way you talk about your favorite song or movie or person. “Why, you know him?”

He was my best friend. He was my first love. I had sex with his big brother. I broke his fucking heart.

“Yeah,” I say finally, reaching for another donut and forcing a weak, jellyfish smile of my own. “I do.”

There’s a moment of silence, Tess still smiling but her eyes gone cloudy and confused. Then I watch her figure it out.
“Molly,”
she says, like my name is the answer to a pie-piece question in a tied game of Trivial Pursuit, like she’d known it somewhere at the back of her head but hadn’t been able to come up with the word in time. Like she lost. “Wow, hi.”

“Hi,” I say, executing the world’s most awkward wave even though she’s standing a foot away from me. Jesus Christ, why do I insist on leaving my house? “I’m sorry; I wasn’t trying to be a weirdo. I didn’t realize—”

“Yeah, no, me neither.” Tess swallows the rest of her donut like a shot of Jameson, wrinkling her nose and setting the balled-up napkin down on an empty side table. For a second neither one of us talks. I imagine her calling Patrick in Colorado.
I met your trashy ex-girlfriend this morning
. I purposely don’t imagine what he’ll say in response.

“It was nice to meet you,” I tell Tess finally, wanting to get out of this lobby like I haven’t wanted anything since I got here. I wonder if she’s made friends with Julia. I wonder if she helped egg my house. It was stupid, to feel hopeful like that for a second. It was stupid of me to take this job at all. “I . . . guess I’ll see you around.”

“I guess so,” Tess says, nodding, raising one hand in an awkward wave of her own as I head toward the hallway that leads to the kitchen. I imagine I can feel her behind me the rest of the whole afternoon.

*

I’m sitting at the reservations desk in the lobby near the end of my shift, making a list of magazines and websites for us to advertise with, when the front door to the Lodge swings open and Imogen walks in. “Uh, hey!” she says when she spies me, clearly startled—she’s got that same look from the coffee shop the other morning, like I’ve surprised her and not in a good way. “Are you working here again?”

I nod, tucking my wavy hair behind my ears and trying for a smile. I hate how colossally awkward it feels between us, like puzzle pieces that got wet and warped and don’t fit correctly at all anymore. Imogen never treated me like a pariah before I left. “Grand opening in a couple weeks,” I try anyway. “Games and fireworks. You here to sign up for the three-legged race?”

Imogen shakes her head, smiling the kind of tolerant smile you’d use on a little kid who just asked if your refrigerator was running. “I’m actually supposed to pick up my friend Tess.” Her dress has buttons up the front and is printed with tiny leaves. “She works here, too. We were gonna get food and maybe drive over to Silverton and see a movie.”

I bite the inside of my cheek—of
course
they’re friends, of course they would be. For a second I think meanly of that movie
All About Eve
that my mom likes, where the young actress takes over the other woman’s whole identity. “I met Tess,” I say. I’m dying to ask Imogen if she and Patrick are serious—if they’ve been together ever since last September, if he loves her more and better than he ever loved me. “She’s nice.”

“You want to come with?” Imogen asks now, her voice high and uncertain. “We’re probably just going to the diner or something, but you could . . . come with?”

God, that’s a non-invitation if ever I’ve heard one. “I’ve got some stuff to finish up here,” I tell Imogen, shaking my head. I miss her, though. I can’t deny that. When we were little we always wore our hair exactly the same. “But maybe we could get dinner sometime, just you and me, catch up? I’ll get cake, you could do my cards?” Imogen’s mom has been crazy for tarot for as long as I’ve known her; Imogen got a deck of her own for her thirteenth birthday. She used to read for me all the time, laying out the spread slow and careful on my fluffy duvet, the quiet flipping sound as she turned them over: four of swords, seven of pentacles. The hanged man. The sun. I always repaid her in German chocolate cake from the diner on Main Street, which I maintain is dry and crumbly and gross—cake and diner both—but which Imogen loves beyond all others.

She shrugs at the invitation, though, blunt bangs swinging as she shakes her head. “I’m not really doing that so much anymore,” she tells me. “Cards, I mean. But sure, let’s get dinner, absolutely.”

I’m about to suggest a day when we both spot Tess coming in across the lobby, holding a piece of watermelon. Imogen’s gone so fast I don’t get a chance to say good-bye.

“I gotta go,” she calls over her shoulder. The door to the Lodge thuds shut.