99 Days (4 page)

I’m wiped when I get back from the Lodge the next afternoon, having spent the better part of my shift helping clear the old furniture out of the dining room so the ugly old carpet can get ripped out in the morning—work I liked a lot, actually, because it meant nobody could talk to me. All I want is a shower followed by a face plant directly into my bed, but my mom’s in the kitchen, cutting up lemon slices to float in the iced green tea she drinks by the gallon whenever she’s working on a book, wearing jeans and a silky tank top, barefoot on the hardwood. She grew up in this house, has walked these same creaking, wide-planked floors since she was a baby. She was born in the master bedroom upstairs.

I was born in a county hospital in Farragut, Tennessee, to a couple younger than I am now who couldn’t keep me:
The night Molly came home
was a staple bedtime story when I was a kid. “I chose you,” my mom liked to tell me, both of us tucked under the duvet, my small feet brushing her kneecaps and my hair a tangled mess over the pillows. She never was much for braids or bows. “I chose you, Molly baby. All I wanted in the whole world was to be your mom.”

Diana Barlow, if nothing else, has never lacked the imagination to craft a tall tale.

Okay,
possibly
I’m editorializing a little. Still, for somebody who wanted a baby so badly, it’s always been kind of funny to me how emphatically not maternal my mom is. Not in an ice-queen, TV,
Flowers in the Attic
kind of way—she was never mean or cruel, she always told me she loved me, and I believed her—but in a way where she was just kind of
bored
by kid stuff, Patrick and Julia and me yelling our heads off in the yard all day long. It was like she’d woken up one day to find some foreign storybook creature living in her house with her and she wasn’t entirely sure what to do with it. Maybe that makes sense, though—after all, she wanted a
baby
.

And that baby turned into—well. Me.

“You’re filthy,” she observes now, dropping the lemons into the pitcher and sticking the whole outfit into the refrigerator. “What do they have you doing over there, huh?”

“Hog wrestling, mostly.” My muscles are aching. I probably smell. I fill a glass of water at the tap, waiting for it to run cold as I can get it. She’s done work on the kitchen since I left, different appliances and countertops, and I pull the peanut butter from the pantry with its new sliding barn door. My mom hadn’t written a book in five years when she stole my worst secret and turned it into a best seller. The novel she put out before that,
Summer Girls
, was a giant flop. Not writing made her angry, had her stalking around the house like a zoo animal in a too-small cage; I remember how glad I was when she disappeared into her office again my junior year, how happy she seemed to be back at work. “I cleared the block!” she crowed, toasting me with her coffee cup one morning over breakfast. I had no idea she’d used me as the dynamite to do it.

“Oh, you’re funny,” she says now, shaking her head and smirking at me a little. “I mean it; I thought you were doing a personal assistant thing over there, not physical labor.”

I shrug, taking a big gulp of my water and fishing a spoon out of the drawer. “I do whatever she needs me to do.”

“You don’t have to be doing it at all, Molly.” My mom turns to look at me. “You don’t have to spend this summer working, I told you that. It’s your last summer before college; you should be spending it relaxing, not making hotel beds for ten dollars an hour.”

“I’m not making hotel beds,” I argue. “But even if I
was
—”

“You don’t have to work at
all
,” she counters, and I have to make an actual effort not to roll my eyes at her. She used to ring this bell all the time when the book came out and all holy hell broke loose, as if somehow her cannibalizing my darkest secrets was some generous act she did for my benefit. It never seemed to occur to her that the last thing I wanted was her payoff. “That money is
yours
.”

“That money is Emily Green’s,” I shoot back angrily. Emily’s the heroine in
Driftwood
, some effortlessly beautiful sap caught in a dumb, turgid love triangle—a horrifying fun-house version of me, gross and distorted but still completely recognizable to anyone who cared enough to look. “I don’t
want
it.”

Vita scampers out of the kitchen at the sound of our raised voices; I set the water glass down on the countertop hard enough that both of us flinch. “I don’t want it,” I repeat, more quietly this time. My mother shakes her head. I take a deep breath, smelling pine trees and lake water through the open window. I try to remember if this place ever felt like home.

I’m running some errands for Penn the next day on my lunch break, singing along to a Joni Mitchell CD I’d forgotten I had. It’s nice out—iced coffee weather—so I park outside of French Roast to grab a latte on my way back. I’m already out of the car when I spy Gabe in a pair of shorts and a Yankees cap, holding court on one of the benches outside on the patio, and I stop short without meaning to, because he’s drinking mocha chillers with Elizabeth Reese from the Lodge.

I freeze in the middle of the sidewalk for a second, awkward and stung and right away telling myself it’s ridiculous to be. Clearly, he can drink mocha chillers with whomever he likes. Elizabeth was a year ahead of me and Patrick and Julia at school, which put her a year behind Gabe; she did student government with him and always wore a long row of bracelets up one arm, silver and jingling. She goes to Duke now, I think. She’s pretty.

On the wooden bench she laughs and punches Gabe in one sinewy bicep, her smooth ponytail swishing—there’s nowhere to walk but right past them and sure enough, Gabe sees me and waves. “Hey, Molly Barlow,” he calls easily, tipping his cup in my direction. Elizabeth doesn’t say anything at all, just purses her glossy mouth and looks away.

I mutter a quick, embarrassed “Hey” before I slip into the dark, temperature-regulated safety of the coffee shop.

Imogen’s not working today, but I linger inside anyway, cheeks flaming, hoping the two of them will have disappeared by the time I clear out. I’m fifty-percent successful—Elizabeth’s gone, but Gabe gets up and follows me all the way to the curb. “Hey,” he says, reaching out and curling his fingers around my upper arm, gentle but insistent. “Molly, wait up.”

“I’m
working
.” I’m overreacting is what I’m doing—I
know
that I’m overreacting—but I feel close to tears anyway, tired and frustrated and so lonely all over again. Even Gabe is a lost cause to me now. It’s my fault, it’s my own stupid fault; I made my choices. But the truth is it doesn’t feel fair.

“You got time for lunch?” Gabe asks, undeterred by the poisonous cloud I feel sure is hanging low around me, heavy as cigarette smoke. “I’m thinking about lunch.”

I check my watch like a reflex. “Not really, no.”

“We’ll make it quick,” he promises. “You gotta eat, right?”

I shake my head. “Gabe . . .” What the hell? I feel sour and cranky, and I can’t even articulate why, exactly: if it’s the sting of catching so much more blowback than Gabe has seemed to or just the interested way he was looking at Elizabeth when I drove up to French Roast. It’s insane to feel jealous—I don’t even know what I’m jealous
of
, like maybe I’m just some horrifying green-eyed monster guarding the one person who’s seemed glad to see me since I got back here, or if maybe I possibly liked his attention in a different, more serious way. “Quick,” I warn after a moment. “And not at the pizza place.”

Gabe grins at that. “Not at the pizza place,” he says.

We walk a block over to Bunchie’s, a diner with greasy burgers in red plastic baskets and one of those claw-prize machines ringing loudly in the corner, a staple for families on vacation in town. “Can I ask you something?” I begin once we’ve ordered. It’s half past noon and the diner is noisy, the clink of cheap silverware on heavy white plates. I can hear Loretta Lynn on the stereo, line cooks calling to one another in the back. I take a breath. “Not that this is any of my business, and not that I’m, like, assuming anything, but are you dating Elizabeth Reese?”

Gabe smiles at that—he looks surprised now, himself, thick eyebrows arcing just the slightest bit. His eyes are very, very blue. “No,” he says slowly, a dimple I’d forgotten he had appearing in the crease of his cheek. He’s stupidly cute, Gabe is. All the girls used to say so, but I never saw it until the moment I did. “I . . .
definitely
am not, no. Why?”

“Just wondering,” I hedge, taking a bite of my burger. Then, once I’ve swallowed: “You know, in the interest of avoiding further scandal, how it follows me everywhere I go and all.”

“Yup.” Gabe smirks. “Everywhere you and me go together, you mean?” He nods over his shoulder, just subtle: By the plate-glass window is a gaggle of Julia’s friends staring like we’re Bonnie and Clyde fresh off a bank robbery, shotguns still smoking in our hands.

“Uh-huh,” I say, the itchy prickle of shame creeping down my backbone one more time. God, what am I even doing here? I hunch my shoulders defensively, imagining Gabe’s hand splayed out flat on my naked rib cage. Remembering the press of his warm mouth on mine. I think of the look on Patrick’s face when he found out about us, like a thousand years of solitude was preferable to ever seeing me again, and I push my plate to the side.

“Ignore them,” Gabe advises, swapping my fries for some of his onion rings, his tan arm brushing mine as he reaches across the table for the squeeze bottle of ketchup. Then, changing the subject altogether: “I don’t know what you’re doing this week, but a buddy of mine’s having a party if you wanna come hang out,” he tells me, voice so casual that for a moment I can’t tell if it’s put on or not. “Meet some new people.”

“I don’t know.” I flinch at the spray of laughter coming from the table by the window—it’s one of the girls from the Lodge, Michaela, plus two girls I only recognize by face. You don’t have to know me to hate me in this town. I don’t want to
do
this again, how it was before I left for Bristol, conversations stopping abruptly whenever I walked into a classroom, and
Molly Barlow can’t keep her legs closed
written in sparkly lip gloss on the bathroom mirror at school. “Are there new people to meet in Star Lake?”

Gabe nods, like
fair point
. “Probably not,” he admits. He’s still got his hat on plus a green Donnelly’s Pizza T-shirt, the tawny hair on his arms catching the sunlight pouring in. “But there are some cool ones.”

“Oh yeah?” I raise my eyebrows. “That so?”

“That’s so.” Gabe smiles. “His place is right on the lake; you can bring a suit if you want. It’ll be fun.”

I’m opening my mouth to tell him thanks but no thanks when somebody kicks the back of my chair leg, hard enough to jostle my arm into the plastic French Roast cup I brought inside. It’s empty but the leftover ice spills all over the table; my gaze snaps up just in time to see Michaela heading for the doorway, tossing a casual wave over her shoulder in my direction. “Oops,” she coos, sweet as crumble-topped pie laced with DDT.

Watch out
, I want to snap, but Michaela’s already through the doorway; Gabe swears and reaches for a napkin to mop up the ice. I can taste the iron muscle of my heart, like I bit my tongue without realizing it.

I’m humiliated.

But I’m also totally pissed.

I shut my eyes and when I open them I find Gabe watching closely, like he’s ready to take any cue I want to give him. Like he’s ready to let me lead. I take a deep breath, let it out again. “So, hey, when’s that party?” I ask.

The TVs in the Lodge rooms are all huge monstrosities from the 1980s with bunny ears and dials on the sides, so I spend the morning calling around to price out new ones—never mind the fact that the budget Penn gave me to work with is barely even enough to have somebody come haul our old ones
away
. I’m trying to figure out the best approach for me to sell her on abandoning the idea altogether
(Back to nature! Commune with your family away from the harsh glare of consumerism! Hipsters don’t own TVs, and neither do we!)
when I look up and find Desi hovering in the doorway of the office like a specter, her small skinny body pressed against the dark wooden frame. I’ve got no idea how long she’s been waiting. More than a week here, and I’ve never heard her speak.

“Hey, Des,” I venture quietly, voice cautious like I’m trying not to scare a baby deer. Her hair is done in a million tiny, careful braids all over her head. She’s a beautiful kid, Desi. Her eyes are dark and huge. “You looking for your mom?”

Desi shakes her head, but doesn’t say anything. Her T-shirt’s got a picture of Dora the Explorer. She’s got her hands knotted in its hem, tugging like she’s bored or unhappy, but I have no earthly idea what she’s after.

“You wanna come color?” I try next—there’s a sixty-four-count box of Crayola crayons on the bookshelf for just this purpose, along with a stack of activity books and a couple of board games—but that earns me another silent no. We look at each other. I think. Finally, I reach into my purse and pull out a package of Red Vines, hold them out in her direction like an offering.

Desi grins.

Gabe’s buddy Ryan is a friend of a friend he knows from college, an early-twenties trust-fund burnout type who lives in a possibly illegal camper on the far side of Star Lake. Gabe’s got to work the dinner rush at the shop, so he texts me to meet him at the party, and I go late on purpose so I don’t show up before he does. It’s close to nine-thirty by the time I park the Passat and the air has that night-water smell about it, murky and mysterious. There’s a bonfire blazing on a sandy patch of shore.

“Hey,” Gabe calls, weaving through the crowd once he sees me. He’s holding two red Solo cups, and he hands one over when he’s hugged me hello, wavy hair curling down over his ears and a look on his face that might or might not be worried; it’s hard for me to tell. I can hear some clang-y, fratty music coming from somebody’s tinny iPod speakers, Vampire Weekend maybe. “You made it.”

“I did.” I smile at the half-surprised look on his face. “Thought I’d bail?”

Gabe shrugs and taps his plastic cup against mine, grinning. “Maybe.”

“Well,” I tell him, trying to sound more confident than I feel, “here I am.” I swig a big, sour gulp of my beer. It’s noisy, way more people than I was expecting—girls in shorts and bikini tops, guys in flip-flops. There’s a group of dudes playing beer pong on an old door laid horizontally across two sawhorses.

I’m about to ask where all these people came from when a shirtless guy in a cowboy hat I’m assuming is ironic slings his arm around Gabe’s shoulders. “Angel Gabriel,” he intones in a voice like the Bedtime Magic DJ on a lite FM radio station. “Who’s your friend?”

“Angel Gabriel, seriously?” I snort, putting my hand out to shake his. “That . . . is really something.”

“What’s more embarrassing is that he answers to it,” the guy says good-naturedly. “I’m Ryan, this is my hobo palace. Come on, kids, there’s food.”

“There’s food,” Gabe echoes wryly, like
how can we possibly say no to that amazing offer
, and we follow Ryan across the yard toward the grill. The whole affair is kind of cheerfully sketchy, Christmas lights rigged up across the yard and the faint reek of pot every time a breeze comes through. Gabe slips his hand into mine so I don’t get lost as we make our way through the crowd, and I try not to shiver at the contact. His palm is warm and dry.

I was wrong, that there’s nobody new to meet in Star Lake: The crowd here is a little bit older—kids who would have been seniors back when I was a freshman, and were off at college by the time the
Driftwood
debacle hit school like a hurricane. I was a sophomore when Gabe and I slept together; he left for Notre Dame that summer, and I spent all of junior year back with Patrick, trying so hard to pretend nothing had ever happened between me and his brother that some days I almost forgot anything had.

Everyone here seems to know Gabe, one eager voice after another calling out his name, everyone wanting his attention. He weaves me through the crush of people, one easy hand on the small of my back, introducing me to a long-haired guy studying horticulture at Penn State and a girl named Kelsey with giant gauges in her ears who works at a trendy gift shop in town. “What’re you going to major in?” she asks when she finds out I’m headed to Boston at the end of the summer.

I’m about to explain to her that I don’t really know when Gabe bumps my arm with his, friendly, and motions to where Ryan and a guy whose name I think is Steve are splashing around in the lake like a couple of lunatics. “What do you say, Molly Barlow?” he asks, raising his eyebrows. He’s had a couple more beers than me, I think. He looks as mischievous as a little kid. “You wanna get in?”

“Uh, no,” I tell him, smirking. Even if there
were
a snowball’s chance in hell I’d wear a bathing suit in front of a bunch of strangers looking like I look right now, I didn’t bring one. “I’ll pass, thanks.”

Gabe nods. “You sure?” he asks, teasing, inching closer. “You need some help getting there, maybe?”

Oh, there’s no way. “Don’t you dare,” I manage, taking a step backward, laughing a little. It’s been a long time since somebody flirted with me.

“Sorry, what’s that?” Gabe asks. “I couldn’t hear you. It sounded like you were saying you wanted me to pick you up and throw you off the dock.”

“I’ll murder you,” I warn him, just as Kelsey says, “Uh-oh!” and then Gabe’s just doing it, scooping me up and tossing me over his shoulder like I don’t weigh anything at all. “A violent death!” I promise, but the truth is I can hardly get the words out with how hard I’m laughing. I smell smoke from the bonfire and the clean cotton of Gabe’s T-shirt as he strides toward the dock. Steve and Ryan are hooting at us from the lake, somebody clapping. Everyone’s looking, I’m sure of it. The weird thing is, in this moment I don’t even mind. “Lots of pain!”

“Sorry, what’s that?” Gabe asks. “I still can’t hear you.”

“With a hammer!” I declare, pounding my fists on his back. I don’t actually think he’s going to do it, but I’m about to smack him on the ass anyway when he stops super-abruptly and puts me on my feet all at once.

“The hammer scared you off, huh?” I say, out of breath from giggling, my hair all crazy messy and hanging in my face. When I lift my head to look at him, though, Gabe isn’t laughing back. I follow his gaze and that’s the moment I spy Tess watching us in the light of the bonfire, orange sparks flying through the air.

And Patrick—
my
Patrick—is by her side.

For a minute we only just stare at each other across the sandy, scrubby distance, his smoke-gray eyes locked on mine from yards and yards away. He’s taller than he was last time I saw him. There’s a livid purple bruise across one sharp cheek. I open my mouth and then close it again, feeling like I left my heart on the side of the road somewhere, blood-red and beating. My chest has closed up like a fist.

Patrick looks from me to Gabe and back again, shakes his head ever so slightly. “Are you
kidding
me right now?” he asks. From the look on his face before he turns away you’d think he was seeing something truly disgusting, a rotting corpse or a puddle of human vomit.

Or me.

The instinct to run is physical, as if some kind of rabid animal is snapping at my heels; I make for my car as fast as I can without breaking into an all-out sprint and calling even more attention to myself. I twist my ankle on a tree root anyway, trip a bit before I catch my balance. All I want is to get out of here without talking to another breathing soul. I had a hoodie at some point, I think vaguely; I don’t know what happened to it. I’m jabbing at the
UNLOCK
button on my key ring over and over, frantic, when Gabe catches up to me. “Molly,” he says, catching my arm and tugging gently until I turn to face him, his handsome face painted dark with worry. “Hey. Wait up.”

“Are you
kidding
me?” I gape at him, echoing his brother without meaning to—I can’t believe what just happened here, that I just walked into it so completely blithely. I feel like a moron. I feel like what people are probably calling me. I feel like a dumb slut. “You think for one second I’m going to
stay
here?”

Gabe takes a step back, like he suspects I’m about to rip his throat out. “Okay,” he says, holding up both hands in surrender. “That was bad. But just listen to me for a second, okay?”

“Uh-uh,” I manage, breathing hard. The jagged edge of my car key is digging into my palm. “That was shady. You knew he was here, obviously you knew he was here, and you just—you
set me up
, Gabe. Like, I don’t understand—why—”

“I didn’t set you up,” he says, shaking his head, looking wounded that I’d think that about him. “Molly, hey, come on, it’s me. I wouldn’t do that. I knew he was home, okay, but I didn’t think he was going to show up here. And I knew if I told you, you wouldn’t have come out.”

“You’re right,” I tell him flatly. “I wouldn’t have.”

“But I wanted you to.”

“So you
lied
?” There’s something about that that really doesn’t sit right with me. Patrick used to complain about it all the time, I remember suddenly—that Gabe was the nicest guy in the world as long as he’s getting his way. I don’t like seeing that side of him turned in my direction. “You wanted me to come, so you lied?”

Gabe’s forehead wrinkles. “I didn’t lie,” he argues. “I was going to tell you at the end of the night, I swear. I just, we were having a good time,
you
were having a good time, and I knew—”

“Yeah,” I cut him off, wrapping my arms around myself and caring a little more about my missing hoodie now, how I feel so absurdly exposed. “That’s still a bullshit excuse, Gabe.”

Gabe lets a breath out, rubs a bit at the back of his neck. “You’re right,” he says after a minute. I can still hear the sound of the party through the trees, people laughing. “Okay. You’re right. I screwed up. I’m really sorry. It was stupid of me. Look, why don’t we get out of here, go get a coffee or something? I don’t know what’s even gonna be open now, but let me make it up to you.”

I shake my head, holding myself a little bit tighter. I keep picturing the totally disgusted look on Patrick’s face. “I just wanna go,” I tell him quietly. “I just—I’m done for tonight, okay?”

Gabe exhales again, but he doesn’t argue. “Text when you’re home,” is all he says. I don’t tell him I have no idea where that is.