99 Days (8 page)

The next day is another long colorful blur, a Grand Opening cookout on the shore of the lake and an old-fashioned pie-eating contest, prep for a huge fireworks display set to start at the end of the night. Gabe sneaks in midafternoon and finds me in the office for a quick, guilty kiss, his warm hands resting on my hipbones and his sly mouth moving against mine. “Missed you,” he murmurs when my hands wander up to tangle in his silky hair. I’m surprised by how pleased I am to hear him say the words.

“Missed you back,” I tell him, and realize all at once that it’s true. We’ve been texting a bit since our date at the movies, but I think he somehow got I needed time to parse stuff out. It’s unexpected, how the sight of him—feel, smell, taste—makes me smile.

Gabe grins against my lips, slow and easy. I push Patrick’s bruised face out of my mind.

We make plans to meet up for breakfast in the morning, and I walk him out the side entrance of the Lodge to the parking lot, tugging his belt loop to say good-bye. I’m headed back inside when I run into Tess.

“So that’s happening, huh?” she asks, pale eyebrows raised and a dozen different embroidery floss friendship bracelets stacked up one arm—she had a poolside arts-and-crafts thing on the schedule this morning, I remember. She grins at me. Then, off my clearly stricken expression: “Oh, God, sorry, no, I’m not trying to give you a hard time or anything. I like Gabe, I think he’s a good guy.”

“No,” I say immediately, the impulse to lie like a reflex. I remember what I said to Patrick that day in the store,
I know what you think, but there’s nothing going on here
. “I mean, he’s a good guy, I just—”

“Hey, don’t worry about it.” Tess holds a freckly hand up, shaking her head. “You know, don’t even answer that. It’s none of my business, I won’t say anything to anybody.”

“No, it’s fine,” I say, exhaling. “Thanks.”

Tess shrugs. “No problem,” she tells me, reaching up to scrape her hair into a ponytail. “Hey, listen, I don’t know if this is hugely weird or whatever, but Imogen and I were talking about it, and we were going to ask you anyway—we’re gonna do Crow Bar tomorrow, if you wanna come with.”

It’s a suicide mission. It’s completely absurd.
Why are you even talking to me?
I want to ask her.
Why are you being so
nice
?
Still: “Sure,” I hear myself answer, like this summer’s got a swiftly moving current, like somehow I’m getting swept away. “That could be fun.”

Tess grins. “Good,” she declares, turning around and heading for the lakefront. “And, hey, your Chapstick’s totally smeared.”

Crow Bar is a squat stucco building near the entrance to the highway, a giant silhouette of the black bird in question leering down from the wooden sign outside. It’s after ten when the cab drops us off, the short, stocky bouncer giving us a perfunctory once-over before he waves us inside. The place is a dive right off the highway in Silverton that’s notoriously easy to get into even if you don’t have an ID, and for good reason: It’s dingy enough that no self-respecting adult would ever want to hang out here. It smells dank and beery, with a pool table at one end and a jangling game of Buck Hunter, the crush of bodies and the clang of a dumb Kings of Leon song on the jukebox. I freeze for just one second in the doorway, and Imogen slips her hand into mine and tugs me along through the crowd.

“Shots?” Tess asks, eyes wide and grinning. She’s more dressed up than I’m used to seeing her, her red hair loose down her back and a scattering of freckles along her cheekbones that make her look sort of mischievous. I can see what Patrick likes about her: In the cab over here she offered me both her drugstore-brand lip gloss and some dried mango from her purse, friendly enough to make me wonder if maybe girlfriends aren’t totally out of the question for me this summer, even one as improbable as Patrick’s. If maybe it’s okay to relax.

“Shots,” Imogen echoes, and I laugh, digging some cash out of my purse to hand to Tess. I can see Patrick across the bar along with Jake and Annie from the Lodge, their faces lit by the blue-red glow of a neon sign for Pabst. After a moment they catch me looking: Jake waves and Annie tips her beer in not-quite-friendly recognition, but Patrick just stares at me, eyebrows raised, before saying something I can’t make out to both of them and disappearing toward the back of the room.

Tess heads over to say hello to them. Imogen weaves her way to the bar. I scan the crowd for another moment, spotting some faces I recognize and more who clearly recognize me—a few girls who used to sit at my lunch table, and Elizabeth Reese in a slinky black top. I stop and blink when my gaze lands on a girl not two feet away from where I’m standing, raven hair and red lips, pale skin like Snow White in the enchanted forest; the Donnellys have always been a ridiculously good-looking family, but Patrick’s twin sister is the winner of that genetic lottery, no question. Julia’s dressed in skinny jeans and ballet flats and a long, loose tank top with a bright purple bra underneath, and she’s frowning.

I gasp. I can’t help it, like seeing a wolf in the middle of a shopping mall or the feeling of tumbling off a cliff right before you fall asleep. Julia was totally straightedge the first two years of high school, didn’t drink or smoke at all. Crow Bar is the last place I ever expected to see her.

Looks like the feeling is mutual; her blue eyes widen when she notices me, like maybe she thought her
welcome home fuck you
campaign was enough to keep me in the house for longer than this. Then she sighs. “Bitch,” she mutters, just loud enough so I can hear her. She sounds profoundly annoyed, like she’s irritated at having to expend the energy it takes to hate me, like it’s a game I keep making her play even though she’s bored. Julia and I grew up like sisters, shared clothes and dolls and makeup until we were sixteen years old. Now, standing here in the middle of Crow Bar at the beginning of our last summer before college, she tilts her delicate wrist so that the contents of her beer glass tip right down the front of my shirt.

For a second, I only just gape at her, Julia who loves
Full House
reruns, Julia who snorts when she laughs. We’ve got a little audience by now, the half-dozen people standing in our immediate vicinity, plus Imogen, who’s crossed the bar like some long-dormant Spidey-sense was tingling in her brain stem. “Jesus, Julia,” Imogen says, grabbing my arm and pulling me back like she thinks maybe Julia’s about to do something worse. “What the hell?”

“It’s fine,” I say, holding up both hands in surrender. I was right; this was a terrible idea. I don’t know what I was possibly thinking. I can feel the scorching heat through my whole entire body, the cold shock of the beer where it’s soaking through my top. I shake Imogen off. “It’s
okay
,” I manage, more sharply than I mean to. Then, to the back of her receding figure: “Good to see you, too, Jules.”

Julia doesn’t stop moving. “Might want to lay off the beers, Molly,” she singsongs over her shoulder. “You’re looking a little thick.”

“Okay,” I manage once she’s gone, hands shaking. I can see Patrick watching from across the bar. All I want is to shut my eyes and be as far away as humanly possible, but if I can’t have that then I want my third-floor bedroom, the big gray blanket and the glow of the computer in my lap. I want to go home. “I’ve gotta—I mean, this was—I gotta
go
, Imogen.”

“What just happened?” That’s Tess, coming up behind us and bumping Imogen’s hip with hers, three shots of something amber in her hands and some orange slices she stole off the bar for a snack. Her eyes widen when she sees my shirt, alarmed. “Did Julia do that on purpose?” she asks.

Imogen shakes her head. “Don’t ask.” Then, taking two of the shot glasses out of Tess’s hand and handing me one like I never said anything about leaving: “You ready?”

I look at the two of them—improbable teammates after everything that happened, but here they are. Gabe is right; I can’t hide forever. I’ve only got seventy-six days to go. “Ready.”

I wake up in the blackest of moods, the pulse of a hangover beating behind my eyes and my mouth tasting cottony and foul—there’s no way I’m running, that’s for sure. Instead I brush my teeth and throw my tawny, knotty hair up into a ponytail, then shuffle downstairs for coffee. My mom’s sitting at the kitchen island, reading the
Times
in her new thick-framed glasses and a striped T-shirt that could as easily have come from my closet as from hers.

“Morning,” she says, a pointed glance at the clock on the wall meant to let me know it’s well after noon. “How you doing?”

I sniff the milk carton, wrinkle my nose. “Fine,” I mumble. My stomach doesn’t feel so great.

“Really?” she asks, sitting back in her chair to eye me with the kind of motherly skepticism I’m not used to from her anymore, how she hasn’t tried to parent me in more than a year. Emily Green, conveniently, was an orphan. “Because, I have to say, you’re not really looking fine.” She takes a sip from her steaming mug, swallows. “You want to tell me?”

“Tell you
what
?” I snap irritably. That’s what she said the night I blabbed about Gabe sophomore year, I remember all of a sudden, me out of my stupid brain with guilt and panic and her sitting at the desk in her office,
You want to tell me?

And I did.

I told her everything.

God, any curiosity from her is so gross to me now, the instinct for self-preservation kicking up like a stiff autumn wind across the lake. I feel like she wants to pick the meat off my bones. “What do you have, writer’s block or something? Looking for new material? I said I’m okay.”

My mother huffs out a noisy sigh. “Okay, Molly,” she says. “Have it your way. I know you’d rather not be here this summer, and I’ve apologized to you. I’m sorry if you feel like I violated your privacy, but I’m still—”

I whirl on her. “If I feel like you violated my
privacy
?” I can’t believe her. I honestly cannot believe her. “Who are you? Who
says
that? How can you possibly—”

“I’m a writer, Molly,” she interrupts me, like it’s a religion or her freaking culture or something, like some kind of messed-up moral relativism will explain this away. “I take real-life events and I fictionalize them—that’s what I do, that’s what I’ve always done. Of course there are going to be—”

“You’re my
mom
!” I counter, my voice cracking in a way that betrays all the nasty coldness I’ve spent the last year and a half cultivating, an ugly break in the shell. I shake my head, slam the coffeepot down on the counter hard enough I’m afraid it might shatter. “Or, like—you were supposed to be. You
chose
me, remember? That’s what you always said. But really you just wanted to sell me for parts.”

My mom blanches at that, or maybe I just want her to. “Molly—”

“And you’re right, that I’d rather not be here. I’d rather not have anything to do with you for the rest of my life, actually. And you know what?
That
you can go ahead and put in your next book. You can tell the whole world, Mom. Have at it.”

I leave my empty mug on the counter and stalk up the stairs, scaring the crap out of Vita and sending Oscar scrabbling into the mudroom. The old stairs creak under my weight.

“Hey,” Gabe begins, pulling back for a moment and taking a ragged, rattled breath that’s kind of weirdly satisfying to me, how I can tell I’m getting to him. The skin of his neck is very, very warm. “Can I float something here without you totally freaking out?”

I nod distractedly, sitting back in the passenger seat of the station wagon and breathing a smidge hard myself. We’ve been parked in the dark in the lot of the Lodge for almost an hour, alternately making out and talking about nothing in particular—a little kid who streaked naked through the lobby the other day, the fig-and-gorgonzola pizza that was the special at the shop this afternoon. Gabe’s warm hands crept slow and steady up the back of my shirt. I can’t totally decide if I think it’s fun or seedy, fooling around like this in his car underneath a low canopy of pine trees, the radio turned down low, but the reality is I don’t want to bring Gabe home to my house and we’re certainly not about to go to his, so . . . station wagon it is.

“Sure,” I reply now, pushing my hair behind my ears and looking at him curiously. My lips feel swollen and itchy from too much kissing. Gabe’s cheeks are flushed pink in a way that makes me grin, like I’ve accomplished something—it’s different, messing around with him, more and less serious both at once. Neither Patrick nor I had done much of anything with anybody when we started dating, and we took things almost achingly slow—each new milestone stretched out and a little scary, the two of us so familiar and everything we did so completely brand-new. With Gabe it’s not like that, not really: one, because we’ve already
been
wherever this is possibly going, and two, because—well, because it’s
Gabe
. Things are easy with him.
This
is easy with him. There’s nothing to obsess about or overthink. “What’s up?”

Gabe wrinkles his nose like he’s bracing for something. The pale glow of the parking lot lights catch the side of his face through the window. “Here’s the thing,” he begins, sounding more careful than normal, more hesitant than I’m used to from him—I think he’s a person who gets what he wants, generally, who’s comfortable asking for things. “How do you feel about maybe coming to the party?”

Just like that, the full-body buzz I’ve been working on, the heavy pleasure that’s been tumbling through my arms and legs and everywhere, straight-up evaporates. I actually snort. “No
way
,” I tell him, shaking my head so hard and resolutely, it just might snap off my neck and go bouncing behind us into the backseat of the wagon. I don’t even have to ask which party he means. “
Noooooo
way. Nice try. No. No, a thousand times no.”

“I said don’t freak out!” Gabe protests, laughing. He reaches for my hand across the gearshift, laces his fingers through mine, and tugs until I’m close enough that he can plant a tiny kiss on the curve of my jawline. He adds a scrape of teeth, just lightly, and I shiver in spite of myself. “Look,” he murmurs, his nose brushing the skin back by my ear. “I know it’s ridiculous even to ask you—”

“It’s a
little
ridiculous, yeah,” I agree, pulling back again. The party’s the one the Donnellys hold every year to celebrate all three of their summer birthdays, Julia’s and Patrick’s and Gabe’s. It’s a giant cookout on the sprawling green expanse of the family farm, complete with a volleyball game and fourteen different kinds of baked goods, Beatles music blasting all night long. Growing up, it was the best day of the summer. Last year was the first I ever missed. “Like, can I come to your joint birthday with your mom who hates me, and your sister who hates me, and your brother who hates me more than anyone and who I used to
date
, and
you
who I’m—”

I break off abruptly, embarrassed all of a sudden, not knowing how to continue. Not knowing exactly what Gabe and I are. The idea of turning up at the biggest event on the Donnelly calendar with anyone other than Patrick is enough to clam me up completely, enough to have me wondering who in the hell I think I am. Gabe and I kissing in the station wagon is one thing—a selfish, stupid thing, admittedly, but one that’s fun and free and easy and ultimately harmless. It’s a secret, one that’s not really hurting anybody.

The party? That’s a different animal altogether.

“Me who you’re
what
?” he prods, kind of teasingly. He reaches out with his free hand and draws a circle on my bare, slightly stubbly knee, fingertips creeping higher until he reaches the hem of my shorts. I breathe in. “Me who you’re
what
,
hm
?”

“Shut up,” I mutter, feeling my skin go prickly in all the places he’s touching, not to mention some he isn’t. I wait a minute before I continue, can hear the faint sound of cicadas and the far-off hoot of an owl in the pine trees. “You who I’m screwing around with in the car every night, for starters.”

“Oh, is
that
what you’ve been doing?” Gabe grins at me, near wolfish, but there’s something else behind it, something I can’t entirely read. “That’s what this is, huh?”

“I mean”—I wave my hands a bit, vaguely, feeling awkward in a way I hardly ever do in front of Gabe—“isn’t it?”

Gabe shakes his head. “I don’t know, Molly Barlow,” he says, eyes steady and even on mine. “I’ve been waiting for you to offer to make an honest man out of me, but so far, no dice.”

“You have, huh?” I ask, and my voice comes out a lot softer than I’m expecting it to. “That what you want?”

“Yeah,” he tells me, the quiet pitch of his voice matching mine almost exactly. It sounds like he’s been thinking about it, like it’s not something that’s only just occurring to him in this moment. “It really, really is.” He’s still got his hand on my knee, and he squeezes once before he says it: “What about you?”

“I don’t
know
.” I yank a hand through my tangled hair, feeling cornered and exhilarated in equal parts. It’s like I’ve lost all decision-making capability since I came back here, like I can’t tell the difference between love and loneliness. I
like
Gabe—I like Gabe
so much
, his smile and his steady heart and how easygoing he is, like he expects the world to be on his side and so it is, simple as that. The days I spend with him feel like gemstones threaded into the long, fraying rope of this summer, valuable and unexpected. “I mean
yes
, but—”

“Yeah?” That makes Gabe smile.

“Maybe!” I throw my hands up, laughing a little, nervous or something else. “Come on, you’re
you
, obviously I’ve thought about it.”

Oh, he likes that, too. “I’m me, huh?” he asks, eyebrows up.

“Ugh, don’t be gross.” I roll my eyes, trying to picture it: how I’ll never be accepted by anyone in his family, how dating Gabe for real would be opening myself up to all kinds of fresh torment, ripping the scabs off injuries that have barely even begun to heal. Not to mention that I’m headed to Boston the first week of September—what happens at the end of the summer, do we just high-five and say it was fun while it lasted? The threat of distance was the thing that undid Patrick and me to begin with—or at least, it was one of the things. There were a lot of them. Still, it’s piling stupid on top of stupid to start something with Gabe that’s already got an expiration date stamped on the container with indelible ink.

But Patrick never asked me to be his girlfriend like this, I realize suddenly. We always just sort of
were
. No conscious decisions, just the two of us sliding right into it—sliding right into each other—and staying there. Neither one of us knowing how to climb back out.

“What would it look like?” I ask finally, sitting up a little straighter, my spine pressing against the passenger side door of the wagon. “You and me dating, how would it look?”

“What, to other people?” Gabe asks, shaking his head.

I boggle. “To your
family
, to start with.”

“They’ll get over it.” Gabe’s voice is urgent. “Or they won’t, but they’re not over it now, either, are they? Why are you going to let people who are hell-bent on not forgiving you keep you from something that could actually be great?” He stops short then, looking suddenly embarrassed, like it’s just occurring to him that maybe he’s taken things too far. “Assuming that’s all that’s holding you back, I mean. Like”—oh my God, he’s actually blushing—“assuming you want to, otherwise.”

“I
do
want to,” I blurt, realizing as I say it that it’s true: I want to take a chance with him; I want to try being happy for the rest of this summer. “Screw other people, you’re right. I mean, no, you’re not right, not totally, I think there’s a lot of stuff you’re not considering, but—”

“Molly.”
Gabe laughs and nudges his mouth against mine then, a clumsy bump that’s nothing like the smooth moves I’m used to seeing out of him, how sometimes I get the impression he’s thinking a half beat ahead. This is spontaneous, a little awkward. Our teeth click. Still, it’s maybe my favorite kiss from him all summer; when it’s over Gabe smiles and leans his warm forehead against mine.

“I’m still not coming to your freaking party,” I mutter stubbornly.

Gabe laughs, low and pleased, against my cheek. He wrestles me into the backseat of the wagon, all our limbs and the smell of his neck and clean T-shirt; out the window I can see the white moon rising, heavy and nearly full.