The weird, sweet truth, though, is that nobody at this party seems particularly interested in me one way or the other. Nobody trips me and snickers; nobody blows a gum bubble into my hair. Around four Kelsey gets up to track down some more pasta salad, and thanks to her—and also, okay, thanks to the margarita one of the boozy Ciavolella aunts poured me—I’m relaxed enough to risk a solo trip to pee. I’m just coming out of the tiny powder room underneath the stairs when I hear Connie around the corner in the living room: “Come outside and help me with the ice cream, will you, birthday girl?” she’s saying, familiar voice echoing off the high ceiling and shiny wide-plank floors. We used to love to slide around in there in our socks, all four of us. Then: “And maybe wipe the look off your face like you smell something bad, just for the company?”
“I do smell something bad, thanks,” Julia retorts immediately. “And her name is Molly.”
“Enough,” Connie interrupts, even as I feel myself blanch so hard I worry I’ve actually made a sound: It’s like a trapdoor has opened up underneath me. This used to happen a lot, before I left for Bristol, overhearing people talking about me whether they knew I was listening or not. I ought to be more used to it by now. The familiar wave of shame is physical as dizziness. “Can we not do this now, please?” Connie continues. “Just as long as the girl is, you know, in this house?” I wince at that, the girl—at the idea that that’s who I am to Connie now, after all the times she hugged me hello and put me to bed and generally mommed me. I used to be pretty sure she loved me like one of her own three kids. “There’s no point in getting yourself all worked up about it now, Jules, letting it ruin the day.”
Julia’s not convinced. “I am worked up about it,” she counters. I can picture her so clearly, her J. Crew clothes and her swan limbs, long and graceful. Julia’s a warrior, she always has been. I used to tell her that if I ever had to bury a body or wage a ground campaign in Tasmania, she was the one I would call. “I think it’s tacky. It’s tacky and gross of Gabe to bring her here to begin with, and it’s doubly gross of her to come when Patrick—”
“Patrick’s here with Tess,” Connie points out.
“Mom, that nice girl is a giant rebound, and everybody here knows it, so—”
“Can you give it a rest, Julia?” Connie sounds exasperated now, like there’s no way this is the first time they’re having this conversation—I remember, bizarrely, the summer we were eight and Julia decided she didn’t ever want to wear shoes, how adamant she was no matter how anybody argued with her. “Come on, we’re going to have cake. It’s your birthday, we’re all together, let’s not—”
“It’s not my birthday today,” Julia points out.
Connie sighs. “Liz, help me out with her, will you? Explain to her that Molly doesn’t matter?”
There’s a high, affable laugh—Elizabeth Reese, too, then, all three of them, shooting the breeze about me and my tacky, gross behavior—but all I can hear over and over are those last three words:
Molly doesn’t matter.
I can taste the metallic ticking of my heart at the back of my mouth. I know they’re not even wrong, that’s the worst part—it was absurd of me to come here, it was way out of line.
“Ugh, whatever, don’t bring Lizzie into it,” Julia’s saying now, disgust dripping from her voice like gasoline. “She isn’t worth it, blah blah, even if she is a filthy—”
“Are you guys serious right now?” an angry voice interrupts her—Gabe’s angry voice. I shrink farther back into the half darkness of the bathroom—heart pounding with even more force than it was a moment ago, if that’s possible, humiliated at the thought of him hearing what they said. “Sitting in here shit talking like a bunch of stray freaking cats?”
Julia snorts. “Like a bunch of wha—”
“I expect it from you, Jules, but, like—what the hell, Ma? Like, who even are you right now?”
There’s a beat before Connie answers, the silence hanging pregnant in the air. “Gabriel . . .”
“Molly was our family. Molly was here when Dad died. And I don’t—not to put too fine a point on it, but it takes two people to do what we did, okay? And Patrick’s my brother. I just, I’ve had it with this shit. I really have.”
“Easy, tiger,” Julia is saying, voice hard and brittle. Connie doesn’t say anything at all—or maybe she does and I just don’t hear it, how the back of my wrist is pressed hard to my mouth so I don’t sob outright and give myself away.
I slip out of the bathroom as I hear him stalking down the hallway, put a finger to my lips at the sight of his surprised, baffled face. I yank him around the corner into the kitchen, press him against the wall and plant a kiss against his startled mouth. “Thank you,” I keep it together enough to say.
Gabe just shakes his head and laces all ten of his fingers through mine, squeezes. “Come on,” he says, and nips at my bottom lip, friendly. “There’s a party outside, did you hear?”
Things start to wind down around midnight, citronella candles burning low and the after-dinner Stevie Wonder replaced with Ray LaMontagne crooning quietly about Hannah and Jolene. Tess waved good-bye a little while ago, her hair like a beacon in the blue-purple night. It’s chilly away from the fire pit, goose bumps rising on my arms and legs.
I find Gabe stretched out in a lawn chair, alone for maybe the first time all night, a mostly done bottle of Ommegang dangling from his fingers. I raise my eyebrows. The Donnellys were never strict, as parents go, and once Chuck died Connie basically gave up on discipline altogether—even if he’d lived, though, I think they still would have been do-it-in-the-house-if-you’re-going-to-do-it kind of parents. But as he sits up, I can tell Gabe’s drunker than is strictly toward at a family affair. “Hi,” I tell him, perching at the edge of the lawn chair, down by his tan ankles. “I should probably think about an alternate route home, huh?”
Gabe furrows his brow in mock consternation, then grins. “I . . . definitely shouldn’t drive, yeah,” he says cheerfully, reaching for my hand and tugging until I scoot closer on the chair, the heat of his body bleeding through his T-shirt and mine. “I’ll find somebody to take you, though.”
“I could take your car,” I suggest. “I could drive it back tomorrow before work, or—”
Gabe shakes his head. “I gotta open the shop tomorrow,” he tells me, then, like he’s just realizing: “Ugh, I gotta open the shop tomorrow, I’m stupid, I’m gonna hurt. Anyway. Let me see if—”
“I can take her.”
I startle, head whipping around in the darkness: there’s Patrick, hands in his pockets and the same hard, unfamiliar stare I’ve gotten used to lately, like we never slept side by side in the hayloft in summer or told each other our ugliest fears. He scratches at a mosquito bite on his elbow, idle.
I feel myself go pale, sitting there on the lounge chair. I’ve left him alone all day on purpose, wanted to give him as much space as I could—or, at least as much space as I could after showing up at his party. “Patrick.” I swallow. “You don’t have to.”
But Patrick’s already turned toward the driveway, car keys jingling like bells in his hand. “You coming?” he calls over his shoulder.
All I can do is nod.
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day 28
According to the clock on the dashboard, it’s 12:30 A.M. by the time I climb into the passenger seat of the Bronco across from Patrick, fussing with the tricky seat belt until I finally hear the buckle snick into place, just like I have a million times before. This is the car I think of when I think of the Donnellys—the one Connie used to haul us all around in, the one we crowded into every morning for the sleepy drive to school. We used to climb up onto the roof and look for comets.
“Thanks for taking me,” I say now, swallowing down the strange thickness of memories in my throat as Patrick pulls out of the drive
way. “You really didn’t have to do that.”
Patrick keeps his eyes on the road, his face cast reddish in the dashboard light. He’s got the faintest batch of freckles across his nose. “I know” is all he says.
We ride in silence the whole way to my mom’s house, no radio and the woods pressing in on either side of the road, close and haunted. The headlights carve broad white slices through the dark. There’s not another car on the road, just me and Patrick; I open my mouth and close it again, helpless. What can I possibly say to him? What could I possibly tell him that would matter?
After what feels like a living eternity Patrick turns up my mom’s winding driveway, the Bronco coasting to a stop on the side of the house. “Okay,” he says, shrugging a little, hands resting loosely on the steering wheel. It’s the first time he’s opened his mouth since we left the farm. “See you, I guess.”
“Uh-huh.” I nod mechanically like a robot or a marionette. “Okay. Thank you. Seriously. I—seriously, yeah. Thank you.”
“No problem,” Patrick mutters. He barely waits until I’m out of the car before peeling back down the driveway, which is why I’m so wholly surprised when he slams on the brakes again before he’s even halfway to the road.
“Fuck it,” he says, getting out and slamming the door of the Bronco behind him, closing the distance between us in what feels like three big steps. “I just. Fuck it. I hate this.”
“Patrick.” My heart is pounding wetly in my throat, fast and manic. I didn’t even make it up the walk. “What the hell?”
Patrick shakes his head. “I hate this,” he repeats when he’s reached me—when he’s close enough so I can smell him, overwarm and familiar. “Jesus Christ, Mols, how can you not hate this? Just being in the same car with you makes me want to scrape my own skin off. I fucking hate this. I do.”
I stare at him, stunned, unsure if this outburst is global or specific, if I should apologize or yell back or kiss him hard and honest right here where we’re standing.
If he’d even let me. What it would mean if he did. What it means that part of me might want to, even as I can feel myself falling into Gabe.
“I hate it, too,” I venture finally, ten years of history pressing at the insides of my rib cage, like time itself is expanding in there. I wish for the hundred thousandth time that I knew how to make this right. “I’m so sorry, I—”
“I don’t want to hear you’re sorry, Mols.” God, he sounds so, so tired. He sounds so much older than we actually are. “I want it to stop feeling like this.” Patrick shakes his head. “I want . . . I want . . .” He breaks off. “Forget it,” he says, like he’s suddenly remembered himself, like a sleepwalker coming back from a dream. “This was stupid, I don’t know. I wanted to make sure you got home, you’re home. Like I said, I’ll see you.”
“Wait,” I say too loudly, my voice ringing out in the quiet yard. “Just. Wait.”
I sit down on the ground where I’m standing, night-damp grass whispering cool against my legs. Then I turn my back. “Come on,” I say, facing away from him just like we used to when we were kids and needed to talk about something important or embarrassing. “Sit for a sec.”
“Are you serious right now?” he asks me instead. “I—no, Molly.”
Even though I can’t see him I can picture the look on his face exactly, the barely contained annoyance, like I’m embarrassing us both. For once, I don’t care. I tip my chin backward until just the top of his head comes into view behind me, that curly hair. “Just humor me for a second, okay?” I ask. “You can go back to hating me right after, I promise. Just humor me for one second.”
Patrick looks at me for a long minute, upside down and scowling. Finally, he sighs. “I don’t hate you,” he mutters, and sits down on my mother’s front lawn with his broad, warm back pressed to mine.
I breathe in. “No?” I ask when he’s settled on the ground behind me, the first physical contact we’ve had in over a year. I can feel each individual pleat of his spine. We’re hardly even touching–it’s nothing to write dumb romance novels about, certainly—but it’s like my body is full of sparks anyway, like I have no skin and I can feel him in my organs and my bones. I try to hold very, very still. “You don’t?”
“No,” Patrick says, then, all in a rush: “I don’t like you with my brother,” he tells me, so fast I know that’s what he was trying to get out a minute ago. The back-to-back on the ground trick still works. “I just—I think about you with him, and I don’t—I don’t like it.”
I feel the blood moving through my veins, a low frantic swish. What does that mean? I want to ask. “Well, I don’t like you with Tess,” I say instead, addressing the trees at the far end of the property. Patrick’s hand is planted on the grass not far from mine. “As long as we’re airing our grievances.”
“I don’t know if you get to have an opinion about me and Tess,” Patrick says immediately. He moves his hand away from me then, sitting up a little bit straighter. A breath of cool air slices between his back and mine.
“We were broken up,” I blurt, turning around and losing the physical contact entirely. “Come on, Patrick. Before anything ever happened with him, you broke up with me, remember?”
I’m surprised at myself for saying it—I never even think about it that way, because it feels like making excuses. It’s true, at the basest of levels: Patrick wasn’t my boyfriend when I slept with his brother at the end of my sophomore year. We’d been fighting for months, ever since I’d first floated the idea of going to Bristol, when we finally hit a wall and he told me to get out. But technicalities have never, ever mattered when it comes to the two of us.
“Are you really going to try to argue that with me right now?” Patrick demands, still facing away from me. “We were together our whole lives and he’s my brother, and you’re telling me it doesn’t matter cause we broke up five minutes before?”
“That’s not—” God, it feels like he knows how to twist everything, to make it seem like I’m trying to wriggle out of what I did. “I’m not saying—”
“You kept that secret from me for a year,” Patrick says, and he sounds so hurt it’s heartbreaking. “A whole year. If your mom hadn’t written that freaking book, would you ever have told me? Before we got married or whatever? Before we had kids?”
“Patrick,” I say, and I know that I’ve lost this one. He’s right—the secret was almost worse than the act, how every single day we were together after that was a lie of the most epic proportions, a million small untruths hardening like a crust on top of the big one. I faked the flu at Christmas junior year just to avoid seeing Gabe while he was home from Notre Dame, I remember suddenly. Patrick brought me soup and Home Alone on DVD.
Now I turn around again, settle my shoulders against his one more time. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s fine. I mean, it’s not.” Patrick exhales, waits a minute. Leans back, so I can feel him breathe. “We’re even, then, is that what you’re saying?”
It takes me a minute to realize he’s looped back around, that he’s talking about me and Gabe versus him and Tess. I shake my head even though he can’t see me—he can feel it, probably, and that’s enough. “I don’t know that I’d call us even, exactly.”
“No,” Patrick says, and I don’t know if I’m imagining him pressing back a little bit harder against me, like he’s letting me know he’s still there. “I guess not.”
We sit there for a long time, both of us breathing. I can hear crickets calling in the trees. A dog barks far away, and Oscar answers. My stomach makes a sound, and Patrick snorts.
“Shut up,” I say automatically, sending my elbow back into his rib cage. Patrick grabs it for a second before letting me go. “What do we do now?” I ask him quietly.
“I don’t know,” Patrick tells me. For somebody who thought this was a stupid experiment he hasn’t made any move to turn around, I notice: I wonder if he’s afraid of it like I am, like seeing his face again will break whatever spell we??
?re under, the night and the privacy and the feeling of being home. “I have no idea.”
“We could try being friends,” I venture finally, feeling like I’m edging dangerously close to a precipice, like I’ve got more to lose than I did twenty minutes ago. If he shuts me down again that’ll be the end of that. “I mean, I have no idea if we can actually do it, but . . . we could try.”
Now Patrick does turn to look at me; I turn, too, when I feel him moving, his gray eyes locked on mine. “You want to be friends?” he asks, the barest hint of a smile I can’t read pulling at the edges of his mouth. “Seriously?”
“If you’ll have me.” I shrug. “I don’t know.”
“Yeah.” Patrick shakes his head as he climbs to his feet, like that’s typical. “You never did.” Then, before I can contradict him: “Let’s be friends, Mols, sure. Let’s try it.” He heads back across the lawn toward the Bronco. “Can’t be any worse than what we are now.”
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day 29
I take a different route than usual on my run, closer to the highway past some weird commercial remnants of Star Lake’s failed 1980s redevelopment—a McDonald’s, a family-owned water park called Splash Time that looked like a lawsuit waiting to happen even when I was five, and a Super 8 with a scrubby lawn housing a broken fountain and a flimsy sign stuck into the grass reading BUILDING FOR SALE BY OWNER. I’m so distracted thinking about Patrick—have been thinking about him for more than twenty-four solid hours by now, the moment in front of my house and everything it might or might not mean—that it doesn’t really register until I pass it again on my way back, pushing hard through the last couple of miles.