BUILDING FOR SALE.
Huh. I wonder if the contents are for sale, too.
Probably the smart thing to do would be to go home and call them like a grown-up but the truth is I’m excited now, this little lick of adrenaline flicking its way through my veins. I cross the mostly empty parking lot and cross the drab, faded lobby to where a sleepy-looking clerk is slouched greasily behind the desk. “Can I help you?” he drones, blinking twice.
I take a deep breath. “Hi,” I say, sticking my hand out in what I hope is an authoritative manner, pasting a let’s-make-a-deal smile on my red, sweaty face. “I’m Molly Barlow, from the Star Lake Lodge. I was hoping to talk to somebody about purchasing your TVs.”
“Oh, you’re clever,” Penn says, grinning across her desk at me when I report my early morning success story—forty late-model flat screens available for a fraction of what I’ve been able to negotiate anywhere else, provided we can haul them away by next weekend. Turns out the owner is about to foreclose. It feels kind of bad, making bank of somebody else’s bad fortune—but not bad enough that I don’t grin back when she continues, “You’re good.”
I’m embarrassed all of a sudden, not used to the praise. “It wasn’t that big of a deal, really.”
“Don’t do that,” Penn advises, shaking her head at me. “Don’t downplay what you did over there. You saw an opportunity, you took the initiative, and you got it done. I’m impressed with you, kiddo. You should be impressed with yourself, too.”
“I—” I shake my head, blushing. “Okay. Thank you.”
“You earned it.” Penn looks at me from over her coffee cup, curious. “Hey, Molly, what are you studying in the fall, huh?” she asks. “Is that a thing I know about you?”
I shake my head. “It’s not a thing I know about me, even.” I shrug. “I don’t really know what I want to do.”
Penn nods like that’s not at all unusual, which I appreciate. It feels like everybody else I know is a hundred percent sure of where they’re headed—Imogen off to art school, Gabe headed back to his org chem classes. Pretty much every girl in my graduating class at Bristol was enrolled in specialized programs in things like engineering and political communications and English lit. A lot of times it feels like I’m the only one still lost. “They’ve got a business program at BU, don’t they?” she asks.
“Oh.” I nod back, unsure where she’s headed. People always ask me if I want to be a writer like my mom. “They do, I think, yeah.”
Penn nods. “You should think about it,” she advises. “You’re good at it, what you do here. You should know that about yourself. You’re doing a really good job at this.”
I grin at that, wide and happy. It’s been a long time since I felt good at much of anything. “You’re doing a really good job at this, too,” I tell Penn finally, head out to the lobby to see what else needs to get done.
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day 30
My mom’s in New York for a meeting with her editor and a stop at Good Morning America to hawk the Driftwood paperback, so Gabe brings over a pizza from the shop and we put an Indiana Jones marathon on cable. I haven’t seen him since the other night at the Donnelly party. We haven’t been alone in nearly a week.
“You sure you wanna watch this?” he asks me, settling back into the man-eating leather couch and grinning around his slice of pepperoni. We kissed for half an hour in my kitchen when he got here, my hands fisted in his wavy, tangly hair and the capable press of his warm mouth on mine. Gabe really, really knows how to kiss. He ducked his head to get to my collarbone and sternum, and I tried to push Patrick out of my mind as best I could, I don’t like you with my brother. I keep remembering the other night on my lawn. “There’s not, like, a documentary about juicing or the soil content of West Africa you were hoping to catch instead?”
“Already seen both of those, thanks,” I tell him cheerfully. I dressed up a little bit before he came over, skinny jeans and a scoop-neck tank top, two thin gold bracelets on my wrist. With Patrick, I only ever wore my usual ripped denim and flannels, but there’s something about hanging out with Gabe that makes me feel like I should dress the part. It’s kind of nice, making the effort. “There’s a thing about killer whales at SeaWorld I’ve been meaning to get to, though.”
“Dork.” Gabe swings his free arm around my shoulders and pulls me close in the half dark, just one Tiffany table lamp casting a warm glow across the room. Then, turning to face me: “So, hey, how’d it go with my brother the other night?” he asks, frowning just a little. “In the car, I mean. I’m sorry; I totally threw you under the bus there, huh? I didn’t realize how smashed I was till I was really smashed.”
“No, no,” I protest, “it was fine.” I pause, feeling careful and not totally sure why. “We had kind of a good talk, actually.”
“Oh, yeah?” Gabe grins, fingers tracing the strap of my tank top over and over. “I knew he’d mellow out eventually.”
“I—yeah.” I don’t know if I’d describe what happened the other night as Patrick mellowing out, but I’m not sure exactly how to explain that to Gabe—or if I even want to. “Yeah,” I finish lamely.
Gabe doesn’t seem to notice my hesitation, thank goodness; instead he kisses me again, licks his way into my mouth until I’m gasping. I’ve never kissed a guy and had it be like this. His hand is warm and heavy on my waist—I’ve been nervous about letting him see any part of me that isn’t normally covered by my clothes, how soft and doughy my body still feels in spite of all the running I’ve been doing, but when he rucks my shirt up it’s so slow and easy and I’m so distracted that I almost don’t even notice until it’s already happened. His fingertips set off tiny firecrackers all across my skin. “Jesus,” I mutter against his lips, breathing hard enough that I’m almost embarrassed, my chest moving hard with the quickness of it.
“That okay?” Gabe asks.
I nod, liking that he’s asking. I smell salt and his old woodsy soap. Over his shoulder Indy’s outrunning the boulder, the swell of the old familiar music: “This is the good part,” I murmur quietly, then close my eyes so he’ll kiss me again.
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day 31
Connie’s outside the pizza place turning the flowers in their pots when I show up the following afternoon, the sun yellow and beating on my back. “Hi, Molly,” she says when she sees me, looking surprised: For the most part, I’ve steered clear of the shop all summer. The butterflies in my chest thrum their papery wings.
“Hi, Con,” I say.
“Hi, Molly,” she says again, expression neutral as the paint on the walls in a hospital. “Gabe’s not here.”
I nod, trying to mirror the bland look on her face. Of course I already know the Donnelly boys work opposite shifts now, that they spend as little time together as humanly possible. That they hardly even speak, and it’s my fault. “I just came for some pizza.”
A slice of sausage and pepper is my cover, maybe, but I find the brother I’m looking for in his sauce-speckled apron behind the counter, scattering cheese on a wheel of raw dough. Patrick likes assembling pies, or at the very least he used to. He used to say it made him feel calm. “Hey,” I say softly, not wanting to startle him; the shop’s pretty empty at this hour, just the jabber of a little kid playing Ms. Pac-Man in the corner and the sibilant hum of the lite music station over the loudspeaker. Then, stupidly and a beat too late: “Buddy.”
Patrick rolls his eyes at me. “Hey, pal,” he says, the corners of his mouth twitching: It’s not a smile, not really, but it’s as close as I’ve gotten with him since I’ve been back. He looks even more like his dad than he used to. I grin like a reflex. “How’s it going?”
“Oh, you know.”
I shrug, hands in my pockets. “The usual. Kicking ass, fiending pizza.”
“Uh-huh.” Patrick smirks. He used to tease me for this exact thing when we were together, how when I get nervous sometimes I’ll just get cornier and cornier until someone finally stops me. He looks at me. He waits.
I make a face: He’s not going to make it easy, then, this being friends thing. I guess it’s not his job to make it easy. I try again. “You’re coming to Falling Star, yeah?” I ask. It starts in a few days, the Catskills’ exquisitely lame take on Burning Man: a bunch of teenagers camping in the mountains, all the weed you could possibly smoke and somebody’s brother’s fratty band playing the same three O.A.R. songs over and over. We went two summers ago, though, a whole bunch of us, just for the day—it was after me and Gabe but before the book came out, and I remember feeling happy, just for the space of one sunny afternoon. “You and Tess, I mean?”
Patrick nods, finishing up with the cheese and sliding the pie into the oven. He’s a little shorter than his brother, and ropier. He leans the paddle against the wall. “Looks that way, yeah. She wants to check it out.”
“Okay, well. Me too. So”—I shrug awkwardly—“I guess I’ll see you there, then.”
This time Patrick really does smile—at how hard I’m floundering, probably, but I’ll take what I can get.
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day 32
“Hey,” Tess says the next morning at work, finding me in the hallway outside the dining room as I’m readjusting the old black-and-white photos of Star Lake that Fabian for some reason loves to reach up and tilt askew. “This is probably a stupid question, but . . . what do people wear at Falling Star?”
I smile. “Like, do you need to pack bell-bottoms and macramé?” I ask her, standing back a bit to see if the frame is level. “Nah, you’re probably good. Unless you wanna join the love-in; then there’s a special dress code.”
“For the orgy, right.” Tess laughs. “I was thinking more, like, just shorts and stuff, right? I mean, it’s just camping; I don’t need a dress or anything?”
“I mean, I definitely will not be wearing a dress,” I assure her. “If you ask Imogen I dress kind of like a dude, though, so . . . she might be a better person to ask.”
“Shut up, you always look cool. Okay,” she says, before I can react to the compliment. “Thanks, Molly.” She turns to go, then turns around at the last second, pivoting on the hardwood in her lifeguard flip-flops. “Listen,” she says, “it doesn’t have to be, like, weird or anything, does it?” She gestures vaguely, as if the it in question is possibly the whole world. “Like, all of us going, I mean?”
“No, not at all,” I assure her, though I can’t actually imagine how it could possibly be anything but that. I wonder if Patrick told her about us on the lawn the other night. I wonder if it’s weird that I didn’t tell Gabe. “Of course not.”
“Okay, good.” Tess nods. “I’m sorry we didn’t get to hang out more at the party,” she says then. “I know Julia hasn’t exactly rolled out the welcome wagon.” She looks hesitant, like she’s not sure if she’s crossing a line here, but before I can say anything she presses on. “Anyway, I’m glad you’re going.”
I look at Tess’s freckly face, open and expectant; it’s impossible to hate this girl, truly. God help me, I want to be her friend. “I’m glad you’re going, too.”
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day 33
Handsome Jay isn’t coming up to Falling Star until tomorrow, so Gabe and Imogen and I all carpool into the mountains, a winding drive that takes just over an hour and a half. I’m worried the trip is going to be hugely awkward—I’m worried this whole weekend is going to be hugely awkward, truthfully, that the whole thing is going to feel like some extended blast-from-the-past double-date nightmare with everyone I know there to witness the carnage—but Gabe and Imogen are both talkers, and she’s hardly even settled herself into the backseat of the station wagon before they’re engaged in a cheerful debate about the new Kanye West album. After that they move on to the lech-y driver’s ed teacher at the high school and a gross new sandwich place near French Roast that Gabe keeps calling “Baloney Heaven”; I let out a breath and lean my head back against the seat, happy to listen to them talk.
“So, Handsome Jay is working today?” I ask Imogen, turning around to glance at her in the backseat. She’s wearing a vintage-looking scarf as if she’s Elizabeth Taylor in some old movie, dark sunglasses obscuring half her face. She’s too glam for camping by half but she’s always loved doing it, ever since we were little kids tucked into a fort on her living room rug. She was the one who got us started coming to Falling Star to begin with.
“Uh-huh,” she says now, sighing dramatically, then, peering at me over the tops of her lenses: “Don’t you make the schedule at that place, P.S.?”
“Not the kitchen one!” I defend myself. “Just the front desk and stuff.”
“Sure, sure,” Imogen says, smirking. She leans forward a bit, nods at the bag of Red Vines I’ve got in the console. “Pass those back, would you?”
“Mm-hmm. How’s that going, anyway?” I ask, once she’s pulled a handful of licorice from the package, snapping the end off one of the strips with her molars. “You and Handsome Jay.”
“It’s going goooooood,” Imogen says, laughing a little. “He took me to Sage the other night, actually.”
“Fancy!” I crow. Sage is the only white-tablecloth place in Star Lake other than the dining room of the Lodge. My mom used to take me on my birthday, just the two of us, but going with a guy is a totally different thing.
“Right?” Imogen says. “I know it’s totally just a fling, we’re both out of here at the end of the summer, but, like—I like him.” She glances at Gabe, wrinkles her nose a little. “Sorry,” she says, “is this totally boring to you?”
“No, no.” Gabe shakes his head, sincere. “Floor’s all yours.”
Imogen grins. “Well, in that case,” she says, and dives in. I reach over and squeeze Gabe’s knee, dumbly proud of how easy things seem between them.
It’s almost . . . normal.
Imogen’s chatting happily about Jay’s family, his dad who likes to paint. Suddenly, I remember running into her before homeroom the morning after I slept with Gabe—how I hadn’t talked to Patrick or my mom or anyone else yet, how I’d been walking around in a soup-thick fog all morning and the sight of her smiling at me across the hallway, her flowered dress and her cork-heeled shoes, was enough to have me swallowing back tears. “Morning, sunshine,” Imogen said brightly. She never carried a backpack. She didn’t think it was ladylike. “What’s up?”
Don’t be nice to me, I wanted to tell her. Don’t be nice to me, I’m awful, I don’t deserve it, I did the worst thing I could possibly do. For one moment I wanted to tell Imogen everything, to pour it all out regardless of the mess it would make, to stand back and stare at the horribleness of it like the world’s ugliest piece of art.
Then I realized I never wanted to tell anyone ever.
“Nothing,” I called back, shaking my head resolutely. “Morning.”
Now we stop for gas at a grimy station off the side of the highway, cars rushing by packed with suitcases and camping gear. It’s high summer, vacation time. It’s hot. “Can I tell you something?” Imogen asks me, both of us waiting in line for the questionable bathroom. “You seem, like, really happy.”
“I do?” I blink at that, surprised—it’s the first time anyone’s described me that way since I got back here. It’s the first time anyone’s described me that way in more than a year. Hearing it feels oddly incorrect, like someone pronouncing your name wrong.
Imogen laughs. “Yeah,” she says. “You do. That so ha
rd to believe?”
“I—no, actually. I guess not.” I glance at Gabe, who’s pumping gas across the blacktop. He catches me looking and grins. I think of his goofy stories, the interested way he chats with every last person in town; I think of how he knows my ugly parts and likes me anyway, how he’s not perpetually disappointed by the person I turned out to be. I’m still nervous about this weekend—ugh, actually just thinking about meeting up with Patrick and Tess makes my stomach flip unpleasantly—but out here in the middle of nowhere with Gabe and Imogen, I’m really glad I said I’d come.
The gas pump shuts off with a noisy thunk. “I am happy,” I tell Imogen, tipping my face up toward the sunshine.
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day 34
Falling Star’s in full swing by the following afternoon, the whole campsite crowded with people. The air is thick with the smell of weed and sunscreen and grill smoke, girls in bikinis lounging on the rocks and the constant clang of a dreadlocked white boy strumming away on a guitar. Imogen and I made totally undrinkable coffee over the campfire this morning, then gave up, got in Gabe’s station wagon, and drove twenty minutes to the nearest town: I brought a cup back for him, waving it under his nose where he was still sleeping inside the tent we’re sharing. “You’re my fucking hero,” he told me, and I laughed.
Now we’re clustered around a couple of the picnic tables eating chips and playing poker with handfuls of crumpled one-dollar bills—me and Gabe and Imogen, Kelsey and Steve, who wandered over from their campsite down the way, and Handsome Jay, who drove up after his breakfast shift at the Lodge this morning. Even Patrick and Tess are playing, Tess’s red hair braided into a heavy-looking skein hanging over one shoulder. She looks like something out of an Anthropologie catalog, rustic and effortless. I pick at my cuticles and sip at my water bottle, trying not to notice Patrick’s hand on her knee. They showed up last night, the two of them ambling over to the campfire. Tess hugged me hello while Patrick hung back in the shadows: “Hey,” I said to him, making a point of it. After all, we said we’d try and be friends, didn’t we?