Patrick just looked at me, even. “Hey, yourself,” he said, so quietly no one but me could hear.
Now Gabe lays down three tens which is a winner, all of us grumbling good-naturedly as we toss our cards onto the rough wooden table. “Thank you, thank you,” he says grandly, reaching for the pot with silly, exaggerated movements.
“Oh, no, wait, hold up, though,” Imogen says, pointing, just before Jay reaches out to clear the deck. “Patrick’s got a full house, right?”
Patrick looks up at that, then down at the table, surprised—he’s been playing with half a mind, no question, lost in Patrickland while the rest of us hang out here on Earth. Then he smiles. “Oh, hey, no shit, yeah I do.” He reaches for the cash, but his brother stops him.
“Wait a second,” Gabe says, shaking his head a little. “Isn’t that how we play, though: you don’t notice, you don’t take the pot?”
Patrick makes a face like, nice try. “I don’t think so, dude.”
Gabe frowns. “I’m just saying, you’re hardly even playing, you needed somebody else to tell you that you even won—”
“Yeah, okay, but I did win,” Patrick says, the faintest hint of an edge creeping into his voice, the kind you wouldn’t even notice if you hadn’t known him pretty much forever. I’ve known him pretty much forever, though. I shift my weight, not liking the trajectory here.
So has Gabe: “Dude, it’s, like, twenty bucks we’re talking about,” he says now, shaking his head like Patrick’s being stupid.
“Dude, it’s, like, my twenty bucks.”
Shit. Patrick mimics his tone exactly, which I know from when we were kids is one of the fastest ways to get under Gabe’s skin. Sure enough: “Why are you being such a dick about this?” Gabe asks, eyes narrowing.
“Why am I being a dick?” he asks, sounding pissed about a whole lot more than twenty bucks in George Washingtons. I wince. “You didn’t win, bro. I know it contradicts your whole entire understanding of the universe, but—”
“It contradicts my understanding of the universe to be a little bitch about everything, yes,” Gabe interrupts.
“You wanna talk about who’s being a little b—”
“I left my sunglasses in the car,” I announce suddenly, standing up so fast I almost turn over the table. “I’m going to go get ’em.”
“Molly,” Gabe starts, sounding more irritated than I’m used to. “You don’t have to—”
“No, no, I’ll be right back.” It’s bailing, I know it is, just like I always do, but sitting there listening to them argue feels like trying to hold still while centipedes crawl all over my naked body. I can’t do it; I don’t have the stomach. I gotta, gotta go.
“You want company?” Imogen asks me.
“Nope, I’m good.”
I take off at a pretty quick clip but the raised voices have already caught Julia’s attention; I pass by right as she’s getting up off the old Donnelly camp blanket, where she’s been reading magazines with Elizabeth Reese. “Did you just start another fight between my brothers?” she demands, shaking her head like she honestly can’t believe me. “Seriously?”
“I—no,” I defend myself. “Jesus, Julia. They’re into it over a stupid game, I don’t know.”
“Uh-huh,” she says, brushing by me. “Sure they are.”
On my way to the lot I see Jake and Annie from the Lodge, who’ve got a complicated setup involving a generator—Jake’s an Eagle Scout, I remember vaguely. He works behind the reception desk, so I see him more than I see Annie, who’s a lifeguard. “Hey, Molly,” Jake calls. “You want a beer?”
For a second I almost accept, but as soon as the words are out of his mouth Annie’s shooting him a look that could peel the sap right off a pine tree, so I shake my head awkwardly. I swear I’m not after your boyfriend, I want to say.
Instead I get my sunglasses out of the station wagon and sit on the bumper for a minute, trying to take deep breaths and calm down a little. In my logical brain I know this one wasn’t really my fault, not entirely—Patrick and Gabe were never super-close, even before everything happened. When we were kids it was fine, regular brother stuff, but once Chuck died it was like they swerved sharply in opposite directions or something, like they were never quite traveling in the same car after that. Gabe’s personality, his gregariousness, got bigger and more exaggerated, like if he was surrounded by his friends 24/7 then it meant he never had to be alone. Meanwhile, Patrick did exactly the opposite: He didn’t want anything to do with anybody who hadn’t known Chuck well enough to have a nickname, didn’t want to go out or hang out or do much at all besides sit in the barn or his bedroom with me, the two of us wrapped up in our own private Idaho. Julia would drop in and watch movies with us sometimes, but for the most part it felt like other people just didn’t understand what was happening: “His dad died,” I protested when Imogen complained about how often I’d blown her off lately.
“Yeah, a year ago,” she countered.
I didn’t know how to reply to that. I’d always known how Patrick’s aloofness sometimes played to the outside world. It didn’t look that way to me, though—after all, Patrick was my person, my other half. I never felt stuck or cut off or like there was other stuff I’d rather be doing, never felt like there was anyplace else I’d rather be.
At least, not until the moment it did.
It was a few weeks after my meeting with the Bristol recruiter in the guidance office, April of sophomore year—I’d gotten another e-mail from her a couple of days before: Just wanted to say again how nice it was speaking with you. I’d written back, asking a few more questions. I hadn’t brought it up with Patrick again, but the idea was still itching at me like the tag at the neck of a cheap cotton T-shirt, like walking around with a tiny shard of glass in my shoe. It was weird, feeling like I had something to say that he didn’t want to hear about. That had never happened to me before.
I tried to push it out of my mind, though, which felt easier now as Patrick kissed a trail down the side of my neck, both of us sprawled on the couch in the family room at the Donnellys’, killing time before that night’s baseball game at school. We were the only two people in the house. His warm fingers traced the pattern of my rib cage, trailed down over my still-flat stomach, fussed tentatively with the button on my jeans. I breathed in. In spite of how long we’d been dating we’d never gone much further than this, and every inch of new skin he touched felt scary-amazing, icy hot. “What do you think?” he muttered into my ear, so quiet. “You wanna go upstairs?”
I did, truly—I wanted him to keep doing exactly what he was doing, wanted his familiar face and body and the rumpled T-shirt sheets on his bed. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I do, let me just.” I took a deep breath, my head swimming a little. Were we really about to do what I thought we were maybe, possibly, probably about to do? “Let me just pee first, okay?”
Patrick laughed. “Sure.” He stood up off the couch, adjusted himself a little. Took my hand and pulled me to my feet. “You got Chapstick?”
“Ha, why, too much kissing?” I grinned. “In my backpack, yeah.”
“Smartass.”
“You love me,” I called over my shoulder, confident in the fact that he did, that he always would; when I got back a minute later, though, his darkened face threw me into sudden doubt. “What’s this?” he asked me, holding up a sheet of printer paper.
Shit. It was my e-mail exchange with the recruiter, the paper he’d clearly found in my backpack—I’d printed it out at school earlier, intending to show it to my mom that weekend.
I took a deep breath. “Patrick—”
“Are you going?” he asked, zero to totally pissed in 3.5 seconds. “To Arizona?”
“No!” I said, wanting to calm him down as fast as possible—wanting to get back to how everything had felt a minute ago, safe and exciting both. “Probably not, I mean, I just wanted—”
“Probably not?”
“I don’t know!” I said. “I was going
to talk to you about it, I wanted to talk to you about it, I just—”
“Thought you’d lie to me about it for a week instead?”
“Hey, kids,” Gabe said just then, pausing in the doorway to the family room, rapping twice on the frame like he knew he was interrupting something but wanted to give us a heads-up that he was there. “You almost ready to go?”
“Oh, crap, what time is it?” I looked up at Gabe, then at the clock on the cable box, blushing at the idea he’d heard us fighting. He was supposed to give us a ride to the baseball game. I’d totally lost track of time. “We gotta go, huh?”
“Got a little time,” Gabe assured me. He was a senior that year, would be graduating in a month. “Game’s not till seven.”
I looked from him to Patrick’s stony expression, back again. “I know, but I told Imogen we’d go early.” Sports weren’t a huge deal at our school, but our baseball team was in the playoffs and it was a Friday game, a night one that we’d been talking about all week. Julia was cheering, and Annie had made a bunch of banners with the art club; we had plans to go for pancakes at the diner afterward. It felt like a long time since I’d hung out with everyone, a weird ache I’d started to notice, like my friends felt far even though they were right where they’d always been. Like some secret part of me was already getting ready to leave. I took a deep breath, looked back at Patrick, putting my hand on his wrist like a peace offering. Tried to ask him telepathically: Please, please can we just table this for now? “Come on,” I said, out loud. “Let’s get ready.”
“What if we skipped it?” Patrick said, standing frozen in place with his arms crossed. It was still cool out and he was wearing this lightweight hoodie I loved, gray and hundred-wash soft.
“Skipped it?” I repeated. “Why would we skip it?”
“I don’t know.” Patrick glanced at his brother, shook his head. “You don’t think it sounds lame?”
“Not really,” I said, “no. I kind of wanna go, actually.”
“I . . . kind of really wanna stay here.”
“Whoa, dissent in the ranks,” Gabe teased from the doorway. “All right, you guys figure it out. I’m gonna change my shirt. Train leaves the station in five minutes.”
I perched on the arm of the couch to face him. “I’m sorry, okay? I’m not going anywhere, I promise. I was being dumb, I should have told you I was thinking about it. But I’m not even thinking about it anymore.”
I thought that would fix things, that we’d get back to having a fun, normal night, but Patrick sighed. “I think it’s lame,” he said, ignoring what I’d said about Bristol, like we’d moved onto a different conversation entirely. “I just think it’s so boring and fake, to go hang out with a bunch of people I don’t even like and cheer for a baseball team I literally could not care less about. I don’t feel like going.”
“They’re our friends,” I countered. “Since when do you not like our friends?”
“I like our friends fine,” Patrick said, shaking his head. “I don’t know.” He sat back down then and picked the remote up off the couch, flicking through the channels. “Look, that show about the pit bulls and the criminals is coming on. How can you possibly say no to a show about pit bulls and criminals?”
“Paaatrick,” I said, laughing a little uneasily—he was kidding but also not, I could tell, wanted me to ditch our friends and the baseball game and stay here.
To ditch Bristol and stay here, too.
God, it felt so suffocating all of a sudden, the idea of spending the rest of the night watching whatever five-year-old episode of How I Met Your Mother came on next, the air inside the house close and stale. We’d spent any number of Fridays like that, just the two of us, and it had never, ever bothered me, but all of a sudden it made me want to scream.
Gabe turned up in the doorway again then, jacket on and car keys rattling inside his hand. “You guys figure your shit out?” He looked back and forth between us, undoubtedly the twin faces of two people who had emphatically not. He made a face like, definitely not getting in the middle of that. “I can just take you over, Molly, if my brother’s being a pain in the ass about it.”
“Screw you,” Patrick muttered.
“No,” I said, “he’s not—”
“Just go,” Patrick said to me harshly. “Seriously, you wanna go with Gabe, go with Gabe. I’m not your warden.”
“I—” I put one foot back down on the floor, uncertain. We were supposed to meet Imogen in ten. “Come on, Patrick, don’t—”
“Jesus Christ, Molly, can you not make a federal fucking case out of it?” Patrick huffed out an irritated breath. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
That made me mad, that he’d talk to me that way in front of his brother. That he’d talk to me that way at all. I felt my cheeks heat up, embarrassed and pissed. This was me and Patrick, was the thing here—we were a unit, a package deal, us on one side of the road and everybody else on the other. We never, ever fought in public.
Except that apparently now we did.
Well, if he was going to be that way, I wasn’t going to sit here and ruin my night trying to talk him out of it. “Fine,” I said, grabbing my backpack off the floor and swinging it over my shoulder. I looked at Gabe, smiled a little. “Ready to go?”
Things seem to have calmed down by the time I get back to the campsite. Patrick and Tess are gone, and Jake and Annie have wandered over, the cards forgotten in the center of the picnic table; Gabe pulls away from the herd when he spots me. “Hey, you,” he says, slinging a warm, heavy arm around my shoulders. “Get your sunglasses?”
“Uh-huh.” It’s surprising and a little weird to me, how he seems happy to brush off the scene I walked out on. “Everything okay?”
“What? With my brother?” Gabe shrugs a bit. “Yeah, it was fine. You know how he is; he was just being an asshole.”
That stops me. It was a small, stupid thing, maybe, but Patrick did have the winning cards. I remember Patrick complaining about Gabe what feels like forever ago, the two of us stretched out barefoot in the barn: “Everybody thinks he’s this great sport about shit, but he’s a great sport about shit because he always gets his way.” Is that what just happened here? I wonder.
I don’t say any of that out loud, though, just hum noncommittally and reach up to lace my fingers through his. “We’re gonna play Frisbee for a bit,” Gabe tells me. “You want in?”
I shake my head, suddenly exhausted—the heat, maybe, or just the slightly overwhelming feeling of being with everyone again, the same as we used to and completely different all at once. “I might just nap,” I tell him, then immediately feel guilty about it—after all, isn’t this exactly what I used to do when I was with Patrick, duck out and away from the group? We came here to hang out with our friends, I remember telling him the last time we were here together. Shouldn’t we, you know, hang out with our friends? “I mean, unless you want me to? I can rally.”
Gabe doesn’t seem bothered, though: “Nah, take a rest,” he says, planting a casual kiss on my forehead. “We’re gonna do the campfire thing again later anyway, will probably be another late night.”
“Okay,” I tell him, tipping my face up so his next kiss lands on my mouth instead of on my forehead. “Just for a little bit.”
I borrow a big flowered sheet from Imogen and sack out in the sunshine, never mind that it’s the middle of the baking day. It takes me a long time to get comfortable. I can’t stop thinking about the night of the baseball game a hundred years ago, the weird backward feeling of leaving Patrick in the family room and walking out the back door of the farmhouse with Gabe. Jailbreak, I thought, then immediately hated myself for it.
It was early spring still, the air getting chilly as the sun disappeared behind the mountains, all blue and purple twilight. “You can turn that off,” Gabe said when the radio in the Bronco started up along with the ignition, one of those alt-country stations that played a lot of Carrie Underwood. “I think Julia was listening to it.”
“A likely story,” I teased, then right away felt awkward about it. I tucked my hands between my thighs, looked out the window. I tried to remember the last time I’d been on my own with Gabe, and couldn’t. I thought of Patrick by himself back at the farmhouse. Maybe this had been a mistake.
Gabe glanced over at me as we turned out onto the parkway, curious. “You okay over there?” he asked.
“He’s mad at me,” I blurted before I even knew I was going to do it, then shook my head. God, what was my malfunction tonight? “I’m sorry. I mean, yeah, I’m fine.”
Gabe laughed a little at that, but not meanly. “Okay,” he said, then: “What’s he mad about?” he asked.
“I talked to a recruiter a few weeks ago,” I confessed, pulling one knee up on the bench seat. “About going and running track for this boarding school in Arizona.”
“Boarding school?” Gabe asked, sounding surprised—but not appalled like Patrick had. “Yeah?”
“Do you think that’s totally stupid?”
“No, not at all,” Gabe said, no hesitation. He had one casual hand hooked over the steering wheel, his face open and honest in the fading light. “I think it could be awesome, actually.”
“I think it could be awesome, too!” I told him, almost embarrassed by how dumbly enthusiastic I sounded. “But, duh, it would mean being not here, and . . . I don’t know.” I shrugged and glanced out the window again, the moon beginning to rise. “Patrick . . . does not think it’s a good idea.”