“Yeah,” Gabe said. “I can see him thinking that. Do you think it’s a good idea?”
I considered that for a moment—how I felt when I was running, how my head got quiet and my body was strong. I wondered how it might feel to run for a school that took that seriously. And even though I didn’t want to, even though I knew I was just pissed at Patrick and would probably see things totally differently in twenty minutes, I thought of that word jailbreak again. “I . . . think I might, yeah.”
“Well,” Gabe said, just as quiet. “That’s something to think about, then, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I replied. “I guess it is.”
We rode the rest of the way in an oddly comfortable silence, both of us breathing in the purple darkness. I’d never changed the country station, and neither did Gabe. When we pulled up to school, I was almost sorry to be getting out of the car.
“I can give you a ride home, too, if you need one,” Gabe said before we split up at the gate to the baseball field, as if he’d read my thoughts somehow. Already his friends had spotted him and were hooting his name. “Just come find me later on.”
“I can probably go with Imogen,” I told him. “Thanks, though.”
“Yeah,” he said. “No problem.” He waved, and we headed off in opposite directions, but not five seconds later: “Hey, listen, Molly—”
“Hm?” I turned back around, surprised and curious. “What’s up?”
Gabe shook his head. “Never mind. Just, congrats on getting recruited, is all I was going to say.”
That made me smile—nobody had congratulated me yet, I realized. Patrick certainly hadn’t. “Thanks,” I said, smiling one more time before I went to go find Imogen in the stands.
It’s hotter than I realize, and when I wake up on Imogen’s flowered sheet sometime later the first thing I register is the red roasting sensation all up and down the skin of my arms and legs, on the tops of my feet and the bridge of my nose around my sunglasses.
The second thing I register is Patrick.
“Mols,” he says, looming above me, so his face is all in shadow, nudging my hip with his ankle until I startle. I sit up fast and disoriented. Everything stings.
“Did you just wake me up?” I ask stupidly. I’ve been avoiding him on purpose since we got here, trying to give him and Tess their space. Not that they need my help, really—after they got here they spent most of last night sitting on a huge rock near the water, heads tipped close together, telling secrets I couldn’t even begin to guess. I’d taken the beers Gabe offered and sat with everyone else around the fire. Tried not to feel jealous about that. “Where is everybody?”
“You’re frying,” Patrick tells me now, not particularly friendly. “Come on, you gotta put sunblock on, get in the shade or something.”
“Oh,” I say, disoriented, that underwater nap feeling where you’re groggier after than you ever were before. I’m eye level with his knees, ripped denim he’s had for as long as I can remember and a swatch of tan skin showing through. It occurs to me to wonder how long he’s been standing there, and what went through his mind while he did. I’m sorry about earlier, I want to tell him. Gabe was being a jerk, and I’m sorry. “Okay.”
“Here,” Patrick says, thrusting a bottle of Coppertone in my general direction, the callused pads of his fingers brushing mine. By the time I get it together enough to look up and say thanks, he’s already gone.
There’s a concert that night, the clang of drums and guitars echoing through the mountains like a call-and-response from some other lifetime; Gabe pulls me away from the crowd to make out for a while in the darkness, his palms scraping pleasantly across my stinging, sunburned face. “You’re fun,” he mutters, biting my bottom lip a little.
“You’re funner,” I tell him, and grin.
I’m coming back from the bathroom when I run into Tess standing by herself near where our tents are, arms around herself and looking confused. “Where’d everybody go?” she asks when she sees me. She smells like booze and bug spray. “I lost everybody.”
“They’re still back over by the field,” I tell her. Then, looking a little more closely: “You okay?”
Tess shakes her head. “I’m fucked up,” she says bluntly. “Ohh, Molly, I am fucked up.”
“You are, huh?” I’m a little buzzed myself, to be honest, the few beers I had singing through my blood and brain and bones. “Hit it hard?”
“Yeah,” Tess says vaguely. “Too hard. I don’t really feel so good.”
“Okay,” I tell her, frowning a bit, taking her arm and leading her over to a picnic table. “You’re okay. Just sit for a second, I’ll grab you some water.”
“No, don’t leave,” Tess says immediately. “I just—please don’t.”
I blink, surprised and a little alarmed. “Okay. It’s okay.” New plan, then. “I’m not going anywhere.” I’m squinting through the darkness to see if I spy anybody from our group when all of a sudden Tess is up off the bench.
“Nope,” she says. “Nope, nope, I’m gonna—”
From the green, panicky look on her face it’s pretty clear what she’s going to do, even when she doesn’t finish the statement—I don’t see a garbage can anywhere nearby, so I take her by the shoulders and steer her toward a clearing that’s not too close to anybody’s tent. “Right there,” I instruct, basically forcing her to bend down, arranging her limbs like she’s a doll. “You’re okay.”
I keep saying it over and over while she’s sick—you’re okay—rubbing her back a little and making sure the thick rope of her ginger braid doesn’t swing into any oncoming grossness. It feels like it goes on a long time. I actually really hate the sound of throw-up—like, it pretty reliably makes me gag—but it’s not like I’m going to wander away and leave her, so I look around at the trees and try not to listen too closely.
“Oh my God,” Tess says when she’s finished, standing upright and wiping the back of her hand across her mouth, eyes red-rimmed and face puffy. She looks about ten years old. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Don’t tell Patrick, okay? Please don’t tell Patrick.”
“Patrick wouldn’t care,” I assure her, peeling a loose strand of hair off her forehead, although I actually get her impulse to want to hide it from him. I know from experience he’s not the easiest person to admit a screwup to. “He’d just want to make sure you’re okay. But no, of course I won’t. You wanna go lie down?”
“I need water,” Tess says, so I nod and lead her by the hand back to where our stuff is, digging around until I find my big plastic Nalgene bottle. “Drink it slow,” I tell her, not wanting her to get sick again. Tess nods obediently and glugs it down, then pretty much crawls into her tent before passing out fully clothed on top of Patrick’s sleeping bag. I refill the water bottle and stick it in there beside her for later. Her hangover is going to hurt.
I head back across the field to find Gabe but Patrick’s the first Donnelly I come upon, sitting by the low-burning embers of the campfire and staring into the flames like he’s trying to solve a mystery, the light flickering over his serious face. His dad used to build us fires just like this one in the backyard of the farmhouse, tell us long, involved stories before we fell asleep. We’d pass out side by side in our sleeping bags. We sat side by side at Chuck’s wake.
I don’t know if he sees me or just senses me lurking, but after a moment Patrick turns and raises his hand to wave. I stand there for a minute, looking at him and remembering, wondering what would happen if I walked over and sat down beside him.
Wondering what would happen if I leaned in and kissed him good night.
God. What is my malfunction? I just held his girlfriend’s hair back while she puked, for Pete’s sake. I shake my head once to clear it, embarrassed. I raise one cautious hand and wave back.
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day 35
/> Tess takes it easy the next day, predictably, mostly prone in a nest of sleeping bags with a Stephen King book and a bag of pretzels, which is the closest thing to saltines that anybody brought. The rest of us hike until our blisters are bleeding, till it feels like the mountains are having their way with all of us: Patrick has a run-in with some poison sumac. Imogen gets stung by a wasp. My sunburn chafes against my clothes until I’m swearing to anyone who’ll listen that I’m done with outdoor activities forever. “I mean it,” I tell Imogen, hobbling along back down the mountain, hair falling out of its messy bun. “As soon as we get home I’m going to set up shop in a hermetically sealed bubble and never come out again.”
“Sounds like a great plan!” Julia calls brightly, coming up behind us. Imogen and I look at each other wide-eyed for a moment before bursting into wild, slaphappy giggles.
“That Julia,” I gasp, practically doubled over with laughter. It’s been a long time since Imogen and I cracked up like this, since before I left, definitely. I don’t know if the two of us are just exhausted or what, but it almost makes the burn worth it. “You can always count on her.”
Tess has perked up enough by the time we get back that she helps Patrick grill burgers and hot dogs over the campfire, lining the buns up along the table in neat, symmetrical rows. “Feel better?” I ask when I come over to grab a pair for me and Gabe, along with one of the knock-you-naked brownies Imogen made. Tess nods quickly, tilting her head to accept a kiss on the cheek from Patrick that might or might not be for my benefit, it’s impossible to tell.
“Good,” I say brightly, paper plate in each hand, feeling my face do a weird thing and willing it not to. You’re welcome, I think nastily. “I’m glad.”
I tell myself there’s nothing to feel strange about all of a sudden, that I’m cranky and uncomfortable because of my sunburn and sleeping on the ground for a third night in a row. But later on I’m coming back from the campground bathroom holding my toothbrush in one hand and rubbing my opposite arm with the other—it’s chilly this high in the mountains, goose bumps blooming up and down my limbs—when I spy Patrick holding the flap of the tent open for Tess so she can climb on in ahead of him. I can’t hear what he says to her, but I hear her full-bodied laugh in response, muffled as Patrick zips the door shut. It’s the same tent Chuck set up for us behind the farmhouse summer after summer when we were kids. Inside, I know it smells like mothballs and dirt.
I breathe in sharply, hit all at once with this weird, strong instinct to scream out Stop, like seeing someone about to step in front of an oncoming car or put their hand down on a hot burner. Like I’m trying to stave off something awful and disastrous—only I’m the one about to get hurt.
God. I actually shake my head as I turn purposefully back toward the tent I’m sharing with Gabe. I don’t know how to make myself quit feeling like this. Of course I knew the two of them were sharing a tent, of course the various implications of that fact had occurred to me—and, I guess, so had the fact that those various implications were irrelevant as long as Tess was puking her guts out.
Gabe reaches for me almost as soon as I’m inside, one hand in mine and tugging me down onto the soft pile of our sleeping bags, rucking my practical tank top up over my head. “This is some sunburn, Molly Barlow,” he murmurs, looking at me in the dim moonlight shining in through the vent in the ceiling. He presses his mouth against a red place on my shoulder, another one near my hip where yesterday’s shirt rode up as I slept. “That hurt?”
Tess is thinner than me, I think meanly. She’s probably better-looking with her clothes off than I am, she’s probably—
Stop it.
“Doesn’t hurt,” I promise, closing my eyes and sinking into it a little, Gabe’s hands and his mouth and the now-familiar hum he cranks up in my body. Patrick and I were babies when we started dating, young enough that it didn’t feel like we were in a hurry to do anything, both of us probably shyer than we’d admit even to each other. But we’re older now, we’re at the point where it’s definitely not inconceivable for him and Tess to have moved way faster, for him to be pulling off her T-shirt right now, tugging at the elastic on her underwear and—
“I can’t,” I blurt suddenly, sitting up with such force I pretty much shove Gabe right off me, bolt upright in my half-unzipped sleeping bag with my face flushed sweaty and red. I completely don’t know how to follow it up, how to explain to him that it’s Patrick and Tess one tent over and the two of us in here, and that everything feels connected, too close, terrible, and right this second all I want is for no one to ever touch me again. We’ve done it already, haven’t we? Maybe it shouldn’t be so big of a deal, but it just, it is, I don’t—“I’m sorry,” I try, “I just—”
“Hey, easy,” Gabe says, sitting up and scrubbing his hair out of his face. “You’re okay; we don’t have to do anything. Easy, hey.” He reaches out and laces his fingers through mine, squeezing. “You wanna go for a walk?”
I smile at that, embarrassed and grateful, reaching for my shirt and fussing with the hem for a moment. “Are you, like, perfect or something?” I ask him, shaking my head before pulling the shirt over it. “Is that your superpower?”
“Nah,” Gabe says seriously. “My superpower is X-ray vision.”
I snort. “Oh my God, I take it back.”
Gabe grins. “Come on,” he says, standing up and pulling me to my feet along with him. “Let’s go see some fucking stars.”
I grab some snacks and supplies, and we pick our way across the campground, past parties still going strong and intense late-night conversations happening around dying fires. I shiver as the night air hits my sunburned skin. Gabe’s hand is warm around mine, though, and by the time we reach the clearing where the concert was last night I’ve pushed Patrick and Tess and whatever they might or might not be doing resolutely out of my mind. This is what’s happening, me and Gabe and these fucking stars above us. This is right where I’m supposed to be.
We find a patch of grass mostly clear of garbage and spread the blanket on the damp ground, leaning back to look up at the sky. We’re far enough from any real civilization that the moon looks like a spotlight—there’s Orion, one of the Dippers, Cassiopeia in her upside-down chair. “This is the part where we talk about what specks we are compared to the universe,” I inform Gabe wryly, but the truth is I’m really, really glad we came out here to look. “Here,” I say, pulling a couple of beers out of my backpack. “To being specks.”
Gabe grins at that, surprised. “Look at you, Girl Scout,” he says, twisting the caps off both of them and handing one back to me. “I love you, you know that? You’re something else.”
I blink at him for a moment, Gabe blinking back at me. Then both of us start to laugh. “You know what I mean,” he says, and I do, I think, sitting out here with the bowl-shaped sky above us. I kiss him hard to show I understand.
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day 36
Back at home there’s another e-mail from the dean in my inbox: Dear Incoming Student, please, for the love of all things holy, hurry up and figure out your life.
Or something like that, at least.
I make a snack of apple and peanut butter, shoot Gabe a text to let him know what a good time I had.
You’re okay, too, for a speck, he texts me back, and I giggle. With Gabe I never feel like a walking, talking letdown. With Gabe I just feel like me.
So why can’t I stop thinking about his brother?
I finish my apple and take Oscar out into the yard for a while, pushing the image of Patrick and Tess disappearing into the tent out of my mind and telling myself I’m being melancholy and dumb. I make a list of projects to tackle when I head back to work in the morning. Finally, I dig my phone out of my pocket.
How’s the rash? I text Patrick, just teasing.
He doesn’t text back.
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day 37
He does the next morning, though: itchy, he reports, just the one word and no punctuation. A couple of minutes later, though: how’s the burn?
I grin down at my phone, feeling silly and glad. Burn-y, I reply.
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day 38
My mom’s got an aloe plant, he texts while I’m filing invoices in Penn’s office. Could come by and get some if you still look like a lobster.
I don’t, not really; the worst of the burn’s faded, is beginning to peel away like so many layers of snakeskin, like I’m becoming something entirely new. All I can do is deal with the grossness and wait for whatever’s underneath.
Still: will do, I text him back, no hesitation. When’s good?
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day 39
I don’t know what it means that Patrick tells me to come over at a time I know Gabe’s working at the pizza shop—just that he doesn’t want anything to do with his brother, maybe, or possibly nothing at all.
“Hey,” he says, letting me in the feeble side door—it felt strange to knock on the frame and then wait for him, how I used to barge right in and sneak bites of whatever Chuck was making in the kitchen, usually something with lentils or whole-wheat flour. Patrick’s barefoot in his shredded old jeans. His hair’s grown out a little since he’s been back in Star Lake and he looks a bit more like I remember, some of those sharp edges filed off. “Come on in.”