For a moment, Patrick doesn’t answer, and it’s like I can’t backpedal fast enough. “I mean, I get that that’s probably colossally weird,” I say. “On top of which you’re probably busy with Tess and the shop and stuff, I just . . .” I trail off, a little helpless. “I don’t know.”
For a minute, Patrick just looks at me, wordless. I feel like he can see the tissue underneath my skin. “I don’t know, either,” he says finally. “But, yeah, let’s try.”
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
day 44
Sasha at the front desk has her break at three-thirty, so I offer to cover, straightening my ponytail and my Star Lake Lodge name tag both. I check in a family with three triplet girls, all blonde and bespectacled, and a couple of paramedics from the Berkshires who wanted to try a different mountain range for variety’s sake. Their two redheaded toddlers climb on the leather couches, all dimpled arms and legs.
The couple who comes in behind them is older, a guy in khaki shirts and a sun-leathered woman in a brightly colored parrot T-shirt, a plastic tote bag with hula girls, and lime-green flip flops on her feet. “Welcome to the Lodge,” I say as she hands over her credit card.
The woman ducks her yellow-gray head forward conspiratorially, like we’re old friends. “Maybe you can tell me,” she says, voice lowered, just-between-us-girls. “Does Diana Barlow really live in this town?”
Well.
“She does,” I confirm, trying to keep my face neutral. I fish their keys out of the cubby behind the desk. “You a fan?”
“Oh, the biggest,” the woman assures me. “Mostly her early stuff, but have you read Driftwood? I cried for two days. And you know it’s about the daughter.” When I turn back around she’s leaning almost all the way over the desk as if she thinks my mother is possibly crouched back here, hiding. She shakes her head. “It’s heartbreaking stuff.”
“Terrible,” I agree, my whole body heating up like a torch held to copper, like if you looked at me from above I might seem to glow. This is the worst part, I remind myself, working to keep my face impassive. Except for all the other worst parts. “So sad.”
The woman takes her room keys and her bloated-looking husband and heads upstairs, finally, leaving me alone in the lobby with no one to blame but myself. I hold one palm to my flaming cheek, unpin my name tag with the other. Molly, it reads in big block letters, innocuous, anonymous enough that the woman with the parrot shirt probably didn’t even think to look.
That’s when I turn and see Tess.
“Don’t,” I say, holding my hand up. She’s hovering in the doorway that leads to the office in her flip-flops. I have no idea how long she’s been there, but from the look on her face I can tell it’s been long enough. “It’s fine.”
“I wasn’t going to say a word,” Tess says, and something in her voice telegraphs she’s serious, that she probably would have brought that particular exchange to her grave. She nods at Sasha, who’s crossing the lobby to reclaim her post. “Was gonna take my break, though. You wanna come for a walk?”
I open my mouth the refuse her, then close it again. “I—sure.”
We wander out onto the back porch, down the crooked wooden steps to the pool level. It’s overcast today, just a couple of little kids gallantly dog paddling their way across the shallow end, teeth chattering and lips tinted purple. “We used to be just like that,” Tess says, gesturing with her chin. “Me and my brother. We’d have swum in February, if we could.”
That makes me smile. She’s never mentioned her brother before. “Is he older or younger?”
“Older,” Tess tells me. “He’s at NYU, so I’ll get to see him a little bit in the fall. I’m going to Barnard, so it’s pretty close.”
“That’s cool.” We slip our shoes off and sit down on the concrete edge of the pool, dangle our feel into the chilly water.
“Uh-huh,” Tess says, reaching down to skim a leaf off the surface of the pool. “I had to promise my mom I wouldn’t stop shaving my armpits once I got there, but I don’t know, their econ program seems interesting enough. We’ll see, I guess.”
I think of my e-mail from the dean about declaring a major, still flagged in my inbox and awaiting a response. “How is that a thing you knew you wanted to do?”
Tess shrugs. “I’m good at math,” she says. “I’ve always been good at math; I’ve been doing my parents’ bills since I was eleven. And I like international stuff—like, how what happens in one country money-wise affects what happens in another country.” She grins. “I get that that’s, like, really boring to most people, don’t worry.”
“No, it’s not at all. I’m super impressed.” I shake my head a bit and pick at a place where the caulk is peeling on the side of the pool, making a mental note to tell the maintenance guys about it. Tess leans back on her palms, turning her face up like she’s trying to wring sunshine out of the clouds. “Do you think you and Patrick will stay together?” I ask, then immediately feel awkward about it—feeling like a creep and not even knowing why I’m asking, exactly. “Sorry.” I shake my head. “That’s totally weird and over the line.”
Tess shakes her head. “No, it’s fine; I’d be curious, too. I think so, yeah. We’ve talked about it a little. He’s not sure where he’ll be, but it’s not so far from there to here.” She wrinkles her nose a bit. “Did you guys used to talk about going to college together?” she asks me. “As long as we’re, you know, being over the line?”
That makes me smile—it is weird, no question, but in some strange kind of way I appreciate it. “Yeah,” I tell her, “we did.”
Tess nods at that, seemingly unbothered. “Sun’s coming out” is all she says.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
day 45
Patrick and my first act as People Who Are Trying to Hang Out is to meet for the world’s most awkward run around the lake, a couple of boats bobbing along in the current and a woodpecker knocking around in the trees. On one hand, we don’t actually have to talk very much, so that’s helpful. On the other, while the running itself isn’t the painfest it was when I first got back from Bristol, trying to keep pace with him makes me realize how easy I’ve been taking it.
“You good?” Patrick asks, not looking at me.
“I’m good,” I say, eyes straight ahead.
It didn’t used to be this uncomfortable—nothing about being with Patrick used to be uncomfortable, but running around in particular was part of our everyday: racing to the tree line at the edge of the farm and back, suicides up and down the bleachers at the high school on weekends. Sometimes Patrick won, and sometimes I did. As far as I know neither one of us ever threw a race.
Now I ignore the burn in my leg muscles and keep going. I feel hyperconscious of how soft and out of shape I probably still look in my leggings and tank top, like there’s a layer of pudding under my clothes. I wonder if he’s been running every day since he got back, too, both of us orbiting circles around each other all over town. The idea makes me lonely and sad. Then again, he’s got Tess, doesn’t he? Tess, who I drove home from work last night; Tess, who put her flip-flops up on my dashboard and sang along in the world’s most off-key, unselfconscious voice to the Miley Cyrus song on the radio.
Tess, who I definitely didn’t tell about this little outing.
“Way to be,” Patrick says when we’re finished, throwing me a high five to say good-bye like he’s congratulating me on something, even though it doesn’t feel like we’ve accomplished anything at all. “We should do it again.”
I shake my head in wonder as I watch him jog away from me, back in the direction of the farmhouse. The sun feels prickly and hot at the back of my neck.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCo
llins Publishers
..................................................................
day 46
“You should pay them,” I argue after dinner the next evening, sprawled on the grass in my mom’s damp backyard. A couple of fireflies flicker lazily in the pine trees. “They’re doing a job, they should get paid.”
“They’re college athletes!” Gabe says stubbornly. “You get a scholarship, that’s the compensation. If you don’t go to class and use it, that’s—”
“You can’t go to class and use it!” I fire back. I like this, arguing with him good-naturedly. Patrick and I agreed on everything . . . until the moment we emphatically didn’t. “You’ve got practice, like, eighty hours a week; the coaches actually tell you not to study and focus on their games.”
Gabe makes a face. “I get paid eight bucks an hour to swipe cards at the student center at school,” he tells me, warm ankle nudging against mine. “You want to pay them eight bucks an hour?”
“Maybe!” I say, laughing. “Better than not getting paid at all.”
“Uh-huh.” Gabe grins at that, ducking his face close to mine in the darkness. “This is a stupid argument,” he decides, bumping our noses together. “Let’s make out instead.”
“You wish,” I tell him, climbing up onto my knees so I can reach over him and grab the bag of gummy worms he brought me—the movement ignites a searing ache in both thighs, though, and I groan a little bit.
“Easy, tiger,” Gabe says, reaching for the bag himself and handing it over. “Been running a lot, huh?”
“I—yeah.” With your brother, I almost tell him—could tell him, could just slip it in right now and it wouldn’t have to be weird, it could be normal, like I have nothing to hide there at all.
I don’t have anything to hide.
Do I?
“Could rub,” Gabe offers now, pulling my calves into his lap and squeezing. I smirk at him in the blue twilight and keep quiet, tilt my head back and enjoy the view.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
day 47
I’m supposed to go shopping for dorm stuff with Imogen in the morning—she has a very specific type of shower caddy in mind—but Patrick texts me to run again, so I ask her if we can reschedule for the afternoon and lace up my ancient sneakers even though the sky above the lake is purple-gray and heavy-looking, threatening a biblical kind of rain. Sure enough, we’re only a quarter mile in when it starts to pour.
I’m ready to turn back but Patrick turns and raises his eyebrows like a challenge: “Wanna keep going?” he asks, and I nod.
The rain falls cold and fast and steady. We run. Water soaks my tank top, trickles into my socks; it flicks off my eyelashes and skids in rivulets down my spine. Suddenly, I’m taken down in a giant mud-slick, legs sliding right out from underneath me as I land on my ass and hard. For a second, I just sit there, shocked.
“You okay?” Patrick calls, stopping two strides ahead and tracking back to stand beside me, New Balances making deep prints in the muck. He reaches out to pull me to my feet.
“I—” I stare at his hand like it’s a foreign object, something from another planet entirely. The night on my front lawn not withstanding, he’s barely touched me at all since I’ve been back.
“I got it,” I tell him, conducting a quick inventory of my arms and legs and deciding it’s just my pride that’s broken. He’s seen me wipe out a million times before, but this feels different. “I’m fine. I’m just slow and fat now, these things happen.”
“You’re what?” Patrick’s eyes are the same color as the heavy gray sky. “Are you crazy?”
“Oh God, please don’t.” I scramble to my feet and slip again like something out of effing Laurel and Hardy, the black-and-white movies Chuck used to lose his shit laughing over when we were little kids. I’m about to do something and I honestly don’t know if it’s going to be laugh or cry. God, I am so, so tired. “I wasn’t fishing. I don’t need you to, like, give me a sad compliment or whatever. I’m just saying, I’m sitting in this mud puddle because I’m fat and slow now. In case it’s somehow escaped your attention.”
Patrick shakes his head, annoyed. “You’re sitting in the mud puddle because you won’t take my hand, Mols.”
“I mean, fine,” I say, susceptible to logic and willing to concede that particular point, if not the larger one. “But—”
“And, like, clearly you’re beautiful, so I don’t know what the hell you’re—”
“Patrick.” I blurt his name before I can stop myself, stupid and unthinking—he shuts up right away, and it feels like a lighter that’s almost out of juice catching just for a second, that spark that’s there and gone.
“Take my damn hand, will you?” Patrick asks quietly. “Please.”
I take it.
“Thanks,” I tell him, shocked and hopeful. Patrick nods and doesn’t say a thing. It’s still pouring as we take off again, a cautious jog that builds to something faster: just me and him and sound of the rain on the blacktop, running through the end of the world.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
day 48
Gabe’s still in the shower when I come by to pick him up for dinner and Julia’s prowling around the downstairs of the house like a hungry tiger at the Catskill Game Farm, so I creep outside to the back of the farmhouse and sit on in a lawn chair to wait. Connie’s roses are lush and sprawling in the summer heat, their heavy heads fat and drooping like Penn’s sleepy kids at the end of the day. The vegetable garden is bright with still-green tomatoes, slowly ripening summer squash.
I squint at the barn at the far edge of the property, its peeling paint and crooked doorways. The roof looks like it’s close to caving in. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to look at the sloping roof and not remember the first time Patrick kissed me, bundled up in heavy-duty sleeping bags in the loft that’s never been used for anything but storage and sleepovers. It was fall, too cold to be camping, but that was right after Chuck died and nobody was keeping much of an eye on Patrick to begin with: Gabe ran all over Star Lake with every girl in the sophomore class, it seemed like, and Julia had one disciplinary notice sent home after another. Patrick was quiet, though, flying under the radar.
Patrick had me.
It was October, the smell of things decaying, being absorbed back into the earth. The wind snuck underneath the floorboards, through the hairline seams in the walls—we weren’t talking, both of us paging through Chuck’s old National Geographics like a couple of nerds, but we were pressed together without even meaning to be, the instinct to get close to wherever it’s warm. I could feel his ribs move in and out as he breathed.
“Listen to this,” I said distractedly, the bag of Red Vines crinkling as I rolled over to face him—it was an article about a tortoise called Lonesome George, the very last one of his species. When I looked up at Patrick, Patrick was already looking at me.
Emily Green would have been surprised by what happened next, probably. She would have been prettily baffled, would have never seen this coming, but the truth is of course I had: for weeks and months and maybe years, like if you’d put your ear to the ground on the day that Patrick and I met you would have been able to hear this heading toward us, a rumble from miles and miles away. I’d listened. I’d been paying attention. And when his mouth pressed against mine I wasn’t shocked.
It wasn’t a long kiss; it wasn’t a make-out; just barely a press like, there you are. There you are, I thought, looking at him in the glow of the cage light hanging on the wall, the camping lantern that had been his dad’s along with the magazines.
There you are.
“Hey,” Gabe says now, side door clattering shut behind him as he crosses the patio in shorts and a button-down. He
smells like soap and water, clean and new, and just like that all my memories of Patrick evaporating like steam off a damp hot sidewalk. That was then, I remind myself. This is now. “Sorry about that. I just had the craziest phone call.”
“Dial a date?” I ask cheerfully.
“Oh, you’re a comedian.” Gabe offers one big hand to pull me to my feet. “No, so Notre Dame does this program with a bunch of different hospitals, right? Like a semester abroad, I guess, but for premed people and you change bedpans or whatever instead of drinking your face off in Prague. Anyway, I applied in the spring and they wait-listed me, but I guess some kid just dropped out, and there’s a spot open at MGH.”
I blink at him as I reach for the handle on the passenger side of Volvo, baked warm by an afternoon in the sun. “MGH?” I ask, trying to suss out the acronym. “Is that . . . ?”
“Massachusetts General Hospital, yeah,” Gabe says, raising his eyebrows across the roof. “In Boston.”
“Really?” I ask, taken aback—but not, I realize, necessarily in a bad way. “You could be in Boston in the fall?”
“Oh, you’re freaking out now,” Gabe says, laughing as he turns the key in the ignition. “You’re all, shit, I was planning to use this kid for his body all summer and then never talk to him again, what the hell am I gonna do now?”
That makes me laugh, too. “I would love to have you changing bedpans in my new home city. Boston bedpans, I hear, are the best in the land.”
“That’s what you hear, huh?” Gabe’s still grinning. “It’s not definite or anything yet. I gotta drive up there in a couple of days, have the interview. I guess it’s between me and one other guy.”
I nod and let myself picture it for a minute—Gabe and me walking through Boston Common, hanging out and listening to the buskers at Faneuil Hall. It’s not what I’d pictured when I sent in my acceptance last April. But I like the way it feels. “You’ll get it,” I decide, smiling out the windshield. “You’ll see.”