I start, an electrical shock jolting through me. Did he just say—? “Because—” I break off, try again. Suddenly, his face is so, so close. “Because—”
That’s when Patrick kisses me.
It’s clumsy at first, his face butting at mine so hard and unexpected he almost knocks me backward. I taste blood and can’t tell if it’s his or it’s mine. It used to be that Patrick was kind of shy when he kissed me, all bashful and hesitant like he was scared he was going to break me if pushed even a hair too hard.
This . . . does not feel like that.
This feels like a fire in the forest, like one of those carnival rides where the floor drops out and centrifugal force is the only thing keeping you stuck to the wall. Patrick’s hands are everywhere at once. I wind my arms around his neck to keep steady, heart slamming with a shocking violence against my rib cage and his sharp teeth biting at the edges of my tongue. His smell is the only thing that’s the same. I fist my hands in his shirt and lean into him, standing on my tiptoes to get as close up into his space as I can manage. I’d climb inside him if I could, set up house in there, walk around for the rest of the summer. Walk around for the rest of my life.
And then I remember Gabe.
“Stop,” I say before I realize I’m going to do it, heart pounding in a different way altogether, pulling back all at once. “I just,” I say, holding my hands up in a panicky flutter. “I can’t. Patrick. I can’t. Not when—I can’t do this again, please.”
Patrick looks completely baffled for a moment. Then his eyes narrow. “Because of my brother?” he demands, backing off fast enough that it feels like he’s shot me, a ricochet and shatter in my bones. I flinch. “Are you serious right now?”
“Patrick, please,” I start, but I can feel him receding, feel that I’ve ruined this all over again, the whole world immolating in front of my eyes. The panic is hot and awful and immediate. I grab his arm before he can turn away.
“Wait,” I demand, bossy and urgent. I press my traitorous mouth to his one more time. Patrick makes a sound, a hum or a growl. Kisses back until I can’t imagine anything but this.
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day 54
I wake up before sunrise with a slamming headache, a feeling like my heart’s been juiced:
What did I do what did I do what did I do?
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day 55
I stand in the shower for an hour and fifteen minutes, the water as hot as I can possibly stand it. I want to burn off the top layer of my skin.
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day 56
Elizabeth and Michaela both burst into giggles when I pass them in the employee hallway on my way into work the next morning, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when I get to my locker and find a Post-it with a drawing of a stick-figure girl I’m assuming is me giving blow jobs to a gaggle of stick-figure guys. Right away, I feel that tightness in my face.
It’s the same garden-variety nastiness they’ve been flinging my way all summer, I remind myself—there’s no way they could possibly know what happened with me and Patrick—but still I bolt upstairs and hide in the office for as long as my shift lasts, realphabetizing the files in Penn’s cabinets and watching The Blue Planet on the computer. Every time I hear someone coming down the hallway, I flinch.
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day 57
I’m worried I’m going to run into Patrick if I go my usual route down by the lakefront, so instead I do a couple of laps around the track at the high school, everything closed up tight and empty for the summer like something out of the zombie apocalypse. It’s strange to be back here, this place I didn’t graduate from, where everything finished up without me while I hid out on the other side of the country.
Still, the track is warm and solid under my feet, and my legs feel strong and easy: My mind rests calm and quiet and blank. I’m jogging back up through the parking lot when I stop so fast I almost trip.
There’s Julia, parked in the Donnelly Bronco, her raven hair up in a knot on top of her head: She’s got her hands on either side of Elizabeth Reese’s pretty, angular face, their mouths pressed together like there’s literally nobody else in the world.
I stare for a minute. I blink. It feels like the twist at the end of one of my mom’s books or that movie where it turns out the guy was dead the whole time, a million throwaway half clues clicking together all at once: how Julia and Elizabeth are always together, just like Patrick and I used to be. How surprised Gabe looked at the beginning of the summer when I asked him if he and Elizabeth were dating. It occurs to me, not for the first time, that you can never really know what anybody’s got hidden in the back of her secret heart.
I mean to escape before anyone sees me: I wonder who, if anyone, knows. I want to slip away and leave her to it, to whatever she’s figuring out or already understands, but I’m too slow and too stupid just like always, and a second later she pulls back and blinks alert.
Fuck. I see Julia’s mouth move more than I hear it; there’s my answer, then, about who knows or might not. I feel myself blush, caught staring like a creep. I want to promise her I won’t tell anyone—that I understand things being private, and I’m not the kind of girl who would blab. I never get the chance, though, because Julia’s throwing the truck into drive and peeling off toward the exit, her cold gaze locked on mine.
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day 58
The doorbell rings twice and insistent as I’m changing the water in Oscar’s doggie bowl. I’m thinking it’s Alex coming to let me know he’s here to fix the loose shutter my mom’s been complaining about but there’s Julia standing on the other side of the screen door, tank top and a floaty scarf and dark hair in a complicated set of braids pinned on top of her head, like Heidi.
I stand there. I gape at her. She’s got her jaw set, hands clenched into tight little fists at her sides: She might as well have them raised like an old-fashioned boxer—Put ’em up.
“I’m not going to say anything,” I tell her, not bothering to open the door and let her in here. The last thing in the world I have the energy for is a fight. “If that’s why you came.”
“I—” For a second Julia looks totally confused, like she showed up to a war with tanks and cannons and found me watching soap operas and filing my nails. “You’re not?”
“No,” I say immediately, feeling a surge of irritation—like that was ever even a question. She knows me. She knows I’m not the kind of person who’d go yelling all over creation about something that’s none of my business to begin with, especially something as loaded as this is. I thought I knew her, too, once upon a time. “I’m not.”
Julia blinks, still with that startled expression on her face like I’ve thrown her off entirely. She thinks so little of me. “Okay,” she says after a moment. “Thank you. Elizabeth told me about the Post-it the other day; she says she’s sorry.” Then: “Nobody else knows about us except Gabe.”
She stays still on the porch for a moment, looking at me through the old screen door. I remember how much pleasure she’s taken in ripping me to ribbons for the better part of the last year and a half. I remember Chuck strapping her into a life jacket on the Sally Forth. “You know your mom wouldn’t care, right?” I say, not entirely sure why I’m sticking my nose in. Maybe because her family was m
y family, once upon a time. “I mean. Not that I’m a person you want to take advice from, probably. But she’d be happy that you were happy, that’s all. Patrick, too.”
Julia crosses her arms, shifts her weight a bit. Her nail polish is a screaming neon red. “I know that,” she says, sounding a little defensive. “Of course Patrick wouldn’t care that me and Elizabeth are—whatever. He just doesn’t like her. He thinks she’s vapid, and that I’m vapid for hanging out with her, and I just—you know how Patrick is.”
That surprises me—I do; of course, I do. I know how talking to Patrick requires a certain kind of courage, how it can make you feel stubborn and shy. That’s what got me where I am in the first place after all. It was so much easier to tell a secret to Gabe.
I want to explain that to Julia all of a sudden, want to tell her how everything happened to begin with, but I know it’s a lost cause before I even open my mouth. “Yeah” is all I tell her. “I know how Patrick is.” Then, as a kind of offering: “Elizabeth’s pretty.”
“Oh, God, enough.” Julia rolls her eyes at me, shaking her head. “We’re not friends anymore, okay? You don’t have to, like, try and bond with me over liking girls. I came here to make sure your freaking mom wasn’t going to write a book about the lesbian down the road, that’s all. We good?”
Julia Donnelly, ladies and gentlemen. I don’t know why I expected anything else.
“Yeah,” I promise, shaking my head a little. It’s all I can do not to grin. “We’re good.”
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day 59
I’ve been pretty much entirely off the grid since Crow Bar—since Patrick—hiding in the office at work to avoid running into Tess, and coming straight home at night to work my way through documentaries about girl boxers and the Louisiana Purchase. how’re your lady parts??? Imogen inquires on a group message, and Tess chimes in with an emoji face that’s got two Xs for eyes: Did you die of cramps?
The fact that I’ve got friends who care enough to check in on my imaginary period makes me hate myself even more than I already do, both for the lie and for what happened after I told it. Julia’s right: I don’t deserve anything good.
I’m alive, I text them back, the only truth I seem to be able to manage, then turn my phone off and hide from the world for one more day.
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day 60
Gabe stopped off to see some school friends in Rhode Island on the way back from Boston; he gets back in the morning and texts to say he’s going to come meet me at work at the end of the day. I spend my entire shift dreading it, guilt and shame eating at my insides like somehow I swallowed a mouthful of the chlorine we use at the pool. Thoughts tumble around in my brain, wild and overheated like clothes in a dryer—by the time I punch my time card and pull my purse out of my locker, I feel like I’m legit about to be sick.
Then, though—
Then I see Gabe.
He’s standing outside in the parking lot, all tan summer skin and a soft blue T-shirt, car keys dangling lazily from one hand. “Hey, Molly Barlow,” he says, grinning across the blacktop slow and easy.
I launch myself right into his arms.
It’s insane, the effect Gabe has on me—like a storm at sea clearing, like a hurricane calming down. The churning in my stomach disappears the moment he catches me and all of a sudden everything seems so enormously obvious. He seems so enormously right. There’s nothing tortured or painful about being with him. Everything about him is easy and good.
“Hey, you,” Gabe says, laughing, lifting me off my feet a little. His arms feel like a life preserver, feel safe. “Missed me, huh?”
“Yeah.” I clamp my hands over his ears and stamp a kiss on his mouth, decisive. “How’d it go?”
“It went okay, I think,” Gabe says, setting me down gently and lacing his fingers through mine. “Actually, I think it went really, really well.”
“It did?” That makes me smile. “Think you’re gonna get it?”
Gabe shrugs, grinning mischievously. “We’ll see.”
“We will,” I agree. I can picture it now, just like I could before he left but somehow forgot while he was away from me—the two of us sitting in coffee shops or huddled in dark Harvard bars, riding the T over the Charles River with the city lights winking in the distance. What was I trying to do with Patrick the other night, prove that I didn’t deserve this?
I tilt my face up to Gabe’s, his hair gleaming golden in the late afternoon sunlight. “I’m really glad you’re back,” I say, and grin.
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day 61
The florist we use for the lobby screws up and sends two dozen extra gladiolas, which are Connie’s favorite, so I bundle them up in paper towels and bring them by the Donnellys’ after work. I’ve been thinking about her, about all of them, the secrets they keep from one another. They used to feel like such a solid unit of measure, the ideal family. They used to make me feel so safe.
“My God, Molly,” Connie says when she answers the door in her mom jeans and her work shirt, the baffled smile turning her face young and pretty. “What are these for?”
I shrug, feeling shy and awkward—I purposely picked a time I was pretty sure none of her offspring would be around, but I feel caught out and exposed anyway, like possibly this was a giant overstep. Back when Driftwood first came out and everything unspooled around me like somebody dropping a ball of yarn, I used to imagine Connie calling or coming to my house to take me out for coffee and waffles with whipped cream, to dispense some kind of sage motherly advice. She didn’t, of course—close as we were I was never actually a blood daughter, and it was her real kids that I’d screwed with. I don’t even know my own mom’s favorite flower, I realize now.
“Oh, Molly,” Connie says, sounding pleased and resigned in equal measure. The flowers are a bright, screaming pink. “You shouldn’t have.”
“I know,” I say quietly, and we both know I’m not talking about the flowers. I think of the tourist from the Lodge: It’s heartbreaking stuff. “But I did.”
“You did, didn’t you?” Connie agrees, looking at me with something like kindness. “Thank you.”
I’m about to say good-bye and go when Julia appears in the doorway behind her in denim shorts and a plaid button-down, wearing her glasses, which she never does outside the house. “Who is it?” she asks. Then she sees me. “Oh. Hi.”
“I was just going,” I assure her, taking a step back on the crumbling stoop. “I just—” I motion to the flowers. “Have a good night.”
Julia nods but doesn’t make any move out of the doorway, looking at me for a long moment like she’s considering something. I brace myself, a thousand unpleasant possibilities cycling through my brain.
“You should stay for dinner,” she announces.
For a moment just I blink at her, baffled. I hallucinated, I must have. “I should?”
“Sure,” she says, turning around and heading toward the kitchen, the long sharp column of her spine. “The boys’ll be home soon; we’re having tacos. Right, Mom?”
Connie glances from Julia to me and back again, uncertain—wondering, probably, if this is some kind of elaborate plan Julia’s got to murder me and hide the body in the barn under some old camping gear. “Right,” she says eventually, stepping back with her armful of flowers. “Come on in, Molly.”
Which is how I wind up eating tacos at the long farm table in the Donnellys’ dining room like somehow I’m thirteen again, only this time it’s Gabe sitting beside me on the bench. He grinned a surprised, tickled grin when he came in through the back
door and found me chopping onions with his sister, Rubber Soul on Connie’s bulky, old iPod docked on the counter. “Sneak attack, huh?” he asked, yanking me back against him by my belt loops and kissing the base of my neck when nobody was looking. “Glad you’re here.”
Patrick ambled in a few minutes later, Julia setting the table and Gabe gone into his bedroom to change. Patrick stopped for a moment in the doorway and stared at me like possibly he’d never laid eyes on me before, like I was strange and potentially dangerous. I hadn’t seen him since our messy, confusing middle-of-the-night kiss in the doorway.
“Hey,” I said, eyes on his, steady.
“Hey,” Patrick said to me, then turned around and walked away.
“Any word from Mass General?” Connie asks Gabe now, spooning some black beans into her taco. All the Donnellys fix them the same way, with a soft shell wrapped around the hard one to keep the whole affair from falling apart once you bite into it. It’s an old trick of Chuck’s he taught us all when we were small.
Gabe shakes his head and swallows. “Not yet,” he says. “They said it could be a couple weeks; I think the other kid was interviewing after me.”
My eyes cut across the table at Patrick, the sleeves of his hoodie shoved to his elbows and his freckly forearms, his serious face. He’s looking at his taco, not at me. He must know what it’ll mean, if Gabe spends this fall in Boston.