Right now he seems totally unbothered, though; when he lifts his head and gazes around the table his eyes are clear. “Boston seems like your kind of place,” he tells his brother blandly, then reaches for a serving spoon and refills his plate.
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day 62
Penn wants me to train a couple of new front desk girls on the database software, so I’m clicking around in her office while she looks over my shoulder periodically, making sure there’s nothing I don’t understand well enough to explain. “Do we send thank-you cards?” I ask, scrolling through the records and snapping off the end of my Red Vine. Desi is perched quietly on my knee, her dark head bent over a Little Mermaid coloring page. “Or, like, could we? At the end of the summer, maybe, a postcard thanking people for staying and inviting them to come back—or, like, a coupon or a discount code or something for in the fall when it’s slow?”
Penn’s eyebrows shoot up, a slow grin spreading over her smooth brown face. “Look at you with your thinking cap on,” she says, nodding. “Wanna cost it out?”
“Sure,” I say, smiling back at her enthusiasm, shifting Desi to my opposite knee. She’s been sticking pretty close lately, hooking her small fingers in my back pocket as I walk the hallways in the morning and buckling herself into the backseat of my car when Penn sends me into town to run errands. I like her spry, quiet company. I like the skinny-but-solid weight of her little-kid body in my lap. “I’ll get it to you tomorrow.”
“Sounds good. You’re feeling better, then?” she asks, leaning against the edge of the desk and studying me. “That didn’t get past me, all that weirdness with you last week.”
“I—I’m sorry,” I say, embarrassed. “It was personal stuff; I was trying to keep it separate. Were there things that didn’t get done?”
Penn shakes her head. “You were fine. You just seemed a little off, was all. Like you didn’t want to be spending a whole lot of time outside this office.” She cocks her head to the side, eyes narrowing a little bit. “Those two girls who work in the dining room, Michaela and what’s her face, the other one. They giving you a hard time?”
I shake my head. Actually, the truth is that since Elizabeth’s little drawing they’ve pretty much laid off lately, leaving me mostly to my own devices with only the occasional nasty look to deflect. There’s no way I can tell Penn that I actually spent all of last week dodging Tess. “It’s fine,” I promise. “It’s all resolved now.”
“Okay.” Penn nods, brushing her hands off like they might have some dirt on them, case closed, then. “Good. You wanna go run by the kitchen, make sure the guys all got their breaks?”
“Sure thing. What do you say, Des?” I ask her, easing her off my lap and onto the carpet. “You wanna go for a walk?” Desi hops up piggyback, and we head out into the lobby. When we round the corner there’s Tess in her red lifeguard bathing suit and a pair of mesh shorts, whistle hooked on a long nylon cord she’s spinning around two fingers. “Oh, hey, there you are,” she says, “I was looking for you this morning. Hi, Desi.” She grins at the forty pounds of kid peering over my shoulder curiously. Then, to me: “I have to tell you something, and I feel stupid about it. Or, like, I’m actually really happy about it? But I feel stupid.”
“Okay . . .” I say uncertainly, boosting Des up a bit higher on my shoulders. She’s slipping. “What’s up?”
“Patrick and I kind of got back together last night.”
“Ow!” I flinch as Desi catches a hunk of my hair in the elastic of her shiny plastic bracelet, yanking hard. “Easy, kid.” I set her down while we get untangled, eyes watering at the sting in my scalp, though in truth I’m grateful for the distraction and the half beat it gives me to rearrange my face into something more appropriate than my gut reaction.
Back together.
Patrick and Tess.
“Sorry,” I say, standing upright again; Desi scampers across the lobby after Virgo, the Lodge’s cranky orange cat. Tess is looking at me expectantly. “That’s . . . great!” I manage. I think of how strange it seemed that Patrick seem so unbothered about Gabe going to Boston—about Gabe and me—at dinner last night. I guess it wasn’t actually strange at all.
“I feel like the Girl Who Cried Breakup,” Tess explains, shaking her head a little. “Or a traitor to the sisterhood or something.”
“What sisterhood is that?” I ask, trying to sound jokey and cool about it. “The International League of Patrick’s Ex-Girlfriends?”
“Exactly.” Tess smiles. “I made him suffer, for what it’s worth. But he showed up and said all this amazing stuff about, like, the future, and I just . . . I don’t know. It felt good, you know? It felt right.”
I twist my face into a smile I hope looks genuine. Because this is a good thing, isn’t it? What happened with me and Patrick while he and Tess were broken up was an aberration, the worst kind of self-sabotage, and I want to put it behind me forever. Here’s solid, unequivocal proof that Patrick does, too. I made my choice, and so did Patrick. “I do.”
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day 63
It’s Imogen’s birthday, so we wolf down a truckload of pizza at Donnellys’ and then head for the woods beside the lake, a cooler of watery Bud Light hidden under a blanket in Gabe’s station wagon and Tess’s iPod sitting in a red plastic Solo cup to amplify the sound. Handsome Jay made cupcakes, which strikes me as incredibly freaking dear.
It’s a pretty big crowd, us and Jake and Annie and a bunch of Imogen’s French Roast girlfriends; Julia and Elizabeth were hanging out at the pizza place and deigned to tag along for the ride. “I like those jeans,” Julia tells me, popping the top off her bottle and nodding at my holey Levi’s. Then, off what must be my vaguely stunned expression: “No, Molly, I’m not hitting on you. You can relax.”
“That’s not what—” I begin, shaking my head quickly. Julia only smirks.
I’m headed to the cooler to grab a beer of my own when Patrick grabs my arm like it’s an emergency. “What?” I demand with alarm. He doesn’t answer, just yanks me back behind a giant oak where no one can see us, dark enough that I can barely see him.
“What the hell are you doing?” I open my mouth to say but never get the words out because right away he’s kissing me hard just like the other night on his doorstep, hot and messy, his tongue sliding into my mouth. He tastes like beer and like Patrick. His hands burn like brands through my shirt.
I should push him away. Oh my God, I need to push him away, Tess and Gabe are twenty feet from where we’re standing, on top of which it’s wrong, it’s terrible, but it’s like I’m outside my body watching myself do this horrible fucking thing and I can’t stop, the bark of the oak tree scraping roughly at the skin of my back and the sting as Patrick bites down on my bottom lip. In some enormously messed-up way, the pain almost feels good.
Not almost. It does feel good.
Patrick doesn’t say anything, just keeps on kissing me, nudging his knee between my thighs and rocking a little, all this heat bleeding through his clothes and mine. He reaches up and cups the back of my skull so it doesn’t hit the tree trunk, surprisingly gentle, then tilts my head back and sucks my neck so hard I’m almost sure he’s going to leave a mark. It feels like there’s a series of explosions going off one after another inside my body, like somehow he improvised a chain of dirty bombs along my spine when I wasn’t paying attention.
I don’t know how long it goes on for—it feels like hours, like time’s bent backward on itself, but in reality it’s probably less than a minute or two before Patrick pulls away from me fast and all at once, leaves me gasping. “We gotta get back,” he says quietly, reaching up and wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. “You ready?”
>
“I—” I’m breathing so hard I don’t know if I can stand fully upright. I have no idea what just happened here—what I just let happen here. “Seriously?”
Patrick looks at me for a moment, unreadable. “Come on” is all he says, tipping his head in the direction of the party. I can hear the high, tickled trill of Imogen’s laugh. I close my eyes and count to ten, try to collect myself. When I open them again Patrick’s gone.
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day 64
The house is quiet when I come downstairs for a snack but there’s my mom, watching Tootsie on the couch with our old blue quilt piled over her, a bowl of garlic-Parmesan popcorn in a ceramic bowl in her lap. I haven’t thought about that popcorn in a full year but my mouth waters at the smell of it—it’s a Diana Barlow specialty, one of my favorite foods from when I was little. She used to let me eat it for dinner sometimes, for a treat.
I stall out in the doorway for a minute, watching as Dustin Hoffman wobbles around on-screen in a pair of high heels, not wanting to talk to her but not really wanting to go back upstairs, either. I don’t even think she’s noticed me standing there until she holds the bowl out in my direction.
“You want to come and have some popcorn?” she asks me, sharp eyes still trained on the TV. “Or you want to just stand there and lurk?”
I open my mouth to tell her I was planning on lurking, then shut it again just as fast. Suddenly, I am so, so tired. My mouth feels like it’s burning from the kiss Patrick branded there. My chest aches like my legs after yesterday’s run.
“Popcorn could be good,” I admit finally, shuffling into the living room, the knotty floors creaking noisily under my feet. My mom nods her curly blonde head without comment. I perch on the edge of the slouchy leather couch, trying without a ton of success not to get swallowed by the cushions. When she offers me the blanket, I take that, too. The TV chatters quietly. I breathe.
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day 65
“—and she realizes, as the door locks behind her, that she just left a bag of poop on the kitchen counter.”
Imogen, Gabe, and I stare at Jay for a moment before bursting into laughter so loud and so horrified that people clear across Bunchie’s turn to look at us. “That’s an urban legend!” I protest through my giggles, half-afraid I’m going to snort my milk shake right out my nose. “That’s an urban legend, uh-uh, I’m Googling it. No way.”
“Go ahead and Google it,” Jay says magnanimously, picking the last couple of fries off his plate and nodding. “It happened to my cousin’s friend.”
“Uh-huh.” I reach over, snag one of Imogen’s pickles. “I . . . think you are full of garbage, but that’s also pretty much the best story I’ve ever heard, so . . .”
Gabe slings his arm over the back of the booth, the inside of his elbow brushing my hair. “Molly’s a skeptic,” he says.
“I am a skeptic!” I agree, but in truth at the moment I’m a happy one—if you’d told me at the start of the summer if I could have something like this, a normal night out with my boyfriend and my friends, I would have asked you what exactly you were smoking and where I could get some, too.
Or, okay—not normal, exactly. I try to ignore the sick pit in my stomach every time I remember what happened with Patrick the other night. I think of the slickness of Patrick’s warm skin under my fingertips. I think of the clutch of my legs around his waist. I feel like a horror show, I feel like exactly the kind of nightmare Julia thinks I am—tearing through the Donnellys again and again like some kind of natural disaster, a tornado that changed course halfway through and came back for more.
But other than that? Totally normal.
We’re debating whether or not to get a round of potato skins for dessert when the door to Bunchie’s opens and Patrick and Tess walk in. I feel a quick, violent sandstorm kick up inside my chest—Imogen asked earlier if it was cool to text Tess and tell her where we were and I made a big show of acting cool about it, but after what happened between Patrick and me the other night I told myself there was no way he’d have the balls to tag along.
I must look visibly rattled, because Imogen glances at me quizzically for one sharp second before she recovers, rearranging her features into a wide, friendly smile. “Hi, kids!” she calls gaily. “You just missed Jay’s great story about a girl taking a crap on her one-night stand’s kitchen counter. Here, come sit.”
“She didn’t take the crap on the counter,” Jay protests as we all shift around to make room. Tess slides into the booth next to Imogen, leaving Patrick no place to sit except next to me—once he’s there I’m literally sandwiched in between him and his brother, one warm Donnelly on either side of me and quarters so tight I can hardly move my arms. My whole body goes rigid, some small furry animal that senses a predator. Patrick doesn’t look at me once. I try not to think of his mouth on mine, the rough scrape of tree bark against my naked back. When I reach for my water glass, I’m so flustered I knock a dirty fork right into his lap.
“Sorry,” I mutter as Patrick hands it back to me wordlessly.
“You okay?” Gabe murmurs in my ear. He’s got one warm hand on my knee, reassuring. I nod.
We order the potato skins; Tess tells a story about her new roommate from Barnard, who she just friended on Facebook today. Patrick’s arm is hot and solid against mine. I think of spring of sophomore year again, the end of May and our third argument in as many days—about stupid, inane stuff, whether or not to go to the underclassman formal or what music to listen to while we studied for chem. This time it had started over plans for the weekend and boomeranged right back to Bristol, just like it had every other afternoon this week. I kept waiting for things to right themselves between us, for this bizarre alternate universe where Patrick and I couldn’t be in the same room without arguing to go back to normal.
Also, I was waiting to stop feeling like Arizona might be a really good idea for next fall.
Neither of those things had happened yet.
“Okay.” I took a deep breath and I got up off the bed where I was sitting, pacing past the desk and dresser and back again. I knew every last corner of this room: the warped closet door that never quite closed correctly, the stain on the rug from where we’d ground in Play-Doh by mistake when we were seven. It might as well have been my own. I carved a hand through my hair, frustrated. “You don’t think we’re—” I struggled for a minute, trying to think of how to say it without pissing him off, without making myself more foreign to him than I already seemed to be right now. “You don’t think we sometimes, like . . . spend all this time together at the expense of other stuff in our lives?”
Patrick blinked at me. “What?” he asked, shaking his head faintly. “Like, what are you even saying?”
“I’m just asking!” God, he was irritating me so much lately, moody and intractable in a way he’d never been before—or, if he had, in a way that had never, ever been directed at me. I didn’t know which one of us was changing. It scared me to think maybe both of us were. “Can we just—”
“Molly, if you want to go to Arizona to run, you should go to Arizona to run,” Patrick’s voice was flat and careless. “I didn’t realize I was holding you back quite so hard.”
“You’re not holding me back!” I burst out. “I’m asking you a question; I’m trying to have a conversation with you. I thought that what’s we do: We have conversations. We’ve been having one long conversation our whole lives and now—”
“Now you’re bored, and you want to go have other ones. I get it, kid. I do.”
“Can you not finish my sentences, please?”
“Why, is that holding you back, too?”
“Okay, stop it. Just—stop, for a second.” I sa
t down on the floor, back against the doorframe where Chuck had measured how tall we were the whole time we were growing up, pencil lines and his neat, blocky handwriting: Julia. Patrick. Molly. Gabe. This was my family, I thought, looking across the room at Patrick’s hardened, hurt expression. This would always be my home.
“We wouldn’t have to break up,” I told him softly, gazing at him across the bedroom. “If I went. That’s not what it would mean. We could visit, we could—”
“Yeah.” That was the wrong thing for me to say, clearly—I actually watched him shut down then, the angry set of his jaw. “Whatever. Okay. You can leave now, Mols. We’re getting nowhere. I’ll see you, really.”
“Patrick.” My eyes widened—I couldn’t believe he was doing this again. It was like he was determined to get rid of me any way he could. “Why are you doing this? Can you stop, like, actively pushing me away—”
“I’m not pushing, Mols!” His voice cracked then, hoarse and aching. “You want to run so bad? Go run. Seriously. Don’t come back.”
I blinked. “What does that—?”
“It means this isn’t working,” Patrick said coldly. “It means we should just be done.”
I stared at him for a moment like he was suddenly speaking Mandarin, like he was someone from clear on the other side of the vast, breathing world. “Are you breaking up with me right now?”
“Yeah, Mols,” he said, and he sounded like a stranger. “I am.”
A burst of laughter rips me out of the memory, spooking me so hard I startle a second time, though at least I don’t send any more silverware flying. Gabe’s still got his palm on my knee. He squeezes a bit, then slides his hand farther over, fingertips picking at the seam on the inner thigh of my jeans.
That’s when Patrick nudges his leg against mine.