I glance over my shoulder at the doorway, which is empty. Vita snores quietly on the rug. I’m alone here, just me and the book my mother wrote about me, the mystery words I’ve never been able to look at for more than a few seconds at a time. I’ve skimmed paragraphs here and there, with the guilty, shameful feeling of looking at something illicit and dirty.
Now I take a deep breath, pick it up, and read.
It’s good is the worst part of everything; in my head it was hackneyed and nasty, like a cheap daytime soap on the page. The truth is it’s . . . kind of compelling. I get why it did so well. The boys aren’t Patrick or Gabe, not exactly, and while reading about Emily Green makes me supremely, squirmingly uncomfortable, I have to admit I’m rooting for her stupid coin-flipping self by the time I near the end.
I’m almost finished, turning the pages faster and faster, and the rain long since calmed to a steady drizzle when I hear the creak of the floorboards behind me: There’s my mom in the doorway with Oscar, and I am unmistakably caught.
“Morning” is all she says, though, setting the dog down on the floor so he can trot over to where I’m curled under the blanket, toenails clicking on the floor. She looks from me to her book and back again, her face impassive. “You been up awhile?”
Long enough to read the best seller you penned about my love life, I think, but for the first time I can’t bring myself to get worked up about it. “For a bit,” I say. “Yeah.”
My mom nods. “You want more coffee?”
I almost tell her something else then. I want to tell her something else—that reading this book was like spending three hours with her, that I miss her, that she’s talented and even if I don’t forgive her I’m still proud that she’s my mom. The cover feels like it’s gone hot inside my hands.
“Coffee would be great,” I finally tell her, and smile. My mom nods at me slowly, smiles back.
Once she’s gone I dig around in the couch cushions for a moment, come up with a fistful of crumbs but also exactly what I’m after—a tarnished, gummy nickel, cool and heavy in the palm of my hand. I squeeze it tightly for a moment, like I can give it special powers that way, like I can infuse a whole year’s worth of questions into the metal.
Then I flip.
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day 69
I’m down in the kitchen feeding Oscar his expensive, locally produced kibble when my phone starts buzzing in my pocket. When I fish it out I’ve got a new Facebook notification: Julia Donnelly has tagged you in a photo.
I tense, a low, greasy roll of dread rumbling through me before I can quell it, like too much questionable not-quite-Mexican food from the dining hall at Bristol. Julia did this a lot before I left: tagging pictures of me with bad angles that made it look like I had a double chin, ones with my eyes closed where I was making a stupid face. Once she posted a picture of a literal pig with my name on it. I’m not sure which of her brothers finally made her take it down. We’re friendly again now, sure—at least, I think we’re friendly—but as I click View Post I flinch anyway, that feeling like the moment between when you stub your toe and when the pain hits. I’m sure this is going to hurt.
Which is why I’m surprised when I see what she’s tagged this morning, that it’s not a porn star with my face Photoshopped in or a blown-out close-up of me with a bad breakout. What she’s posted is a throwback shot—the same one that’s shoved in my desk drawer at this very moment, that I pulled off the bulletin board when I got back to Star Lake: the four of us, Gabe and Patrick and Julia and me, sitting in the hayloft, Patrick’s arm wrapped tight around my rib cage. No mean caption, no cartoon penis drawn helpfully on my face. Just us, how we used to be. Before.
I look at our faces in the photo, grinning and silly. I smile at the screen in reply.
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day 70
I’m looping the lake early the following morning, legs burning and swallowing giant mouthfuls of air, when I spy a familiar figure heading in the opposite direction. “We gotta stop meeting like this,” I tell him as he slows to greet me, and Patrick raises his eyebrows.
“It’s early,” he says, and it is, still—the sky just getting light around the edges, all that smudgy pink and gray. It’s going to be nice out today. I can hear the waking calls of the birds up in the pine trees.
“Uh-huh.” I nod as he falls in step beside me, him doubling back in the direction he came from. The back of my warm, damp hand brushes his for a moment before he takes it, lacing his fingers through mine.
“Patrick,” I tell him, low and warning. It occurs to me that possibly we aren’t meeting here by chance.
Patrick ignores me. “You know what we haven’t done yet?” he asks instead, grinning like a little kid with a secret.
“I can think of a lot of things,” I retort without thinking, and Patrick tilts his head like, Fair enough before inclining it toward the placid surface of the lake, morning-tranquil and empty. Right away I pick up what he’s putting down.
“No way.” It’s a thing we used to joke about constantly, half-kidding and half-serious—both of us testing each other’s boundaries or something, both of us feeling it out. Neither one of us ever called the bluff. “I’m not skinny-dipping in this lake with you right now.”
“Why not?”
“Because we’re not on Dawson’s Creek! Like, to start with.”
“And to end with?”
“Shut up.”
“You don’t have to take everything off,” he tells me.
“Oh, how generous of you,” I snap, and Patrick wrinkles his pretty nose.
“You know that’s not what I meant,” he says, a flash of flinty anger in his deep gray eyes. “I’m not some gross guy who wants to—” He breaks off.
Get naked with his brother’s girlfriend? I almost supply. Not like we’re not both thinking it. On top of which Patrick is that guy, clearly. He’s exactly that guy.
And I guess I’m exactly that girl.
He can feel me considering it, he knows me that well; we’ve stopped moving entirely, standing here beside somebody’s rotting old dock. There’s not a soul here to stop us. There’s not a soul here to know. “Mols,” Patrick says, and his voice is so quiet. “Get in the water with me.”
I look at him for a moment. Then I sigh.
“I’m not losing all my clothes right now,” I tell him firmly.
“Noted.” Patrick nods.
“And neither are you.”
That makes him laugh. “Noted.”
We don’t talk a whole lot as we pull our various clothes off, my shorts and tank top and Patrick’s T-shirt hitting the weathered wood of the dock in a cascade of quiet swishing. All I want in the world is to stare. My heart is thudding away inside my chest, the animal build of anticipation, the feeling of finishing what we started before everything crumbled away like wet sand. I swallow a breath down, trying not to shiver. Goose bumps prickle up and down my arms. When I glance up I see Patrick’s staring back at me, watching, curious and overt.
“Sorry,” he mutters when I catch him, rolling his eyes a bit.
“S’okay,” I reply, gazing back at him evenly, both of us standing there in our underwear. It occurs to me that this is the first time since I got back from Bristol that I don’t feel self-conscious about how I might look.
You can stare, I want to say to Patrick. It’s fine, it’s me; I promise you can look.
He shrugs, rubbing at his neck a little, looking out at the chilly black water. “You ready?” he asks.
“Uh-huh.” I clear my throat, swallow once. “If you are.”
“Yeah, Mols,” Patrick says. “I’m ready.”
We jump.
It’s exhilarating, hurtling t
hrough the air like that—the sensation of flying just for a second, the chilly morning air buffeting my skin. We smash through the placid surface of the lake like twin explosions.
“Holy shit,” Patrick swears once we’ve surfaced—it’s freezing, he’s not wrong about that, the cold sharp and immediate and aching. He barks out a frigid-sounding laugh. “Whose fucking idea was this again?”
“Some dummy’s, certainly,” I tell him, voice shaking a bit with the force of my shivering. I swim a few strokes toward the center, splashing around to try and warm up. Patrick turns a fast somersault, flecks of water sticking to his eyelashes. His bare collarbone juts in a way that makes me want to trace it with one gentle finger. I wonder what would happen if I did. I can feel my chest moving underneath the surface of the water. God, it is so, so cold.
“Now what?” I ask, a little breathless.
“I don’t know,” Patrick says, water dripping from his hair and skimming over his cheekbones, and puts his surprising mouth on mine.
It’s a good kiss. God, it’s the best kiss, it’s the kiss I’ve been waiting for all summer and maybe my whole life, Patrick’s warm mouth and the slickness of his wet shoulders sliding under my palms, his neck and the damp hair at the base of his skull. Every inch of my skin feels like it’s on fire, the prickle and pop of nerve endings come to life all over my body. I swear I can hear the steady hum of my blood inside my veins.
“Hi,” Patrick mumbles against my jaw, licking at the pulse point just underneath it. I can feel the mossy floor of the lake underneath my toes. He’s fumbling for the band of my sports bra, my arms coming up to help him as he peels the whole soaking thing off, the water cold and black and all the warm places where he’s pressed against me. My legs come up like a reflex to wrap around his waist.
“Hi,” I tell him quietly, and kiss him again.
It goes on for a long time out there in the murky water, nobody around to stop or see us, his solid body and his hands carding through my wet, tangled hair. Patrick pulls back for a moment to look at me, intentional. For a second he only just stares. “Mols,” he says, in this voice like I’m a precious thing, in a voice like I’m rare. “Molly.”
I shake my head, blushing even as the water feels like it’s getting colder, how I’m freezing and burning up all over the place. “Patrick.”
“I meant it, what I said that day it was raining,” he murmurs, swallowing audibly. “About you being beautiful. I know you weren’t fishing. But you are.”
I get my hands on his face and kiss him again then, not wanting to think about anything but this moment, like the sound of our own quick breathing can keep everything else at bay. Still, though, I can’t keep myself from asking again: “What are we doing?” His mouth tastes like water, the zing of this morning’s Colgate behind his teeth. “Huh? Patrick? You gotta tell me here, what are we—”
“I don’t know,” Patrick tells me, urgent, more vulnerable than he’s sounded all summer long. His face so close I can see his eye freckle, that dark fleck I’ve always thought of as just mine. Like you could get into his soul that way. “I don’t know. We’re going different places, aren’t we? You’re going to Boston with my brother.”
“I’m not—” I begin to protest, but Patrick cuts me off.
“It doesn’t matter,” he says, his hands wandering, me arching into his touch before I can stop myself. “It’s still here, isn’t it? Between you and me. I loved you, Molly, I love—”
Patrick catches himself just then, doesn’t finish. I wrap my arms around his neck and hold on.
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day 71
I’m useless at work the next day. I have to recalculate payroll three different times before the numbers check out. I can’t stop thinking about Patrick.
I remember finally telling my mom about me and Gabe at the very end of sophomore year—two weeks after it happened, graduation come and gone, Gabe headed off to be a camp counselor in the Berkshires, and Patrick and I still not speaking. Everything burbled up out of me like some long-dormant volcano: “Tell me,” my mom urged, looking at me hard and searchingly. It felt like a purifying fire.
After that I ran to the Donnellys’ before it was even light out, let myself in with the spare key Connie kept hidden underneath a clay frog in the garden. “Wake up,” I said to Patrick, crawling across his bed in the blue still-darkness. He smelled like sleep, and like home. I felt like I’d dodged the most deadly of bullets, like one of those people that gets hit by a train but somehow manages to walk away unscathed. I felt guilty and lucky, a full helping of both. “Wake up, it’s me.”
“What?” Patrick blinked awake, startled, reaching for my arm. “Mols, what’s wrong? What are you doing here?”
“I don’t want to be broken up anymore,” I blurted. “I’m not going anywhere, I’m never going anywhere; I was being an idiot.” I shook my head. “I can run here, I want to stay here. I decided, and I wanted to tell you as soon as—” I broke off. “Please. Let’s just forget about it and be normal again, okay?”
“Hey, hey.” Patrick sat up then, looking at me curiously. His curly hair was crazy with sleep. “You all right?”
“I’m fine,” I promised. “I’m perfect. I was being an asshole, I was just—”
“You weren’t being an asshole,” Patrick told me, “I was. I don’t want to hold you back. I love you; that’s the last thing I want. I’d fucking hate myself, if that’s what I was.”
“It’s not,” I insisted, looking at him urgently. “It’s not. I want to stay here, I want to be with you.”
“I want that, too.” Patrick nodded. “Come here, hey. Of course I want that, too.”
I climbed underneath the covers then, the cotton sheets warm with their time against his body. I’d made a huge mistake, doing what I’d done with Gabe, the weight of it like a grizzly settling down right on my chest. I’d never kept a secret from Patrick before. Still, in the moment it almost felt like a small price to pay to figure out what I really wanted: I was going to fix us. I was going to make it all right.
And nobody but me, my mom, and Gabe would ever, ever have to know.
“What’re you doing?” Fabian demands, banging through the door of the office with a plastic Captain America in one hand and the Falcon in the other, yanking me out of the memory. I click SAVE on the computer, glance at the clock on the screen—Gabe’s due to pick me up from work in twenty minutes.
Fabian’s still waiting on an answer, impatient; I take the action figure he proffers, shake my head. “I’ll tell you, buddy: That’s a really good question.”
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day 72
Imogen and Handsome Jay seal the deal at the beginning of August at his tiny student apartment; two days later he surprises her with tickets to a sculpture park in Woodstock, a place she told him she wanted to visit on their very first date.
“Good on you, lady,” I tell her, sitting cross-legged on the carpeted floor of her bedroom as she organizes the pieces for her art show at French Roast, which is coming up two weeks from now—I offered to help her, but she’s got a complicated vision, she says. “You should be with somebody who knows you that well, you know?”
Imogen raises her eyebrows, glancing over her shoulder at me—she’s holding up two small canvases with birds on them, scrutinizing how they look side by side. “You mean like you and Patrick?” she asks distractedly.
My internal temperature drops roughly fifteen degrees. “I—what?”
“Oh my God,” Imogen says, whirling around to face me completely, dropping one of the canvases onto the carpet and clapping a hand over her mouth. She huffs out an awkward giggle, eyes wide. “I totally just meant to say you and Gabe. I legit wasn??
?t even trying to heckle you just then, I’m so sorry. You and Gabe, you and Gabe.”
“Jerk.” I’m blushing and laughing, relief and embarrassment washing through my body in equal measure, hot and cold. “Me and Gabe, yes. Like me and Gabe.”
“God, sorry. Let’s just be thankful Tess wasn’t here, too.” Imogen picks the second canvas back up off the floor, holding them out for my inspection. “What do you think, which way?”
“Um,” I manage, swallowing audibly, relieved at her willingness to drop it. I haven’t told a soul about what happened—what’s happening?—with Patrick. The smart thing to do is to let him alone. “Side by side.”
“I think I like them stacked,” Imogen says, and I don’t answer. My head thuds softly back against the wall.
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day 73
I’m almost asleep, that foggy in-between that’s not quite dreaming, when my phone buzzes loudly on the nightstand: You home? Patrick wants to know.
I push my hair out of my face, sit up on the mattress. Yeah, I key in, trying to ignore the dark thrill in my stomach that tells me this can’t possibly lead to anything good. Where are you?
In your driveway.
I creep downstairs and let him in the back door wordlessly, lead him up to my third-floor tower with his warm hand tucked in mine. As soon as the door’s shut, he presses me up against it. My T-shirt hits the carpet with a barely audible whoosh. I never turned a light on and it’s dark in here, nothing but a silver puddle of moonlight on the carpet and the feel of his warm mouth wandering over my collarbone and ribs.