“Well,” my mother says, sipping her coffee; she came outside when she heard my laughter through the open window, a deranged cackle that didn’t sound anything like my normal laugh. I sobbed once as she stepped through the front door to investigate, then pulled it together. The wet grass is seeping through my shorts. “You have to give her points for narrative consistency, I suppose.”
“Mom,” I snap, and this time she softens. She offers a hand to help me up. “You can call Alex,” I tell her miserably. “You can call Alex to fix it this time. I give up.”
My mom looks at me with something like compassion, her slim hands surprisingly strong. “You know what you gotta decide when you’re a writer?” she asks when I’m standing, damp green grass sticking to the backs of my legs.
“Whether or not to turn your teenage daughter’s sex life into a best seller?” I reply. It’s an instinct, but a vestigial one, and my mom can tell. She rolls her eyes, but kindly, still holding on to both my hands.
“Which stories to tie up at the ending, Molly,” she tells me. “And which ones you have to let go.”
I look at her for a moment, at this woman who chose me eighteen years ago. Who raised me and broke me and just lifted me off the ground. “Can I ask you something?” I begin, feeling stupid and embarrassed but also like this is a vital piece of information, something I should have known long before today. “What’s your favorite flower?”
My mom looks surprised—that I’m asking, I guess, or maybe that I care. “My favorite—lilies, I guess. I like lilies.”
I nod slowly. “Lilies,” I repeat, like it’s a word I’ve never heard before. “Okay.”
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
day 89
I find Tess hosing off the rubber lounge chairs in the morning, a dozen of them lined up like soldiers in the sunshine along the pool deck. I have to force myself down the stairs from the porch. Up close she looks terrible, face swollen and shiny and tender from crying, a zit sprouting on one cheek. Her hair is lank and greasy. I think I probably look way worse.
“Hey,” I say, one hand up in an awkward wave like it’s the beginning of the summer all over again, like she’s a stranger I’m vaguely afraid of. Like I’m a stranger she probably hates. “Can I talk to you a sec?”
I’m not far off: Tess looks at me for a moment, something like wonder passing over her puffy, distorted features. “No,” she says.
“Tess—”
“Don’t, Molly,” she interrupts, shaking her head at me. She drags the hose across the concrete, begins to wind it up. “I mean it. I don’t want to hear it, I really can’t.”
“I’m so sorry,” I try anyway. “Tess, seriously, please just listen for a sec—”
“You listen for a sec!” she explodes. It’s the first time I’ve heard her raise her voice all summer. “I was nice to you when nobody else was, do you get that? Everyone said to watch out for you but I liked you, so I didn’t care.” She shakes her head, eyes filling. I feel like the worst person in the world. “Is that why you were friends with me to begin with?” she asks me, voice high and brittle. “To, like, misdirect?”
“No!” I exclaim. “No, I swear. I liked you, too, right away. You’ve been such a good friend to me this summer, and I—”
“Thought you’d pay me back by screwing around with my boyfriend?” she asks.
“I—” I break off, helpless, glancing around like an instinct to see if anyone has heard her, like I did when I first found Julia’s note on my car. I’m ashamed of myself, truly. It’s inexcusable, what I did to Tess.
“Please leave,” Tess tells me, trying unsuccessfully to undo a stubborn kink in the hose. “Seriously. Just—if you ever wanted to do something in your life that wasn’t selfish. I mean it. Please, please leave.”
Back in June, I watched a documentary about ghost hearts, which doctors prep for transplant by scrubbing all the cells until all that’s left is connective tissue, empty and white and bloodless. I don’t know why I’m thinking about that right now.
“Of course,” I say finally, nodding ever so slightly. I turn around and get out of her way.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
day 90
I sit in bed with my arms wrapped tight around my knees and watch a documentary about Mary Shelley, who kept her husband’s heart in her dresser drawer for years after he died. I cry for a while. I hide.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
day 91
I haven’t heard a word from Gabe or Patrick—not that I was expecting to, I guess, but there’s a small part of me that held out hope Gabe would reply to one of the thousand I’m so sorry texts I’ve sent him. I’ve called, but he hasn’t picked up. Late last night I gathered up all my courage and drove out to Ryan’s camper, where Imogen told me he’s staying, but even though the station wagon was parked in the clearing nobody answered my knocks on the door. I sat there for hours, in the cold and the dark, waiting and waiting, but he never came. Now I type his name into the search bar on Facebook, stare at his tan, smiling face.
I friend Roommate Roisin while I’m on there, then lose an hour snooping idly through a bunch of her photo albums. Raisin has a super hot boyfriend! I’d text Tess, if I thought Tess ever wanted to hear from me again in this lifetime. Instead I keep clicking: Roisin and her softball team in Savannah, Roisin in a prom dress last May. She looks well adjusted and popular and nice and friendly.
I wouldn’t want a thing to do with me if I were her.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
day 92
I haul myself out for a run the next morning, a blessedly solitary loop around the lake. A cool breeze is blowing, the first one I’ve felt all summer, it seems—that reminder that fall is on her way. I round a copse of trees and stop short where I’m standing—the Donnelly Bronco is rattling down the road in my direction, gleaming in the late-summer sun.
For a second, this incredibly strange, incredibly real fear flickers through me, this cold knowledge that I’m all by myself out here. And of course in my head I know none of the Donnellys would ever physically hurt me—the very thought of that is insane—but I don’t know that for sure about Mean Michaela or even Elizabeth really, and people do crazy things in groups. I don’t know if I was always the kind of person whose first instinct is to run, or if this summer has made me that way. It’s not a quality I like in myself.
In any event, it’s not Julia and her coven of nasties behind the wheel of the Bronco, waiting to hock something from the window or jump out and beat me up.
It’s Connie.
“Thought that was you,” she says, slowing to a stop where I’m hovering frozen and stupid, peering at me through the passenger side window. Her gray hair is in its usual stubby ponytail at the back of her head. “You wanna hop in, I’ll drive you home?”
That would kind of defeat the purpose of my run, on top of which it feels like I’ve pretty much hit my quota of Donnelly time for one summer, but it doesn’t exactly seem as if she’s asking. “Um . . . sure,” I hear myself tell her, opening the passenger door and climbing up onto the bench seat. I can smell the sweat clinging to my skin. “Thanks.”
“No problem,” Connie says as we head back around the lake in the direction that I came from. We ride in silence for a moment, just the crackle of the oldies station she and Chuck always used to listen to when they dropped us off or picked us up. “Just a few more days, hm?” she asks, pausing for the traffic light at the intersection of the lake road and Route 4. ?
??I’m driving Julia out to Binghamton next week.”
“Yeah,” I say vaguely—it feels weird to the point of distracting to be in the car with her, to wonder what she’s heard and thinks and feels. “We talked about that, a little.”
Neither of us says anything after that, this echoing silence that feels like it stretches on for days. The sun bounces off the wide wooden dashboard. Connie speaks first. “Listen, Molly,” she says, sighing a little. “I don’t know what went on between you and my boys this summer. I don’t really want to know. They’re my boys, all right? I’m always, always going to stick up for my boys. But honestly—” Connie breaks off. “Honestly, kiddo, you didn’t exactly have an easy go of it either the last few months, did you.”
“I—” I have absolutely no idea how to respond to that; it’s not a question. I feel like the top of my head’s been blown off. “I’m okay,” I tell her finally, because it seems like the best answer even if it’s maybe not the truest. “I made it through.”
“You did.” Connie nods. “I used to be able to give you guys Band-Aids and Popsicles,” she tells me. “That used to be all it took.”
I don’t know what to say to that, either, exactly. It feels like she’s trying to tell me something, but I don’t know what. We’re approaching my house now, the long ribbon of driveway; I probably could have made it home just as fast on my own. Connie stops at the bottom, doesn’t bring me all the way up. “Thanks for the ride,” I say.
“You’re welcome,” she says, nodding. “Take care of yourself, Molly.”
I stand there until her taillights disappear, just watching.
That’s when I remember.
It was before Patrick broke up with me, before anything happened with Gabe: I stopped by the Donnellys’ on the way back from my run after school and found Connie in the kitchen making breakfast for dinner. “They’re out in the barn, I think,” she said, sneaking me a piece of bacon off the paper towel. “Tell them this is almost ready, okay?”
“Sure,” I promised, but I hadn’t even made it all the way across the yard when I heard their raised voices.
“—can’t just let it alone, can you?” Patrick was asking. “Just back the fuck off, bro, I mean it.”
“It’s not really up to you, is it?” That was Gabe. I stopped outside the barn, still flushed from my run and feet sinking into the fragrant muck of the yard. What were they fighting about? It felt like things had been building between them for months now—or longer, maybe, ever since Chuck died.
“It’s not up to me?” Patrick countered, disbelieving. I couldn’t see him inside the barn but I could picture him fine, his limbs sprawled across the sagging plaid sofa. “What is that, a challenge?”
“Call it whatever you want,” Gabe said. “She’s a big girl. She can make her own choices.”
I stand there at the foot of the driveway, not quite home and not quite gone. For so long I’ve felt like the one who came between Patrick and Gabe, this horrifying destroyer who busted up their otherwise perfect family. And maybe I am.
But maybe—
What is that, a challenge?
I take a deep breath and head up the driveway. I unlock the door and go inside.
That night I don’t sleep, I just lie there, brain raging like a hurricane: Patrick and Gabe and my own bad judgment, that quiet argument in the barn in the winter chill.
dirty slut dirty slut dirty—
Enough.
I lift my head up off the pillow, actually open my eyes in the dark: At first it sounds like Penn’s voice, or possibly my mother’s. For a moment I think it might be Imogen.
Then I realize: It’s only me.
Enough.
Enough.
Enough.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
day 93
I’m fully intending to skip the Lodge’s end-of-summer staff send off—it’s pretty clearly suicide to show up—but Penn stops me on my way out the door specifically to make sure I’m going to be there, and I don’t have the heart (or the courage) to tell her no. The stupid party was my idea to begin with, back when this summer seemed like it might somehow work out after all. I don’t want Penn’s last memory of me to be as someone who bailed.
As soon as I turn up poolside, though, I know it was a mistake of epic proportions: Here are Tess and Mean Michaela with their feet in the water, Julia by the food table with Elizabeth Reese. I was hoping Jay might bring Imogen for a buffer—even texted her a frantic SOS—but she’s working late tonight at French Roast, which means I’m totally on my own. I swallow and square my shoulders, trying not to feel like a zebra smack-dab in the middle of a hungry pride of lions. I have as much right to be here as they do after all.
That’s what I try to tell myself, anyway.
The wait staff is playing a noisy game of Marco Polo over in the deep end, and after I say hi to Jay and the rest of the kitchen guys I watch them for a while, trying to act like I’m really interested. I fish my phone out of my pocket, trying to ignore an overheard snatch of conversation from Julia’s corner that night or might not include the word ho. I feel my face flush scarlet anyhow. I can feel everybody’s eyes on me like physical touches, like I’m being grabbed from all sides. Twenty minutes, I promise myself firmly, going far enough to set an alarm on my phone—like there’s any way I might miss it. You have to stay for twenty more minutes, and then you can go.
I’m pouring myself a plastic cup of Diet Coke, not because I actually want it but because at least it’s something to do, when a shove from behind jostles me forward, the sticky soda splashing all over my flip-flops: My head snaps up and there’s Michaela and Julia passing by.
“Better watch where you’re going, Mols,” Julia says, her voice more artificially sweet than the cola coating my feet and ankles. Then, more quietly: “Skank.”
I whirl on her then, spine straightening, drawing myself up to my full height. All at once I’ve had it. Suddenly, I’m mad enough to spit blood. “You know what, Julia?” I snap. “Shut up.”
She looks at me, surprised, stopping in the middle of the concrete. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me.” There’s something hot and acidic running through my veins and it takes me a moment to realize it might be bravery, that for once—for the first time all summer, maybe—the urge to fight is stronger than the urge to run away. “I’m sick to death of you and everybody else acting like your brothers are some perfect angels that I defiled or something. That’s not what happened. And even if it was what happened, it’s not your business.” I turn to Mean Michaela: “And it’s definitely not your business. So I don’t want to hear it.” My hands are shaking, but my voice is steady and clear. “Enough,” I say, echoing the words I heard late last night in my head in my bedroom. “I’ve had enough.”
Julia’s just staring at me, pink mouth gaping. Tess is staring at me, too. I focus my attention on Julia and Michaela, eyebrows raised in challenge: Come at me, I want to tell them. I’m not going to let you hurt me anymore. And maybe that’s true and maybe it isn’t but in this moment I feel invincible, I feel full of strength and steel.
I’m about to say something else when I feel my phone alarm vibrate in my pocket—time is up, then. I’m allowed to go home. I’m not running, I know as I set my cup down and head for the lobby, a quilt of silence around the pool deck that somehow doesn’t rattle me at all.
I’m done. And I’m walking away.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
day 94
“Sooo, I heard you laid the smackdown on Julia at the Lodge party last night,” Imogen tells me. We’re up on wobbly stepladders at French Roast after closing, taking down the pieces from her show so we can wrap them and send them off to their new homes. She sold more
than half of what she exhibited. I’m as proud as if she was my kid.
“I didn’t lay the smackdown!” I protest, lifting a canvas collaged with magazines cutouts to look like the lakefront at night off the wall and setting it carefully on the bowed wooden floor. She’s got Bon Iver on the stereo. “Or, like, okay. I laid the smackdown a little bit.”
“Mm-hmm,” she replies, prying a nail out of the wall with the claw end of a hammer and dropping it into a coffee mug along with the others. “That’s what I thought.”
“It’s not that I don’t think they all deserve to hate me,” I tell her truthfully. “I mean, Tess definitely does, and probably Julia, too. But I’m not the only one they deserve to hate. It just felt like such a gross double standard, I don’t know. I got mad about it; I got word vomit.”
“It is a double standard,” Imogen says, reaching for the giant roll of bubble wrap. “And I’m glad you said something. Equal opportunity hate, or no hate at all.”
“Exactly!” I giggle at the dark absurdity. Six days until I leave for Boston, and it seems like that’s all that’s left to do it about it.
Or, okay, not all that’s left to do about it.
But close.
“Anyway, I’m proud of you,” Imogen tells me now. “It was gutsy, what you said to them. I think Emily Green would be proud, too.”
I reply with a loud, theatrical retching sound. “Oh my God, gross.”
“I mean . . . the book was good,” Imogen defends herself. “You gotta admit that.”