“No toilet paper,” the girl warned her. She was wearing white jeans and a chambray button-down that revealed sharp, angular collarbones; her hair was dark and thick and wavy, the kind you could wash every three days or even less without it turning into an oil slick. A tiny gold necklace in the shape of a wishbone nestled in the hollow of her throat. “Savages.”
“It’s okay,” Gabby said. “I don’t actually have to go.” Right away she felt like an idiot—after all, what exactly was she doing creeping up here if not looking for a bathroom?—but the girl only nodded.
“Just looking to hide out for a bit, huh?” she asked.
Gabby nodded. “Something like that.”
“Well, there’s a lot to look at,” the girl said, motioning to the pictures. “I’m such a snoop in other people’s houses. I’m always like, looking at the bookshelves and what people have hanging on their fridges and stuff. Jordan Highsmith’s sister got an A-minus on her essay about the causes of World War I, in case you were wondering.”
Gabby laughed. “Good for Jordan Highsmith’s sister.”
“I think she could have worked a little harder on her five-paragraph structure, personally,” the girl said, shrugging. Then she grinned and stuck her hand out. “I’m Shay.”
“Gabby.” Gabby felt herself flush at the contact as they shook. She’d known she liked girls as long as she’d known she liked boys, basically—since way back in middle school when it occurred to her that she was equally attracted to both of the leads on Celia’s favorite sexy doctor show. Still, aside from one aborted kiss with Kerry Caroll when she and her sisters were visiting her aunt Liz in Cincinnati last summer, she’d never been so immediately drawn to one in real life. She wondered what Shay’s deal was. On first glance she wasn’t giving anything away, but something about the extra second she held on to Gabby’s hand made her wonder. “You go to Colson?” Gabby asked.
“Mm-hmm,” Shay said. “I’m a junior.”
“I’m a sophomore,” Gabby said.
“Cool.” Shay nodded. For a moment that lasted one beat too long, neither one of them said anything, the silence unfurling like a rug. “So what do you like to do besides hiding out upstairs at parties?” she asked.
Gabby opened her mouth and shut it again, surprised and momentarily drawing a giant blank. She always had this problem when people asked her questions like that; distilled to its particles, her life sounded enormously boring. This was why she preferred nobody ask her any questions at all. “I do some photography,” she managed. “I work on the yearbook.”
“Oh yeah?” Shay asked, sounding interested. “Did you work on it last year? I really liked that one picture that was right at the front of it, you remember that one? Of all the cars leaving in the rain after that football game?”
Gabby’s stomach flipped with recognition. “I took that picture,” she blurted. “That was me.”
“No way!” Shay grinned. She had a nice smile, one crooked canine tooth and a soft-looking mouth. “Well, okay. I’m a big fan, then.”
They sat down at the top of the staircase as they chatted, noise from the party drifting upward. It felt like hiding out in a fort. They talked about all kinds of random stuff: the best frozen yogurt at the mall in Yorktown, the woman on Gabby’s block who had a whole battalion of dolls lined up in her bay window, how Shay used to watch reruns of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman every Saturday night on the Christian channel at her grandma’s house. “She’s the head of the women’s group at her church up in Amenia,” Shay explained off Gabby’s grin. “All things considered, she took it weirdly well when she found out I was gay.”
There it was. Gabby felt her stomach flip, everything getting realer all of a sudden. She herself was still trying to figure out how to slip being bi into casual conversations, but Shay made it seem easy, like no big deal. And that was Gabby’s main impression of her, really: that here was a person who had things figured out but wasn’t a jerk about it. Here was a person Gabby wanted to be around. It was strange: the only person she’d ever liked this completely and immediately was—Ryan, actually.
Gabby didn’t feel like thinking about Ryan right now. After all, he’d been pretty clear about where exactly they stood. So instead she crossed her ankles on the carpet and leaned back, listening as Shay chatted about a movie she’d seen with her parents last weekend, some arty independent thing Gabby had never heard of. The longer they sat here, the closer they seemed to be, she realized; when Shay leaned back on her palms the tips of her fingers brushed Gabby’s, and Gabby noticed she didn’t pull them away.
“I know,” Shay said when she saw Gabby glancing down at them. “I have, like, freakishly small hands. I’m like that Kristen Wiig character on SNL. Don’t judge me.”
“What?” Gabby shook her head, blushing. “You do not. Our hands are, like, the exact same size.”
“No way.”
“They are!”
Shay held her hand up, palm out and facing Gabby. “Measure,” she said.
Gabby’s stomach swooped like a tire swing. “Okay,” she said, and flattened her hand against Shay’s warm, smooth one.
“See?” Shay said. “Freakishly small.”
“Delicate,” Gabby corrected, them immediately wished she could grab the word out of the air and shove it back into her mouth. God, she was so bad at every conceivable form of social interaction. “I mean—”
But Shay just smiled, the corners of her eyes crinkling up appealingly. She rotated her wrist a fraction of an inch, lacing her fingers through Gabby’s. “Oops,” she said, and squeezed Gabby’s hand.
Gabby breathed in. “Oops,” she echoed quietly, and smiled.
Shay’s expression clouded a little bit at that, like maybe she thought Gabby meant the oops in a stop-holding-my-hand kind of way; it was the look of someone suddenly worried they’d calculated wrong. You calculated right, Gabby wanted to tell her, but she didn’t know how to, so instead before she could think better of it, she used her grip on Shay’s hand to pull her forward and pressed a kiss against her mouth. Shay tasted like beer and like gum and like summer coming, like possibilities. Gabby could not believe what she’d just done.
“Sorry,” she said immediately when it was over, feeling herself blush down to the soles of her feet inside her boots. “Was that—? That was forward.”
But Shay grinned. “I like forward,” she said, and kissed Gabby again.
It went on like that for a long minute, Shay’s hands on her shoulders and her neck and her cheekbones; Gabby reached up and twisted two fingers in Shay’s hair. She felt like she’d jumped out of an airplane. She felt like she could reach out and grab the sky.
Finally Shay pulled back, grinning, her face flushed and her hair a little frizzy. “You wanna grab a drink and go find a place to hang out that doesn’t have quite so many dead ancestors watching?” she asked, gesturing to the photo wall. “These guys are kind of starting to give me the creeps a little bit, I won’t lie.”
Gabby felt herself smile back, felt something swinging open like a gate inside her chest. “Yeah,” she said, letting Shay pull her to her unsteady feet on the carpet. “Sounds good to me.”
RYAN
Leaning against the knotty trunk of a maple tree in the immaculately manicured backyard of Jordan Highsmith’s house, half listening to Michaela Braddock from his English class chatter animatedly about a minor celebrity’s nose job, Ryan felt like shit.
He felt like shit physically—his head was thudding along with the bass seeping out of somebody’s portable speakers on the back deck, his shoulders ached as if somebody had unzipped his neck and replaced all his muscles with sedimentary rocks, and he was vaguely sick to his stomach, which was weird ’cause he hadn’t actually had that much to drink at all since he got here.
But also—and woof, Ryan knew this was pathetic of him—he felt like shit in his emotions.
He blinked twice, trying to listen to the story Michaela was telling—she’d switched topics now, was
nattering on about the car wash her Key Club was doing tomorrow and the matching shirts they’d all made. Ryan had known Michaela since middle school at Thomas Aquinas, and he liked her: She was pretty. She was a good person, apparently, who was spending her Saturday morning doing charity work for a women’s homeless shelter. And she had truly fantastic boobs.
But all he could focus on was his fight with Gabby.
This was stupid, Ryan thought, even as he shot a hopefully charming smile in Michaela’s direction. He was stupid. He couldn’t believe how badly he’d blown it back there, how he’d clammed right up and stumbled all over himself like somebody who’d never even talked to a girl before, let alone dated one. He hadn’t even realized how bad he’d wanted this to finally be his chance with her until he’d missed it, like watching a puck sail right past him across the ice.
Unless he hadn’t actually missed it at all.
He could still tell her, Ryan thought suddenly. He could go find her right now, take her by the hand and lay it all out for her. Maybe she’d think he was crazy. Maybe she’d tell him to get lost. Maybe their friendship really would be over. But he had to try, didn’t he? He had to try.
Once he thought it he couldn’t unthink it, like those Magic Eye books his mom used to do with him when he was little: once you found a picture in the pattern, you couldn’t figure out how all you’d seen before was dots. He made his excuses and extricated himself from Michaela, then headed back inside the house, hoping Gabby hadn’t bailed out entirely and gone home. That would be just like her, he thought, peering with no luck through the crowds in the kitchen and the den. His head was still throbbing, a rhythmic pulse deep in his brain stem. He thought he might have fucked himself up for real today.
She must have left, he thought, when he didn’t find her after another ten minutes of looking. Well then, he’d have to go over to the Harts’. He made his way to the front of the house, waving good-bye to a couple of his buddies before letting himself out; he was halfway across the lawn when he stopped short. Because Gabby hadn’t left at all. She was sitting mostly hidden in the shadows on the screened-in side porch, the sharp column of her spine as familiar as her face every morning.
And she was kissing a girl.
Ryan turned around, feeling himself—Jesus Christ—feeling himself blush like a scandalized grandma. He knew Gabby was bi, obviously, thanks to an extremely awkward top ten celebrity crushes conversation halfway through freshman year. But there was a difference between knowing something existed without ever having seen it in real life, like the Grand Canyon, and having evidence of it right in front of your face. God, he was such a fucking idiot. He’d been so distracted trying to figure out whether or not Gabby had feelings for him that it had never occurred to him to wonder if she might have them for somebody else entirely. But she did. And here was the indisputable, undeniable proof.
They hadn’t seen him, and Ryan wanted to keep it that way. He turned around and wandered toward the back of the house. He really, really was not feeling good; his brain was a pot of the clean-out-the-fridge soup his mom made when she hadn’t been grocery shopping, murky and full of suspicious floating bits.
“Hey, McCullough.” It was his buddy Remy from hockey; his voice sounded far away, though Ryan wasn’t sure exactly why. “You okay over there?”
“Hey, Remy,” Ryan said, trying to sound cheerful.
That was when he leaned over and barfed.
GABBY
Sitting huddled together on the darkened side porch a little while later, Gabby shivered as Shay sucked lightly on her lower lip. It felt like she’d left her body entirely, except for the fact that she was sharply, deliciously aware of every single one of her cells vibrating back and forth, her blood moving underneath her singing skin. She had never in her life done anything like this, made out with a stranger at a party, but it was official: she wanted to do it forever. She wanted to kiss Shay forever. She smelled like vanilla and chamomile. Her mouth was clever and warm.
“I almost didn’t come to this party,” Shay admitted, fussing with a strand of Gabby’s hair, twisting it around her finger and letting it go again. “I was going to meet some friends in the city tonight instead.”
“Really?” Gabby asked. The idea that Shay was the kind of person who popped down to the city with friends for the night gave her a weird little thrill, half fear and half admiration. She wanted to know everything about her, suddenly; she wanted to know everything Shay knew. “Well,” she said. “I’m calling it a win that you did.”
“Uh-huh.” Shay grinned right up against Gabby’s mouth, the curve of it like an open parenthesis. “I’m calling it one, too.”
“Yo, Gabby?” said a deep voice in the darkness, the rickety screen door to the porch swinging open, then: “Whoa. Sorry.”
Gabby pulled back and blinked at a kid in a Colson Cavaliers hoodie who she vaguely recognized as one of Ryan’s hockey buddies, though she wasn’t entirely sure which one. Honestly they all kind of looked like Thor to her. “I—um.” She could feel herself blushing; she tucked her messy hair behind her ears. “Yeah?”
“Sorry,” the kid repeated, holding his hands up in mock-surrender and grinning a twisty, unpleasant grin. “Didn’t realize you were busy.”
Shay huffed a quiet sound out, irritated; Gabby rolled her eyes. “Did you need something?” she asked. She had no idea how this kid even knew who she was.
“I mean, I don’t,” he said, still looking at them in a way Gabby didn’t appreciate. “But your boyfriend’s puking all over himself in the backyard.”
Shay pulled back like someone had slapped her. “You have a—”
“No,” Gabby said immediately. “Honestly, I don’t.” Still, she thought guiltily, it wasn’t like she didn’t know who this guy was talking about. “You mean Ryan?”
Hockey Bro nodded. “He told me to come get you, yeah.”
“Because he’s drunk?” Ugh, Gabby was going to murder him. She turned to Shay. “We’re friends, is all. Seriously. I came here with him.”
“He’s pretty fucked up,” Hockey Bro put in helpfully. Gabby grimaced.
Shay looked unconvinced, but she nodded. “Okay,” she said, wiping her hands on those immaculate white jeans. “You should probably go check on him, then.”
“Okay. I’ll be right back, though.” Gabby blew out a sigh and got to her feet, a little unsteady even though she’d only had two sips of beer. Her lips felt swollen and itchy from kissing; her limbs were heavy and sluggish and warm. “Where is he?”
She found Ryan at the far side of the backyard, slumped against a boxwood hedge that was swallowing him in its branches. “This is not the way to prove to me I’m not your sidekick, dude,” she said, peering down at him in irritation. She smelled, and then saw, the puddle of barf a few feet away. “Ryan,” she said. God, was this what he was like at every party he ever went to, and she just never knew because she wasn’t usually there? “Seriously? Again?”
Ryan didn’t answer for a moment, his eyes mostly closed. Sprawled on the grass like this he looked even bigger and taller than normal, like some kind of fallen giant from a fairy tale. He blinked at her, not quite focusing. Trying again. “It’s you,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s me.” She looked at him more closely, squatting down so they were eye level. Gabby frowned. She’d seen Ryan drunk before. This . . . did not seem like that. His gaze was still oddly unseeing; his face was weirdly, waxily pale.
“Ryan,” she said again. “Hey, dude, listen to me, how much did you drink?”
“I didn’t,” he mumbled.
“Ryan, this is not the time to be a dick—”
“I didn’t,” he insisted, and this time he sounded irritated. “Or I did, okay, but only one beer.” He listed to the side a little bit. “Got hit.”
“You got hit?” Gabby’s heart skipped like one of her mom’s scratched old CDs. “When?”
“At the game,” he said vaguely, and closed his eyes again.
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“Oh, shit, yeah, he did,” put in Hockey Bro, who Gabby realized abruptly was still standing behind her. “I hadn’t even thought of that. He got his fucking clock cleaned this afternoon, it’s true.”
“And nobody thought that maybe he should go to the doctor?” Gabby screeched. “Ryan,” she said, grabbing his arm and shaking; Ryan made a quiet groaning sound, but didn’t open his eyes. “Ryan.” Shit, she was scared now. She wanted her parents. She wanted literally any adult.
She turned to Hockey Bro, who was still hulking behind her with his hands in the pocket of his hoodie, useless as a dead tree. “I’m calling 911,” she said. “You have five minutes to get everybody out of here if you don’t want the cops to come too.”
“Damn,” Hockey Bro said. For a second she thought he was going to argue with her, but in the end he looked over her shoulder at Ryan and nodded. “Yeah, fair. Okay.”
The paramedics showed up in a ghoulish carnival of lights and sirens, terse and efficient and wholly unimpressed. “It’s not alcohol poisoning,” Gabby tried to explain to them, trotting along beside them as they wheeled Ryan on a stretcher across the bumpy cobblestone driveway; it felt very important that they know this, that they realize he wasn’t just some dumb drunk kid. “He’s a hockey player, he got hit.”
“Who are you?” asked one of the EMTs distractedly.
She took a deep breath, then hopped up into the back of the ambulance before anyone could stop her. “I’m his best friend,” she said.
GABBY
Gabby sat in a padded vinyl chair in the bright, chilly hospital corridor, watching CNN on mute above the nurses’ station and nervously clicking her phone on and off. She’d been in this same hospital just the previous summer, when Kristina fell off her bike trying to do wheelies and broke her wrist in three places, although that time her mom had been here too, calmly reassuring them all that everything was going to be fine. Tonight, Gabby was on her own. It occurred to her to wonder if this was what growing up meant, to continuously find yourself in situations that you didn’t feel remotely prepared to handle.