99 Days (21 page)

Tess sacks out around midnight, the cheery purple glow of a
Friends
rerun on the old tube TV in our motel room; she’s an easy sleeper, our Tess, limbs starfished sloppily across the bed. I’m not tired, though, not even a little: “I’m going to check out the vending machine,” I tell Imogen, slipping outside and down the concrete staircase, humid night pressing in from all sides.

I dig a dollar out of my shorts and get myself a pack of Twizzlers—not Red Vines, but they’ll do in a pinch—then wander back up to where our room is. Instead of going back inside, I lean over the concrete railing for a minute, staring blankly at the neon light of the motel sign and the Burger King across the street and trying to ignore the chorus of voices—Julia’s, Connie’s, Penn’s, Patrick’s loudest of all—echoing endlessly through my skull. I don’t know how long I’m out there before the door opens behind me.

“You’re right here?” Imogen asks, flipping the deadbolt so the door won’t lock behind her and joining me on the catwalk. The faint scent of cigarettes lurks in the air. “I thought you got murdered.”

“Sorry,” I tell her, holding out the package of Twizzlers. She’s in her pajamas, these crisp old-fashioned looking things with pink and white stripes. “Was just thinking.”

“About what, huh?” Imogen asks, fishing a strand of licorice out of the plastic. “You’re been emo all day.”

“I have not!” I protest. Have I? I’ve been trying to act normal—thought I
was
acting normal—but could be she knows me better than I give her credit for, even after all this time.

“Okay,” Imogen says, making a face like,
nice try
. “You and Tess both, a pair of Mopey Mopersons.”

Yeah. “That’s what my driver’s license says, actually,” I tell her, leaning against the railing. There’s a scatter of moths flinging themselves at the yellow light mounted to the wall.

“Mm-hmm,”
Imogen says, smiling a little. “What’s up?”

I don’t answer for a minute, debating. I tuck my messy hair behind my ears. I remember that I didn’t tell her last time, that I carried my secret like a rock in my shoe and in the end it came tumbling out anyhow.

This time, I tell her everything.

*

Imogen looks at me for a moment once I’m finished, unreadable. Then she shakes her head. “That’s fucked up,” Imogen tells me. “Crap, why the hell did you just tell me that, Molly?”

I blink. “I thought—” I start, that same horrible sinking feeling as I got the other night with Patrick, like I’ve totally misread everything and everyone. “Should I not have?”

Imogen shakes her head again. “No, no, I take it back, of
course
I want you to tell me, but . . .” She glances over her shoulder at the door to our motel room, open just the tiniest crack. She moved over a little, sits right down on the grubby cement floor. Like an instinct, I sit down across from her, our bent knees making twin pyramids so that anyone walking by would have to spelunk over us. “Tess is my friend, too. Tess is
your
friend, too, I thought.”

“She is!”

“Really?” Imogen raises her eyebrows. “Because that was, like, a serious breach of the Ovary Code.”

“I know,” I say miserably, thumping my head back against the wall. “I know. I messed up. I really messed up, Imogen.”

“You did,” she says matter-of-factly. “You messed up huge. But so did Patrick. On top of which, I think virginity is kind of an antiquated concept, right? Like some boy sticking it in you changes who you are as a human being?”

“I don’t know if it was so much about the concept of my virginity as it was about me losing it to Gabe,” I point out.

“I mean, fair.” Imogen sighs. “Look, you know I never thought it was so bad, what you did with Gabe to begin with. I mean, it was
bad
, but it’s not like you killed anybody. But the point is that the moment it gets to be about doing messed-up stuff to other girls is the moment I get off the train.”

“I know,” I tell her honestly. She’s always been that way, Imogen, some combination of her own achingly compassionate temperament and seventeen years spent praying to the Goddess. “I want to get off the train, too. It’s done now; it’s over. I am officially off the train.”

“You promise?” Imogen asks me, and holds up her pinky for linking. I hook our fingers tight together, and I swear.

You home?
I text Gabe as soon as I’m back in Star Lake, jumping into my car and heading down the treelined road to the farmhouse; over the last decade I’ve traveled its winding curves on foot and by bike and once in a pair of vintage roller skates of Connie’s that Patrick and I found in the Donnellys’ attic.

Today, I speed.

Sure thing
, Gabe texts back just as I’m pulling into the driveway.
You coming over?

Already here.

He comes out the side door fresh from the shower, hair damp and curling down over his ears. “What’d you, miss me or someth—” he starts to ask me, then gets cut off as I jump up right into his arms.

“I did,” I tell him firmly, arms monkeyed tight around his broad back and the stamp of my lips against his. “But I’m back now.”

“Can I talk to you for a minute?” Penn asks when I get in the next morning, shutting the door to the office behind us. She’s wearing a pale pink blouse with three-quarter sleeves, a man’s watch around one wrist.

“Sure,” I tell her, with a little trepidation—we checked in over the phone about the club chairs while I was in Hudson, but other than that we haven’t really talked since she was sharp with me the other day. “What’s up?”

“I owe you an apology, I think.”

I blink at her. Penn’s office is basically the only room in the Lodge that didn’t benefit from the rustic-chic makeover: The chairs are all covered in pink flowered cushions, and there’s an ugly print of a cluster of sailboats along one wall. Fabian’s coloring stuff is heaped on the cheap pressboard bookshelf. “You do?”

Penn nods. “I was a weirdo to you about Des the other day,” she says, taking a sip of her coffee. She perches on the edge of the cluttered desk instead of sitting behind it. “Before I sent you off like that. She’s attached to you, and it just tweaked me out a little, I’m sorry.”

“No, no.” I shake my head, surprised. “I mean, I’m attached to her, too, obviously. I’m really sorry if I overstepped.”

“You didn’t,” Penn says flatly. “Look, it was a bad divorce, me and the kids’ dad. I bought this place because I needed a fresh start, and I thought the kids needed one, too, but then we got here and Des just completely stopped talking.” She waves her hand like she’s trying to clear cigarette smoke away, like there’s something poison in the air keeping her from breathing it properly. “Maybe I was wrong, I don’t know. But I just wasn’t crazy about the idea of Des getting close to another person who’s leaving, and I was trying to protect her from that. And maybe I was trying to protect myself, too.” She rolls her eyes. “I rely on you for a lot here, you know? You help me run this place, and you’re not going to be here forever.” She drains the coffee, sets the empty mug back down on the desk. “Not the most emotionally intelligent moment of my life, maybe, but there you have it. That’s why I was short with you the other day.” Penn sighs. “Anyway. I hope I didn’t scare you off from hanging with Des. Ultimately, my kid needs as many people that care about her as possible, right?”

I smile at that, then step forward impulsively to hug her. “Yeah,” I say finally. “Yeah, I think she does.”

I get an email from the housing office alerting me that my roommate is one Roisin O’Malley from Savannah, Georgia.

“Does that say
Raisin
?” Tess asks, peering over my shoulder at the computer in the office, her braid damp from the pool and dripping onto my back. “Raisin O’Malley?”

“Yes,” I tell her, laughing, closing down the browser. We’re almost done for the day, and have a plan to get dinner at Bunchie’s. “That’s exactly what it says. My roommate is a sun-dried grape.”

The next morning when I get into the office, there’s a giant package of California Raisins sitting on my desk chair.

“You girls are very strange,” Penn says.

After dinner I bring a cup of coffee up to my bedroom, sit down at the desk beneath the bulletin board and the cheerful
Golly, Molly
. I log into my incoming student account, click through the pages until I find the drop-down menu full of majors: Architecture and Art History, Education and Engineering. I scroll through the list until I get to Business, my fingers hovering over the track pad on the laptop.

I take a deep breath, and declare.

I head over to the Donnellys’ the next evening to watch some weird Canadian import show Gabe can’t get enough of, everybody dressed in plaid and saying “aboot” all the time. His long fingers play idly in my hair. The episode’s just ended when the screen door in the kitchen slaps open, Julia’s giggle ringing out through the house. She appears in the doorway of the family room a moment later. I hear a set of footsteps behind her, and I’m terrified it’s going to be Patrick, but instead it’s Elizabeth at her heels, holding a pint of Ben & Jerry’s. “Oh, hey,” Julia says, her eyes flicking from Gabe to me and back again. “I didn’t know you guys were here.”

“Here we are,” Gabe says mildly, but I wonder if he can feel the muscles in my arms and back and shoulders seizing up, how self-conscious I feel about the way I’m sacked out across the cushions. How many times has Julia walked in on this exact tableau over the course of our lifetimes—but with me tucked into the crook of Patrick’s arm instead of Gabe’s?

If she thinks it’s weird, though, she doesn’t say anything about it. “You want ice cream?” she asks instead. Then, without waiting for us to answer: “Lizzie, you wanna get two more spoons?”

Which is how I wind up splitting a pint of Phish Food with Gabe, Julia, and Julia’s girlfriend, the two of them sitting on the floor and scrolling through the channels for close to an hour, all of us making fun of lame car insurance commercials and passing the ice cream back and forth. Elizabeth, randomly, does a really good William Shatner impression.

“I heard you talked Penn into throwing an end-of-summer staff party,” she says as she’s getting ready to leave later, sliding her feet back into her Sperrys. “That was pretty cool of you.”

It’s not exactly
Sorry I tormented you at our place of business
, but I’ll take what I can get. Gabe nudges me in the back with all the subtlety of a big brass band. “Yeah,” I tell her, ignoring him and smiling a little. “It should be fun.”

Gabe walks me out not long after, the smell of coming rain wet and heavy in the air. “
Thaaaaaat
was something out of an alternate universe,” I say, disbelieving. “Like, in all seriousness, did I just hallucinate this whole night?”

Gabe shrugs. “Face it, Molly Barlow. We’re old news.”

“I guess so.” I smile in wonder. None of us talked about anything important, nothing was awkward or heavy or weird. It felt . . . normal.

Gabe’s not interested in processing the events of the night with me, though: “So, hey,” he begins, and right away it’s clear he’s got something else entirely on his mind. “You know my buddy Ryan, the one who had the party? He’s at some music festival in Nashville the next couple days.” Gabe shrugs a little then, too casual to actually be nonchalant. “He said the camper’s empty, if we wanted to use it for a night or two.”

I raise my eyebrows at him, unable to hide a grin even as my stomach’s flipping over at the notion. “I’m sorry,” I tease, glancing instinctively at the barn, which is dark and shuttered. “If we wanted to use it for
what
exactly?”

Gabe shakes his head at me, all that fake coolness melting away like ice cream on a sun-warmed sidewalk. “Shut up,” he mutters, smiling.

“No, really, tell me,” I nudge, bumping my bare ankle at his. “I want to know what exactly you were imagining we’d be using Ryan’s super-swank camper to
do
.”

Gabe rolls his eyes, rubs at his jaw a little. “You’re the worst.”

“I know,” I tell him, still grinning. “Tell me.”

He changes tactics then, slips a finger into my belt loop, gets closer. “To be alone,” he says.

“Oh, to be
alone
.” I pretend to consider it—as if there’s anything left to consider at this point. I pop up onto my tiptoes to press a kiss against his mouth, gentle. “I see.”

The carpet in Ryan’s decrepit camper by the lake is this truly hideous green shag number, the kind I feel sure must be housing some kind of wildlife; Gabe and I sit on it anyway, my legs canted open over his and an ancient checkerboard on the floor between us. He traces patterns on my ankle with one finger, the skin prickling there.

“My dad used to love checkers,” Gabe tells me, skipping his red checker over two of mine. There’s a Young the Giant song on his iPhone, quiet and slow. “We used to have these epic tournaments every time it snowed.”

I smile at him, remembering. “I know.”

“Shit, of course you do.” Gabe shakes his head. “I love that you knew my dad, you know that? I love
you
.” Then, as my surprised gaze comes up away from the board to look at him: “I do. I mean it. I know I kind of said it at Falling Star, but I mean it.”

“I love you, too.” It’s tumbling out of my mouth before I even think about it, maybe the first thing I’ve done or said all summer without worrying about how it’s going to look or sound. It’s true, though; I know as soon as I hear it. It feels like everything that happened since I got back to Star Lake—including,
especially
what happened with Patrick—has led me here. “Hey. Gabe.” I grin, the feeling of it breaking open inside me, molten and real. “I love you, too.”

“Yeah?” He looks surprised at that, and so happy—it feels good and powerful, to make someone so glad. He leans across the board and he kisses me. I hold on as tight as I possibly can.