99 Days (23 page)

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.

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 waitstaff 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, attempting 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 whips 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 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.

“
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 were my kid.

“I didn’t lay the smackdown!” I protest, lifting a canvas collaged with magazine 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 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.”

I shake my head and move the ladder over, climbing to the top to reach a canvas hung way up high. “I don’t, actually,” I counter. “Or at least, not out loud.”

Imogen laughs at that, trilling and familiar. Even after everything, I’m glad I came back. It’s strange to think in a few weeks we’ll have completely different lives again, that we refound each other this summer just in time to say good-bye for good.

“Uh-uh, don’t get mushy on me now,” Imogen says, like she can tell exactly what I’m thinking. “You said it yourself, Boston and Providence aren’t that far.” She reaches over and gently tugs the back of my flannel, so I know she’s behind me.

“We’ll be neighbors,” I tell her, and grin.

“Don’t,”
Patrick says immediately when I come into the shop the next day, bells above the door ringing out and my wild hair pulled back off my face with an enamel comb I filched off my mom. I wanted to look serious or something. This felt too important for messy hair. Patrick’s standing behind the counter, his whole body tense and rigid like the bars on a birdcage. There’s a green-yellow bruise healing on his face.

“Patrick.”
I gasp when I see it even though I knew it would be there, the difference between hearing about a natural disaster and seeing the wreckage yourself. “Is that from—?”

“I said
don’t
, Molly.” Patrick shakes his head, voice lower than I’ve ever heard it. There’s a bunch of middle school boys scarfing slices at the table by the window, a middle-aged couple lined up side by side on the stools. “It’s done now, okay? It’s finished. You shouldn’t have come here.”

“It’s not, though.” I take a deep breath. It’s all I’ve been able to think about since Connie picked me up by the lakefront. I have to get an answer from him once and for all. “Was this even about me?” I ask, and it feels like all the air is rushing out of me. “This whole summer, everything that happened? Or was it all some kind of messed-up contest with Gabe?”

Patrick looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “Everything that
happened
?” he parrots back incredulously. “Like you had no part in it.”

“That’s not what I’m saying!” I’m loud enough that the middle-aged couple looks up, but I’m too far gone to be embarrassed. I’m too far gone for anything but this.
I’m the girl from the book
, I want to tell them.
Go ahead and stare
. “That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m a big kid,” I tell him, echoing his mom without meaning to. “I made my choices. But what we did—admit it, Patrick. It wasn’t ’cause you missed me, it wasn’t because we’re us and you wanted to try to make this work, whatever it is. It was just ’cause you wanted to take me away from your brother. You wanted to win.”

“I wanted
you
,” Patrick counters, and the way he says it sounds worse than any curse he’s ever uttered. “I fucking loved you, Mols, how do you not get that?”

“Loved me so much that you messed with me all summer and humiliated me in front of everyone we know?”

Patrick looks at me for a beat across the counter. Then he sighs. Like he’s got nothing left. “I didn’t know how to let you go.”

I stare back at him for a moment—farther away than he ever was the whole time I was in Tempe, my heart leaking something so pungent I feel like he’ll be able to smell it over the sauce and pepperoni. I search his pretty face and his gray-storm eyes, the cut of his angry jaw, but he’s just—he’s not there. My Patrick—the Patrick I know and remember and love—is gone. I broke it, this thing between us. Both of us did. I used to think we could fix it—that what was happening between us all summer was fixing it, bringing us back together in some messed-up way. But some things can’t be repaired. I don’t know if I ever really believed that, not until now. The realization makes me feel as if my ribs have parted ways.

“I shouldn’t have said what I said to you,” he says finally. “In your room that night, I shouldn’t have called you—” The bells above the door jingle then, interrupting; a family of five traipses in. Patrick makes a face and winces, the livid yellow and green on his face. When he speaks again, the spell is broken. “Look, Molly,” he says, like I’m just another customer. Like I’m a stranger right off the street. “I gotta work.”

I feel the air go out of me, like a valve’s been released somewhere. All at once I’m so tired I can hardly stand. “I leave in a few days,” I tell him finally. I take a deep breath. “I’ll miss you.”

Patrick nods. “Yeah, Mols,” he says, and it sounds like the end of the summer. “I’ll miss you back.”