99 Days (5 page)

I re-up my supply of Red Vines and spend the next day learning about the intricacies of General Sherman’s march to the sea, courtesy of Ken Burns’s
The Civil War
documentary, wearing sweatpants and a long-sleeved shirt even though it’s seventy degrees outside the house. I get all the way to 1864 before I even leave my room to pee. I was never into documentaries before I went to Bristol, but my roommate, this ferrety brunette named Karla who hung a sheet from the ceiling around her bed to disguise whatever the hell she was doing in there, was surprisingly generous with her Netflix password—probably because she thought it would keep me from doing anything crazy like trying to strike up a conversation. That was when I started working my way through one after another, a chorus of soothing, mostly British narrators explicating the details of various terrifying oddities, both natural and not: the Alaskan frontier, Steve Jobs, the Aryan Brotherhood. The knowledge felt like power, a little. It felt like a way to keep control.

Today I wait until I hear the crunch of my mom’s wheels receding down the gravel driveway before I creep downstairs for some avocado on toast. I’ve been living mostly on corn syrup and red 40 since I got here. I can feel a zit sprouting on my cheek. I fiddle with the fancy coffeemaker and stare out the window at the yard while it gurgles away on the granite counter. Oscar sighs noisily on the black-and-white tiled floor. Used to be when I had a sulk on Patrick would tell me stupid jokes until I snapped out of it:
What did the buffalo say when he dropped his kid off at school? (Bye, son)
and
What’s green and has wheels? (Grass, I lied about the wheels)
.

I think of his face the first time he ever kissed me. I think of his face when he saw me last night. I take my coffee and my toast and get back under the covers with my laptop, and I do my best not to think at all.

I’m not sure if Patrick’s working his old shifts at the shop now that he’s back in Star Lake for the summer, but I can’t get it out of my head that I have to see him, so the next afternoon I find him parked behind the ancient register just like two years ago, ringing a middle-aged lady up for three large extra-cheese pies.

Donnelly’s Pizza is sandwiched between a grubby laundromat and a clog-heavy shoe store on Main Street, has been for as long as I’ve been alive: Connie and Chuck were high school sweethearts, and started up the shop the year after they got married. It was always Chuck’s dream to own a pizza place, and Connie, whose maiden name was Ciavolella, taught him how to cook. The building is cheerfully scruffy, a big plate-glass window emblazoned with curling yellow script and a roof of unpainted wooden shingles, what’s probably the one working pay phone in the entire state of New York mounted on the wall outside the bathrooms. Red-and-white checked oilcloth covers all the tables. Photo collages of sports teams from the high school paper the walls.

Patrick doesn’t notice me right away, sharp face bent over the register and his curly hair falling into his eyes. When we were in first and second grade, all the girls used to try and touch it. It used to make Patrick nuts.

For a second I only just watch him—outside of the party the other night we haven’t shared space since the day more than a year ago when the
People
article came out. Julia was the one who showed it to Patrick to begin with—she loves any and all things having to do with celebrity, or at least she used to. She had subscriptions to
People
and
Us Weekly
and
Life & Style
, and strong opinions about the veracity of the information contained in each. I woke up to fourteen missed calls from her that morning on my cell phone, plus a series of texts so garbled by disbelief and anger and copious
WTF
s that I had to read them all twice before I figured out what the hell had happened.

What had happened was that I’d finally been caught.

When Patrick turned up later that day it was with a page yanked from Julia’s magazine, the edges ragged and torn. There was a crease in the middle of the photo of my mom in her office, a fold running right down the center of her face.

“Is this real?” Patrick asked me, and his voice was so quiet. The Bronco was still running in the driveway of my house. It was raining, a pale cold drizzle. Exhaust huffed out into the misty gray air.

“Okay,” I said, voice shaking, hands flat and out to try and soothe him. I’d seen the article that morning, and had been hiding in my room all afternoon. I knew what was coming. I should have gone to him first thing and faced the inevitable. Instead I’d been a coward and made him come to me. “Okay, can we just—”

“Mols.” Patrick looked ripped open, like shrapnel had exploded inside him. He looked like someone who’d come home and found a crater where his house used to be. “I said, is it true? Did you—” He shook his dark, curly head, so baffled. “I mean. With my
brother
?”

“I need you to listen,” I said, instead of replying. “Will you—”

“I’m listening.” Already Patrick’s voice was dangerously cold, like somewhere inside him he knew what was coming and wanted to brace for it. His eyes had turned the flat gray of steel. “Yes or no, Mols?”

“Patrick,” I said, and I couldn’t even answer him. “Please.”

Patrick took a step back then, like I’d physically struck him. There was rainwater collecting on his eyelashes and in his hair. “Okay,” he said slowly, then, fast, like a rubber band snapping: “I need to—yeah. I need to not be here.”

“Patrick,” I said again, curling my fingers around his arm to try and stop him; he shook me off and swung himself into the truck in one long fluid movement, slamming it into reverse and taking off like someone who hadn’t expected to be here very long at all. I stood on my lawn in the rain and I watched him recede into the distance, my heart and my history gone gone gone.

Now I hold my breath as I wait for him to see me, scanning the shelves underneath the counter for Red Vines. Connie used to order them specifically because she knew I was obsessed with them, but I don’t see them tucked between the Sour Patch Kids and the Mars bars, where they used to be. I’m looking around to see what else is different in here when the lady takes her pizza boxes and walks away, and then it’s just the two of us, me and Patrick, staring at each other like we’re on opposite sides of the lake.

“So, hey,” I try now, my voice coming out in a sandpapery croak, like maybe I haven’t talked since the party. “Heard any good gossip lately?”

Patrick doesn’t smile, just shakes his head and reaches under the counter for a fresh roll of register tape. He wouldn’t speak to me at all after the article came out, wouldn’t even come near me, and it was the horrifying loneliness of losing him even more than it was everyone else’s nastiness that sent me to Bristol in the end. “What do you want, Molly?” he asks, opening up the printer and setting it inside. The bruise underneath his eye has mostly faded, just a sickly yellow green.

“What happened?” I ask instead of answering, tucking my hands into the pockets of my shorts and chancing half a step closer.

Patrick shrugs and finishes with the receipt paper, slamming the lid shut and ripping off the colored edge with finality. “I hit somebody,” he tells me flatly. “Then I got hit back.”

That surprises me: Never, in all the years I’ve known him, has Patrick ever gotten in a physical fight. Connie and Chuck were practically the poster parents for nonviolent conflict resolution. Growing up, they made us work out our arguments using handmade felt puppets. “Is that why you came home?” I ask.

“Yup,” Patrick says, without elaboration. “That’s why.”

“Okay.” I nod and wonder who he is now, to toss something he wanted for so long like it didn’t even matter. I wonder if somehow I made him that way. “Look, Patrick. I just—there’s nothing going on with me and Gabe, okay? I just want you to know that. I came home for the summer, and I was being pathetic and so he invited me to that party, but it isn’t—we’re not—” I break off, unsure how to keep going. When we were twelve and thirteen, Patrick always talked about serious stuff sitting back-to-back, like it made it easier if we didn’t have to stare at each other. I wonder what would happen if I asked him to do that with me now.

Instead, he holds up a hand to stop me. “Look, Mols,” he says, echoing my tone exactly. It’s the nickname he’s had for me since we were little kids in pre-K, the same one his dad used to use. “Here’s the thing: You can whore around with my brother every day of the week if you want to. I really don’t care.”

I take a step back like Patrick’s hit
me
this time, like tomorrow morning I’ll wake up and find both my eyes swollen shut. My whole body goes prickly and hot. Patrick’s calm as the woods in dead winter, though, turning his full attention to the young family coming through the door, a practiced indifference like maybe I never interrupted him to begin with. Like maybe I was never here at all.

“Done for the day?” Penn asks me at quitting time, both her kids trailing her down the staff hallway toward the exit that leads to the side parking lot. Fabian takes karate twice during the week and once on Saturday afternoons, and is skipping across the linoleum in his immaculate white
gi
. Desi follows silently, her tiny hand tucked into her mom’s.

“All done,” I tell her, spinning the combination on my locker—the ones lining the hallway are small, like the kind at gyms and skating rinks, big enough to hold my canvas purse and emergency cache of Red Vines and not much else.

“Any luck with the TVs?”

“Not yet.” I shake my head. “But I’m working on it. Oh, also, remember you’ve got that meeting tomorrow with the guy from—” I break off suddenly, staring at the contents of my locker. Big enough for my purse and not much else, right—the
not much else
, at this particular moment, being a long strip of a dozen foil-wrapped condoms that I definitely didn’t put there myself.

Penn stops a few feet away and turns to look at me, quizzical. “Meeting with the guy from . . .?” she prompts.

“Oh! Uh,” I say, shoving the condoms into the bottom of my purse before I take it out, praying that Penn—or, God forbid, the kids—don’t get a glimpse of them. I blink at the vents on my locker door, just wide enough for somebody to slide the foil strip inside. “With the glass guy, about the cracked windows on the second floor. I called to confirm yesterday afternoon.”

“Good girl,” Penn says, still looking at me a little uncertainly. Then: “You coming?”

“Yup,” I manage. Fabian flings his tiny body against the PUSH bar on the door, sunlight leaking into the hallway. “Let’s go.”

I wave good-bye to Penn and the kids, and cross the blacktop to my car—it’s sitting right under a pine tree where I left it this morning, exactly the same save a long, jagged scratch along the side.

Someone’s keyed my driver’s door good, leaving a deep white scar clear across the body.

Not someone.

This is all Julia.

“
Damn
it,” I say out loud, slamming my palm down hard against the window, loud enough that Penn and the kids, climbing into their spaceship-like minivan, look up in alarm.

“You swore,” Fabian calls out cheerfully from the backseat, sneakered legs kicking. Penn clicks the remote and shuts both kids inside.

“You lose your keys?” she calls, crossing the lot in my direction. “Molly?”

“No, it’s—” I shake my head, ashamed and embarrassed, not wanting her to come any closer. I hate the idea of Penn seeing, like she’ll be able to figure the whole sordid story just from a fistful of condoms and one stupid scratch on my car.

In the end, I’m pretty sure it’s my face that gives me away more than the damage to the Passat. “Yikes,” Penn says, looking from me to the gouge and back again. “Molly. You know who did that?”

I think of Julia’s hands all of a sudden, her knobby knuckles that she hates and how she always has a neon manicure, hot pink or electric yellow. She used to like to paint mine, too. I remember the chemical smell of the nail polish hanging low and heavy in her room—back when the rule in the Donnelly house was that I could still sleep over as long as I crashed with Julia, the two of us piled head-to-toe in her twin bed, her chilly ankles brushing my arm. “Oh my
God
, this mattress is not big enough for the both of us,” she complained one night, rolling onto her side and whacking her elbow on the nightstand. The tiny bottles of polish rattled in protest. Julia swore.

“I said I’d go get the sleeping bag!” I protested.

Julia sighed theatrically. “No, it’s fine,” she said, then made a goofy face so I knew she wasn’t actually irritated. “Just hurry up and marry my brother so you can crowd him instead, will you?”

My eyebrows arced, surprised to hear her say the words out loud. Not even Patrick and I talked like that,
forever
s and
when
s. Possibly we were both too afraid. “Oh, is that the plan?” I asked teasingly.

“That is the plan,” Julia confirmed, stretching her arms up over her head so her fingertips brushed the headboard. “You guys are going to give me a million nieces and nephews, and gross everyone out with the story of how you met when you were fetuses, and it’s going to be totally vomitous but also nice. The end.”

I snorted.

“What?” Julia propped herself up on the pillows and peered at me in the dark, her voice gone oddly serious. “You don’t think it’ll happen?”

Julia was funny that way, one-half full of kerosene and one-half hopeless romantic, but I hadn’t really thought she was serious before now. Of
course
I thought about Patrick and me long term. We were already long term, the two of us. “No, I’m not saying that at all, I just—”

“Relax, you big weirdo.” Julia grinned then, flopping back onto the pillows and pulling the quilt up around her shoulders. Her hair fanned out across the mattress, a blue-black storm. “I don’t have, like, a creepy binder full of cutouts from wedding magazines for you guys. I’m just glad Patrick has you, is all I’m saying. I’m glad you guys have each other.”

I thought of the good-night kiss Patrick had pressed behind my ear a few minutes earlier. I thought of him breathing on the other side of the wall. This was maybe a year after Chuck died, everything barely scabbed over, that feeling of needing to keep everything close. “I’m glad we have each other, too,” I said.

“Good.” She patted me on the shin through the blankets, cartoonish. “Just try not to wake me up when you sneak out of my room to go bone.”

“Oh,
gross
!” But I was giggling, I remember, and Julia was giggling, too, the sound of her laughter the last thing I remembered hearing before I fell asleep.

“Molly?” Penn’s still watching me curiously, like she’s pretty sure there’s more to the story here. “Hey. You okay?”

I nod resolutely, the first time I’ve lied to her. I can tell she doesn’t buy it one bit. “Just an accident,” I tell her brightly, blinking back a stinging in my eyes and my sinuses. “Nobody to blame but myself.”