Authors: Katie Cotugno
Back at home there’s another email from the dean in my inbox:
Dear Incoming Student, please, for the love of all things holy, hurry up and figure out your life
.
Or something like that, at least.
I make a snack of apple and peanut butter, shoot Gabe a text to let him know what a good time I had.
You’re okay, too, for a speck
, he texts me back, and I giggle. With Gabe I never feel like a walking, talking letdown. With Gabe I just feel like me.
So why can’t I stop thinking about his brother?
I finish my apple and take Oscar out into the yard for a while, pushing the image of Patrick and Tess disappearing into the tent out of my mind and telling myself I’m being melancholy and dumb. I make a list of projects to tackle when I head back to work in the morning. Finally, I dig my phone out of my pocket.
How’s the rash?
I text Patrick, just teasing.
He doesn’t text back.
He does the next morning, though:
itchy
, he reports, just the one word and no punctuation. A couple of minutes later, though:
how’s the burn?
I grin down at my phone, feeling silly and glad.
Burn-y
, I reply.
My mom’s got an aloe plant
, he texts while I’m filing invoices in Penn’s office.
Could come by and get some if you still look like a lobster.
I don’t, not really; the worst of the burn’s faded, is beginning to peel away like so many layers of snakeskin, like I’m becoming something entirely new. All I can do is deal with the grossness and wait for whatever’s underneath.
Still:
will do
, I text him back, no hesitation.
When’s good?
I don’t know what it means that Patrick tells me to come over at a time I know Gabe’s working at the pizza shop—just that he doesn’t want anything to do with his brother, maybe, or possibly nothing at all.
“Hey,” he says, letting me in the feeble side door—it felt strange to knock on the frame and then wait for him, how I used to barge right in and sneak bites of whatever Chuck was making in the kitchen, usually something with lentils or whole-wheat flour. Patrick’s barefoot in his shredded old jeans. His hair’s grown out a little since he’s been back in Star Lake and he looks a bit more like I remember, some of those sharp edges filed off. “Come on in.”
“Sure,” I say, stepping past him into the dark, empty house, the familiar smells of dust and wood and sunlight. “Hey.” Pilot hauls himself up off the floor and comes across the room to wag his hello. It makes me feel sort of disproportionately happy that he remembers me somewhere at the back of his loyal canine brain, like maybe in some alternate universe I’m still part of this family after all. “Hey, Pilot. Hey, boy.”
“His hips are going,” Patrick says quietly, reaching down to scratch behind Pilot’s affable, furry ears. “He’s ten; he can’t really do stairs anymore. My mom rigged up a little step-stool thing so he can get up on the couch.”
I look down at Pilot, who’s panting cheerfully. His muzzle’s gone a silvery-gray. I remember when the Donnellys brought him back from the ASPCA, wriggly and wormy—Patrick and I rolled around in the yard with him anyway, muddy and covered in grass stains. Julia didn’t want anything to do with any of us. Gabe was off with his friends, I think. “Shoot, I didn’t know.”
Patrick shrugs. “Yeah, I can see how that’s the kind of thing my brother wouldn’t have told you,” he says, giving Pilot a final rub and heading for the kitchen door.
That stings. “Patrick—” I start.
“Aloe’s in the sunroom,” he interrupts me. “Come on.”
“Sure.” I follow him through the hallway, past the creaky staircase and into the bright, airy sunroom that Connie’s filled with fiddle-leaf fig and cacti, an enormous and vaguely terrifying spider plant that’s been holding court next to the picture window since I was a little girl. There’s a bright patterned rug spread over the floor, oranges and reds. Patrick picks a pair of scissors out of a jar on the bookshelf—one is encouraged to prune, if one is going to spend time in here—and snips a couple lengths of aloe off the plant.
“Thanks,” I tell Patrick quietly—our fingers brush as he hands me the aloe, this stupid useless shiver I feel all over my body. Way before anything romantic ever happened between us Patrick and I were always touching-friends, his arm slung around my shoulders or our palms pressed together to see whose hand was bigger. It used to make me feel reassured, when I bothered to think about it at all, a way of orienting myself in space, like running your hand along the wall in a dark room. Now even this much contact feels foreign and strange.
For Patrick, too, apparently: “I’ll get you a baggie,” he says, clearing his throat and heading back toward the kitchen, leaving me alone in the sunlight and green.
Imogen invites me over to have my cards read, which is how I know I’m really forgiven; I head over after work with two slices of the Lodge’s midnight chocolate cake and a CD of a singer-songwriter Penn turned me on to, this new chick from Brooklyn who plays the slide guitar. The night’s summer-cool, the sky over the lake a toasted rose gold. It rained this afternoon, quick and violent, and the road is still shiny and wet.
I haven’t been to Imogen’s house much since I got back here, a cottage off a side road not far from the high school, full of crystals and an altar to the Goddess set up in the front room. It smells like vanilla and patchouli oil, familiar. “Well, hey, Molly,” her mother says when she answers the door in a pair of flowy pants she’s had as long as I’ve known her; her hair’s different, though, pure white and cropped short around her face. I remember what Imogen told me about the cancer, and I squeeze her long and tight to say hello.
I grab two forks from the kitchen and head up the back staircase to Imogen’s room, where she’s putting the finishing touches on a huge brush script painting she’s working on, twenty-four by forty-eight inches that just says
EASY DOES IT
. “Not bad advice,” I say.
“I like to think so.” Imogen grins, dunking her paintbrush into a mason jar full of water and motioning toward the bed. There’s a picture of her and Tess in their graduation gowns tucked into the mirror. Her RISD sweatshirt’s slung over the chair. “You ready?
Ooh
, you brought cake, huh?”
“As per the agreement,” I tell her, passing a fork over and settling myself down on the ancient quilt. She hands me the cards to shuffle; after a moment, I hand them back. “Ready,” I say, taking a breath.
Imogen nods. “Think of your question,” she instructs me, just like always. When we were in middle school I remember wanting to know if Patrick
liked
-liked me. After Gabe I remember silently begging the cards to tell me what to do. Tonight I’m not even sure what I’m after exactly, but before I can articulate it even to myself Imogen sets the cards down on the bed.
“You hurt me,” she says, and I snap to attention, like hearing my name called in class. “When you peaced out like that.” Imogen glances down at the deck in front of her. She’s wearing purple mascara, and her lashes cast shadows across the apples of her cheeks. “You were my best friend, Molly. You always had Patrick. But I only ever had you.”
I open my mouth to tell her I’m sorry, to start apologizing and never ever stop, but Imogen looks up and shakes her head before I can get there: “Think of your question,” she says again, more softly. She takes a breath and flips the first card.
“You know what tomorrow is, right?” Gabe asks me. We’re perched at the counter at the shop eating messy slices of pizza and drinking fountain Cokes, orange grease pooling in the ridges of the cheap paper plates. I forgot how much I loved Donnelly pizza until this summer: It’s like I’m craving it all of a sudden, like there’s some secret ingredient my system’s been lacking.
I squint at him. He’s got a stringy bit of cheese stuck to his bottom lip, and I reach up to peel it away. “The day after today?”
“Yeeeeessss,”
Gabe says. “That’s very astute of you, thanks for that. It’s also first day of Knights of Columbus.”
“Is it really?” The Knights of Columbus carnival is the dorkiest of all summer traditions, a handful of slightly sketchy rides folded out of trucks at the park downtown, vendors hawking sausage and peppers and sugary fried dough. It’s put on to take advantage of the tourists, but we all used to love it anyway, would go four times in a week if we could find someone to take us, all blinking neon lights and beepy music like Las Vegas in the middle of Star Lake. The summer after fourth grade Patrick rode the swings six consecutive times over Chuck’s patient warnings and then threw up hot dog all over himself—and me. It occurs to me that I ought to remind him of that, that he actually barfed on me once and our relationship previously survived.
Gabe’s still looking at me expectantly, his eyes blue blue blue in the overhead lights of the shop: There are a couple of high school kids parked in the red plastic booths, a family splitting an extra cheese pie and a pitcher of grape soda. I blink, and the memory of Patrick recedes like a cloud of semolina flour, disappearing into the air. “I’d love to,” I tell Gabe, stealing the crust of his pizza off his plate and finishing it in two big bites. “I can’t wait.”
We hit Knights of Columbus with a crowd of Gabe’s friends, a noisy herd ambling down the midway in the pink-purple twilight. My boots kick up tiny clouds of dust under my feet. The whole Falling Star crew has turned up, too: Tess and Patrick, Imogen and Annie and Handsome Jay; my spine rattles in time with the chorus of mechanical beeping coming from the long row of games, the periodic
Hey!
as the water-gun booth broadcasts “Rock and Roll Part 2” over and over. I’m taking my change from the cotton candy vendor when Tess touches my arm, urgent. “Can I talk to you for a sec?” she asks.
“Sure thing,” I tell her, forehead wrinkling, wondering immediately what Patrick’s told her—not that there’s anything
to
tell, but still. I rip off a wad of spun sugar and stuff it into my mouth as I follow her around the corner beside a giant whirring generator. “What’s up?”
“I never really said thank you,” she tells me, tipping her head close even though there’s nobody but me around to hear her. She’s wearing clean white shorts and a plaid button-down, a smudge of lip gloss the only makeup she’s wearing as far as I can tell. Her eyelashes are pretty and pale. “After the other night.”
“For what?” I ask, swallowing my cotton candy and staring at her blankly. “Oh, for the water and stuff? Don’t even worry about it. Seriously, it could have been any of us. We were all pretty banged up.”
Tess shakes her head. “That wouldn’t happen to you.”
That surprises me. “I like how you think I’m this person who has my shit together,” I say, laughing a little, waving my cotton candy in her direction until she nods and pulls some off. “It’s very charming.”
“I don’t know.” Tess smiles back. “Sometimes it just feels like—”
“Hey, ladies!” That’s Patrick from a distance, motioning to where the rest of our group has already receded down the midway, bound for the hulking cluster of rides. “You wanna join us over here or not so much?”
“We’re talking about our periods,” Tess informs him loudly, which makes me laugh. “Anyway. Thanks,” she adds quietly.
“Don’t mention it,” I tell her. “Really.”
We rejoin the group and head for the Scrambler, which Annie swears beheaded somebody at a carnival outside Scranton. I spy Julia and Elizabeth Reese waiting in line for the giant slide. I turn to point them out to Gabe, find Patrick at my side instead, and startle; Tess is chatting animatedly with Imogen, nobody paying attention to us at all.
“How you feeling?” Patrick asks, quiet enough so only I can hear him. He’s wearing jeans so holey they’re basically shorts and a faded ringer T-shirt, hands shoved into his pockets. “The sunburn, I mean.”
I blink. “Better now,” I tell him, surprised not just that he’s walking beside me but that he’s actually speaking to me in public—Patrick, for one, definitely doesn’t share his girlfriend’s opinion that I’m somebody who knows what she’s doing in this life. “Really wasn’t so bad after all.”
He and Tess break off to ride the Scrambler with Jay and Imogen. “There you are,” Gabe says when I catch up to him, swinging a sturdy arm around my shoulders. He keeps it there as we walk, easy and casual in a starchy button-down with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, like he really is the mayor on his night off; his buddy Steve chats to me about Boston, if I’m planning to root for the Red Sox once I move.
“The Sox are filthy,” Kelsey puts in, sniffing like they’ve done something to personally offend her. “Don’t do it.”
I win a bright orange monkey at the water-gun game, which I pass off to Gabe with great fanfare amidst groans and catcalls from his buddies; he stamps a kiss against my temple, pulls me into line for the Ferris wheel just as the sun slips below the horizon line. Paused at the top I can see the winking lights of town in the distance, the dark spine of the mountains, and the first few pinprick stars.
“I used to think about bringing you up here,” Gabe tells me now, an arm around my shoulders and his face half shadow, half brilliant light. “When I was, like, thirteen or fourteen or whatever.”
“What? You did not.” I actually scoff, the bark of my laugh good-natured and incredulous.
Gabe laughs back, but he nods as he’s doing it. “I did.”
“Yeah, okay.” I shake my head. Gabe’s spent his life as the host of a party—Star Lake’s most wanted, a million different people all around him all the time. The idea that he was harboring secret Ferris wheel fantasies—that he was harboring any fantasies at
all
, that there was anything he wanted that he didn’t already have and, more than that, that that something was
me
—is hugely surprising. “No, you didn’t.”
“I
did
. You just didn’t notice because you were running all over the place playing Peter Pan and Tiger Lily with my brother, but I used to think about it a lot.”
“We weren’t playing Peter Pan and Tiger Lily,” I protest automatically, although the truth is that probably we were—Patrick and I pretended until we were way, way too old. I shake my head anyhow. “If you were fourteen, I was twelve.”
“Uh-huh.” Gabe grins. “Missing the point there a little bit, Molly Barlow.”
I shake my head again, ducking it down close so he’ll kiss me. “I’m not,” I promise seriously. “I’m not.”
“Uh-huh.” Gabe smirks and obliges, his mouth warm and friendly and wet. Him feeling something for me when we were younger, him having this whole other side I never guessed—I wonder how my life would have been different if I’d known and understood that before this summer. I wonder about the things it might have changed. For so long I belonged to Patrick, the two of us so close we weren’t even two distinct people, like conjoined twins or one of those mutant double crackers you get sometimes if the Nabisco machinery slips up and doesn’t separate them correctly. It was good until it wasn’t, it worked until it broke, but sitting here at the top of the Ferris wheel with the whole world spread out in front of me, all I can wonder is what would have happened if I’d spent all of high school—all my
life
—with Gabe instead. What if I’d gone to lake parties and hung out at Crow Bar instead of hiding out in the Donnellys’ barn with Patrick, the two of us casting idle judgment and breathing each other’s air? Would I have left so much horrifying wreckage? Would I have had more than just a tiny handful of friends? It feels good, being here in this rickety little car with him, Steve and Kelsey directly behind us and a crowd of friendly faces on the ground. It feels easy and healthy and
right
.
So I kiss Gabe again, sinking into it as the motor jolts back to life, a rapid creak and the swooping feeling as we sink down toward Earth.