Authors: Katie Cotugno
Patrick comes by the Lodge to pick Tess up in the middle of the afternoon, and this time he doesn’t bolt the second he gets a fleeting look at my face. “Want me to get her?” I ask. She’s teaching an old-lady water aerobics class this afternoon, I know—she and I ran out to French Roast on our break this morning, and she told me how much she was dreading it. But Patrick shakes his head.
“I’m early,” he says, sitting down beside me on one of the porch rockers. I brought the schedule out here to fuss with, everybody’s PTO requests stacked up on the rough-hewn coffee table beside me. I made some watery iced coffee, cubes melting faster than I can drink it down. “How’s your day?”
“Oh, you know.” I wave the papers at him, surprised and pleased. “Trying not to piss anybody off too much.”
Patrick’s eyebrows twitch, but he lets that one go. “Could always settle employee disputes via mud wrestling,” he suggests, stretching his long legs out in front of him.
“A dance-off,” I counter.
“Rock Paper Scissors,” Patrick says, then: “Or just flip a fucking coin like Emily Green.”
That stops me, the reference to
Driftwood
and its dumb heroine’s decision-making strategy of choice, how in the book she keeps an Indian Head penny tucked in her shoe for whenever things got real sticky—or so I’ve heard. “You
read
it?” I ask, surprised.
Patrick shrugs, looking away from me. “I read parts,” he mutters.
We’re quiet for a minute, both of us breathing the piney, dirt-smelling air. “Penn thinks I should be a business major,” I say finally, more to make noise than anything else.
“Yeah?” Patrick leans forward and considers that for a minute, all bunchy shoulders, his elbows on both denim-covered knees. “Remember when you made Julia and me start an iced-tea stand because you said the lemonade market was flooded? Or that time you had us make mac and cheese for my mom and dad and then told them they had to pay for it?”
I snort. “I was seven, thank you.”
Patrick smirks. “I’m just saying, that’s a head for business right there.”
“Shut up.”
“Or that track team fund-raising thing you did sophomore year,” he points out, more serious this time. “The running in heels thing.”
“You thought that was the stupidest fund-raiser ever,” I protest, remembering—we needed new uniforms, so we had the guys and girls race to raise money. “You told me so every day.”
“I mean, yeah, but it worked,” Patrick says. For a second he looks sort of sorry, like maybe he regrets how he blew it off back then. “That was real. You’re good at organizing and planning stuff; your boss is right.”
“Yeah?” I ask. I’ve had the idea in my head on and off ever since Penn mentioned it, but something about Patrick—who knows me better than anyone, or who at least used to—saying it’s a good idea, that makes it feel like an actual possibility.
Molly Barlow
, I imagine myself saying the next time someone asks,
business major
.
Patrick nods. “Yeah,” he says. “I think so.”
We’re quiet again, the late-afternoon lull of the Lodge all around us, that pre-dinner pause. Across the parking lot a boy and a girl shuffle along the blacktop in their bathing suits and flip-flops, both of them holding bright plastic pool rafts. All of a sudden my chest aches so hard I can barely breathe.
“Could we ever hang out?” I blurt before I can rethink it or get too embarrassed or cowed. “Like, on purpose? Not just when we run into each other or whatever?”
For a moment, Patrick doesn’t answer, and it’s like I can’t backpedal fast enough. “I mean, I get that that’s probably colossally weird,” I say. “On top of which you’re probably busy with Tess and the shop and stuff, I just . . .” I trail off, a little helpless. “I don’t know.”
For a minute, Patrick just looks at me, wordless. I feel like he can see the tissue underneath my skin. “I don’t know, either,” he says finally. “But, yeah, let’s try.”
Sasha at the front desk has her break at three-thirty, so I offer to cover, straightening my ponytail and my Star Lake Lodge name tag both. I check in a family with three triplet girls, all blond and bespectacled, and a pair of paramedics from the Berkshires who wanted to try a different mountain range for variety’s sake. Their two redheaded toddlers climb on the leather couches, all dimpled arms and legs.
The couple who comes in behind them is older, a guy in khaki shirts and a sun-leathered woman in a brightly colored parrot T-shirt, a plastic tote bag with hula girls, and lime-green flip flops on her feet. “Welcome to the Lodge,” I say as she hands over her credit card.
The woman ducks her yellow-gray head forward conspiratorially, like we’re old friends. “Maybe you can tell me,” she says, voice lowered, just-between-us-girls. “Does Diana Barlow really live in this town?”
Well.
“She does,” I confirm, trying to keep my face neutral. I fish their keys out of the cubby behind the desk. “You a fan?”
“Oh, the biggest,” the woman assures me. “Mostly her early stuff, but have you read
Driftwood
? I cried for two days. And you know it’s about the daughter.” When I turn back around she’s leaning almost all the way over the desk as if she thinks my mother is possibly crouched back here, hiding. She shakes her head. “It’s heartbreaking stuff.”
“Terrible,” I agree, my whole body heating up like a torch held to copper, like if you looked at me from above I might seem to glow. This is the worst part, I remind myself, working to keep my face impassive. Except for all the other worst parts. “So sad.”
The woman takes her room keys and her bloated-looking husband and heads upstairs, finally, leaving me alone in the lobby with no one to blame but myself. I hold one palm to my flaming cheek, unpin my name tag with the other.
Molly
, it reads in big block letters, innocuous, anonymous enough that the woman with the parrot shirt probably didn’t even think to look.
That’s when I turn and see Tess.
“Don’t,” I say, holding my hand up. She’s hovering in the doorway that leads to the office in her flip-flops. I have no idea how long she’s been there, but from the look on her face I can tell it’s been long enough. “It’s fine.”
“I wasn’t going to say a word,” Tess says, and something in her voice telegraphs she’s serious, that she probably would have brought that particular exchange to her grave. She nods at Sasha, who’s crossing the lobby to reclaim her post. “Was gonna take my break, though. You wanna come for a walk?”
I open my mouth to refuse her, then close it again. “I—sure.”
We wander out onto the back porch, down the crooked wooden steps to the pool level. It’s overcast today, just a couple of little kids gallantly dog-paddling their way across the shallow end, teeth chattering and lips tinted purple. “We used to be just like that,” Tess says, gesturing with her chin. “Me and my brother. We’d have swum in February, if we could.”
That makes me smile. She’s never mentioned her brother before. “Is he older or younger?”
“Older,” Tess tells me. “He’s at NYU, so I’ll get to see him a little bit in the fall. I’m going to Barnard, so it’s pretty close.”
“That’s cool.” We slip our shoes off and sit down on the concrete edge of the pool, dangle our feet into the chilly water.
“Uh-huh,” Tess says, reaching down to skim a leaf off the surface of the pool. “I had to promise my mom I wouldn’t stop shaving my armpits once I got there, but I don’t know, their econ program seems interesting enough. We’ll see, I guess.”
I think of my email from the dean about declaring a major, still flagged in my inbox and awaiting a response. “How is that a thing you knew you wanted to do?”
Tess shrugs. “I’m good at math,” she says. “I’ve always been good at math; I’ve been doing my parents’ bills since I was eleven. And I like international stuff—like, how what happens in one country money-wise affects what happens in another country.” She grins. “I get that that’s, like, really boring to most people, don’t worry.”
“No, it’s not at all. I’m super impressed.” I shake my head a bit and pick at a place where the caulk is peeling on the side of the pool, making a mental note to tell the maintenance guys about it. Tess leans back on her palms, turning her face up like she’s trying to wring sunshine out of the clouds. “Do you think you and Patrick will stay together?” I ask, then immediately feel awkward about it—feeling like a creep and not even knowing why I’m asking, exactly. “Sorry.” I look down at my feet. “That’s totally weird and over the line.”
Tess shakes her head. “No, it’s fine; I’d be curious, too. I think so, yeah. We’ve talked about it a little. He’s not sure where he’ll be, but it’s not so far from there to here.” She wrinkles her nose a bit. “Did you guys used to talk about going to college together?” she asks me. “As long as we’re, you know, being over the line?”
That makes me smile—it
is
weird, no question, but in some strange kind of way I appreciate it. “Yeah,” I tell her, “we did.”
Tess nods at that, seemingly unbothered. “Sun’s coming out,” is all she says.
My first act with Patrick as People Who Are Trying to Hang Out is to meet for the world’s most awkward run around the lake, a couple of boats bobbing along in the current and a woodpecker knocking around in the trees. On one hand, we don’t actually have to talk very much, so that’s helpful. On the other, while the running itself isn’t the painfest it was when I first got back from Bristol, trying to keep pace with him makes me realize how easy I’ve been taking it.
“You good?” Patrick asks, not looking at me.
“I’m good,” I say, eyes straight ahead.
It didn’t used to be this uncomfortable—nothing about being with Patrick used to be uncomfortable, but running around in particular was part of our everyday: racing to the tree line at the edge of the farm and back, suicides up and down the bleachers at the high school on weekends. Sometimes Patrick won, and sometimes I did. As far as I know neither one of us ever threw a race.
Now I ignore the burn in my leg muscles and keep going. I feel hyperconscious of how soft and out of shape I probably still look in my leggings and tank top, like there’s a layer of pudding under my clothes. I wonder if he’s been running every day since he got back, too, both of us orbiting circles around each other all over town. The idea makes me lonely and sad. Then again, he’s got Tess, doesn’t he? Tess, who I drove home from work last night; Tess, who put her flip-flops up on my dashboard and sang along in the world’s most off-key, unselfconscious voice to the Miley Cyrus song on the radio.
Tess, who I definitely didn’t tell about this little outing.
“Way to be,” Patrick says when we’re finished, throwing me a high five to say good-bye like he’s congratulating me on something, even though it doesn’t feel like we’ve accomplished anything at all. “We should do it again.”
I shake my head in wonder as I watch him jog away from me, back in the direction of the farmhouse. The sun feels prickly and hot at the back of my neck.
“You should pay them,” I argue after dinner the next evening, sprawled on the grass in my mom’s damp backyard. A couple of fireflies flicker lazily in the pine trees. “They’re doing a job, they should get paid.”
“They’re college athletes!” Gabe says stubbornly. “You get a scholarship, that’s the compensation. If you don’t go to class and
use
it, that’s—”
“You can’t go to class and use it!” I fire back. I like this, arguing with him good-naturedly. Patrick and I agreed on everything . . . until the moment we emphatically didn’t. “You’ve got practice, like, eighty hours a week; the coaches actually
tell
you not to study and focus on your games.”
Gabe makes a face. “I get paid eight bucks an hour to swipe cards at the student center at school,” he tells me, warm ankle nudging against mine. “You want to pay them eight bucks an hour?”
“Maybe!” I say, laughing. “Better than not getting paid at all.”
“Uh-huh.” Gabe grins at that, ducking his face close to mine in the darkness. “This is a stupid argument,” he decides, bumping our noses together. “Let’s make out instead.”
“You wish,” I tell him, climbing up onto my knees so I can reach over him and grab the bag of gummy worms he brought me—the movement ignites a searing ache in both thighs, though, and I groan a little bit.
“Easy, tiger,” Gabe says, reaching for the bag himself and handing it over. “Been running a lot, huh?”
“I—yeah.”
With your brother
, I almost tell him—
could
tell him, could just slip it in right now and it wouldn’t have to be weird, it could be normal, like I have nothing to hide there at all.
I
don’t
have anything to hide.
Do
I?
“Could rub,” Gabe offers now, pulling my calves into his lap and squeezing. I smirk at him in the blue twilight and keep quiet, tilt my head back and enjoy the view.
I’m supposed to go shopping for dorm stuff with Imogen in the morning—she has a very specific type of shower caddy in mind—but Patrick texts me to run again, so I ask her if we can reschedule for the afternoon and lace up my ancient sneakers even though the sky above the lake is purple-gray and heavy-looking, threatening a biblical kind of rain. Sure enough, we’re only a quarter mile in when it starts to pour.
I’m ready to turn back, but Patrick raises his eyebrows like a challenge: “Wanna keep going?” he asks, and I nod.
The rain falls cold and fast and steady. We run. Water soaks my tank top, trickles into my socks; it flicks off my eyelashes and skids in rivulets down my spine. Suddenly, I’m taken down in a giant mud-slick, legs sliding right out from underneath me as I land on my ass and
hard
. For a second, I just sit there, shocked.
“You okay?” Patrick calls, stopping two strides ahead and tracking back to stand beside me, New Balances making deep prints in the muck. He reaches out to pull me to my feet.
“I—” I stare at his hand like it’s a foreign object, something from another planet entirely. The night on my front lawn not withstanding, he’s barely touched me at all since I’ve been back.
“I got it,” I tell him, conducting a quick inventory of my arms and legs and deciding it’s just my pride that’s broken. He’s seen me wipe out a million times before, but this feels different. “I’m fine. I’m just slow and fat now, these things happen.”
“You’re what?” Patrick’s eyes are the same color as the heavy gray sky. “Are you crazy?”
“Oh God, please don’t.” I scramble to my feet and slip again like something out of effing Laurel and Hardy, the black-and-white movies Chuck used to lose his shit laughing over when we were little kids. I’m about to do something and I honestly don’t know if it’s going to be laugh or cry. God, I am so, so tired. “I wasn’t fishing. I don’t need you to, like, give me a sad compliment or whatever. I’m just saying, I’m sitting in this mud puddle because I’m fat and slow now. In case it’s somehow escaped your attention.”
Patrick shakes his head, annoyed. “You’re sitting in the mud puddle because you won’t take my hand, Mols.”
“I mean, fine,” I say, susceptible to logic and willing to concede that particular point, if not the larger one. “But—”
“And, like, clearly you’re beautiful, so I don’t know what the hell you’re—”
“Patrick.”
I blurt his name before I can stop myself, stupid and unthinking—he shuts up right away, and it feels like a lighter that’s almost out of juice catching just for a second, that spark that’s there and gone.
“Take my damn hand, will you?” Patrick asks quietly. “Please.”
I take it.
“Thanks,” I tell him, shocked and hopeful. Patrick nods and doesn’t say a thing. It’s still pouring as we take off again, a cautious jog that builds to something faster: just me and him and the sound of the rain in the treetops, running through the end of the world.