99 Days (6 page)

I stop by French Roast the next morning on the way back from my run—awkward or not, I need to talk to somebody about what’s going on here, and Imogen’s possibly the only girl in all of Star Lake who isn’t secretly applauding Julia for dishing out exactly what I deserve. I’m fully intending to throw myself on her mercy, but when I burst through the doors of the coffee shop I find her taking her break at one of the long wooden tables, sitting across from Tess with a Celtic cross spread of tarot cards laid out between them.

My first instinct is to turn around and walk right back out, my skin going hot inside my T-shirt. I haven’t seen Tess since the night of the party, when I took off like my hair was engulfed in flames—our shifts hardly ever overlap, they won’t until the Lodge opens for real, and the few mornings I’ve noticed her on the schedule I’ve hidden out in the office like a political dissident seeking asylum. Beyond the shock of locking eyes with Patrick was the sting of seeing him with his new girlfriend. Tess is living, breathing proof I can’t fix what I broke.

“Hi, Molly,” Tess calls before I can make a break for it, obviously raised with better manners than I was. She’s wearing a big pair of tortoiseshell glasses and picking at a fruit cup, peering down at the cards as Imogen flips them over.

Imogen looks up guiltily as I approach, offering a little wave.
I’m not really doing that anymore
, I think of her saying. What she meant was she wasn’t going to do it for me.

“Hi, guys.” I offer a watery, pulpy smile and glance at the major arcana cards laid out on the table—justice and judgment, temperance and strength—and wonder what question Tess wanted answered, if there’s anything she’s unsure of at all. I wonder what things are like between her and Patrick, if he tells her stupid jokes when she’s feeling worried. If he talks her back to sleep when she has bad dreams. I feel a fresh, familiar ache behind my rib cage, like re-tearing a muscle that never quite healed right.
He’s moved on
, I remind myself silently. Everyone has.

Except for me.

Patrick has a new girlfriend now. Imogen has a new best friend. Bristol was supposed to be this great fresh start, but the reality is I was a ghost there, too. I laid low. I did homework. I kept to myself. I thought of my time at boarding school like a jail sentence, and for the most part it suited me just fine.

More than two weeks at home now, though, and it occurs to me I’m still serving it out.

“I can do yours after this,” Imogen offers now, flipping over the Four of Cups and laying it down on the table—an olive branch, maybe, but I’m too exhausted and stung to reach out and take it. I shake my head and hold up my wallet. There’s no way I can tell her about Julia, I realize belatedly. I’ve got nobody to talk to here at all.

“I’ve gotta run,” I tell her, wanting to let the both of us off the hook—I lost her somehow, I was careless, same as I lost everything else I used to have. I don’t need the cards to shine a light on things for me. I already know I’m the fool.

The next day Gabe comes by the Lodge with two cups of coffee and the hoodie I left at the party. “Here you go, Cinderella,” he announces. Fabian, who darted into Penn’s office with the giddy announcement that a
boy
was here to see me, peers at us openly from behind one of the fraying brocade sofas in the lobby.

“Cinderella left her shoe,” I inform Gabe, turning Fabian around by the shoulders and sending him off to find his sister with a pat between the skinny wings of his shoulder blades. “Not her grotty track sweatshirt from freshman year.”

Gabe grins. “I’m familiar with the fairy tale, thank you.”

“Thank
you
,” I correct. “For picking it up and everything.” I busy myself with the plastic lid on the coffee cup, taking way longer than I need to pull it back. I know in theory there’s no reason to feel embarrassed in front of Gabe—if I’m a slut, he’s a slut, right?—but all the piss and vinegar that had me agreeing to come to the party to begin with feels like it’s been bleached out by everything that’s happened in the last few days, like there’s no fight left inside me at all. Nobody’s putting condoms in Gabe’s locker, I don’t think.

“Hey, there.” As if he can read my thoughts, Gabe takes a step toward me, ducking his face to meet my gaze. “We’re on the same team, remember? You and me.” He scrubs at his neck, shakes his head a little. “Look, I know you caught the brunt of the bullshit when everything hit the fan, and I should have said something way before now. It’s messed up that I didn’t. But you and me, this summer and whenever else? We’re on the same team.”

That makes me smile in spite of myself, a warm, pleased flush. I try to remember the last time I had anybody else on my team, and can’t. Track, maybe. Maybe track. “We are, huh?” I tease, lips twisting. “Partners in shame and degradation?”

“Exactly.” Gabe laughs low and easy. I can’t tell if stuff genuinely rolls off his back like a duck in the lake, or if maybe he’s just a born politician, a master of spin and PR. Patrick’s never been like that—everything he feels is always written across his face like a sign on the highway, no secrets to suss out there at all. It’s one of my favorite things about him, or it was.

“So, hey,” Gabe says now, perching comfortably on the edge of the sofa like he hangs out here every day of his life. “In the spirit of being dirty rotten scoundrels, what do you say we get out of here, huh? Go for a drive?”

“Gabe.”
I shake my head even as I’m still smiling back at him, the crooked grin I’m starting to realize is possibly more than just friendly on his part. Right away I want to say yes just as much as I need to say no. “I’m working.”

Gabe raises his eyebrows. “You must get off sometime, right?”

“I—yes.” In less than an hour, actually, but it’s not that easy. It can’t possibly be that easy, and it’s not. “Your whole family hates me,” I remind him. “It’s a disaster wherever we get anywhere within fifty feet of each other. I think it’s pretty clear the whole of Star Lake would rather I just stayed in my room and watched documentaries all summer. I mean, there’s one about farmers who grow giant pumpkins for cash prizes that I’m really looking forward to, so . . .”

“So.” Gabe just looks at me, patient, like someone who’s willing to wait me out. The lobby is quiet, sun streaming in through the freshly wiped French doors at the far end of the lobby and a jungle’s worth of green plants newly arranged on the mantel of the tall stone fireplace. “So
what
, exactly?”

I huff out a noisy breath instead of answering.
“Why?”

Gabe laughs. “’Cause I like you. I’ve always liked you, and now you’re a social outcast, so I’m figuring you’re free.”

I snort. “Rude,” I scold, ignoring the compliment. Ignoring the
always
, and everything that might mean. “What happened to being on the same team?”

“I’m a social outcast, too!” Gabe exclaims immediately, which is as absurd as it is weirdly winning. He grins wide and pleased when I crack up. “Come on,” he says, like he senses he’s got me. “Nobody will see, you can crouch down in the seat until we get to the highway. Wear a disguise.”

“Those glasses with the nose attached, maybe,” I suggest, shaking my head and smiling.
Screw it
, a tiny voice inside my head is saying—the same voice, just maybe, that told me to go to the party at the lake. Almost everybody in this whole town hates me or is totally indifferent. Everyone, it feels like, except for—
“Gabe.”

“Molly,”
he says, echoing my tone exactly. “Trust me.”

So. I do.

We drive an hour to Martinvale with the windows of the station wagon rolled down to let the wind in; it’s bracing, the feeling of old skin sloughing off in the breeze. “So, biology, huh?” I ask him, reaching across the center console and flicking the Notre Dame key ring dangling from the ignition with one of my short, naked fingernails. I expected the ride out to be loaded or awkward. Instead it just feels nice. “What’re you gonna be, a mad scientist or something?”

“Uh-huh, exactly.” Gabe lets go of the wheel and puts his arms out like Frankenstein’s monster, his warm shoulder bumping against mine as he does it. “Sex robots, for the most part. Some secret stuff with lizards.” Then, as I’m laughing: “Nah. I’m premed.”

“Really?” That surprises me for some reason. I always thought of Julia as the brains of the Donnelly family. Gabe had the personality. Patrick had the soul. “What kind?”

“Cardiologist,” he says immediately, then huffs out a wry little breath and shakes his head at the windshield. “I guess it’s kind of lame and obvious why, huh? ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this kid’s dad keeled over from a heart attack, behold as he works out all his issues in the world’s most obvious way.’”

I’ve never heard Gabe talk about his dad before. I don’t know why I always thought of Chuck’s death as Patrick’s loss more than anyone else’s—because I felt it from him most, I guess, because Patrick was my favorite Donnelly and so somewhere in the back of my unconscious head I’d always assumed he must be Chuck’s, also. That was the great thing about Chuck, though, why six hundred people showed up at his funeral: Everybody he knew thought they were his favorite. That was just the kind of person he was.

“Not the most obvious,” I tell Gabe now, tilting my head to look at him in profile. The sun makes dappled patterns on the smooth skin of his cheeks and forehead. His nose is very, very straight. “The
most
obvious would be joining a band.”

That makes him laugh. “True,” he allows, signaling to pull off the parkway. “Joining a band would be worse.”

We get lunch at a drive-through burger joint not far from the exit, wax-paper sacks full of French fries and tall plastic cups of iced tea. I feel weirdly self-conscious as I’m eating, glancing down at the wide white expanse of my thighs sticking out of my shorts. New running routine or not, probably the bacon on my burger is not helping the situation here.

“What’s the word?” Gabe asks now, nudging me in the shoulder—it’s an old expression of his mom’s. I shake my head, crumpling my fry bag up into a little ball.

“Your sister keyed my car,” I confess.

Gabe gapes at me. “Wait,
what
?” he demands, blue eyes widening. We’ve been sitting in the open hatchback of his station wagon, our legs dangling out over the bumper, but all at once he’s springing to his feet. “Jesus Christ, Molly. When?”

“At work,” I mutter, looking down at my lap again, hiding behind the curtain of my long, wavy hair. I haven’t told anyone until right this minute and admitting it to Gabe feels like lancing a blister, a combination of satisfying and completely, abjectly gross. I don’t know how I became this person, one of those girls with a lot of drama around her. A person whose romantic garbage literally fills an entire book. Patrick and I would have judged the shit out of me, two years ago. I’m judging the shit out of myself right now.

Gabe doesn’t seem to be, though: When I glance out from behind my waterfall of hair his face is painted with anger, but it’s definitely not directed at me. “Look,” he says, “I’ll deal with her, okay? That’s, like . . . that is actual bullshit, right there. Julia gets away with murder sometimes. And, like, I’ve been trying to go easy on her lately because of—” Gabe breaks off, shaking his head. “Whatever. I’ll handle her.”

“No, no, no,” I protest, scrambling out of the hatchback myself. God, that would only make it worse, if Gabe got in the middle. Maybe it’s fair and maybe it isn’t, but whatever this is between me and Julia—between me and Patrick, between me and Gabe himself—I’m the one that needs to handle it. “It’s okay,” I lie, wanting it to be for both of our sakes. I reach out and touch his arm below the elbow, warm skin and the rope of muscle underneath. “Seriously, please don’t. I’ll figure it out.”

Gabe rolls his eyes, but he doesn’t argue. I like that—that he seems to trust my judgment. That he doesn’t try to convince me he knows best. For a moment I follow his gaze out to the tree line; he parked with the back of the wagon to the summer woods, this wide expanse of uninterrupted green. I forgot how much I missed this when I was in Tempe. “Okay,” he says, sliding his arm back until our hands catch, squeezing for a moment before he lets go. The gesture sends a clanging all the way up into my elbow, like I banged my funny bone. “But I just—I know your life has basically been one long, uninterrupted shitshow since you got back here. And I know a lot of that is my fault.”

I shake my head, ready to protest. “It’s not—”

Gabe makes a face. “It kind of is,” he says.

For a second I remember the feeling of his warm mouth pressing at mine. I feel safe when I’m with Gabe, I’m realizing slowly, like the station wagon is a getaway car and we’re headed for the border by nightfall. It’s not exactly an unattractive thing to pretend. “Okay,” I admit finally. “It kind of is.”

“Same team, remember?” Gabe shrugs, sun catching the lighter streaks in his hair, brown and amber. He sits back down in the trunk of the Volvo, picks some dog hair off the interior, and drops it on the ground. “I won’t do anything you don’t want me to, it’s your rodeo, but . . . same team.”

“My rodeo, huh?” After a moment I sit down beside him, stretch my palms out behind me, and turn my head to look at him. “Okay.”

“Okay,” Gabe echoes. He leans back so his arms are behind him just like mine are. His pinky brushes mine on the floor of the trunk. I glance over my shoulder, look at our hands side by side, my ragged cuticles and the pale fuzz of blondish hair on his wrists. I imagine him grown up and finished with med school, patients lying on the operating table—reaching inside people’s rib cages, fixing their broken hearts.

The Lodge opens in a few days, and Penn’s dialed up to eleven: This morning she had me and Desi dusting the details of the crown molding with Q-tips, then interrupted us halfway through that to taste-test three different ketchup options in the kitchen. I’m exhausted, a wrung-out kind of limpness in my arms and my shoulders—so tired, in fact, that when Mean Michaela waves to me in the hallway on my way to the time clock, I’m stupid enough to wave back in the moment before she turns her hand and flips me off instead. “Night, bitch,” she singsongs cheerfully, the door slamming behind her as she goes.

“Nice,” I mutter, rolling my eyes even as I feel the familiar heat of shame flooding my face. All I want to do is go home and crash without speaking to another human person, but when I grab my bag out of my locker and head for the exit, I find Tess already there punching her card.

“Long day?” she asks, looking pretty wiped herself—I can only imagine what pool duties were today, if she had to scrub tile grout with a toothbrush or something. Tess is wearing shorts and a Star Lake Lodge T-shirt with the old logo on it, one she must have found floating around the hotel somewhere. Her hair’s in a messy knot on top of her head. She doesn’t look like a supermodel or anything, isn’t tall or extraordinarily pretty. It makes her a lot harder to hate.

“Long day,” I echo, punching my card and slipping it into the appropriate slot. The time clock dates way back to the sixties. I start to wave good-bye, feeling awkward just being around her, but Tess holds up a hand so I’ll stay.

“Look, Molly,” she says, shrugging her broad athlete’s shoulders. She’s holding a half-eaten peach in one hand. “I guess I just wanted to say—” She breaks off. “God, this is awkward. This is really awkward, right?”

That makes me smile. “A little,” I admit.

“Okay,” Tess says. “Well, we’re in it now, so I’m gonna push through. I guess I just wanted to say that I know it’s weird between us, but, like—we work together, we’re gonna see each other a lot now that we’re opening, and I just—whatever happened before I moved here, you definitely never did anything to me, you know? And even though—” She stops again, wrinkling her nose up. “I hope you feel the same way about me.”

Right away I feel enormously grateful, and also two inches tall. “I thought you
hated
me,” I blurt, blinking at her in the bright lights of the staff hallway. “I mean, ’cause of—”

“I read the book,” Tess confesses. “And I mean, Patrick told me—”

I cut her off with a nod. “Yeah—”

“But I definitely don’t hate you. I was kind of scared of you, to be honest.”

“Seriously?” I gape. “
Why
? I have no friends! Have you noticed I have no friends?”

“You have Gabe,” Tess points out. Then, like she realizes that’s possibly not the best example to be using: “And you’re Penn’s favorite, clearly. I just, I don’t know, you’ve known those guys forever, you’ve known Imogen forever—”

“It’s not like that.” I shake my head. “Whatever it used to be—it’s definitely not like that anymore.”

“Well, whatever.” Tess smiles, then takes the last bite of her peach and tosses the pit into a nearby trash can. “So we’re okay? I just didn’t want to spend the whole freaking summer doing that
Mean Girls
stuff, that’s not really how I roll. We’re okay?”

“We’re
fine
,” I tell her, and my smile then is genuine. Even if Patrick’s going to hate me forever, it occurs to me to be glad he’s got someone like Tess. “Yeah, we’re good.”