99 Days(14)

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 WTFs 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.