99 Days(16)

“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.”





Day 16


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.





Day 17


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.