99 Days(34)

Gabe doesn’t seem to notice my hesitation, thank goodness; instead he kisses me again, licks his way into my mouth until I’m gasping. I’ve never kissed a guy and had it be like this. His hand is warm and heavy on my waist—I’ve been nervous about letting him see any part of me that isn’t normally covered by my clothes, how soft and doughy my body still feels in spite of all the running I’ve been doing, but when he tugs my shirt up it’s so slow and easy and I’m so distracted that I almost don’t even notice until it’s already happened. His fingertips set off tiny firecrackers all across my skin. “Jesus,” I mutter against his lips, breathing hard enough that I’m almost embarrassed, my chest moving with the quickness of it.

“That okay?” Gabe asks.

I nod, liking that he’s asking. I smell salt and his old woodsy soap. Over his shoulder Indy’s outrunning the boulder, the swell of the old familiar music: “This is the good part,” I murmur quietly, then close my eyes so he’ll kiss me again.





Day 31


Connie’s outside the pizza place turning the flowers in their pots when I show up the following afternoon, the sun yellow and beating on my back. “Hi, Molly,” she says when she sees me, looking surprised: For the most part, I’ve steered clear of the shop all summer. The butterflies in my chest thrum their papery wings.

“Hi, Con,” I say.

“Hi, Molly,” she says again, expression neutral as the paint on the walls in a hospital. “Gabe’s not here.”

I nod, trying to mirror the bland look on her face. Of course I already know the Donnelly boys work opposite shifts now, that they spend as little time together as humanly possible. That they hardly even speak, and it’s my fault. “I just came for some pizza.”


A slice of sausage and pepper is my cover, maybe, but I find the brother I’m looking for in his sauce-speckled apron behind the counter, scattering cheese on a wheel of raw dough. Patrick likes assembling pies, or at the very least he used to. He used to say it made him feel calm. “Hey,” I say softly, not wanting to startle him; the shop’s pretty empty at this hour, just the jabber of a little kid playing Ms. Pac-Man in the corner and the sibilant hum of the lite music station over the loudspeaker. Then, stupidly and a beat too late: “Buddy.”

Patrick rolls his eyes at me. “Hey, pal,” he says, the corners of his mouth twitching: It’s not a smile, not really, but it’s as close as I’ve gotten with him since I’ve been back. He looks even more like his dad than he used to. I grin like a reflex. “How’s it going?”

“Oh, you know.” I shrug, hands in my pockets. “The usual. Kicking ass, fiending pizza.”

“Uh-huh.” Patrick smirks. He used to tease me for this exact thing when we were together, how when I get nervous sometimes I’ll just get cornier and cornier until someone finally stops me. He looks at me. He waits.

I make a face: He’s not going to make it easy, then, this being friends thing. I guess it’s not his job to make it easy. I try again. “You’re coming to Falling Star, yeah?” I ask. It starts in a few days, the Catskills’ exquisitely lame take on Burning Man: a bunch of teenagers camping in the mountains, all the weed you could possibly smoke and somebody’s brother’s fratty band playing the same three O.A.R. songs over and over. We went two summers ago, though, a whole bunch of us, just for the day—it was after me and Gabe but before the book came out, and I remember feeling happy, just for the space of one sunny afternoon. “You and Tess, I mean?”

Patrick nods, finishing up with the cheese and sliding the pie into the oven. He’s a little shorter than his brother, and ropier. He leans the paddle against the wall. “Looks that way, yeah. She wants to check it out.”

“Okay, well. Me too. So”—I shrug awkwardly—“I guess I’ll see you there, then.”

This time Patrick really does smile—at how hard I’m floundering, probably, but I’ll take what I can get.





Day 32


“Hey,” Tess says the next morning at work, finding me in the hallway outside the dining room as I’m readjusting the old black-and-white photos of Star Lake that Fabian for some reason loves to reach up and tilt askew. “This is probably a stupid question, but . . . what do people wear at Falling Star?”

I smile. “Like, do you need to pack bell-bottoms and macramé?” I ask her, standing back a bit to see if the frame is level. “Nah, you’re probably good. Unless you wanna join the love-in; then there’s a special dress code.”

“For the orgy, right.” Tess laughs. “I was thinking more, like, just shorts and stuff, right? I mean, it’s just camping; I don’t need a dress or anything?”

“I mean, I definitely will not be wearing a dress,” I assure her. “If you ask Imogen I dress kind of like a dude, though, so . . . she might be a better person to ask.”

“Shut up, you always look cool. Okay,” she says, before I can react to the compliment. “Thanks, Molly.” She starts to go, then turns around at the last second, pivoting on the hardwood in her lifeguard flip-flops. “Listen,” she says, “it doesn’t have to be, like, weird or anything, does it?” She gestures vaguely, as if the it in question is possibly the whole world. “Like, all of us going, I mean?”