99 Days(37)

“I—no,” I defend myself. “Jesus, Julia. They’re into it over a stupid game, I don’t know.”

“Uh-huh,” she says, brushing by me. “Sure they are.”

On my way to the lot I see Jake and Annie from the Lodge, who’ve got a complicated setup involving a generator—Jake’s an Eagle Scout, I remember vaguely. He works behind the reception desk, so I see him more than I see Annie, who’s a lifeguard. “Hey, Molly,” Jake calls. “You want a beer?”

For a second I almost accept, but as soon as the words are out of his mouth Annie’s shooting him a look that could peel the sap right off a pine tree, so I shake my head awkwardly. I swear I’m not after your boyfriend, I want to say.

Instead I get my sunglasses out of the station wagon and sit on the bumper for a minute, trying to take deep breaths and calm down a little. In my logical brain I know this one wasn’t really my fault, not entirely—Patrick and Gabe were never super-close, even before everything happened. When we were kids it was fine, regular brother stuff, but once Chuck died it was like they swerved sharply in opposite directions or something, like they were never quite traveling in the same car after that. Gabe’s personality, his gregariousness, got bigger and more exaggerated, like if he was surrounded by his friends 24/7 then it meant he never had to be alone. Meanwhile, Patrick did exactly the opposite: He didn’t want anything to do with anybody who hadn’t known Chuck well enough to have a nickname, didn’t want to go out or hang out or do much at all besides sit in the barn or his bedroom with me, the two of us wrapped up in our own private Idaho. Julia would drop in and watch movies with us sometimes, but for the most part it felt like other people just didn’t understand what was happening: “His dad died,” I protested when Imogen complained about how often I’d blown her off lately.

“Yeah, a year ago,” she countered.

I didn’t know how to reply to that. I’d always known how Patrick’s aloofness sometimes played to the outside world. It didn’t look that way to me, though—after all, Patrick was my person, my other half. I never felt stuck or cut off or like there was other stuff I’d rather be doing, never felt like there was anyplace else I’d rather be.

At least, not until the moment it did.

*

It was a few weeks after my meeting with the Bristol recruiter in the guidance office, April of sophomore year—I’d gotten another email from her a couple of days before: Just wanted to say again how nice it was speaking with you. I’d written back, asking a few more questions. I hadn’t brought it up with Patrick again, but the idea was still itching at me like the tag at the neck of a cheap cotton T-shirt, like walking around with a tiny shard of glass in my shoe. It was weird, feeling like I had something to say that he didn’t want to hear about. That had never happened to me before.

I tried to push it out of my mind, though, which felt easier now as Patrick kissed a trail down the side of my neck, both of us sprawled on the couch in the family room at the Donnellys’, killing time before that night’s baseball game at school. We were the only two people in the house. His warm fingers traced the pattern of my rib cage, trailed down over my still-flat stomach, fussed tentatively with the button on my jeans. I breathed in. In spite of how long we’d been dating we’d never gone much further than this, and every inch of new skin he touched felt scary-amazing, icy hot. “What do you think?” he muttered into my ear, so quiet. “You wanna go upstairs?”


I did, truly—I wanted him to keep doing exactly what he was doing, wanted his familiar face and body and the rumpled T-shirt sheets on his bed. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I do, let me just.” I took a deep breath, my head swimming. Were we really about to do what I thought we were maybe, possibly, probably about to do? “Let me just pee first, okay?”

Patrick laughed. “Sure.” He stood up off the couch, adjusted himself a little. Took my hand and pulled me to my feet. “You got Chapstick?”

“Ha, why, too much kissing?” I grinned. “In my backpack, yeah.”

“Smartass.”

“You love me,” I called over my shoulder, confident in the fact that he did, that he always would; when I got back a minute later, though, his darkened face threw me into sudden doubt. “What’s this?” he asked me, holding up a sheet of printer paper.

Shit. It was my email exchange with the recruiter, the paper he’d clearly found in my backpack—I’d printed it out at school earlier, intending to show it to my mom that weekend.

I took a deep breath. “Patrick—”

“Are you going?” he asked, zero to totally pissed in 3.5 seconds. “To Arizona?”

“No!” I said, wanting to calm him down as fast as possible—wanting to get back to how everything had felt a minute ago, safe and exciting both. “Probably not, I mean, I just wanted—”

“Probably not?”

“I don’t know!” I said. “I was going to talk to you about it, I wanted to talk to you about it, I just—”

“Thought you’d lie to me about it for a week instead?”

“Hey, kids,” Gabe said just then, pausing in the doorway to the family room, rapping twice on the frame like he knew he was interrupting something but wanted to give us a heads-up that he was there. “You almost ready to go?”