99 Days(45)

“I used to think about bringing you up here,” Gabe tells me now, an arm around my shoulders and his face half shadow, half brilliant light. “When I was, like, thirteen or fourteen or whatever.”

“What? You did not.” I actually scoff, the bark of my laugh good-natured and incredulous.

Gabe laughs back, but he nods as he’s doing it. “I did.”

“Yeah, okay.” I shake my head. Gabe’s spent his life as the host of a party—Star Lake’s most wanted, a million different people all around him all the time. The idea that he was harboring secret Ferris wheel fantasies—that he was harboring any fantasies at all, that there was anything he wanted that he didn’t already have and, more than that, that that something was me—is hugely surprising. “No, you didn’t.”


“I did. You just didn’t notice because you were running all over the place playing Peter Pan and Tiger Lily with my brother, but I used to think about it a lot.”

“We weren’t playing Peter Pan and Tiger Lily,” I protest automatically, although the truth is that probably we were—Patrick and I pretended until we were way, way too old. I shake my head anyhow. “If you were fourteen, I was twelve.”

“Uh-huh.” Gabe grins. “Missing the point there a little bit, Molly Barlow.”

I shake my head again, ducking it down close so he’ll kiss me. “I’m not,” I promise seriously. “I’m not.”

“Uh-huh.” Gabe smirks and obliges, his mouth warm and friendly and wet. Him feeling something for me when we were younger, him having this whole other side I never guessed—I wonder how my life would have been different if I’d known and understood that before this summer. I wonder about the things it might have changed. For so long I belonged to Patrick, the two of us so close we weren’t even two distinct people, like conjoined twins or one of those mutant double crackers you get sometimes if the Nabisco machinery slips up and doesn’t separate them correctly. It was good until it wasn’t, it worked until it broke, but sitting here at the top of the Ferris wheel with the whole world spread out in front of me, all I can wonder is what would have happened if I’d spent all of high school—all my life—with Gabe instead. What if I’d gone to lake parties and hung out at Crow Bar instead of hiding out in the Donnellys’ barn with Patrick, the two of us casting idle judgment and breathing each other’s air? Would I have left so much horrifying wreckage? Would I have had more than just a tiny handful of friends? It feels good, being here in this rickety little car with him, Steve and Kelsey directly behind us and a crowd of friendly faces on the ground. It feels easy and healthy and right.

So I kiss Gabe again, sinking into it as the motor jolts back to life, a rapid creak and the swooping feeling as we sink down toward Earth.





Day 43


Patrick comes by the Lodge to pick Tess up in the middle of the afternoon, and this time he doesn’t bolt the second he gets a fleeting look at my face. “Want me to get her?” I ask. She’s teaching an old-lady water aerobics class this afternoon, I know—she and I ran out to French Roast on our break this morning, and she told me how much she was dreading it. But Patrick shakes his head.

“I’m early,” he says, sitting down beside me on one of the porch rockers. I brought the schedule out here to fuss with, everybody’s PTO requests stacked up on the rough-hewn coffee table beside me. I made some watery iced coffee, cubes melting faster than I can drink it down. “How’s your day?”

“Oh, you know.” I wave the papers at him, surprised and pleased. “Trying not to piss anybody off too much.”

Patrick’s eyebrows twitch, but he lets that one go. “Could always settle employee disputes via mud wrestling,” he suggests, stretching his long legs out in front of him.

“A dance-off,” I counter.

“Rock Paper Scissors,” Patrick says, then: “Or just flip a f*cking coin like Emily Green.”

That stops me, the reference to Driftwood and its dumb heroine’s decision-making strategy of choice, how in the book she keeps an Indian Head penny tucked in her shoe for whenever things got real sticky—or so I’ve heard. “You read it?” I ask, surprised.

Patrick shrugs, looking away from me. “I read parts,” he mutters.

We’re quiet for a minute, both of us breathing the piney, dirt-smelling air. “Penn thinks I should be a business major,” I say finally, more to make noise than anything else.

“Yeah?” Patrick leans forward and considers that for a minute, all bunchy shoulders, his elbows on both denim-covered knees. “Remember when you made Julia and me start an iced-tea stand because you said the lemonade market was flooded? Or that time you had us make mac and cheese for my mom and dad and then told them they had to pay for it?”

I snort. “I was seven, thank you.”

Patrick smirks. “I’m just saying, that’s a head for business right there.”

“Shut up.”

“Or that track team fund-raising thing you did sophomore year,” he points out, more serious this time. “The running in heels thing.”

“You thought that was the stupidest fund-raiser ever,” I protest, remembering—we needed new uniforms, so we had the guys and girls race to raise money. “You told me so every day.”