99 Days(48)

I don’t have anything to hide.

Do I?

“Could rub,” Gabe offers now, pulling my calves into his lap and squeezing. I smirk at him in the blue twilight and keep quiet, tilt my head back and enjoy the view.





Day 47


I’m supposed to go shopping for dorm stuff with Imogen in the morning—she has a very specific type of shower caddy in mind—but Patrick texts me to run again, so I ask her if we can reschedule for the afternoon and lace up my ancient sneakers even though the sky above the lake is purple-gray and heavy-looking, threatening a biblical kind of rain. Sure enough, we’re only a quarter mile in when it starts to pour.

I’m ready to turn back, but Patrick raises his eyebrows like a challenge: “Wanna keep going?” he asks, and I nod.

The rain falls cold and fast and steady. We run. Water soaks my tank top, trickles into my socks; it flicks off my eyelashes and skids in rivulets down my spine. Suddenly, I’m taken down in a giant mud-slick, legs sliding right out from underneath me as I land on my ass and hard. For a second, I just sit there, shocked.

“You okay?” Patrick calls, stopping two strides ahead and tracking back to stand beside me, New Balances making deep prints in the muck. He reaches out to pull me to my feet.

“I—” I stare at his hand like it’s a foreign object, something from another planet entirely. The night on my front lawn not withstanding, he’s barely touched me at all since I’ve been back.

“I got it,” I tell him, conducting a quick inventory of my arms and legs and deciding it’s just my pride that’s broken. He’s seen me wipe out a million times before, but this feels different. “I’m fine. I’m just slow and fat now, these things happen.”

“You’re what?” Patrick’s eyes are the same color as the heavy gray sky. “Are you crazy?”

“Oh God, please don’t.” I scramble to my feet and slip again like something out of effing Laurel and Hardy, the black-and-white movies Chuck used to lose his shit laughing over when we were little kids. I’m about to do something and I honestly don’t know if it’s going to be laugh or cry. God, I am so, so tired. “I wasn’t fishing. I don’t need you to, like, give me a sad compliment or whatever. I’m just saying, I’m sitting in this mud puddle because I’m fat and slow now. In case it’s somehow escaped your attention.”

Patrick shakes his head, annoyed. “You’re sitting in the mud puddle because you won’t take my hand, Mols.”

“I mean, fine,” I say, susceptible to logic and willing to concede that particular point, if not the larger one. “But—”

“And, like, clearly you’re beautiful, so I don’t know what the hell you’re—”

“Patrick.” I blurt his name before I can stop myself, stupid and unthinking—he shuts up right away, and it feels like a lighter that’s almost out of juice catching just for a second, that spark that’s there and gone.

“Take my damn hand, will you?” Patrick asks quietly. “Please.”

I take it.

“Thanks,” I tell him, shocked and hopeful. Patrick nods and doesn’t say a thing. It’s still pouring as we take off again, a cautious jog that builds to something faster: just me and him and the sound of the rain in the treetops, running through the end of the world.





Day 48


Gabe’s still in the shower when I come by to pick him up for dinner and Julia’s prowling around the downstairs of the house like a hungry tiger at the Catskill Game Farm, so I creep outside to the back of the farmhouse and sit in a lawn chair to wait. Connie’s roses are lush and sprawling in the summer heat, their heavy heads fat and drooping like Penn’s sleepy kids at the end of the day. The vegetable garden is bright with still-green tomatoes, slowly ripening summer squash.

I squint at the barn at the far edge of the property, its peeling paint and crooked doorways. The roof seems like it’s close to caving in. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to look at the sloping roof and not remember the first time Patrick kissed me, bundled up in heavy-duty sleeping bags in the loft that’s never been used for anything but storage and sleepovers. It was fall, too cold to be camping, but that was right after Chuck died and nobody was keeping much of an eye on Patrick to begin with: Gabe ran all over Star Lake with every girl in the sophomore class, it seemed like, and Julia had one disciplinary notice sent home after another. Patrick was quiet, though, flying under the radar.

Patrick had me.

It was October, the smell of things decaying, being absorbed back into the earth. The wind snuck underneath the floorboards, through the hairline seams in the walls—we weren’t talking, both of us paging through Chuck’s old National Geographics like a couple of nerds, but we were pressed together without even meaning to be, the instinct to get close to wherever it’s warm. I could feel his ribs move in and out as he breathed.

“Listen to this,” I said distractedly, the bag of Red Vines crinkling as I rolled over to face him—it was an article about a tortoise called Lonesome George, the very last one of his species. When I looked up at Patrick, Patrick was already looking at me.

Emily Green would have been surprised by what happened next, probably. She would have been prettily baffled, would have never seen this coming, but the truth is of course I had: for weeks and months and maybe years, like if you’d put your ear to the ground on the day that Patrick and I met you would have been able to hear this heading toward us, a rumble from miles and miles away. I’d listened. I’d been paying attention. And when his mouth pressed against mine I wasn’t shocked.