99 Days(49)

It wasn’t a long kiss; it wasn’t a make-out; just barely a press like, there you are. There you are, I thought, looking at him in the glow of the cage light hanging on the wall, the camping lantern that had been his dad’s along with the magazines.

There you are.

*

“Hey,” Gabe says now, side door clattering shut behind him as he crosses the patio in shorts and a button-down. He smells like soap and water, clean and new, and just like that all my memories of Patrick evaporate like steam off a damp hot sidewalk. That was then, I remind myself. This is now. “Sorry about that. I just had the craziest phone call.”

“Dial a date?” I ask cheerfully.

“Oh, you’re a comedian.” Gabe offers one big hand to pull me to my feet. “No, so Notre Dame does this program with a bunch of different hospitals, right? Like a semester abroad, I guess, but for premed people and you change bedpans or whatever instead of drinking your face off in Prague. Anyway, I applied in the spring and they wait-listed me, but I guess some kid just dropped out, and there’s a spot open at MGH.”

I blink at him as I reach for the handle on the passenger side of Volvo, baked warm by an afternoon in the sun. “MGH?” I ask, trying to suss out the acronym. “Is that . . .?”

“Massachusetts General Hospital, yeah,” Gabe says, raising his eyebrows across the roof. “In Boston.”

“Really?” I ask, taken aback—but not, I realize, necessarily in a bad way. “You could be in Boston in the fall?”

“Oh, you’re freaking out now,” Gabe says, laughing as he turns the key in the ignition. “You’re all, shit, I was planning to use this kid for his body all summer and then never talk to him again, what the hell am I gonna do now?”

That makes me laugh, too. “I would love to have you changing bedpans in my new home city. Boston bedpans, I hear, are the best in the land.”

“That’s what you hear, huh?” Gabe’s still grinning. “It’s not definite or anything yet. I gotta drive up there in a couple of days, have the interview. I guess it’s between me and one other guy.”

I nod and let myself picture it for a minute—Gabe and me walking through Boston Common, hanging out and listening to the buskers at Faneuil Hall. It’s not what I’d pictured when I sent in my acceptance last April. But I like the way it feels. “You’ll get it,” I decide, smiling out the windshield. “You’ll see.”





Day 49


There are two texts on my phone when I wake up the following morning, two chimes in a row dragging me out of restless sleep. One’s from Gabe, who decided at the last minute to make an actual trip of it and is going to take a few days to visit school friends on his way back from his interview: I’ll miss you, Molly Barlow. Will tell Boston you say hi.

The second text is from Patrick: run tomorrow?

I stare at the screen for a moment, the messages stacked one on top of the other like some cruel joke at the hands of the universe.

Then I turn it off and go back to sleep.





Day 50


I meet up with Patrick again the following morning; it’s easier to keep up with him than it was last time, the rhythmic thud of rubber on earth and the breath steady in and out of my lungs. We’re halfway around the lake when Patrick stops cold.

“I was trying not to lose you,” he says suddenly, and from the tone in his voice I know he’s been thinking about it for longer than since we started this run. “That’s why I was such a dick about Bristol. I was trying not to lose you.” He shakes his head. Then, before I can rub two wits together: “But I lost you anyway.”

“You didn’t,” I blurt, fast and immediate like I think I’m on Family Feud. I’m breathing hard, from the run or from something else. “You didn’t lose me, I’m right here, I—”

“Mols.” Patrick screws up his face a bit, like, It’s me, please cut the crap. “You moved all the way across the country to get away, you know? And now you date my damn brother.” He scrubs a hand through his curly hair. “That’s a thing I knew, too, not for nothing. That he liked you. He liked you for a long time.”

I blink. I think of what Gabe said at Knights of Columbus, that he’d thought about me on the Ferris wheel. “You did?”

Patrick shrugs his broad shoulders, rolls his storm-gray eyes. “Everybody knew,” he says.

“I didn’t.”

“Yeah.” He glances out at the lake, back at me, out at the lake again. “I know. And I didn’t want you to find out.”

“Why?”

Patrick lets out a breath. “Trying to stave off the inevitable, I guess. I don’t know.” He sounds annoyed that I’m making him talk about it, like he’s not the one who brought it up to begin with. “But Gabe’s Gabe.”

“What does that mean, ‘Gabe’s Gabe’?” I ask, although I already kind of know what Patrick’s getting at. Probably if I was smart I wouldn’t push.

“Molly—” Patrick breaks off, irritated. It’s humid today, and his tan skin is damp with perspiration. He’s standing so close I can feel the heat. “I don’t know. Forget it. Can we just go?”