99 Days(5)

I snort. “Not yet,” I assure him, rolling my eyes as I buckle my seat belt. It’s not until I let out a breath I hadn’t quite known I was holding that I realize I’ve been nervous about this moment all day long. I didn’t need to be, though, of course I didn’t need to be—it’s just Gabe, who I’ve known since I was in preschool; Gabe, my literal partner in crime. “But, you know. It’s early.”


We drive fifteen minutes outside of town to Frank’s Franks, a hot dog truck in a parking lot off the side of the road where his mom and dad used to take us all when we were really small. The perimeter’s strung up with Christmas lights, picnic tables gone tacky with the humidity and too many layers of glossy paint. Families eat ice cream in noisy clusters. A baby fusses in a stroller; a boy and a girl play on a jungle gym in the last of the deep blue twilight. Gabe’s arm brushes mine as we wait in line to pay. He’s gotten handsomer, I think, broader in his back since the last time I saw him—two full years ago, before he left for Notre Dame. He’s almost startlingly tall now.

We sit on top of a free table instead of at one, my boots and Gabe’s preppy leather flip-flops lined up side by side on the bench. He gets a giant paper boat full of onion rings, the smell of fried batter and grill smoke hanging in the air. His body’s warm next to mine, the closest I’ve been to a boy since Patrick told me he never wanted to see me again. In Tempe, I didn’t exactly date. “So, what are you doing back here anyway, huh?” Gabe asks.

I take a sip of my soda, swat idly at a mosquito hovering near my bare knee. “School’s out,” I tell him, shrugging a bit. “Nowhere to go after graduation. Could run, I guess, but . . .”

“Can’t hide,” Gabe finishes, an echo of our conversation at the gas station yesterday. I smile. We sit in comfortable silence for a minute—it’s strange to be with him like this. I was least close to Gabe out of all the Donnellys before everything happened. He wasn’t the person I told my secrets to—at least, not until things fell apart so hard with Patrick. He was never the one who knew my every tell and shudder. Maybe it’s fitting he’s the only one who’ll have anything to do with me now.

We eat our hot dogs, and Gabe tells me about school in Indiana, where he’s a bio major, how he’s hanging out this summer and working at their pizza shop to help his mom.

“How’s she doing?” I ask, thinking of Connie’s thick gray ponytail and easy smile, how instead of folding in on herself like an origami swan after Chuck died, her spine only ever got straighter. Chuck had a heart attack at their kitchen table one night when I was fourteen and over for dinner, right in the middle of an argument between Gabe and Patrick over whose turn it was to hose down their motorboat, the Sally Forth. Connie sold the boat the following summer. She manages the shop by herself.

“She’s good,” Gabe tells me now, and I smile. We talk about dumb stuff: a costume party he went to a couple of weeks ago where all the dudes dressed up as their mothers, and what we’ve been watching on TV. “Wow.” Gabe laughs when I let loose with some truly scintillating facts I’ve gleaned about Prohibition and the Transcontinental Railroad from all the documentaries I’ve been mainlining. “You really are starved for human contact, huh?”

“Shut up,” I tell him, and he offers me the last of his onion rings with a guilty grin. I make a face but take them anyway—after all, it’s not like he’s wrong.

“Well,” Gabe says, still smiling. His eyes are a deep, lake-water blue. Across the lot a car hums to life and pulls out onto the parkway, headlights cutting a bright swath through the summer dark. “For what it’s worth, Molly Barlow, I’m really glad you’re back.”





Day 6


“I’m sorry, are you smiling?” my mom asks the following morning, looking at me incredulously across the kitchen island.

I grin into my coffee cup and don’t reply.





Day 7


I wake up early in the morning with a long-lost, instantly identifiable itch in my body; I lie there under the duvet for a while, waiting to see if it will pass. The sun spills yellow through the window. The air smells cool and Star Lake–wet. I snooze for ten minutes. I reassess.

Nope. Still there.

Finally, I get out of bed and pull an old, ratty pair of leggings out of the bottom dresser drawer, wincing when I realize how tight the waistband is now, cutting into the soft, mushy skin of my midsection. I grimace and set about untying the knots in the laces of my sneakers that are literally a full year old.

I’ll probably drop dead after a quarter mile, wind up lying there like a fat, flattened raccoon on the side of the road.

But I want to run.

My mom’s drinking coffee in the breakfast nook when I come downstairs but—wisely—decides not to comment on my sudden emergence from the third-floor tower, watching wordlessly as I clip Oscar’s leather leash onto his collar. “Be easy on him, will you?” is all she says, probably the first time she’s asked anyone to be easy on anyone else in her entire life. “He doesn’t get much exercise.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I mutter, sticking my headphones into my ears and making for the back door. I wave at Alex, who’s trimming the rhododendrons, and head down the driveway toward the street. “Neither do I.”