99 Days(51)

“Okay,” Imogen says, shimmying into a black halter that makes her look even more like a pinup girl than normal. I’ve got a stretchy skirt and a silky tank top, the closest I’ve gotten to a dress since seventh grade—I wasn’t exactly in a position to go to prom. “Thoughts?”

“Do it,” Tess says cheerfully. She’s all smiles and spice tonight, brassy, but her alabaster face was a little puffy when she got here, her already short fingernails bitten down to painful-looking stubs. She still hasn’t said what the fight was about, if there even was a fight to begin with. I haven’t asked. “Your ass looks great in it. And I wanna go out.”

“Well, you best chug that delicious beverage, then,” I tell her, nodding at her mostly full juice glass of Apple Pucker with a grimace. I like sweet things, but three sips of this stuff and my teeth feel like they’re wearing sweaters. “Bottoms up. Go on, it’s right up your alley, it’s made of produce and everything.”

“Basically a health food.” Tess nods resolutely. “To getting dumped by Patrick Donnelly,” she says, holding it up for a toast.

“To getting dumped by Patrick Donnelly,” I echo, clinking. My laugh sounds strange and hollow, though: The truth is I feel dishonest, this pestering nag at the back of my brain like I’m telling whopper after whopper just by showing up here and being with them. I haven’t heard from Patrick since our run the other morning, but suddenly he’s closer than he’s been in a year and a half.

Tess downs her schnapps and makes a truly hilarious gross-out face, like she just took a swig of human vomit chased with kerosene. “Let’s do this,” she orders as she hops off Imogen’s bed, teetering a little as she lands. She yanks at the short hem of her emerald-green dress, frowning. “I always feel like a drag queen in heels,” she mutters.

“You realize we’re gonna look like hookers at Crow Bar,” I point out, then: “Drag queen hookers,” we say at the same time.

“Oh, you’re very funny,” Imogen says, rolling her eyes at both of us. “Shut up for a second; I’ll call a cab.”

*

At Crow Bar we order shots of fireball whiskey and drop them in glasses of hard cider, a trick Gabe taught me that tastes like apple pie: “Apples are the theme of the night,” Imogen observes. “Abraham Lincoln would be so pleased.” Then, off our blank stares: “You know, cause of the apple tree?” she asks, looking back and forth between us. “He couldn’t cut it down? Or he cut it down and couldn’t lie about it?”

“It was a cherry tree,” I say at the same time Tess points out, “It was George Washington.”

All three of us find this hysterical, for some reason, clustered around a table in the far back near the jukebox, doubled over giggling. “Are we dancing?” Tess asks when the music changes over to the Whitney Houston we plugged in with our fistfuls of quarters. “I’m pretty sure I was promised dancing in my time of need.”

“Oh, we’re dancing.” Imogen grabs me by my wrist and pulls me into the crowd.

I laugh as I thread through the crush along with them, shaking my hair and letting Tess twirl me around, Imogen singing along like we’re still in her room and not technically underage in a bar full of people. I feel like I’m having two separate nights, though, like I’m only half-present: The urge to check in with Patrick is constant and physical, like an itch on the bottom of your foot when you can’t take your shoes off, or a tickle at the back of your throat.

We head to the bathroom after another round, snaking through the crowd one after another. “How you doing?” Imogen asks Tess, bumping their shoulders together as we wait in the long line. It smells like a sewer. “You hanging in?”

Tess sighs. “Yeah, I’m fine,” she says. “I just feel so stupid.” She leans across the puddle-filled counter and peers at herself in the cloudy mirror, wiping away the mascara that’s migrated down underneath her lash line. “At least I didn’t sleep with him, I guess.”


“You didn’t?” I blurt immediately, then cringe. God, how desperate do I sound right now? How gross is it that I care so much if they did or they didn’t? Patrick and I never had sex—in a lot of ways our relationship reset when we broke up and got back together, and we were only just headed in that direction again when the article came out at the end of junior year. I was terrified I’d give myself away somehow, that if we did it he’d be able to tell I’d done it before. To his credit, Patrick never pushed. “I mean, not that it’s any of my business, sorry.”

“Uh-uh.” Tess seems unbothered, both by my question and by the fact that we’re having this conversation in full earshot of, like, six other women. Possibly she’s a little drunk. “I mean, I would have, honestly, but, like . . . He didn’t want to. Which, what eighteen-year-old boy in the universe doesn’t want to have sex? I’m a pretty girl! I should have known something was weird.”

“Maybe his penis is broken,” Imogen volunteers helpfully. “Or, like, got accidentally lasered off in a childhood accident.”

Tess cracks up. “Laser dick,” she says over the sound of a toilet flushing, then heads for the open stall. “That’s definitely what the problem was.”

Imogen and Tess head to the bar, and I weave my way back to our table in the corner and people-watch for a while. I glance at the beer clock on the far wall. I’m digging through my purse for some Chapstick when I feel the buzz of my phone against the back of my hand, the screen lighting up with Patrick’s name.