99 Days(62)

“You want to stop?” he asked, a little breathless. His lips looked very red. “We can stop, f*ck, we should probably . . .” He trailed off, nervous and almost panicky. I’d never seen Gabe anything less than sure. “What do we do?”

I looked one more time toward his bedroom, back up the stairs to where I’d left Patrick what seemed like a lifetime ago. Everything felt inevitable all of a sudden, a book that had already been written. I shook my head. “Let’s go,” I muttered softly. Gabe nodded, took my hand.





Day 68


The next day it storms, which matches the state of my humid brain almost exactly; I wake up early to the wicked flash of lightning, to thunder so noisy I feel it rumble in my bones. There’s no way I’m getting back to sleep, so I drag the quilt off my bed and head down to the living room, opening every window I pass to the hissing gush of rain. The trees rustle uneasily under the force of it, the green smell of water and the brown smell of mud.

Petrichor is the word for the scent of rain as it hits the blacktop. Patrick taught me that, a really long time ago.

I jab at the coffeemaker until it brews and take my mug into the living room with no real plan other than to sit there and listen to the rain, to let it wash me clean if there’s any conceivable way. I’ve felt like crying since the moment I opened my eyes. I settle myself onto the big leather couch, blow on the coffee until it’s cool enough to drink without scalding the inside of my body. There’s a copy of Driftwood sitting with a stack of magazines on the table, a curling Post-it marking the place my mom reads from when she does events at libraries and bookstores.

I glance over my shoulder at the doorway, which is empty. Vita snores quietly on the rug. I’m alone here, just me and the book my mother wrote about me, the mystery words I’ve never been able to look at for more than a few seconds at a time. I’ve skimmed paragraphs here and there, with the guilty, shameful feeling of looking at something illicit and dirty.

Now I take a deep breath, pick it up, and read.

It’s good is the worst part of everything; in my head it was hackneyed and nasty, like a cheap daytime soap on the page. The truth is it’s . . . kind of compelling. I get why it did so well. The boys aren’t Patrick or Gabe, not exactly, and while reading about Emily Green makes me supremely, squirmingly uncomfortable, I have to admit I’m rooting for her stupid coin-flipping self by the time I near the end.

I’m almost finished, turning the pages faster and faster, and the rain long since calmed to a steady drizzle when I hear the creak of the floorboards behind me: There’s my mom in the doorway with Oscar, and I am unmistakably caught.

“Morning,” is all she says, though, setting the dog down on the floor so he can trot over to where I’m curled under the blanket, toenails clicking on the floor. She looks from me to her book and back again, her face impassive. “You been up awhile?”

Long enough to read the best seller you penned about my love life, I think, but for the first time I can’t bring myself to get worked up about it. “For a bit,” I say. “Yeah.”

My mom nods. “You want more coffee?”

I almost tell her something else then. I want to tell her something else—that reading this book was like spending three hours with her, that I miss her, that she’s talented and even if I don’t forgive her I’m still proud that she’s my mom. The cover feels like it’s gone hot inside my hands.

“Coffee would be great,” I finally tell her, and smile. My mom nods at me slowly, smiles back.

Once she’s gone I dig around in the couch cushions for a moment, come up with a fistful of crumbs but also exactly what I’m after—a tarnished, gummy nickel, cool and heavy in the palm of my hand. I squeeze it tightly for a moment, like I can give it special powers that way, like I can infuse a whole year’s worth of questions into the metal.

Then I flip.





Day 69


I’m down in the kitchen feeding Oscar his expensive, locally produced kibble when my phone starts buzzing in my pocket. When I fish it out I’ve got a new Facebook notification: Julia Donnelly has tagged you in a photo.

I tense, a low, greasy roll of dread rumbling through me before I can quell it, like too much questionable not-quite-Mexican food from the dining hall at Bristol. Julia did this a lot before I left: tagging pictures of me with bad angles that made it look like I had a double chin, ones with my eyes closed where I was making a stupid face. Once she posted a picture of a literal pig with my name on it. I’m not sure which of her brothers finally made her take it down. We’re friendly again now, sure—at least, I think we’re friendly—but as I click VIEW POST I flinch anyway, that feeling like the moment between when you stub your toe and when the pain hits. I’m sure this is going to hurt.

Which is why I’m surprised when I see what she’s tagged this morning, that it’s not a porn star with my face Photoshopped in or a blown-out close-up of me with a bad breakout. What she’s posted is a throwback shot—the same one that’s shoved in my desk drawer at this very moment, that I pulled off the bulletin board when I got back to Star Lake: the four of us, Gabe and Patrick and Julia and me, sitting in the hayloft, Patrick’s arm wrapped tight around my rib cage. No mean caption, no cartoon penis drawn helpfully on my face. Just us, how we used to be. Before.