99 Days(72)

I nod slowly. “Lilies,” I repeat, like it’s a word I’ve never heard before. “Okay.”





Day 89


I find Tess hosing off the rubber lounge chairs in the morning, a dozen of them lined up like soldiers in the sunshine along the pool deck. I have to force myself down the stairs from the porch. Up close she looks terrible, face swollen and shiny and tender from crying, a zit sprouting on one cheek. Her hair is lank and greasy. I think I probably look way worse.

“Hey,” I say, one hand up in an awkward wave like it’s the beginning of the summer all over again, like she’s a stranger I’m vaguely afraid of. Like I’m a stranger she probably hates. “Can I talk to you a sec?”

I’m not far off: Tess looks at me for a moment, something like wonder passing over her puffy, distorted features. “No,” she says.

“Tess—”

“Don’t, Molly,” she interrupts, shaking her head at me. She drags the hose across the concrete, begins to wind it up. “I mean it. I don’t want to hear it, I really can’t.”

“I’m so sorry,” I try anyway. “Tess, seriously, please just listen for a sec—”

“You listen for a sec!” she explodes. It’s the first time I’ve heard her raise her voice all summer. “I was nice to you when nobody else was, do you get that? Everyone said to watch out for you, but I liked you, so I didn’t care.” She shakes her head, eyes filling. I feel like the worst person in the world. “Is that why you were friends with me to begin with?” she asks me, voice high and brittle. “To, like, misdirect?”

“No!” I exclaim. “No, I swear. I liked you, too, right away. You’ve been such a good friend to me this summer, and I—”

“Thought you’d pay me back by screwing around with my boyfriend?” she asks.

“I—” I break off, helpless, glancing around like an instinct to see if anyone has heard her, like I did when I first found Julia’s note on my car. I’m ashamed of myself, truly. It’s inexcusable, what I did to Tess.

“Please leave,” Tess tells me, trying unsuccessfully to undo a stubborn kink in the hose. “Seriously. Just—if you ever wanted to do something in your life that wasn’t selfish. I mean it. Please, please leave.”

Back in June, I watched a documentary about ghost hearts, which doctors prep for transplant by scrubbing all the cells until all that’s left is connective tissue, empty and white and bloodless. I don’t know why I’m thinking about that right now.

“Of course,” I say finally, nodding ever so slightly. I turn around and get out of her way.





Day 90


I sit in bed with my arms wrapped tight around my knees and watch a documentary about Mary Shelley, who kept her husband’s heart in her dresser drawer for years after he died. I cry for a while. I hide.





Day 91


I haven’t heard a word from Gabe or Patrick—not that I was expecting to, I guess, but there’s a small part of me that held out hope Gabe would reply to one of the thousand I’m so sorry texts I’ve sent him. I’ve called, but he hasn’t picked up. Late last night I gathered up all my courage and drove out to Ryan’s camper, where Imogen told me he’s staying, but even though the station wagon was parked in the clearing nobody answered my knocks on the door. I sat there for hours, in the cold and the dark, waiting and waiting, but he never came. Now I type his name into the search bar on Facebook, stare at his tan, smiling face.

I friend Roommate Roisin while I’m on there, then lose an hour snooping idly through a bunch of her photo albums. Raisin has a super hot boyfriend! I’d text Tess, if I thought Tess ever wanted to hear from me again in this lifetime. Instead I keep clicking: Roisin and her softball team in Savannah, Roisin in a prom dress last May. She looks well adjusted and popular and nice and friendly.

I wouldn’t want a thing to do with me if I were her.





Day 92


I haul myself out for a run the next morning, a blessedly solitary loop around the lake. A cool breeze is blowing, the first one I’ve felt all summer, it seems—that reminder that fall is on her way. I round a copse of trees and stop short where I’m standing—the Donnelly Bronco is rattling down the road in my direction, gleaming in the late-summer sun.

For a second, this incredibly strange, incredibly real fear flickers through me, this cold knowledge that I’m all by myself out here. And of course in my head I know none of the Donnellys would ever physically hurt me—the very thought of that is insane—but I don’t know that for sure about Mean Michaela or even Elizabeth really, and people do crazy things in groups. I don’t know if I was always the kind of person whose first instinct is to run, or if this summer has made me that way. It’s not a quality I like in myself.

In any event, it’s not Julia and her coven of nasties behind the wheel of the Bronco, waiting to hock something from the window or jump out and beat me up.

It’s Connie.

“Thought that was you,” she says, slowing to a stop where I’m hovering frozen and stupid, peering at me through the passenger side window. Her gray hair is in its usual stubby ponytail at the back of her head. “You wanna hop in, I’ll drive you home?”