99 Days(74)

That’s what I try to tell myself, anyway.

The waitstaff is playing a noisy game of Marco Polo over in the deep end, and after I say hi to Jay and the rest of the kitchen guys I watch them for a while, trying to act like I’m really interested. I fish my phone out of my pocket, attempting to ignore an overheard snatch of conversation from Julia’s corner that night or might not include the word ho. I feel my face flush scarlet anyhow. I can feel everybody’s eyes on me like physical touches, like I’m being grabbed from all sides. Twenty minutes, I promise myself firmly, going far enough to set an alarm on my phone—like there’s any way I might miss it. You have to stay for twenty more minutes, and then you can go.

I’m pouring myself a plastic cup of Diet Coke, not because I actually want it but because at least it’s something to do, when a shove from behind jostles me forward, the sticky soda splashing all over my flip-flops: My head whips up and there’s Michaela and Julia passing by.

“Better watch where you’re going, Mols,” Julia says, her voice more artificially sweet than the cola coating my feet and ankles. Then, more quietly: “Skank.”

I whirl on her then, spine straightening, drawing myself up to my full height. All at once I’ve had it. Suddenly, I’m mad enough to spit blood. “You know what, Julia?” I snap. “Shut up.”

She looks at me, surprised, stopping in the middle of the concrete. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me.” There’s something hot and acidic running through my veins and it takes me a moment to realize it might be bravery, that for once—for the first time all summer, maybe—the urge to fight is stronger than the urge to run away. “I’m sick to death of you and everybody else acting like your brothers are some perfect angels that I defiled or something. That’s not what happened. And even if it was what happened, it’s not your business.” I turn to Mean Michaela: “And it’s definitely not your business. So I don’t want to hear it.” My hands are shaking, but my voice is steady and clear. “Enough,” I say, echoing the words I heard late last night in my bedroom. “I’ve had enough.”


Julia’s just staring at me, pink mouth gaping. Tess is staring at me, too. I focus my attention on Julia and Michaela, eyebrows raised in challenge: Come at me, I want to tell them. I’m not going to let you hurt me anymore. And maybe that’s true and maybe it isn’t, but in this moment I feel invincible, I feel full of strength and steel.

I’m about to say something else when I feel my phone alarm vibrate in my pocket—time is up, then. I’m allowed to go home. I’m not running, I know as I set my cup down and head for the lobby, a quilt of silence around the pool deck that somehow doesn’t rattle me at all.

I’m done. And I’m walking away.





Day 94


“Sooo, I heard you laid the smackdown on Julia at the Lodge party last night,” Imogen tells me. We’re up on wobbly stepladders at French Roast after closing, taking down the pieces from her show so we can wrap them and send them off to their new homes. She sold more than half of what she exhibited. I’m as proud as if she were my kid.

“I didn’t lay the smackdown!” I protest, lifting a canvas collaged with magazine cutouts to look like the lakefront at night off the wall and setting it carefully on the bowed wooden floor. She’s got Bon Iver on the stereo. “Or, like, okay. I laid the smackdown a little bit.”

“Mm-hmm,” she replies, prying a nail out of the wall with the claw end of a hammer and dropping it into a coffee mug along with the others. “That’s what I thought.”

“It’s not that I don’t think they all deserve to hate me,” I tell her truthfully. “I mean, Tess definitely does, and probably Julia, too. But I’m not the only one they deserve to hate. It just felt like such a gross double standard, I don’t know. I got mad about it; I got word vomit.”

“It is a double standard,” Imogen says, reaching for the giant roll of bubble wrap. “And I’m glad you said something. Equal opportunity hate, or no hate at all.”

“Exactly!” I giggle at the dark absurdity. Six days until I leave for Boston, and it seems like that’s all that’s left to do about it.

Or, okay, not all that’s left to do about it.

But close.

“Anyway, I’m proud of you,” Imogen tells me now. “It was gutsy, what you said to them. I think Emily Green would be proud, too.”

I reply with a loud, theatrical retching sound. “Oh my God, gross.”

“I mean . . . the book was good,” Imogen defends herself. “You gotta admit that.”

I shake my head and move the ladder over, climbing to the top to reach a canvas hung way up high. “I don’t, actually,” I counter. “Or at least, not out loud.”

Imogen laughs at that, trilling and familiar. Even after everything, I’m glad I came back. It’s strange to think in a few weeks we’ll have completely different lives again, that we refound each other this summer just in time to say good-bye for good.

“Uh-uh, don’t get mushy on me now,” Imogen says, like she can tell exactly what I’m thinking. “You said it yourself, Boston and Providence aren’t that far.” She reaches over and gently tugs the back of my flannel, so I know she’s behind me.