99 Days(75)

“We’ll be neighbors,” I tell her, and grin.





Day 95


“Don’t,” Patrick says immediately when I come into the shop the next day, bells above the door ringing out and my wild hair pulled back off my face with an enamel comb I filched off my mom. I wanted to look serious or something. This felt too important for messy hair. Patrick’s standing behind the counter, his whole body tense and rigid like the bars on a birdcage. There’s a green-yellow bruise healing on his face.

“Patrick.” I gasp when I see it even though I knew it would be there, the difference between hearing about a natural disaster and seeing the wreckage yourself. “Is that from—?”

“I said don’t, Molly.” Patrick shakes his head, voice lower than I’ve ever heard it. There’s a bunch of middle school boys scarfing slices at the table by the window, a middle-aged couple lined up side by side on the stools. “It’s done now, okay? It’s finished. You shouldn’t have come here.”

“It’s not, though.” I take a deep breath. It’s all I’ve been able to think about since Connie picked me up by the lakefront. I have to get an answer from him once and for all. “Was this even about me?” I ask, and it feels like all the air is rushing out of me. “This whole summer, everything that happened? Or was it all some kind of messed-up contest with Gabe?”

Patrick looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “Everything that happened?” he parrots back incredulously. “Like you had no part in it.”

“That’s not what I’m saying!” I’m loud enough that the middle-aged couple looks up, but I’m too far gone to be embarrassed. I’m too far gone for anything but this. I’m the girl from the book, I want to tell them. Go ahead and stare. “That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m a big kid,” I tell him, echoing his mom without meaning to. “I made my choices. But what we did—admit it, Patrick. It wasn’t ’cause you missed me, it wasn’t because we’re us and you wanted to try to make this work, whatever it is. It was just ’cause you wanted to take me away from your brother. You wanted to win.”

“I wanted you,” Patrick counters, and the way he says it sounds worse than any curse he’s ever uttered. “I f*cking loved you, Mols, how do you not get that?”

“Loved me so much that you messed with me all summer and humiliated me in front of everyone we know?”

Patrick looks at me for a beat across the counter. Then he sighs. Like he’s got nothing left. “I didn’t know how to let you go.”


I stare back at him for a moment—farther away than he ever was the whole time I was in Tempe, my heart leaking something so pungent I feel like he’ll be able to smell it over the sauce and pepperoni. I search his pretty face and his gray-storm eyes, the cut of his angry jaw, but he’s just—he’s not there. My Patrick—the Patrick I know and remember and love—is gone. I broke it, this thing between us. Both of us did. I used to think we could fix it—that what was happening between us all summer was fixing it, bringing us back together in some messed-up way. But some things can’t be repaired. I don’t know if I ever really believed that, not until now. The realization makes me feel as if my ribs have parted ways.

“I shouldn’t have said what I said to you,” he says finally. “In your room that night, I shouldn’t have called you—” The bells above the door jingle then, interrupting; a family of five traipses in. Patrick makes a face and winces, the livid yellow and green on his face. When he speaks again, the spell is broken. “Look, Molly,” he says, like I’m just another customer. Like I’m a stranger right off the street. “I gotta work.”

I feel the air go out of me, like a valve’s been released somewhere. All at once I’m so tired I can hardly stand. “I leave in a few days,” I tell him finally. I take a deep breath. “I’ll miss you.”

Patrick nods. “Yeah, Mols,” he says, and it sounds like the end of the summer. “I’ll miss you back.”





Day 96


I’ve got a ton of packing left to do after dinner, my same old duffel openmouthed and gaping on the bed. I made myself more at home here than I ever meant to: clothes spilling out of drawers, and crinkled Lodge stationery scattered across the desktop.

I think of the last time I packed up like this, grabbing huge handfuls of socks and underwear and shoving them into my bag to bring to Arizona, the whole affair taking roughly twenty minutes and completed in total silence: I’d turned off my phone and computer to dam the incessant ping of text and email and Facebook, one nasty message piling up on top of another and never a single word from Patrick himself. The Bristol track team didn’t need me anymore, they’d told me primly—though I was welcome to try out in the fall—but they’d agreed to take me anyway, the only new senior girl in a class of sixty-five.

One year later and I take my careful time with it, packing up my jeans and my boots and my hair ties; I take the Golly, Molly artwork and the collage of the lakefront Imogen sent me home with the other night. It made me cry when she handed it over. After a minute, it made her cry, too.

I’ve got Netflix for company, the same low drone that’s ferried me through this whole summer, and I’m halfway through a documentary about the secret lives of birds when my phone rings, a number I don’t recognize appearing on the screen. I answer with some trepidation, wondering briefly if it’s someone new and different calling to whisper something poison in my ear: “Hello?”