“Sorry,” he amended. “What did you just say?”
Chelsea rolled her eyes at him, but she was smiling. “Isaaaaaaaid, do you want to get out of here and take a walk with me?”
The DJ had switched over to a Taylor Swift dance remix; the air smelled like body spray and a little bit like sweat. Chelsea was wearing her glasses along with her dress and heels, which gave her a sexy librarian look he was really digging. “Yeah,” Ryan told her. “I definitely do.”
Chelsea took his hand and led him out past the bathrooms, down a dim, carpeted corridor and through a plate-glass door. The night air was chilly and wet-smelling. Out in the overgrown garden was a gazebo of indeterminate structural integrity that Ryan assumed was for brides and grooms to take pictures of themselves staring goonily at each other, should they be lucky enough to get married in such an illustrious venue. “This place is something else,” he said.
“Why?” Chelsea frowned, shivering a little in the breeze. “I think it’s kind of romantic.”
“Yeah, no, it is,” Ryan corrected himself, shrugging out of his too-small sport coat and handing it over to her. “You’re right.” Secretly, though, he was wondering what Gabby might say about it—Top ten methods by which one might get brutally murdered at Knights of Columbus hall in Yorktownortop ten reasons traumatized patrons have asked for their deposits back. He wanted her to see it. He wished she was—
“Hey.” Chelsea climbed the short flight of steps up into the gazebo, leaned against the white wooden railing. Ryan backed her up against a post. “How you doing over there?”she asked, tilting her head to the side and considering him.
“I’m good,” Ryan told her, then pulled her close by the lapels of her borrowed jacket and ducked his head down for a kiss.
GABBY
The fire alarm went off right at the end of seventh period, just as Gabby filled in the last bubble on her Scantron sheet; right away the whole room erupted into assorted sighs and murmurs, the squeak of rubber-tipped chair legs on the linoleum floor.
Gabby frowned. She hated fire drills the same way she hated assemblies, the noise and crowds and the slow-moving press of bodies, everybody trying to occupy the same space at once. “All right, people,” Mr. Caplan said, herding them out the door and into the rapidly filling hallway. “Orderly fashion, et cetera.”
Outside was better. The football field was green and sunny, heavy with the smell of freshly mown grass: everywhere you looked was a sea of skirts and cargo shorts, like everyone had suddenly remembered they had legs. Gabby glanced down at her jeans. She’d thought you were supposed to feel different after you lost your virginity, but actually since having sex with Shay she just felt more likeherself. And for once, that wasn’t actually such a bad way to feel.
Mr. Caplan took attendance and told them to stay together, but as the minutes ticked by and the all-clear bell didn’t ring, people started drifting away in clusters, finding their friends. Gabby glanced around for Shay but didn’t see her, so she dug the book she was reading out of her backpack, hoping nobody would notice she was sitting off to the side by herself like a giant loser. She’d nearly reached the bleachers when she caught sight of a familiar pair of shoulders and stopped short: standing not three feet away from her, effortlessly casual and improbably alone, was Ryan.
Gabby gulped. She meant to slip away unnoticed, to pretend she hadn’t seen him and continue on toward the bleachers, where she could shove her earphones in and bury herself in her book and quell the anxiety blooming like a fungus in her chest. But just then Ryan turned his head, and their gazes locked.
Gabby winced: she watched him do the same thing as she had, weighing in his mind whether or not he could act like he hadn’t seen her. He must have decided he couldn’t, because after a moment he raised one hand in a wave. Gabby waved back, swallowing something that felt like a wad of paper towel jammed down into her throat. “Hey,” she said.
“Hey, yourself.” He looked different, she realized. She’d caught him out of the corner of her eye around school, obviously, but she hadn’t really let herselfseehim, and now that she did she found herself vaguely unnerved. His hair was shorter and less messy; his shoulders were broader inside hisT-shirt. He lookedbiggerthan she thought of him as being, generally. It was weird. “What’s up?”
“Oh, you know,” Gabby said. “Enjoying the sunshine.” Immediately, she cringed.Enjoying the sunshine?Where were they, the courtyard of their nursing home? She gestured around at the crowded field, the fire trucks parked outside the building. “Is this real?”
Ryan shook his head. “Nah, I don’t think so,” he said. “I think some asshole just pulled it to get outside for a little bit. Not that I’m complaining. I was in the middle of an essay test onThe Old Man and the Sea, and it was not going great.”
He hesitated for a moment, then shrugged. “I will say, English is harder without you around to point out the symbols.”
Gabby’s heart did something weird and painful inside her chest, a feeling like a muscle tearing. “I mostly just google,” she admitted.
“Well, still,” Ryan said. Gabby nodded. The silence stretched out between them, like a highway neither one of them could figure out how to cross. Gabby knew there had been a time when it was fine to be quiet around Ryan, when they’d spent entire afternoons sitting around and not talking, but it felt like they’d happened to somebody else entirely. “Well,” he said again, after a moment. “See you around, yeah?”
“Yeah, definitely.” Gabby shoved her hands into her back pockets, told herself she was being ridiculous. They’d beenfriends—best friends, even. But they weren’t anymore. It was what it was. It was fine. It was—
“Ryan,”she heard herself say, and it came out a lot more urgently than she’d meant for it to; she waited to be embarrassed, but the feeling never came. She had a chance here, and she hadn’t even realized how badly she’d wanted one until she was a second away from wasting it.
He turned around. “What’s up?” he asked, sounding slightly impatient; Gabby forged ahead.
“You want to get out of here?”
That got his attention. He looked at her for a moment, his sandy head tilted to the side. “Like, cut eighth period?”
“Yeah, like cut eighth period,” Gabby said. Then, when he hesitated: “What are you, scared?”
He grinned at her then, wide and tickled and completelyhimself, and it was like she was seeing him, the real him, for the first time since that awful night in December. “Of course I’m not scared,” he said.
“Okay,” Gabby said, taking a deep breath and grinning back. “Then let’s go bowling.”
RYAN
