“My mom put him down a few days after the Fourth of July party this year,” Gabe says, clearing his throat and not looking directly at me. “He was full of cancer.”
“Oh no,” I say, leaning back against the window and hugging myself a little, thinking of Pilot’s silky ears. He was old last summer, using a stool to hop up on the bed and the couch for his daily snuggles, though in my head he’s still the lean, long-limbed puppy who pooped on the presents at Julia’s seventh birthday party and was afraid of his own reflection in the mirror. “Oh, Gabe.” Before I know it’s going to happen my eyes fill with tears—for Pilot, for all the Donnellys, for Gabe most of all.
“I’m sorry.” Gabe swipes a hand over his face in the darkness. “This was a fucked-up way to tell you. I don’t know why I didn’t say something last night when you asked about him. I just, like, didn’t have the heart.” He rolls his eyes, like he thinks he’s being maudlin. “I know it’s stupid to be so upset about it. It just feels like—” He breaks off. “Forget it.”
“No,” I say—reaching a hand out to touch him, then thinking better and jamming it into my pocket instead. “Tell me.”
Gabe sighs so loudly it’s almost a cough, like he’s trying to clear something foreign from his lungs. “I just mean—like, clearly, this dog dying doesn’t mean my family is falling apart. My family fell apart a long time ago, and that’s fine. That’s what it is.”
I shake my head, denial my first and fiercest instinct. “Your family didn’t fall apart, Gabe.”
“Really?” Gabe asks, his eyes flashing in the darkness. “Because I’ll tell you, Molly: my dad’s dead, my mom’s losingher mind, my brother’s a lost cause, and our damn restaurant is going to be a Panera Bread by the time I graduate college. So I guess the point I am trying to make here is that me quitting school isn’t really an option.”
His voice cracks on that last sentence, ragged. For one heart-stopping, heartbreaking second, I’m pretty sure he’s close to tears.
“Gabe,” I say quietly. There is, in this moment, nothing I wouldn’t do to make things okay. I would fight with claws and teeth and knuckles. I would eat someone’s heart. “Hey.”
He clears his throat. “I gotta go,” he says. “I’ll see you inside, okay?”
“No,” I say, and this time I do touch him, grabbing his arm so he can’t run away from me. “Can you wait for a second?” I ask him. “I’m your friend, okay? Whatever else happened between us, we were friends first.”
“That’s not true,” Gabe says immediately. “You were friends first with my brother, maybe. But you and me? We were never friends. So you can stop—” He inhales damply, the sound of it thick and painful in his throat. “You can just stop.”
I let go of his arm like I’m freeing a trapped animal, opening my mouth to contradict him and coming up blank. After all, it’s not like he’s wrong. Patrick was my forever human, my closest heart, the person I could tell whole stories to just by catching his eye across the room. Gabe and I never quite had that—we’ve known each other since we were kids,sure, but growing up he always seemed a little too cool for Patrick and me, perpetually gamboling off to a party or a canoe trip or his coronation for prom king. I had no idea he’d ever even noticed me either way until the moment I suddenly realized that maybe I was the one who’d been too distracted to pay proper attention.
We made up for lost time last summer: we saw old movies at the theater in Silverton and went to noisy parties with his friends down at the dock and rode the Ferris wheel at the Knights of Columbus carnival, all of Star Lake spread out in front of us as bright as a quilt. I lost my virginity to Gabe, for Pete’s sake: Ilovedhim. And I thought—no, I wassure—he loved me, too.
It wasn’t until the fall that I started to worry that none of it had actually been real.
“Gabe,” I say now, and it sounds like I’m begging him. “Hey.”
“Fuck.”He scrubs savagely at his eyes with the back of his hand, sniffles once, then shakes his head hard enough to rattle his brain loose. “Fuck. I’m fine. This is embarrassing. I’m good, seriously. I’m drunk, is all.”
He’s lying; I’ve seen him drunk, and that’s not what this is. “Why is it embarrassing?” I ask. “It’s just me. I’m the last person you need to be embarrassed in front of.”
Gabe doesn’t answer. We stand there. We wait. The door to the hardware store opens then, bright light slicing across the pavement and two drunk, giggling girls amblingout, squawking as loud as chickens; I reach for Gabe like an instinct, pulling him around the corner into a darkened alley along the side of the building to give him some privacy. It’s darker back here, deep shadows and a pale sliver of moonlight. It smells like old beer and pavement and trash.
“Look,” I say finally. “It’s a lot of problems to solve, I’m not going to lie to you. But what I don’t understand is how it helps anything to stay in a program you hate to learn how to do a job you don’t want to do.”
“Who says I don’t want to do it?” Gabe asks, but he’s arguing for the sake of arguing; almost immediately, he exhales. “Now isn’t the time for me to chuck my whole major just because I decided it’s not, like, following my bliss.”
“And going off down a road that’s going to leave you with a million dollars in med school loans and a gig you hate just because you’re too stubborn to change course isn’t the way to help them, either.”
“It’s notaboutme,” he insists. “It’s about seeing things through. It’s about being a person other people can count on.”
“You are, though,” I promise him. “You always have been.”
Gabe shakes his head, smiling wryly. “You’re saying that because you’re worried I’m about to fill my pockets with rocks and walk into the fucking ocean.”
“I’m not, actually,” I tell him, taking a step closer before I quite know I’m going to do it; he smells like the detergentConnie buys way back home in Star Lake. “I’m saying that because I know you. Like, everything else that ever happened between us, if you put all that aside, don’t I know you?”
Gabe looks at me for a moment. “Yeah,” he admits finally, and his voice is so, so quiet; he doesn’t say it like it’s a good thing at all. “I guess you do.”
The air changes between us then, heavy and crackling like this morning before the storm rolled in behind Imogen’s cottage; it’s end-of-summer cool out here, and I shiver inside my clothes. I didn’t notice Gabe move, but he must have, because all of a sudden we’re standing closer than is probably a smart idea.
“I miss the hell out of you, you know that?” he tells me, and it doesn’t sound like that’s a good thing either. In fact, he sounds downright annoyed. “I try not to. Like, fuck knows I’ve tried not to. But I do.”
“Gabe.” I startle. Our hands brush with the motion, just barely, and it’s like every nerve ending in my body is concentrated in the tips of my fingers; the shot of desire is shocking, a surgical jolt to my heart. I should tell him he’s being ridiculous—I should tell him I need to go back inside—but all I can come up with is the truth. “I miss you too.”
