We gaze out at the view for another long minute, neither one of us saying anything. In the distance the sun is getting heavier, the sky turning orange and pink. There’s a question mark hanging in the air between us, the conversation not quite finished; sure enough, after a moment he looks over at me one more time. “So what about you?” he asks, rocking back on his heels and raising his eyebrows. “What’s up with you and Louis XIV?”
I roll my eyes. “Shut up,” I scold, though truthfully—guiltily—I have to work not to laugh. “Don’t call him that.”
Gabe must sense he’s almost got me: “Oh, come on,” he says, eyes widened like a standup comedian delivering a punch line. “You didn’t even know he was a secret billionaire, apparently. Like, listen to that sentence for a second. That is anabsurdfucking sentence.”
My whole body prickles, red and embarrassed. “Enough.” I push myself away from the railing. He’s laughing now, like he wants me to share this inside joke with him, two Star Lake kids having one over on my dopey outsider boyfriend.And I’m not going to do that. “You don’t know anything about my relationship with Ian, okay?”
Gabe shrugs. “Maybe not,” he admits easily. “But I know you. I’ve known you almost my whole life, and I know you can’t possibly be happy.”
That galls me—the presumption of it, maybe, the sheer leap on his part. “Oh,really?” I counter, drawing myself up like the heiress to a ball-bearing fortune affronted by a mouthy peasant kicking mud onto her dress. “And why’s that, exactly?”
“Because all of a sudden you’re so—so—” He breaks off in frustration. “You’re just—”
“What?”I demand. “Oh my God, just say it already.”
“Tidy,” Gabe spits out finally.
“Tidy?” Now I do laugh, loud and barking, though it’s not like I don’t know what he’s getting at, exactly. More like I don’t want to think about it. “Wow, Gabe. You really know how to insult a girl. Next thing you’ll be telling me I practice good hygiene or have elegant penmanship. Really putting me in my place, there.”
“I’m nottryingto insult you,” Gabe snaps, like I’m being stupid on purpose. “I’m trying to tell you what I see. And what I see is you turning into this small, inoffensive, terrified version of the person I used to know.” He shakes his head. “You said it yourself a minute ago when you were talking about your roommate, that you’re tying yourself up in knots trying not to give anybody a reason not to like you. Andthat’s a ridiculous way to live.”
Oh, I do not like him saying that to me. I do not like it atall. I feel like he’s caught me at something obscene and perverted; I feel careless and ashamed for letting him get close enough to look. “Okay then,” I reply, voice brittle. “Thanks for the professional diagnosis. Any time you want to stop mansplaining me to myself, that’d be great.”
Gabe rolls his eyes. “I’m not mansplaining anything to you, Molly,” he counters, openly annoyed. “I’m saying that I have noticed, over the course of this weird, miserable week, that you’re putting on a twenty-four-hour stage show like you’re headlining at the fucking Copacabana for everyone else’s benefit, and I’m asking if it doesn’t get tiring sometimes.”
My mouth drops open. “That’s not—” I start, then immediately break off because of course he sees me just like he always has; of course we both know it’s true. It’sexactlywhat I’ve been doing, actually, and itistiring, but at this point I don’t know how I’d possibly go about dropping the act even if I wanted to. Still, Gabe of all people calling me out on it makes me want to run all the way down to the bottom of this tower.
“None of this is actually even your business to begin with,” I counter finally. “We don’t date, I’m not your problem, so—”
“Yeah, well, whose fault is that, again?”
“Oh my God!”I gawk at him, stunned by the bald unfairness of it. “You want to relitigate our breakup right now,Gabe? Fine. Our breakup was my fault. I fucked up. I own it. I havebeenowning it, I promise you. Basically everything I have done allyearhas been about me owning it, so...”
I trail off as Gabe’s eyes narrow. “What doesthatmean?” he asks.
“Nothing,” I say, too quickly. “Forget it.”
“I don’t want to forget it,” Gabe presses. “Tell me.”
“Why?” I ask—cornered and fearful, all talons and teeth. It occurs to me that we’re making a scene, inviting all manner of curious glances in our direction, but for the first time since I left Star Lake last summer, I don’t actually care. “Seriously, why are we even having this conversation? You said yourself we’ve never been friends, and for some reason I’ve been trying to convince myself that we were, or at least that wecouldbe, but you’re right.” I shake my head at my own stubborn stupidity, counting off on my fingers. “If we were friends you wouldn’t have fallen off the face of the planet after last summer. If we were friends you wouldn’t have lied to me and said we were cool. If we werefriendsI would have mattered enough that you could have been bothered to call me back sometime between last October and the moment we ran into each other in freaking London, Eng—”
“I didn’t call you back because you broke my fucking heart, Molly!”
That stops me, baffled and blinking; for a moment the whole world seems to go quiet. “Idid?” I ask, and my voice sounds very small.
Gabe gapes at me. “You know you did,” he says immediately. “Are you seriously going to look at me right now and say you didn’t know that you—”
“No, I just—” I break off. I remember the moment last summer when he found out about Patrick and me, the hurt and betrayal and bewilderment on his face. “I mean, of course I know I did. I guess I just... thought you were over it.”
“Yeah, well,” Gabe says flatly, that belligerent shrug of his shoulders. “I’m not.”
“But the way we left things last summer—” I shake my head, stubborn. “You made it seem like we were okay.”
Gabe makes a face. “Come on, Molly. What was I supposed to say to you? You were going to Boston, you know? You were starting fresh.”
I consider that for a moment, the last twelve months reshuffling in my mind like the vacation photos my mom used to get developed at the drugstore in Star Lake. I thought about Gabe this year—in the stairwell as I left him a voicemail and in the waiting room at the clinic, sure, but also a million other times: eating a really amazing slice of pizza at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in the North End with Roisin. Sticking a carrot I’d begged from the dining-hall guys into the smiling face of a snowman on the Esplanade. At the very end of the semester when all the trees exploded into spring on Commonwealth Avenue, a canopy of pink flowers up above my head. I thought about Gabe every time I heard a dumb joke in the elevator, every time I went to the movies,every time our song came up on Spotify while I ran.
It never once occurred to me that, halfway across the country, he was thinking about me, too.
