“Actually, dude,” Ian says, nodding his chin at Gabe across the table, “you’re exactly the right person to clear this up for me. Your town can’t possibly be as bad as Molly makes it out to be, right? Whenever she talks about Star Lake, it’s like it’s situated directly on top of a hellmouth.”
I wince. He’s ribbing me, doing a little comedy routine for my benefit, but I definitely don’t want Gabe, who’s basically the mayor of Star Lake, to think I go around trash-talking it—especially considering the holy havoc I wreaked there last year. “I never said that,” I protest.
“Oh, really?” Ian gives me a look like,come on; Gabe is eyeing me from across the table, all long eyelashes and inscrutable expression. “I think the exact words you used were—”
“Okay, okay, but Star Lake talk is boring,” I interrupt, then turn to Sadie. “So are you also at Notre Dame?”
“Guilty as charged,” she says, lifting her backpack off the booth to reveal a Fighting Irish water bottle hooked to one strap by a carabiner. She’s premed just like Gabe, she tells us; they met in their organic chemistry class freshman year but didn’t connect until last fall, when they were in the same Shakespeare gen-ed requirement they’d put off as long as humanly possible. “So there we were, these two science nerds trying to figure out what on earth was going on inA Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Sadie recalls. “It was comical, really.”
“Hey, speak for yourself,” Gabe says, smiling the first genuine smile I’ve seen out of him since our eyes locked in the bar; the sight of it sends a pang through my body. Of course he’s smiling at her, I remind myself sharply. She’s hisgirlfriend. I bury myself in my menu, mumbling something inane about shepherd’s pie.
Sadie asks what we’ve seen in London so far and Ian gives her the rundown, thankfully only stopping to tease me a little about what a tight schedule I’ve got us on. “What about you guys?” he finishes, reaching for his pint glass. “When did you get into town?”
“Just a couple of days ago,” Sadie says. They took the train out to Buckingham Palace yesterday, she continues, then snagged student rush tickets to a show in the West End. “We were in Scotland before that,” she finishes. “We spent a few days hiking and camping near Edinburgh.”
I look at Gabe in surprise: “Since when are you intohiking?” I blurt, before I can stop myself.
Gabe’s eyes widen, just slightly. “Since always,” he says, shrugging over his beer bottle and looking irritated. “I used to go all the time back home.”
“In Star Lake?” That’s a lie if ever I’ve heard one: Patrick is pretty outdoorsy, maybe, but Gabe has always been more of the “drinking beer at a party in the woods” type of nature appreciator. Still, it occurs to me all at once that this is dangerous ground to be crossing, and I turn to Sadie instead: “How was Scotland?” I ask her eagerly. “I mean, keep in mind, you could tell me literally anything and I’d believe you. Everything I know about it is from that sexy time-travel show.”
Sadie shakes her sandy head, quizzical. “I don’t know it.”
“Oh man, my roommate and I were obsessed.” I smile, launching into a detailed explanation of the broader plot points—labyrinthine palace intrigue, daring escapes from British prisons, rakishly handsome Highlanders in kilts. “You’d actually probably really like it,” I tell her. “The main character is a woman doctor.”
“Yeah,” Sadie says, in a voice that’s not unfriendly,exactly, but also somehow manages to communicate the fact that I emphatically haven’t sold her on the concept. “I guess I don’t really watch a lot of stuff like that,” she explains, holding one hand up like,you know how it is. “Girly stuff, I mean. I’m more into, like, grittier shows and documentaries, that kind of thing.”
“Oh,” I say, slightly taken aback. Something about the way she said it pings me, but debating Gabe’s new girlfriend over the merits of a time-travel show seems like a stupid hill to die on. “Okay, yeah. I hear you.”
“Molly loves documentaries,” Ian puts in helpfully. Then, looking at me: “Didn’t you say you once spent a year working your way through, like, every documentary on Netflix?”
“Um, yup,” I admit, cringing. In fact, it was senior year of high school; I was away at boarding school in Arizona, hiding out after thePeoplearticle about my mom’s book—and, by extension, about me and Gabe and Patrick—hit newsstands. I did the same thing last summer back in Star Lake in an effort to avoid the wrath of Gabe’s sister, Julia, chomping down on Red Vines and hibernating in my room. “That was me.”
Thankfully, the curly-haired waitress shows up just then, notepad in hand, and once we’ve ordered I slide out of the booth and escape to the tiny, gilded ladies’ room. I splash cold water on my face and stare hard into the fake-aged mirror above the sink:Pull it together, I order myself, and I almost think that I have until the moment I open thebathroom door and find Gabe waiting in the hallway on the other side of it.
“I had to pee,” he says immediately, jaw jutted out and a voice like he thinks I’m about to accuse him of something. “I didn’t just, like, follow you back here.”
Oh, for Pete’s sake. “Okay,” I say, shrugging. “I didn’t say you did.”
Gabe’s eyes narrow as if he’s going to argue, but in the end he just kind of droops. “Sorry,” he says, looking a little ashamed of himself. “This is really fucking weird.”
That makes me laugh, a noisy half-hysterical cackle. “Yeah,” I agree, “no kidding.”
“I mean—” Gabe breaks off and for a moment we just stand there, looking at each other in the narrow, darkened hallway. His short hair makes his face seem sharper, more grown-up. “So, um,” he says, after a beat too long for it not to be awkward. “You called me.”
My face flushes; I’m surprised he brought it up. I remember the night I did it, perched at the top of the tiny fire stairwell in my dorm building last September, one arm wrapped around my stubbly knees:I need to talk to you, I said into his voicemail.It’s important.The memory feels like a bone bruise, ugly and deep.
“Um,” I say finally. For an instant I think about telling him everything: the way my sneakers squeaked against the shiny linoleum floor of the clinic in Boston, the feeling of the doctor’s gentle, sandpapery hands. Watching thebright-orange trees out the window once it was over, leaning back in the passenger seat of my mom’s car. Then I shake my head. There’s no way for me to tell him in this crowded bar halfway across the universe. It’s possible there’s no way to tell him at all. “Yeah.”
“And I didn’t call you back.”
I nod. “That’s true, too.”
Gabe exhales. “I’m sorry,” he says, jamming his hands into his pockets. “I just... was caught up with school stuff, I guess.”
I swallow. “I get it,” I lie hurriedly, waving my hand like it’s no big deal and deciding not to mention that it’s right up there with dogs and homework for the flimsiest excuse I’ve ever heard in my life. “I mean, I probably wouldn’t have called me back either if I were you.”
Even as I’m saying it, it occurs to me that it isn’t true, not really. Gabe and I had the world’s messiest breakup, that much is undeniable—I spent all of last summer somersaulting wildly between Patrick and him, oblivious to the fact that I was more or less the latest prize in some long-running brotherly pissing contest. But we talked it out before I headed up to Boston, the two of us sitting side by side on the sunbaked hood of his beat-up station wagon on the very last day of summer break, and I honestly thought we were, if not exactly okay, then definitely on the road to getting there. I even wondered if there was a chance we might be able to make things work between us someday. OfcourseIwould have called him back, if the situation were reversed. Of course I would have come.
