Gabe’s pretty sweetly happy about it when I text and tell him I’ll come to the party after all; he even picks me up at my mom’s house so I won’t have to turn up by myself like Hester Prynne facing the town scaffold. “Ready to go?” he asks as I buckle myself into the passenger seat of the station wagon. “Loins girded, et cetera?”
“Shut up.” I smile even as I clutch my potluck tomato-dip-and-bread-bowl so tightly it’s apt to be nothing but sludge and crumbs by the time we get to the farmhouse. I can tell Gabe knows how freaked out I am, and also that he thinks it’s kind of unnecessary, but I like that he’s humoring me anyway. “I’m cool, okay? This is me being cool.”
“Oh, is that what this is?” Gabe grins. “I’ll make sure to spread the word.”
I glower at him, exaggerated. “Don’t you dare.”
“I mean, I’m just saying,” he continues, in this even teasing voice, “if you’re beingcool. People should know.”
“Uh-huh.” I nod at the road out the windshield. “Just drive, will you? Before I come to my senses and duck and roll out of your car.”
The Donnelly farmhouse is big and white and weathered, three crumbling chimneys and the listing brown barn. I haven’t dared come here since I got back at the beginning of the summer, but the familiarity of this place takes my breath away, the tangle of Connie’s rosebushes on either side of the porch and the cracked window way in the top right corner of the house where Patrick hit a baseball the autumn we were eleven. I used to curl myself into the crawl space in the stuffy, sloping attic, when all four of us would play hide-and-seek. I’m surprised at the clutch in my chest at the sight of the barn.
My plan is to avoid both Patrick and Julia as much as humanly possible, so of course, they’re the first two people I see when we pull up, sitting on the sagging side steps peeling the silky husks off ears of summer corn and tossing them into a brown paper bag at their feet. My heart takes a traitorous leap inside my chest. Everybody uses the side door at the Donnellys’, even the mailman. Only strangers ever ring the bell in front.
As Gabe parks the car I spy Tess opening the screen and coming out of the kitchen in a floaty white sundress holding one of Connie’s vintage Pyrex bowls, the blue ones with the weird little farm scenes on them. She passes her free hand through Patrick’s short dark curls, casual. He turns his head to plant a kiss against her palm.
I flinch once at the sight of them, then a second time at the unfairness of my own reaction. It’s like I’m some kind of jealousy demon, like I have any right to be even a tiny bit stung. I’m here withGabe, aren’t I? I’m literally about to walk into this party with Patrick’s brother. I need to get my head on right.
Gabe doesn’t seem to be paying attention, thank God: “Come on,” he says now, taking the dip off my lap and opening the driver’s door to the heat and hum of the outside, sunlight trickling down through the ancient trees. I can hear the chat and jabber of the party drifting out of the yard. Patrick and Julia look up at the sound of the door slamming shut again, both of them practically double-taking with this vague, offended incredulity—it’s like they have just seen a moon landing, think it’s a hoax, and are pissed at whoever’s trying to get one over on them. It would be comical—Patrick and I would have thought it was comical, watching it happen to somebody else—if it didn’t ache so damn bad.
I raise my hand in a wave, sheepish. Tess is the only one who waves back.
“See?” Gabe says grandly, rolling his eyes at his siblings’ stony tableau and slipping his hand into mine, squeezing once as we cross the wide green expanse of the yard. “Tell me you’re not already having the time of your life.”
“Uh-huh,” I mutter back. “This is me, being cool.”
The backyard is already populated by a cavalcade of aunts and uncles and cousins and family friends, faces familiar to me from more than a decade’s worth of these summer parties—graduations and ski trips, the receiving line at Chuck’s funeral. Heading toward them feels like being advanced on by an army made up entirely of people who are slightly older than they are in my head. I swallow hard.
“You’re okay,” Gabe murmurs, head ducked down low so only I can hear him. “Stick with me.”
That sounds like the exact opposite of a good plan, actually—for a moment I glance back over my shoulder at Patrick, think wistfully of how good he’s always been at ducking a crowd—but it’s not like I’ve got another option, really, so I smile as wide and as humbly as I possibly can. “Hey, guys,” Gabe says over and over, weaving through the crush of people, the plates of macaroni salad and the beer bottles sweating wetly in people’s hands. The Donnellys’ arthritic mutt, Pilot, sniffs around the yard distractedly, and something twangy and festive, some band withWhiskeyorAlabamain the name, pipes through Patrick’s big old speakers. “You know Molly, yeah?”
He does it over and over, reintroducing me around with a hand on my back and an easy smile, asking after his cousin Bryan’s baseball league and his aunt Noreen’s book club. He’s hugely, enormously, unremarkably casual about the whole thing.
And—hugely, enormously, unremarkably—so is everybody else.
“See?” Gabe asks once we’ve done a lap around the perimeter and settled in by one of the food tables, scooping some mayonnaise-y potato salad onto my plate. We’ve talked to Chuck’s old drinking buddies and Gabe’s cousin Jenna’s new fiancé; I’ve explained to no fewer than three different aunts that no, I don’t know what I want to major in yet. We steered clear of Julia and Elizabeth Reese, now piled in the hammock with their heads tipped close together—they’re wearing matching chambray shirts and, thank God, seem more interested in yakking with each other than in tormenting me on this particular day. Meanwhile, Patrick’s a ghost. I caught glances of him out of the corner of my eye like possibly he can walk through walls and disappear at will, like he’s full of magic tricks, here and gone again.
He and I used to do our own thing at this party—he and I used to do our own thing at every party, truth be told—creeping out into the barn to play Would You Rather or just hang out, legs crossed over each other’s and Patrick’s hand playing idly in my hair. I remember being here the summer after sophomore year, after I’d slept with Gabe but before he’d left for college; Patrick and I were back together by then, and we spent the whole day camped out on the couch in the barn by ourselves. Usually I would have tried to get him to hang out with everyone else, but that day I was grateful for Patrick’s penchant for solitude—after all, it made it easier to avoid his brother.
Gabe’s a social animal, though, and I knew coming in that being here with him would mean beingherewith him—digging in and being part of the party, the kind of person who shows up in the forefront of pictures instead of hiding somewhere in the background, cut off, face turned away.
Patrick and Julia aren’t the only Donnellys avoiding me—I haven’t seen Connie yet, either, only caught a glimpse of her disappearing into the kitchen out of the very corner of my eye. Still, save a couple of admittedly confused looks from Gabe’s uncles, for the most part this afternoon isn’t exactly the medieval gauntlet I was expecting. “Not that bad, right?” Gabe prods, nudging my shoulder with his solid one. “I told them all you were being cool and to play along.”
“Oh, funny guy.” I try to roll my eyes at him, but I can’t keep the smile off my face. It feels like a victory—a tiny one, maybe, but a real, tangible victory. I reach out and tug the belt loop of his shorts.
“Angel Gabriel!” That’s a shout from the driveway—here’s Ryan and a bunch of Gabe’s other friends from the lake party, a whole tribe with cases of beer and soda in hand.
“You have got to get them to stop calling you that,” I tell Gabe as we head over to meet them. That girl Kelsey is here, with the painful-looking earrings and a platinum-blond pixie cut, plus gladiator sandals that lace all the way up to her knees. There’s a long-haired kid whose name I think might be Scott or Steve, maybe, a couple other people I don’t know, all of them in sunglasses and smiles, like there’s no place besides Gabe’s family party they’d ever want to be.
Kelsey hugs me like we’re the oldest of friends when she spots me, then immediately launches into a long and complicated story about the designer of this artisan turquoise jewelry she just ordered for the shop. The big group of us decamp to a cluster of lawn chairs near the vegetable garden, where we drink hard lemonade and eat chips for a good portion of the afternoon. I feel protected and included, surrounded by the crowd of them. With Gabe’s friends, I realize, I feel safe.
The weird, sweet truth, though, is that nobody at this party seems particularly interested in me one way or the other. Nobody trips me and snickers; nobody blows a gum bubble into my hair. Around four, Kelsey gets up to track down some more pasta salad, and thanks to her—and also, okay, thanks to the margarita one of the boozy Ciavolella aunts poured me—I’m relaxed enough to risk a solo trip to pee. I’m just coming out of the tiny powder room underneath the stairs when I hear Connie around the corner in the living room: “Come outside and help me with the ice cream, will you, birthday girl?” she’s saying, familiar voice echoing off the high ceiling and shiny wide-plank floors. We used to love to slide around in there in our socks, all four of us. Then: “And maybe wipe the look off your face like you smell something bad, just for the company?”
“Idosmell something bad, thanks,” Julia retorts immediately. “And her name is Molly—”
“Enough,” Connie interrupts, even as I feel myself blanch so hard I worry I’ve actually made a sound: It’s like a trapdoor has opened up underneath me. This used to happen a lot, before I left for Bristol, overhearing people talking about me whether they knew I was listening or not. I ought to be more used to it by now. The familiar wave of shame is physical as dizziness. “Can we not do this now, please?” Connie continues. “Just as long as the girl is, you know, in this house?” I wince at that,the girl—at the idea that that’s who I am to Connie now, after all the times she hugged me hello and put me to bed and generally mommed me. I used to be pretty sure she loved me like one of her own three kids. “There’s no point in getting yourself all worked up about it now, Jules, letting it ruin the day.”
