“It’s fine. I mean, it’s not.” Patrick exhales, waits a minute. Leans back, so I can feel him breathe. “We’re even, then, is that what you’re saying?”
It takes me a minute to realize he’s looped back around, that he’s talking about me and Gabe versus him and Tess. I shake my head though he can’t see me—he can feel it, probably, and that’s enough. “I don’t know that I’d call us even, exactly.”
“No,” Patrick says, and I don’t know if I’m imagining him pressing back a little bit harder against me, like he’s letting me know he’s still there. “I guess not.”
We sit there for a long time, both of us breathing. I can hear crickets calling in the trees. A dog barks far away, and Oscar answers. My stomach makes a sound, and Patrick snorts.
“Shut up,” I say automatically, sending my elbow back into his rib cage. Patrick grabs it for a second before letting me go. “What do we do now?” I ask him quietly.
“I don’t know,” Patrick tells me. For somebody who thought this was a stupid experiment he hasn’t made any move to turn around, I notice: I wonder if he’s afraid of it like I am, like seeing his face again will break whatever spell we’re under, the night and the privacy and the feeling of being home. “I have no idea.”
“We could try being friends,” I venture finally, feeling like I’m edging dangerously close to a precipice, like I’ve got more to lose than I did twenty minutes ago. If he shuts me down again that’ll be the end of that. “I mean, I have no idea if we can actually do it, but . . . we could try.”
Now Patrick does turn to look at me; I turn, too, when I feel him moving, his gray eyes locked on mine. “You want to be friends?” he asks, the barest hint of a smile I can’t read pulling at the edges of his mouth. “Seriously?”
“If you’ll have me.” I shrug. “I don’t know.”
“Yeah.” Patrick shakes his head as he climbs to his feet, like that’s typical. “You never did.” Then, before I can contradict him: “Let’s be friends, Mols, sure. Let’s try it.” He heads back across the lawn toward the Bronco. “Can’t be any worse than what we are now.”
Day 29
I take a different route than usual on my run, closer to the highway, past some weird commercial remnants of Star Lake’s failed 1980s redevelopment—a McDonald’s, a family-owned water park called Splash Time that looked like a lawsuit waiting to happen even when I was five, and a Super 8 with a scrubby lawn housing a broken fountain and a flimsy sign stuck into the grass readingBUILDING FOR SALE BY OWNER. I’m so distracted thinking about Patrick—have been thinking about him for more than twenty-four solid hours by now, the moment in front of my house and everything it might or might not mean—that it doesn’t really register until I pass it again on my way back, pushing hard through the last couple of miles.
BUILDING FOR SALE.
Huh. I wonder if the contents are for sale, too.
Probably the smart thing to do would be to go home and call them like a grown-up, but the truth is I’m excited now, this little lick of adrenaline flicking its way through my veins. I cross the mostly empty parking lot and the drab, faded lobby to where a sleepy-looking clerk is slouched greasily behind the desk. “Can I help you?” he drones, blinking twice.
I take a deep breath. “Hi,” I say, sticking my hand out in what I hope is an authoritative manner, pasting a let’s-make-a-deal smile on my red, sweaty face. “I’m Molly Barlow, from the Star Lake Lodge. I was hoping to talk to somebody about purchasing your TVs.”
*
“Oh, you’re clever,” Penn says, grinning across her desk at me when I report my early morning success story—forty late-model flat screens available for a fraction of what I’ve been able to negotiate anywhere else, provided we can haul them away by next weekend. Turns out the owner is about to foreclose. It feels kind of bad, making bank of somebody else’s bad fortune—but not bad enough that I don’t grin back when she continues, “You’regood.”
I’m embarrassed all of a sudden, not used to the praise. “It wasn’t that big of a deal, really.”
“Don’t do that,” Penn advises, shaking her head at me. “Don’t downplay what you did over there. You saw an opportunity, you took the initiative, and you got it done. I’m impressed with you, kiddo. You should be impressed with yourself, too.”
“I—” I shake my head, blushing. “Okay. Thank you.”
“You earned it.” Penn looks at me from over her coffee cup, curious. “Hey, Molly, what are you studying in the fall, huh?” she asks. “Is that a thing I know about you?”
I shake my head. “It’s not a thing I know about me, even.” I shrug. “I don’t really know what I want to do.”
Penn nods like that’s not at all unusual, which I appreciate. It feels like everybody else I know is a hundred percent sure of where they’re headed—Imogen off to art school, Gabe headed back to his org chem classes. Pretty much every girl in my graduating class at Bristol was enrolled in specialized programs in things like engineering and political communications and English lit. A lot of times it feels like I’m the only one still lost. “They’ve got a business program at BU, don’t they?” she asks.
“Oh.” I nod back, unsure where she’s headed. People always ask me if I want to be a writer like my mom. “They do, I think, yeah.”
Penn nods. “You should think about it,” she advises. “You’re good at it, what you do here. You should know that about yourself. You’re doing a really good job at this.”
I grin at that, wide and happy. It’s been a long time since I felt good at much of anything. “You’re doing a really good job at this, too,” I tell Penn finally, head out to the lobby to see what else needs to get done.
Day 30
My mom’s in New York for a meeting with her editor and a stop atGood Morning Americato hawk theDriftwoodpaperback, so Gabe brings over a pizza from the shop and we put an Indiana Jones marathon on cable. I haven’t seen him since the other night at the Donnelly party. We haven’t been alone in nearly a week.
“You sure you wanna watch this?” he asks me, settling back into the man-eating leather couch and grinning around his slice of pepperoni. We kissed for half an hour in my kitchen when he got here, my hands fisted in his wavy, tangly hair and the capable press of his warm mouth on mine. Gabe really,reallyknows how to kiss. He ducked his head to get to my collarbone and sternum, and I tried to push Patrick out of my mind as best I could,I don’t like you with my brother.I keep remembering the other night on my lawn. “There’s not, like, a documentary about juicing or the soil content of West Africa you were hoping to catch instead?”
