“You love me,” I called over my shoulder, confident in the fact that he did, that he always would; when I got back a minute later, though, his darkened face threw me into sudden doubt. “What’s this?” he asked me, holding up a sheet of printer paper.
Shit. It was my email exchange with the recruiter, the paper he’d clearly found in my backpack—I’d printed it out at school earlier, intending to show it to my mom that weekend.
I took a deep breath. “Patrick—”
“Are you going?” he asked, zero to totally pissed in 3.5 seconds. “To Arizona?”
“No!” I said, wanting to calm him down as fast as possible—wanting to get back to how everything had felt a minute ago, safe and exciting both. “Probably not, I mean, I just wanted—”
“Probablynot?”
“I don’t know!” I said. “I was going to talk to you about it, Iwantedto talk to you about it, I just—”
“Thought you’d lie to me about it for a week instead?”
“Hey, kids,” Gabe said just then, pausing in the doorway to the family room, rapping twice on the frame like he knew he was interrupting something but wanted to give us a heads-up that he was there. “You almost ready to go?”
“Oh, crap, what time is it?” I looked up at Gabe, then at the clock on the cable box, blushing at the idea he’d heard us fighting. He was supposed to give us a ride to the baseball game. I’d totally lost track of time. “We gotta go, huh?”
“Got some time,” Gabe assured me. He was a senior that year, would be graduating in a month. “Game’s not till seven.”
I looked from him to Patrick’s stony expression, back again. “I know, but I told Imogen we’d go early.” Sports weren’t a huge deal at our school, but our baseball team was in the playoffs and it was a Friday game, a night one that we’d been talking about all week. Julia was cheering, and Annie had made a bunch of banners with the art club; we had plans to go for pancakes at the diner afterward. It felt like a long time since I’d hung out with everyone, a weird ache I’d started to notice, like my friends felt far even though they were right where they’d always been. Like some secret part of me was already getting ready to leave. I took a deep breath, looked back at Patrick, putting my hand on his wrist like a peace offering. Tried to ask him telepathically:Please, please can we just table this for now?“Come on,” I said, out loud. “Let’s get ready.”
“What if we skipped it?” Patrick said, standing frozen in place with his arms crossed. It was still cool out and he was wearing this lightweight hoodie I loved, gray and hundred-wash soft.
“Skipped it?” I repeated. “Why would we skip it?”
“I don’t know.” Patrick glanced at his brother, shook his head. “You don’t think it sounds lame?”
“Not really,” I said, “no. I kind of wanna go, actually.”
“I . . . kind of really wanna stay here.”
“Whoa, dissent in the ranks,” Gabe teased from the doorway. “All right, you guys figure it out. I’m gonna change my shirt. Train leaves the station in five minutes.”
I perched on the arm of the couch to face him. “I’m sorry, okay? I’m not going anywhere, I promise. I was being dumb, I should have told you I was thinking about it. But I’m not even thinking about it anymore.”
I thought that would fix things, that we’d get back to having a fun, normal night, but Patrick sighed. “I think it’s lame,” he said, ignoring what I’d said about Bristol, like we’d moved onto a different conversation entirely. “I just think it’s so boring and fake, to go hang out with a bunch of people I don’t even like and cheer for a baseball team I literally could not care less about. I don’t feel like going.”
“They’re ourfriends,” I countered. “Since when do you not like our friends?”
“I like our friends fine,” Patrick said, shaking his head. “I don’t know.” He sat back down then and picked the remote up off the couch, flicking through the channels. “Look, that show about the pit bulls and the criminals is coming on. How can you possibly say no to a show about pit bulls and criminals?”
“Paaatrick,”I said, laughing a little uneasily—he was kidding but also not, I could tell, wanted me to ditch our friends and the baseball game and stay here.
To ditchBristoland stay here, too.
God, it felt so suffocating all of a sudden, the idea of spending the rest of the night watching whatever five-year-old episode ofHow I Met Your Mothercame on next, the air inside the house close and stale. We’d spent any number of Fridays like that, just the two of us, and it had never, ever bothered me, but all of a sudden it made me want to scream.
Gabe turned up in the doorway again then, jacket on and car keys rattling inside his hand. “You guys figure your shit out?” He looked back and forth between us, undoubtedly the twin faces of two people who had emphaticallynot. He made a face like,definitelynot getting in the middle ofthat. “I can just take you over, Molly, if my brother’s being a pain in the ass about it.”
“Screw you,” Patrick muttered.
“No,” I said, “he’s not—”
“Just go,” Patrick said to me harshly. “Seriously, you wanna go with Gabe, go with Gabe. I’m not your warden.”
“I—” I put one foot back down on the floor, uncertain. We were supposed to meet Imogen in ten. “Come on, Patrick, don’t—”
