“Hey,” Patrick said to me, then turned around and walked away.
“Any word from Mass General?” Connie asks Gabe now, spooning some black beans into her taco. All the Donnellys fix them the same way, with a soft shell wrapped around the hard one to keep the whole affair from falling apart once you bite into it. It’s an old trick of Chuck’s he taught us all when we were small.
Gabe shakes his head and swallows. “Not yet,” he says. “They said it could be a couple weeks; I think the other kid was interviewing after me.”
My eyes cut across the table at Patrick, the sleeves of his hoodie shoved to his elbows and his freckly forearms, his serious face. He’s looking at his taco, not at me. He must know what it’ll mean, if Gabe spends this fall in Boston.
Right now he seems totally unbothered, though; when he lifts his head and gazes around the table his eyes are clear. “Boston seems like your kind of place,” he tells his brother blandly, then reaches for a serving spoon and refills his plate.
Day 62
Penn wants me to train a couple of new front desk girls on the database software, so I’m clicking around in her office while she looks over my shoulder periodically, making sure there’s nothing I don’t understand well enough to explain. “Do we send thank-you cards?” I ask, scrolling through the records and snapping off the end of my Red Vine. Desi is perched quietly on my knee, her dark head bent over aLittle Mermaidcoloring page. “Or, like, could we? At the end of the summer, maybe, a postcard thanking people for staying and inviting them to come back—or, like, a coupon or a discount code or something for in the fall when it’s slow?”
Penn’s eyebrows shoot up, a grin spreading over her smooth brown face. “Look at you with your thinking cap on,” she says, nodding. “Wanna cost it out?”
“Sure,” I say, smiling back at her enthusiasm, shifting Desi to my opposite knee. She’s been sticking pretty close lately, hooking her small fingers in my back pocket as I walk the hallways in the morning and buckling herself into the backseat of my car when Penn sends me into town to run errands. I like her spry, quiet company. I like the skinny-but-solid weight of her little-kid body in my lap. “I’ll get it to you tomorrow.”
“Sounds good. You’re feeling better, then?” she asks, leaning against the edge of the desk and studying me. “That didn’t get past me, all that weirdness with you last week.”
“I—I’m sorry,” I say, embarrassed. “It was personal stuff; I was trying to keep it separate. Were there things that didn’t get done?”
Penn shakes her head. “You were fine. You just seemed a bit off, was all. Like you didn’t want to be spending a whole lot of time outside this office.” She cocks her head to the side, eyes narrowing. “Those two girls who work in the dining room, Michaela and what’s her face, the other one. They giving you a hard time?”
I shake my head. Actually, the truth is that since Elizabeth’s little drawing they’ve pretty much laid off lately, leaving me mostly to my own devices with only the occasional nasty look to deflect. There’s no way I can tell Penn that I actually spent all of last week dodgingTess. “It’s fine,” I promise. “It’s all resolved now.”
“Okay.” Penn nods, brushing her hands off like they might have some dirt on them, case closed, then. “Good. You wanna go run by the kitchen, make sure the guys all got their breaks?”
“Sure thing. What do you say, Des?” I ask her, easing her off my lap and onto the carpet. “You wanna go for a walk?” Desi hops up piggyback, and we head out into the lobby. When we round the corner there’s Tess in her red lifeguard bathing suit and a pair of mesh shorts, whistle hooked on a long nylon cord she’s spinning around two fingers. “Oh, hey, there you are,” she says, “I was looking for you this morning. Hi, Desi.” She grins at the forty pounds of kid peering over my shoulder curiously. Then, to me: “I have to tell you something, and I feel stupid about it. Or, like, I’m actually really happy about it? But I feel stupid.”
“Okay . . .” I say uncertainly, boosting Des up a bit higher on my shoulders. She’s slipping. “What’s up?”
“Patrick and I kind of got back together last night.”
“Ow!”I flinch as Desi catches a hunk of my hair in the elastic of her shiny plastic bracelet, yanking hard. “Easy, kid.” I set her down while we get untangled, eyes watering at the sting in my scalp, though in truth I’m grateful for the distraction and the half beat it gives me to rearrange my face into something more appropriate than my gut reaction.
Back together.
Patrick and Tess.
“Sorry,” I say, standing upright again; Desi scampers across the lobby after Virgo, the Lodge’s cranky orange cat. Tess is looking at me expectantly. “That’s . . . great!” I manage. I think of how strange it seemed that Patrick was so unbothered about Gabe going to Boston—about Gabe andme—at dinner last night. I guess it wasn’t actually strange at all.
“I feel like the Girl Who Cried Breakup,” Tess explains, shaking her head a little. “Or a traitor to the sisterhood or something.”
“What sisterhood is that?” I ask, trying to sound jokey and cool about it. “The International League of Patrick’s Ex-Girlfriends?”
“Exactly.” Tess smiles. “I made him suffer, for what it’s worth. But he showed up and said all this amazing stuff about, like, the future, and I just . . . I don’t know. It felt good, you know? It felt right.”
I twist my face into a smile I hope looks genuine. Because this is a good thing, isn’t it? What happened with me and Patrick while he and Tess were broken up was an aberration, the worst kind of self-sabotage, and I want to put it behind me forever. Here’s solid, unequivocal proof that Patrick does, too. I made my choice, and so did Patrick. “I do.”
Day 63
It’s Imogen’s birthday, so we wolf down a truckload of pizza at Donnellys’ and then head for the woods beside the lake, a cooler of watery Bud Light hidden under a blanket in Gabe’s station wagon and Tess’s iPod sitting in a red plastic Solo cup to amplify the sound. Handsome Jay made cupcakes, which strikes me as incredibly freaking dear.
It’s a pretty big crowd, us and Jake and Annie and a bunch of Imogen’s French Roast girlfriends; Julia and Elizabeth were hanging out at the pizza place and deigned to tag along for the ride. “I like those jeans,” Julia tells me, popping the top off her bottle and nodding at my holey Levi’s. Then, off what must be my vaguely stunned expression: “No, Molly, I’m not hitting on you. You can relax.”
“That’s not what—” I begin, shaking my head quickly. Julia only smirks.
I’m headed to the cooler for a beer of my own when Patrick grabs my arm like it’s an emergency. “What?” I demand with alarm. He doesn’t answer, just yanks me back behind a giant oak where no one can see us, dark enough that I can barely seehim.
