“Okay.” I took a deep breath and I got up off the bed where I was sitting, pacing past the desk and dresser and back again. I knew every last corner of this room: the warped closet door that never quite closed correctly, the stain on the rug from where we’d ground in Play-Doh by mistake when we were seven. It might as well have been my own. I carved a hand through my hair, frustrated. “You don’t think we’re—” I struggled for a minute, trying to think of how to say it without pissing him off, without making myself more foreign to him than I already seemed to be right now. “You don’t think we sometimes, like . . . spend all this time together at the expense of other stuff in our lives?”
Patrick blinked at me. “What?” he asked, shaking his head faintly. “Like, what are you even saying?”
“I’m just asking!” God, he was irritating me so much lately, moody and intractable in a way he’d never been before—or, if he had, in a way that had never, ever been directed at me. I didn’t know which one of us was changing. It scared me to think maybe both of us were. “Can we just—”
“Molly, if you want to go to Arizona to run, you should go to Arizona to run.” Patrick’s voice was flat and careless. “I didn’t realize I was holding you backquiteso hard.”
“You’re not holding me back!” I burst out. “I’m asking you a question; I’m trying to have a conversation with you. I thought that’s what we do: We have conversations. We’ve been having one long conversation our whole lives and now—”
“Now you’re bored, and you want to go have other ones. I get it, kid. I do.”
“Can you not finish my sentences, please?”
“Why, is that holding you back, too?”
“Okay, stop it. Just—stop, for a second.” I sat down on the floor, back against the doorframe where Chuck had measured how tall we were the whole time we were growing up, pencil lines and his neat, blocky handwriting:Julia. Patrick. Molly. Gabe. This was my family, I thought, looking across the room at Patrick’s hardened, hurt expression. This would always be my home.
“We wouldn’t have to break up,” I told him softly, gazing at him across the bedroom. “If I went. That’s not what it would mean. We could visit, we could—”
“Yeah.” That was the wrong thing for me to say, clearly—I actually watched him shut down then, the angry set of his jaw. “Whatever. Okay. You can leave now, Mols. We’re getting nowhere. I’ll see you, really.”
“Patrick.”My eyes widened—I couldn’t believe he was doing this again. It was like he was determined to get rid of me any way he could. “Why are you doing this? Can you stop, like,actively pushing me away—”
“I’m not pushing, Mols!” His voice cracked then, hoarse and aching. “You want to run so bad? Go run. Seriously. Don’t come back.”
I blinked. “What does that—?”
“It means this isn’t working,” Patrick said coldly. “It means we should just be done.”
I stared at him for a moment like he was suddenly speaking Mandarin, like he was someone from clear on the other side of the vast, breathing world. “Are you breaking up with me right now?”
“Yeah, Mols,” he said, and he sounded like a stranger. “I am.”
*
A burst of laughter rips me out of the memory, spooking me so hard I startle a second time, though at least I don’t send any more silverware flying. Gabe’s still got his palm on my knee. He squeezes a bit, then slides his hand farther over, fingertips picking at the seam on the inner thigh of my jeans.
That’s when Patrick nudges his leg against mine.
I can’t tell if he’s doing it on purpose at first, just the barest hint of pressure, heat seeping through his layer of denim and mine. I try to concentrate on what Imogen’s asking, about who’s around to help stretch canvas for her art show, but I feel like I’m listening from the bottom of the lake. My breath comes fast and ragged all of a sudden, and I concentrate on slowing it down so nobody will hear.
The worst part is I can feel myself responding in other ways also, the low swoop of want in my stomach and the skin all over my body tightening up—and I don’t even knowwhoI’m respondingto. What is up with me, howmessed upam I, that I think it might be both of them?
Gabe’s fingers play idly along my inseam, oblivious. Patrick pushes a little bit harder now, the muscle of his thigh insistent enough that there’s no way it’s not intentional. I feel like I’m on fire, engulfed in hideous flame while everyone else sits around and eats French fries. I feel horrified by my body and my heart.
“I gotta pee,” I announce, popping up in the booth and cutting Imogen off mid-sentence, scrambling out of the booth and leaving both Donnelly boys behind.
Day 66
Gabe asks me over for dinner again the next evening—lasagna this time, a big pan of it baking in the oven, and Julia and me putting a salad together side by side at the kitchen counter, lettuce and tomatoes still gritty with the dirt from Connie’s garden.
“Know what I was thinking about?” Julia asks, rinsing the lettuce under the faucet and tossing it into the spinner. She’s wearing a few of Elizabeth’s bangles, I notice, the jingling sound as she moves. “Remember the Year of the Zucchini?”
“Oh God, I thought we agreed never to speak of that again.” I snort, knife clicking against the cutting board. The summer we were eleven Connie accidentally grew a giant bumper crop of the stuff, more than any sane person would ever want to eat in a lifetime. She put it in literally everything—normal stuff like soup and bread, but also chocolate chip cookies and once, hauntingly, this gross ice cream she tried to sneak past everyone, like somehow we wouldn’t notice. Finally, Chuck rounded up everything that was left and drove Patrick and Julia and I all out to dump the whole lot of it in the lake. “They used to serve it as a side dish at my boarding school all the time and I’d have to, like, avert my eyes when I passed by.”
“Did you like it?” Julia asks me, tossing some grated carrot into the salad bowl and raising her eyebrows. “Boarding school, I mean?”
I still can’t believe she’s talking to me like this, almost exactly like we used to. How many hours did we spend in this kitchen, back before I set the whole world on fire? “Look, Jules,” I tell her finally, opening the fridge just like I have a hundred times before, pulling the bottle of salad dressing off the door. “I’m not going to tell anybody about you and Elizabeth, okay? I meant that, I swear.”
