“Is this real?” Patrick asked me, and his voice was so quiet. The Bronco was still running in the driveway of my house. It was raining, a pale cold drizzle. Exhaust huffed out into the misty gray air.
“Okay,” I said, voice shaking, hands flat and out to try and soothe him. I’d seen the article that morning, and had been hiding in my room all afternoon. I knew what was coming. I should have gone to him first thing and faced the inevitable. Instead I’d been a coward and made him come to me. “Okay, can we just—”
“Mols.” Patrick looked ripped open, like shrapnel had exploded inside him. He looked like someone who’d come home and found a crater where his house used to be. “I said, is it true? Did you—” He shook his dark, curly head, so baffled. “I mean. With my brother?”
“I need you to listen,” I said, instead of replying. “Will you—”
“I’m listening.” Already Patrick’s voice was dangerously cold, like somewhere inside him he knew what was coming and wanted to brace for it. His eyes had turned the flat gray of steel. “Yes or no, Mols?”
“Patrick,” I said, and I couldn’t even answer him. “Please.”
Patrick took a step back then, like I’d physically struck him. There was rainwater collecting on his eyelashes and in his hair. “Okay,” he said slowly, then, fast, like a rubber band snapping: “I need to—yeah. I need to not be here.”
“Patrick,” I said again, curling my fingers around his arm to try and stop him; he shook me off and swung himself into the truck in one long fluid movement, slamming it into reverse and taking off like someone who hadn’t expected to be here very long at all. I stood on my lawn in the rain and I watched him recede into the distance, my heart and my history gone gone gone.
Now I hold my breath as I wait for him to see me, scanning the shelves underneath the counter for Red Vines. Connie used to order them specifically because she knew I was obsessed with them, but I don’t see them tucked between the Sour Patch Kids and the Mars bars, where they used to be. I’m looking around to see what else is different in here when the lady takes her pizza boxes and walks away, and then it’s just the two of us, me and Patrick, staring at each other like we’re on opposite sides of the lake.
“So, hey,” I try now, my voice coming out in a sandpapery croak, like maybe I haven’t talked since the party. “Heard any good gossip lately?”
Patrick doesn’t smile, just shakes his head and reaches under the counter for a fresh roll of register tape. He wouldn’t speak to me at all after the article came out, wouldn’t even come near me, and it was the horrifying loneliness of losing him even more than it was everyone else’s nastiness that sent me to Bristol in the end. “What do you want, Molly?” he asks, opening up the printer and setting it inside. The bruise underneath his eye has mostly faded, just a sickly yellow green.
“What happened?” I ask instead of answering, tucking my hands into the pockets of my shorts and chancing half a step closer.
Patrick shrugs and finishes with the receipt paper, slamming the lid shut and ripping off the colored edge with finality. “I hit somebody,” he tells me flatly. “Then I got hit back.”
That surprises me: Never, in all the years I’ve known him, has Patrick ever gotten in a physical fight. Connie and Chuck were practically the poster parents for nonviolent conflict resolution. Growing up, they made us work out our arguments using handmade felt puppets. “Is that why you came home?” I ask.
“Yup,” Patrick says, without elaboration. “That’s why.”
“Okay.” I nod and wonder who he is now, to toss something he wanted for so long like it didn’t even matter. I wonder if somehow I made him that way. “Look, Patrick. I just—there’s nothing going on with me and Gabe, okay? I just want you to know that. I came home for the summer, and I was being pathetic and so he invited me to that party, but it isn’t—we’re not—” I break off, unsure how to keep going. When we were twelve and thirteen, Patrick always talked about serious stuff sitting back-to-back, like it made it easier if we didn’t have to stare at each other. I wonder what would happen if I asked him to do that with me now.
Instead, he holds up a hand to stop me. “Look, Mols,” he says, echoing my tone exactly. It’s the nickname he’s had for me since we were little kids in pre-K, the same one his dad used to use. “Here’s the thing: You can whore around with my brother every day of the week if you want to. I really don’t care.”
I take a step back like Patrick’s hit me this time, like tomorrow morning I’ll wake up and find both my eyes swollen shut. My whole body goes prickly and hot. Patrick’s calm as the woods in dead winter, though, turning his full attention to the young family coming through the door, a practiced indifference like maybe I never interrupted him to begin with. Like maybe I was never here at all.
Day 15
“Done for the day?” Penn asks me at quitting time, both her kids trailing her down the staff hallway toward the exit that leads to the side parking lot. Fabian takes karate twice during the week and once on Saturday afternoons, and is skipping across the linoleum in his immaculate white gi. Desi follows silently, her tiny hand tucked into her mom’s.
“All done,” I tell her, spinning the combination on my locker—the ones lining the hallway are small, like the kind at gyms and skating rinks, big enough to hold my canvas purse and emergency cache of Red Vines and not much else.
“Any luck with the TVs?”
“Not yet.” I shake my head. “But I’m working on it. Oh, also, remember you’ve got that meeting tomorrow with the guy from—” I break off suddenly, staring at the contents of my locker. Big enough for my purse and not much else, right—the not much else, at this particular moment, being a long strip of a dozen foil-wrapped condoms that I definitely didn’t put there myself.