I cross my arms over my chest, instinctive and embarrassed: You’re looking a little thick, I remember, my limbs going hot and numb with shame. Of course he would hear that, of course he would. Of course he already thinks I’m gross. “I thought you didn’t care what I did,” I reply.
Patrick’s eyebrows shoot up, like he wasn’t expecting an argument from me. I don’t think I was expecting it from me, either. For one crazy second I think he’s about to smile and I actually hold my breath in anticipation, like waiting for a sneeze or for a butterfly to land on your finger. In the end he just shakes his head.
“I don’t,” he says, this expression on his face that I can’t read exactly. “You wanna come to the party, come to the party.”
I blink, unsure if he’s serious or if he isn’t. “Is that a dare?”
“Call it whatever you want,” Patrick tells me, turning and heading for the doorway, for the storm hissing and blowing outside. “I’ll see you, Mols. Tell Tess I’m waiting in the car.”
Day 27
Gabe’s pretty sweetly happy about it when I text and tell him I’ll come to the party after all; he even picks me up at my mom’s house so I won’t have to turn up by myself like Hester Prynne facing the town scaffold. “Ready to go?” he asks as I buckle myself into the passenger seat of the station wagon. “Loins girded, et cetera?”
“Shut up.” I smile even as I clutch my potluck tomato-dip-and-bread-bowl so tightly it’s apt to be nothing but sludge and crumbs by the time we get to the farmhouse. I can tell Gabe knows how freaked out I am, and also that he thinks it’s kind of unnecessary, but I like that he’s humoring me anyway. “I’m cool, okay? This is me being cool.”
“Oh, is that what this is?” Gabe grins. “I’ll make sure to spread the word.”
I glower at him, exaggerated. “Don’t you dare.”
“I mean, I’m just saying,” he continues, in this even teasing voice, “if you’re being cool. People should know.”
“Uh-huh.” I nod at the road out the windshield. “Just drive, will you? Before I come to my senses and duck and roll out of your car.”
The Donnelly farmhouse is big and white and weathered, three crumbling chimneys and the listing brown barn. I haven’t dared come here since I got back at the beginning of the summer, but the familiarity of this place takes my breath away, the tangle of Connie’s rosebushes on either side of the porch and the cracked window way in the top right corner of the house where Patrick hit a baseball the autumn we were eleven. I used to curl myself into the crawl space in the stuffy, sloping attic, when all four of us would play hide-and-seek. I’m surprised at the clutch in my chest at the sight of the barn.
My plan is to avoid both Patrick and Julia as much as humanly possible, so of course, they’re the first two people I see when we pull up, sitting on the sagging side steps peeling the silky husks off ears of summer corn and tossing them into a brown paper bag at their feet. My heart takes a traitorous leap inside my chest. Everybody uses the side door at the Donnellys’, even the mailman. Only strangers ever ring the bell in front.
As Gabe parks the car I spy Tess opening the screen and coming out of the kitchen in a floaty white sundress holding one of Connie’s vintage Pyrex bowls, the blue ones with the weird little farm scenes on them. She passes her free hand through Patrick’s short dark curls, casual. He turns his head to plant a kiss against her palm.
I flinch once at the sight of them, then a second time at the unfairness of my own reaction. It’s like I’m some kind of jealousy demon, like I have any right to be even a tiny bit stung. I’m here with Gabe, aren’t I? I’m literally about to walk into this party with Patrick’s brother. I need to get my head on right.
Gabe doesn’t seem to be paying attention, thank God: “Come on,” he says now, taking the dip off my lap and opening the driver’s door to the heat and hum of the outside, sunlight trickling down through the ancient trees. I can hear the chat and jabber of the party drifting out of the yard. Patrick and Julia look up at the sound of the door slamming shut again, both of them practically double-taking with this vague, offended incredulity—it’s like they have just seen a moon landing, think it’s a hoax, and are pissed at whoever’s trying to get one over on them. It would be comical—Patrick and I would have thought it was comical, watching it happen to somebody else—if it didn’t ache so damn bad.
I raise my hand in a wave, sheepish. Tess is the only one who waves back.
“See?” Gabe says grandly, rolling his eyes at his siblings’ stony tableau and slipping his hand into mine, squeezing once as we cross the wide green expanse of the yard. “Tell me you’re not already having the time of your life.”
“Uh-huh,” I mutter back. “This is me, being cool.”
The backyard is already populated by a cavalcade of aunts and uncles and cousins and family friends, faces familiar to me from more than a decade’s worth of these summer parties—graduations and ski trips, the receiving line at Chuck’s funeral. Heading toward them feels like being advanced on by an army made up entirely of people who are slightly older than they are in my head. I swallow hard.
“You’re okay,” Gabe murmurs, head ducked down low so only I can hear him. “Stick with me.”