“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—”
“Jesus Christ, Molly, can you not make a federal fucking case out of it?” Patrick huffed out an irritated breath. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
That made me mad, that he’d talk to me that way in front of his brother. That he’d talk to me that way at all. I felt my cheeks heat up, embarrassed and pissed. This was me and Patrick, was the thing here—we were a unit, a package deal, us on one side of the road and everybody else on the other. We never, ever fought in public.
Except that apparently now we did.
Well, if he was going to be that way, I wasn’t going to sit here and ruin my night trying to talk him out of it. “Fine,” I said, grabbing my backpack off the floor and swinging it over my shoulder. I looked at Gabe, smiled a little. “Ready to go?”
*
Things seem to have calmed down by the time I get back to the campsite. Patrick and Tess are gone, and Jake and Annie have wandered over, the cards forgotten in the center of the picnic table; Gabe pulls away from the herd when he spots me. “Hey, you,” he says, slinging a warm, heavy arm around my shoulders. “Get your sunglasses?”
“Uh-huh.” It’s surprising and a little weird to me, how he seems happy to brush off the scene I walked out on. “Everything okay?”
“What? With my brother?” Gabe shrugs a bit. “Yeah, it was fine. You know how he is; he was just being an asshole.”
That stops me. It was a small, stupid thing, maybe, but Patrick did have the winning cards. I remember Patrick complaining about Gabe what feels like forever ago, the two of us stretched out barefoot in the barn: “Everybody thinks he’s this great sport about shit, but he’s a great sport about shit because he always gets his way.” Is that what just happened here? I wonder.
I don’t say any of that out loud, though, just hum noncommittally and reach up to lace my fingers through his. “We’re gonna play Frisbee for a bit,” Gabe tells me. “You want in?”
I shake my head, suddenly exhausted—the heat, maybe, or just the slightly overwhelming feeling of being with everyone again, the same as we used to and completely different all at once. “I might just nap,” I tell him, then immediately feel guilty about it—after all, isn’t this exactly what I used to do when I was with Patrick, duck out and away from the group? We came here to hang out with our friends, I remember telling him the last time we were here together. Shouldn’t we, you know, hang out with our friends? “I mean, unless you want me to? I can rally.”
Gabe doesn’t seem bothered, though: “Nah, take a rest,” he says, planting a casual kiss on my forehead. “We’re gonna do the campfire thing again later anyway, will probably be another late night.”
“Okay,” I tell him, tipping my face up so his next kiss lands on my mouth instead of on my forehead. “Just for a little bit.”
I borrow a big flowered sheet from Imogen and sack out in the sunshine, never mind that it’s the middle of the baking day. It takes me a long time to get comfortable. I can’t stop thinking about the night of the baseball game a hundred years ago, the weird backward feeling of leaving Patrick in the family room and walking out the back door of the farmhouse with Gabe. Jailbreak, I thought, then immediately hated myself for it.
It was early spring still, the air getting chilly as the sun disappeared behind the mountains, all blue and purple twilight. “You can turn that off,” Gabe said when the radio in the Bronco started up along with the ignition, one of those alt-country stations that played a lot of Carrie Underwood. “I think Julia was listening to it.”
“A likely story,” I teased, then right away felt awkward about it. I tucked my hands between my thighs, looked out the window. I tried to remember the last time I’d been on my own with Gabe, and couldn’t. I thought of Patrick by himself back at the farmhouse. Maybe this had been a mistake.
Gabe glanced over at me as we turned out onto the parkway, curious. “You okay over there?” he asked.
“He’s mad at me,” I blurted before I even knew I was going to do it, then shook my head. God, what was my malfunction tonight? “I’m sorry. I mean, yeah, I’m fine.”
Gabe laughed a little at that, but not meanly. “Okay,” he said, then: “What’s he mad about?” he asked.
“I talked to a recruiter a few weeks ago,” I confessed, pulling one knee up on the bench seat. “About going and running track for this boarding school in Arizona.”
“Boarding school?” Gabe asked, sounding surprised—but not appalled like Patrick had. “Yeah?”
“Do you think that’s totally stupid?”
“No, not at all,” Gabe said, no hesitation. He had one casual hand hooked over the steering wheel, his face open and honest in the fading light. “I think it could be awesome, actually.”
“I think it could be awesome, too!” I told him, almost embarrassed by how dumbly enthusiastic I sounded. “But, duh, it would mean being not here, and . . . I don’t know.” I shrugged and glanced out the window again, the moon beginning to rise. “Patrick . . . does not think it’s a good idea.”
“Yeah,” Gabe said. “I can see him thinking that. Do you think it’s a good idea?”
I considered that for a moment—how I felt when I was running, how my head got quiet and my body was strong. I wondered how it might feel to run for a school that took that seriously. And even though I didn’t want to, even though I knew I was just pissed at Patrick and would probably see things totally differently in twenty minutes, I thought of that word jailbreak again. “I . . . think I might, yeah.”
“Well,” Gabe said, just as quiet. “That’s something to think about, then, isn’t it?”