My first act with Patrick as People Who Are Trying to Hang Out is to meet for the world’s most awkward run around the lake, a couple of boats bobbing along in the current and a woodpecker knocking around in the trees. On one hand, we don’t actually have to talk very much, so that’s helpful. On the other, while the running itself isn’t the painfest it was when I first got back from Bristol, trying to keep pace with him makes me realize how easy I’ve been taking it.
“You good?” Patrick asks, not looking at me.
“I’m good,” I say, eyes straight ahead.
It didn’t used to be this uncomfortable—nothing about being with Patrick used to be uncomfortable, but running around in particular was part of our everyday: racing to the tree line at the edge of the farm and back, suicides up and down the bleachers at the high school on weekends. Sometimes Patrick won, and sometimes I did. As far as I know neither one of us ever threw a race.
Now I ignore the burn in my leg muscles and keep going. I feel hyperconscious of how soft and out of shape I probably still look in my leggings and tank top, like there’s a layer of pudding under my clothes. I wonder if he’s been running every day since he got back, too, both of us orbiting circles around each other all over town. The idea makes me lonely and sad. Then again, he’s got Tess, doesn’t he? Tess, who I drove home from work last night; Tess, who put her flip-flops up on my dashboard and sang along in the world’s most off-key, unselfconscious voice to the Miley Cyrus song on the radio.
Tess, who I definitely didn’t tell about this little outing.
“Way to be,” Patrick says when we’re finished, throwing me a high five to say good-bye like he’s congratulating me on something, even though it doesn’t feel like we’ve accomplished anything at all. “We should do it again.”
I shake my head in wonder as I watch him jog away from me, back in the direction of the farmhouse. The sun feels prickly and hot at the back of my neck.
Day 46
“You should pay them,” I argue after dinner the next evening, sprawled on the grass in my mom’s damp backyard. A couple of fireflies flicker lazily in the pine trees. “They’re doing a job, they should get paid.”
“They’re college athletes!” Gabe says stubbornly. “You get a scholarship, that’s the compensation. If you don’t go to class and use it, that’s—”
“You can’t go to class and use it!” I fire back. I like this, arguing with him good-naturedly. Patrick and I agreed on everything . . . until the moment we emphatically didn’t. “You’ve got practice, like, eighty hours a week; the coaches actually tell you not to study and focus on your games.”
Gabe makes a face. “I get paid eight bucks an hour to swipe cards at the student center at school,” he tells me, warm ankle nudging against mine. “You want to pay them eight bucks an hour?”
“Maybe!” I say, laughing. “Better than not getting paid at all.”
“Uh-huh.” Gabe grins at that, ducking his face close to mine in the darkness. “This is a stupid argument,” he decides, bumping our noses together. “Let’s make out instead.”
“You wish,” I tell him, climbing up onto my knees so I can reach over him and grab the bag of gummy worms he brought me—the movement ignites a searing ache in both thighs, though, and I groan a little bit.
“Easy, tiger,” Gabe says, reaching for the bag himself and handing it over. “Been running a lot, huh?”
“I—yeah.” With your brother, I almost tell him—could tell him, could just slip it in right now and it wouldn’t have to be weird, it could be normal, like I have nothing to hide there at all.
I don’t have anything to hide.
Do I?
“Could rub,” Gabe offers now, pulling my calves into his lap and squeezing. I smirk at him in the blue twilight and keep quiet, tilt my head back and enjoy the view.
Day 47
I’m supposed to go shopping for dorm stuff with Imogen in the morning—she has a very specific type of shower caddy in mind—but Patrick texts me to run again, so I ask her if we can reschedule for the afternoon and lace up my ancient sneakers even though the sky above the lake is purple-gray and heavy-looking, threatening a biblical kind of rain. Sure enough, we’re only a quarter mile in when it starts to pour.
I’m ready to turn back, but Patrick raises his eyebrows like a challenge: “Wanna keep going?” he asks, and I nod.
The rain falls cold and fast and steady. We run. Water soaks my tank top, trickles into my socks; it flicks off my eyelashes and skids in rivulets down my spine. Suddenly, I’m taken down in a giant mud-slick, legs sliding right out from underneath me as I land on my ass and hard. For a second, I just sit there, shocked.
“You okay?” Patrick calls, stopping two strides ahead and tracking back to stand beside me, New Balances making deep prints in the muck. He reaches out to pull me to my feet.
“I—” I stare at his hand like it’s a foreign object, something from another planet entirely. The night on my front lawn not withstanding, he’s barely touched me at all since I’ve been back.
“I got it,” I tell him, conducting a quick inventory of my arms and legs and deciding it’s just my pride that’s broken. He’s seen me wipe out a million times before, but this feels different. “I’m fine. I’m just slow and fat now, these things happen.”
“You’re what?” Patrick’s eyes are the same color as the heavy gray sky. “Are you crazy?”
“Oh God, please don’t.” I scramble to my feet and slip again like something out of effing Laurel and Hardy, the black-and-white movies Chuck used to lose his shit laughing over when we were little kids. I’m about to do something and I honestly don’t know if it’s going to be laugh or cry. God, I am so, so tired. “I wasn’t fishing. I don’t need you to, like, give me a sad compliment or whatever. I’m just saying, I’m sitting in this mud puddle because I’m fat and slow now. In case it’s somehow escaped your attention.”
Patrick shakes his head, annoyed. “You’re sitting in the mud puddle because you won’t take my hand, Mols.”
“I mean, fine,” I say, susceptible to logic and willing to concede that particular point, if not the larger one. “But—”