“And, like, clearly you’re beautiful, so I don’t know what the hell you’re—”
“Patrick.” I blurt his name before I can stop myself, stupid and unthinking—he shuts up right away, and it feels like a lighter that’s almost out of juice catching just for a second, that spark that’s there and gone.
“Take my damn hand, will you?” Patrick asks quietly. “Please.”
I take it.
“Thanks,” I tell him, shocked and hopeful. Patrick nods and doesn’t say a thing. It’s still pouring as we take off again, a cautious jog that builds to something faster: just me and him and the sound of the rain in the treetops, running through the end of the world.
Day 48
Gabe’s still in the shower when I come by to pick him up for dinner and Julia’s prowling around the downstairs of the house like a hungry tiger at the Catskill Game Farm, so I creep outside to the back of the farmhouse and sit in a lawn chair to wait. Connie’s roses are lush and sprawling in the summer heat, their heavy heads fat and drooping like Penn’s sleepy kids at the end of the day. The vegetable garden is bright with still-green tomatoes, slowly ripening summer squash.
I squint at the barn at the far edge of the property, its peeling paint and crooked doorways. The roof seems like it’s close to caving in. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to look at the sloping roof and not remember the first time Patrick kissed me, bundled up in heavy-duty sleeping bags in the loft that’s never been used for anything but storage and sleepovers. It was fall, too cold to be camping, but that was right after Chuck died and nobody was keeping much of an eye on Patrick to begin with: Gabe ran all over Star Lake with every girl in the sophomore class, it seemed like, and Julia had one disciplinary notice sent home after another. Patrick was quiet, though, flying under the radar.
Patrick had me.
It was October, the smell of things decaying, being absorbed back into the earth. The wind snuck underneath the floorboards, through the hairline seams in the walls—we weren’t talking, both of us paging through Chuck’s old National Geographics like a couple of nerds, but we were pressed together without even meaning to be, the instinct to get close to wherever it’s warm. I could feel his ribs move in and out as he breathed.
“Listen to this,” I said distractedly, the bag of Red Vines crinkling as I rolled over to face him—it was an article about a tortoise called Lonesome George, the very last one of his species. When I looked up at Patrick, Patrick was already looking at me.
Emily Green would have been surprised by what happened next, probably. She would have been prettily baffled, would have never seen this coming, but the truth is of course I had: for weeks and months and maybe years, like if you’d put your ear to the ground on the day that Patrick and I met you would have been able to hear this heading toward us, a rumble from miles and miles away. I’d listened. I’d been paying attention. And when his mouth pressed against mine I wasn’t shocked.
It wasn’t a long kiss; it wasn’t a make-out; just barely a press like, there you are. There you are, I thought, looking at him in the glow of the cage light hanging on the wall, the camping lantern that had been his dad’s along with the magazines.
There you are.
*
“Hey,” Gabe says now, side door clattering shut behind him as he crosses the patio in shorts and a button-down. He smells like soap and water, clean and new, and just like that all my memories of Patrick evaporate like steam off a damp hot sidewalk. That was then, I remind myself. This is now. “Sorry about that. I just had the craziest phone call.”
“Dial a date?” I ask cheerfully.
“Oh, you’re a comedian.” Gabe offers one big hand to pull me to my feet. “No, so Notre Dame does this program with a bunch of different hospitals, right? Like a semester abroad, I guess, but for premed people and you change bedpans or whatever instead of drinking your face off in Prague. Anyway, I applied in the spring and they wait-listed me, but I guess some kid just dropped out, and there’s a spot open at MGH.”
I blink at him as I reach for the handle on the passenger side of Volvo, baked warm by an afternoon in the sun. “MGH?” I ask, trying to suss out the acronym. “Is that . . .?”
“Massachusetts General Hospital, yeah,” Gabe says, raising his eyebrows across the roof. “In Boston.”
“Really?” I ask, taken aback—but not, I realize, necessarily in a bad way. “You could be in Boston in the fall?”
“Oh, you’re freaking out now,” Gabe says, laughing as he turns the key in the ignition. “You’re all, shit, I was planning to use this kid for his body all summer and then never talk to him again, what the hell am I gonna do now?”
That makes me laugh, too. “I would love to have you changing bedpans in my new home city. Boston bedpans, I hear, are the best in the land.”
“That’s what you hear, huh?” Gabe’s still grinning. “It’s not definite or anything yet. I gotta drive up there in a couple of days, have the interview. I guess it’s between me and one other guy.”
I nod and let myself picture it for a minute—Gabe and me walking through Boston Common, hanging out and listening to the buskers at Faneuil Hall. It’s not what I’d pictured when I sent in my acceptance last April. But I like the way it feels. “You’ll get it,” I decide, smiling out the windshield. “You’ll see.”
Day 49
There are two texts on my phone when I wake up the following morning, two chimes in a row dragging me out of restless sleep. One’s from Gabe, who decided at the last minute to make an actual trip of it and is going to take a few days to visit school friends on his way back from his interview: I’ll miss you, Molly Barlow. Will tell Boston you say hi.
The second text is from Patrick: run tomorrow?
I stare at the screen for a moment, the messages stacked one on top of the other like some cruel joke at the hands of the universe.
Then I turn it off and go back to sleep.
Day 50