This . . . does not feel like that.
This feels like a fire in the forest, like one of those carnival rides where the floor drops out and centrifugal force is the only thing keeping you stuck to the wall. Patrick’s hands are everywhere at once. I wind my arms around his neck to keep steady, heart slamming with a shocking violence against my rib cage and his sharp teeth biting at the edges of my tongue. His smell is the only thing that’s the same. I fist my hands in his shirt and lean into him, standing on my tiptoes to get as close up into his space as I can manage. I’d climb inside him if I could, set up house in there, walk around for the rest of the summer. Walk around for the rest of my life.
And then I remember Gabe.
“Stop,” I say before I realize I’m going to do it, heart pounding in a different way altogether, pulling back all at once. “I just,” I say, holding my hands up in a panicky flutter. “I can’t. Patrick. I can’t. Not when—I can’t do this again, please.”
Patrick looks completely baffled for a moment. Then his eyes narrow. “Because of my brother?” he demands, backing off fast enough that it feels like he’s shot me, a ricochet and shatter in my bones. I flinch. “Are you serious right now?”
“Patrick, please,” I start, but I can feel him receding, feel that I’ve ruined this all over again, the whole world immolating in front of my eyes. The panic is hot and awful and immediate. I grab his arm before he can turn away.
“Wait,” I demand, bossy and urgent. I press my traitorous mouth to his one more time. Patrick makes a sound, a hum or a growl. Kisses back until I can’t imagine anything but this.
Day 54
I wake up before sunrise with a slamming headache, a feeling like my heart’s been juiced:
What did I do what did I do what did I do?
Day 55
I stand in the shower for an hour and fifteen minutes, the water as hot as I can possibly stand it. I want to burn off the top layer of my skin.
Day 56
Elizabeth and Michaela both burst into giggles when I pass them in the employee hallway on my way into work the next morning, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when I get to my locker and find a Post-it with a drawing of a stick-figure girl I’m assuming is me giving blow jobs to a gaggle of stick-figure guys. Right away, I feel that tightness in my face.
It’s the same garden-variety nastiness they’ve been flinging my way all summer, I remind myself—there’s no way they could possibly know what happened with me and Patrick—but still I bolt upstairs and hide in the office for as long as my shift lasts, realphabetizing the files in Penn’s cabinets and watching The Blue Planet on the computer. Every time I hear someone coming down the hallway, I flinch.
Day 57
I’m worried I’m going to run into Patrick if I go my usual route down by the lakefront, so instead I do a couple of laps around the track at the high school, everything closed up tight and empty for the summer like something out of the zombie apocalypse. It’s strange to be back here, this place I didn’t graduate from, where everything finished up without me while I hid out on the other side of the country.
Still, the track is warm and solid under my feet, and my legs feel strong and easy: My mind rests calm and quiet and blank. I’m jogging back up through the parking lot when I stop so fast I almost trip.
There’s Julia, parked in the Donnelly Bronco, her raven hair up in a knot on top of her head: She’s got her hands on either side of Elizabeth Reese’s pretty, angular face, their mouths pressed together like there’s literally nobody else in the world.
I stare for a minute. I blink. It feels like the twist at the end of one of my mom’s books or that movie where it turns out the guy was dead the whole time, a million throwaway half clues clicking together all at once: how Julia and Elizabeth are always together, just like Patrick and I used to be. How surprised Gabe looked at the beginning of the summer when I asked him if he and Elizabeth were dating. It occurs to me, not for the first time, that you can never really know what anybody’s got hidden in the back of her secret heart.
I mean to escape before anyone sees me: I wonder who, if anyone, knows. I want to slip away and leave her to it, to whatever she’s figuring out or already understands, but I’m too slow and too stupid just like always, and a second later she pulls back and blinks alert.
Fuck. I see Julia’s mouth move more than I hear it; there’s my answer, then, about who knows or might not. I feel myself blush, caught staring like a creep. I want to promise her I won’t tell anyone—that I understand things being private, and I’m not the kind of girl who would blab. I never get the chance, though, because Julia’s throwing the truck into drive and peeling off toward the exit, her cold gaze locked on mine.
Day 58
The doorbell rings twice and insistent as I’m changing the water in Oscar’s doggie bowl. I’m thinking it’s Alex coming to let me know he’s here to fix the loose shutter my mom’s been complaining about, but there’s Julia standing on the other side of the screen door, tank top and a floaty scarf and dark hair in a complicated set of braids pinned on top of her head, like Heidi.
I stand there. I gape at her. She’s got her jaw set, hands clenched into tight little fists at her sides: She might as well have them raised like an old-fashioned boxer—Put ’em up.
“I’m not going to say anything,” I tell her, not bothering to open the door and let her in here. The last thing in the world I have the energy for is a fight. “If that’s why you came.”