“I—” For a second Julia looks totally confused, like she showed up to a war with tanks and cannons and found me watching soap operas and filing my nails. “You’re not?”
“No,” I say immediately, feeling a surge of irritation—like that was ever even a question. She knows me. She knows I’m not the kind of person who’d go yelling all over creation about something that’s none of my business to begin with, especially something as loaded as this is. “I’m not.”
Julia blinks, still with that startled expression on her face like I’ve thrown her off entirely. She thinks so little of me. “Okay,” she says after a moment. “Thank you. Elizabeth told me about the Post-it the other day; she says she’s sorry.” Then: “Nobody else knows about us except Gabe.”
She stays still on the porch for a moment, looking at me through the old screen door. I remember how much pleasure she’s taken in ripping me to ribbons for the better part of the last year and a half. I remember Chuck strapping her into a life jacket on the Sally Forth. “You know your mom wouldn’t care, right?” I say, not entirely sure why I’m sticking my nose in. Maybe because her family was my family, once upon a time. “I mean. Not that I’m a person you want to take advice from, probably. But she’d be happy that you were happy, that’s all. Patrick, too.”
Julia crosses her arms, shifts her weight a bit. Her nail polish is a screaming neon red. “I know that,” she says, sounding a little defensive. “Of course Patrick wouldn’t care that me and Elizabeth are—whatever. He just doesn’t like her. He thinks she’s vapid, and that I’m vapid for hanging out with her, and I just—you know how Patrick is.”
That surprises me—I do; of course I do. I know how talking to Patrick requires a certain kind of courage, how it can make you feel stubborn and shy. That’s what got me where I am in the first place after all. It was so much easier to tell a secret to Gabe.
I want to explain that to Julia all of a sudden, want to tell her how everything happened to begin with, but I know it’s a lost cause before I even open my mouth. “Yeah” is all I tell her. “I know how Patrick is.” Then, as a kind of offering: “Elizabeth’s pretty.”
“Oh, God, enough.” Julia rolls her eyes at me, shaking her head. “We’re not friends anymore, okay? You don’t have to, like, try and bond with me over liking girls. I came here to make sure your freaking mom wasn’t going to write a book about the lesbian down the road, that’s all. We good?”
Julia Donnelly, ladies and gentlemen. I don’t know why I expected anything else.
“Yeah,” I promise, shaking my head a little. It’s all I can do not to grin. “We’re good.”
Day 59
I’ve been pretty much entirely off the grid since Crow Bar—since Patrick—hiding in the office at work to avoid running into Tess, and coming straight home at night to work my way through documentaries about girl boxers and the Louisiana Purchase. how’re your lady parts??? Imogen inquires on a group message, and Tess chimes in with an emoji face that’s got two Xs for eyes: Did you die of cramps?
The fact that I’ve got friends who care enough to check in on my imaginary period makes me hate myself even more than I already do, both for the lie and for what happened after I told it. Julia’s right: I don’t deserve anything good.
I’m alive, I text them back, the only truth I seem to be able to manage, then turn my phone off and hide from the world for one more day.
Day 60
Gabe stopped off to see some school friends in Rhode Island on the way back from Boston; he gets back in the morning and texts to say he’s going to come meet me at work at the end of the day. I spend my entire shift dreading it, guilt and shame eating at my insides like somehow I swallowed a mouthful of the chlorine we use at the pool. Thoughts tumble around in my brain, wild and overheated like clothes in a dryer—by the time I punch my time card and pull my purse out of my locker, I feel like I’m legit about to be sick.
Then, though—
Then I see Gabe.
He’s standing outside in the parking lot, all tan summer skin and a soft blue T-shirt, car keys dangling lazily from one hand. “Hey, Molly Barlow,” he says, grinning across the blacktop slow and easy.
I launch myself right into his arms.
It’s insane, the effect Gabe has on me—like a storm at sea clearing, like a hurricane calming down. The churning in my stomach disappears the moment he catches me and all of a sudden everything seems so enormously obvious. He seems so enormously right. There’s nothing tortured or painful about being with him. Everything about him is easy and good.
“Hey, you,” Gabe says, laughing, lifting me off my feet a little. His arms feel like a life preserver, feel safe. “Missed me, huh?”
“Yeah.” I clamp my hands over his ears and stamp a kiss on his mouth, decisive. “How’d it go?”
“It went okay, I think,” Gabe says, setting me down gently and lacing his fingers through mine. “Actually, I think it went really, really well.”
“It did?” That makes me smile. “Think you’re gonna get it?”
Gabe shrugs, grinning mischievously. “We’ll see.”
“We will,” I agree. I can picture it now, just like I could before he left but somehow forgot while he was away from me—the two of us sitting in coffee shops or huddled in dark Harvard bars, riding the T over the Charles River with the city lights winking in the distance. What was I trying to do with Patrick the other night, prove that I didn’t deserve this?
I tilt my face up to Gabe’s, his hair gleaming golden in the late afternoon sunlight. “I’m really glad you’re back.”
Day 61