It’s good is the worst part of everything; in my head it was hackneyed and nasty, like a cheap daytime soap on the page. The truth is it’s . . . kind of compelling. I get why it did so well. The boys aren’t Patrick or Gabe, not exactly, and while reading about Emily Green makes me supremely, squirmingly uncomfortable, I have to admit I’m rooting for her stupid coin-flipping self by the time I near the end.
I’m almost finished, turning the pages faster and faster, and the rain long since calmed to a steady drizzle when I hear the creak of the floorboards behind me: There’s my mom in the doorway with Oscar, and I am unmistakably caught.
“Morning,” is all she says, though, setting the dog down on the floor so he can trot over to where I’m curled under the blanket, toenails clicking on the floor. She looks from me to her book and back again, her face impassive. “You been up awhile?”
Long enough to read the best seller you penned about my love life, I think, but for the first time I can’t bring myself to get worked up about it. “For a bit,” I say. “Yeah.”
My mom nods. “You want more coffee?”
I almost tell her something else then. I want to tell her something else—that reading this book was like spending three hours with her, that I miss her, that she’s talented and even if I don’t forgive her I’m still proud that she’s my mom. The cover feels like it’s gone hot inside my hands.
“Coffee would be great,” I finally tell her, and smile. My mom nods at me slowly, smiles back.
Once she’s gone I dig around in the couch cushions for a moment, come up with a fistful of crumbs but also exactly what I’m after—a tarnished, gummy nickel, cool and heavy in the palm of my hand. I squeeze it tightly for a moment, like I can give it special powers that way, like I can infuse a whole year’s worth of questions into the metal.
Then I flip.
Day 69
I’m down in the kitchen feeding Oscar his expensive, locally produced kibble when my phone starts buzzing in my pocket. When I fish it out I’ve got a new Facebook notification: Julia Donnelly has tagged you in a photo.
I tense, a low, greasy roll of dread rumbling through me before I can quell it, like too much questionable not-quite-Mexican food from the dining hall at Bristol. Julia did this a lot before I left: tagging pictures of me with bad angles that made it look like I had a double chin, ones with my eyes closed where I was making a stupid face. Once she posted a picture of a literal pig with my name on it. I’m not sure which of her brothers finally made her take it down. We’re friendly again now, sure—at least, I think we’re friendly—but as I click VIEW POST I flinch anyway, that feeling like the moment between when you stub your toe and when the pain hits. I’m sure this is going to hurt.
Which is why I’m surprised when I see what she’s tagged this morning, that it’s not a porn star with my face Photoshopped in or a blown-out close-up of me with a bad breakout. What she’s posted is a throwback shot—the same one that’s shoved in my desk drawer at this very moment, that I pulled off the bulletin board when I got back to Star Lake: the four of us, Gabe and Patrick and Julia and me, sitting in the hayloft, Patrick’s arm wrapped tight around my rib cage. No mean caption, no cartoon penis drawn helpfully on my face. Just us, how we used to be. Before.
I look at our faces in the photo, grinning and silly. I smile at the screen in reply.
Day 70
I’m looping the lake early the following morning, legs burning and swallowing giant mouthfuls of air, when I spy a familiar figure heading in the opposite direction. “We gotta stop meeting like this,” I tell him as he slows to greet me, and Patrick raises his eyebrows.
“It’s early,” he says, and it is, still—the sky just getting light around the edges, all that smudgy pink and gray. It’s going to be nice out today. I can hear the waking calls of the birds up in the pine trees.
“Uh-huh.” I nod as he falls in step beside me, him doubling back in the direction he came from. The back of my warm, damp hand brushes his for a moment before he takes it, lacing his fingers through mine.
“Patrick,” I tell him, low and warning. It occurs to me that possibly we aren’t meeting here by chance.
Patrick ignores me. “You know what we haven’t done yet?” he asks instead, grinning like a little kid with a secret.
“I can think of a lot of things,” I retort without thinking, and Patrick tilts his head like, Fair enough, before inclining it toward the placid surface of the lake, morning-tranquil and empty. Right away I pick up what he’s putting down.
“No way.” It’s a thing we used to joke about constantly, half-kidding and half-serious—both of us testing each other’s boundaries or something, both of us feeling it out. Neither one of us ever called the bluff. “I’m not skinny-dipping in this lake with you right now.”
“Why not?”
“Because we’re not on Dawson’s Creek! Like, to start with.”
“And to end with?”
“Shut up.”
“You don’t have to take everything off,” he tells me.
“Oh, how generous of you,” I snap, and Patrick wrinkles his pretty nose.
“You know that’s not what I meant,” he says, a flash of flinty anger in his deep gray eyes. “I’m not some gross guy who wants to—” He breaks off.
Get naked with his brother’s girlfriend? I almost supply. Not like we’re not both thinking it. On top of which Patrick is that guy, clearly. He’s exactly that guy.
And I guess I’m exactly that girl.
He can feel me considering it, he knows me that well; we’ve stopped moving entirely, standing here beside somebody’s rotting old dock. There’s not a soul here to stop us. There’s not a soul here to know. “Mols,” Patrick says, and his voice is so quiet. “Get in the water with me.”
I look at him for a moment. Then I sigh.
“I’m not losing all my clothes right now,” I tell him firmly.
“Noted.” Patrick nods.
“And neither are you.”