“I’m so sorry,” I try anyway. “Tess, seriously, please just listen for a sec—”
“You listen for a sec!” she explodes. It’s the first time I’ve heard her raise her voice all summer. “I was nice to you when nobody else was, do you get that? Everyone said to watch out for you, but I liked you, so I didn’t care.” She shakes her head, eyes filling. I feel like the worst person in the world. “Is that why you were friends with me to begin with?” she asks me, voice high and brittle. “To, like, misdirect?”
“No!” I exclaim. “No, I swear. I liked you, too, right away. You’ve been such a good friend to me this summer, and I—”
“Thought you’d pay me back by screwing around with my boyfriend?” she asks.
“I—” I break off, helpless, glancing around like an instinct to see if anyone has heard her, like I did when I first found Julia’s note on my car. I’m ashamed of myself, truly. It’s inexcusable, what I did to Tess.
“Please leave,” Tess tells me, trying unsuccessfully to undo a stubborn kink in the hose. “Seriously. Just—if you ever wanted to do something in your life that wasn’t selfish. I mean it. Please, please leave.”
Back in June, I watched a documentary about ghost hearts, which doctors prep for transplant by scrubbing all the cells until all that’s left is connective tissue, empty and white and bloodless. I don’t know why I’m thinking about that right now.
“Of course,” I say finally, nodding ever so slightly. I turn around and get out of her way.
Day 90
I sit in bed with my arms wrapped tight around my knees and watch a documentary about Mary Shelley, who kept her husband’s heart in her dresser drawer for years after he died. I cry for a while. I hide.
Day 91
I haven’t heard a word from Gabe or Patrick—not that I was expecting to, I guess, but there’s a small part of me that held out hope Gabe would reply to one of the thousand I’m so sorry texts I’ve sent him. I’ve called, but he hasn’t picked up. Late last night I gathered up all my courage and drove out to Ryan’s camper, where Imogen told me he’s staying, but even though the station wagon was parked in the clearing nobody answered my knocks on the door. I sat there for hours, in the cold and the dark, waiting and waiting, but he never came. Now I type his name into the search bar on Facebook, stare at his tan, smiling face.
I friend Roommate Roisin while I’m on there, then lose an hour snooping idly through a bunch of her photo albums. Raisin has a super hot boyfriend! I’d text Tess, if I thought Tess ever wanted to hear from me again in this lifetime. Instead I keep clicking: Roisin and her softball team in Savannah, Roisin in a prom dress last May. She looks well adjusted and popular and nice and friendly.
I wouldn’t want a thing to do with me if I were her.
Day 92
I haul myself out for a run the next morning, a blessedly solitary loop around the lake. A cool breeze is blowing, the first one I’ve felt all summer, it seems—that reminder that fall is on her way. I round a copse of trees and stop short where I’m standing—the Donnelly Bronco is rattling down the road in my direction, gleaming in the late-summer sun.
For a second, this incredibly strange, incredibly real fear flickers through me, this cold knowledge that I’m all by myself out here. And of course in my head I know none of the Donnellys would ever physically hurt me—the very thought of that is insane—but I don’t know that for sure about Mean Michaela or even Elizabeth really, and people do crazy things in groups. I don’t know if I was always the kind of person whose first instinct is to run, or if this summer has made me that way. It’s not a quality I like in myself.
In any event, it’s not Julia and her coven of nasties behind the wheel of the Bronco, waiting to hock something from the window or jump out and beat me up.
It’s Connie.
“Thought that was you,” she says, slowing to a stop where I’m hovering frozen and stupid, peering at me through the passenger side window. Her gray hair is in its usual stubby ponytail at the back of her head. “You wanna hop in, I’ll drive you home?”
That would kind of defeat the purpose of my run, on top of which it feels like I’ve pretty much hit my quota of Donnelly time for one summer, but it doesn’t exactly seem as if she’s asking. “Um . . . sure,” I hear myself tell her, opening the passenger door and climbing up onto the bench seat. I can smell the sweat clinging to my skin. “Thanks.”
“No problem,” Connie says as we head back around the lake in the direction that I came from. We ride in silence for a moment, just the crackle of the oldies station she and Chuck always used to listen to when they dropped us off or picked us up. “Just a few more days, hm?” she asks, pausing for the traffic light at the intersection of the lake road and Route 4. “I’m driving Julia out to Binghamton next week.”
“Yeah,” I say vaguely—it feels weird to the point of distracting to be in the car with her, to wonder what she’s heard and thinks and feels. “We talked about that, a little.”
Neither of us says anything after that, this echoing silence that feels like it stretches on for days. The sun bounces off the wide wooden dashboard. Connie speaks first. “Listen, Molly,” she says, sighing a little. “I don’t know what went on between you and my boys this summer. I don’t really want to know. They’re my boys, all right? I’m always, always going to stick up for my boys. But honestly—” Connie breaks off. “Honestly, kiddo, you didn’t exactly have an easy go of it either the last few months, did you.”