“You heard me.” There’s something hot and acidic running through my veins and it takes me a moment to realize it might be bravery, that for once—for the first time all summer, maybe—the urge to fight is stronger than the urge to run away. “I’m sick to death of you and everybody else acting like your brothers are some perfect angels that I defiled or something. That’s not what happened. And even if it was what happened, it’s not your business.” I turn to Mean Michaela: “And it’s definitely not your business. So I don’t want to hear it.” My hands are shaking, but my voice is steady and clear. “Enough,” I say, echoing the words I heard late last night in my bedroom. “I’ve had enough.”
Julia’s just staring at me, pink mouth gaping. Tess is staring at me, too. I focus my attention on Julia and Michaela, eyebrows raised in challenge: Come at me, I want to tell them. I’m not going to let you hurt me anymore. And maybe that’s true and maybe it isn’t, but in this moment I feel invincible, I feel full of strength and steel.
I’m about to say something else when I feel my phone alarm vibrate in my pocket—time is up, then. I’m allowed to go home. I’m not running, I know as I set my cup down and head for the lobby, a quilt of silence around the pool deck that somehow doesn’t rattle me at all.
I’m done. And I’m walking away.
Day 94
“Sooo, I heard you laid the smackdown on Julia at the Lodge party last night,” Imogen tells me. We’re up on wobbly stepladders at French Roast after closing, taking down the pieces from her show so we can wrap them and send them off to their new homes. She sold more than half of what she exhibited. I’m as proud as if she were my kid.
“I didn’t lay the smackdown!” I protest, lifting a canvas collaged with magazine cutouts to look like the lakefront at night off the wall and setting it carefully on the bowed wooden floor. She’s got Bon Iver on the stereo. “Or, like, okay. I laid the smackdown a little bit.”
“Mm-hmm,” she replies, prying a nail out of the wall with the claw end of a hammer and dropping it into a coffee mug along with the others. “That’s what I thought.”
“It’s not that I don’t think they all deserve to hate me,” I tell her truthfully. “I mean, Tess definitely does, and probably Julia, too. But I’m not the only one they deserve to hate. It just felt like such a gross double standard, I don’t know. I got mad about it; I got word vomit.”
“It is a double standard,” Imogen says, reaching for the giant roll of bubble wrap. “And I’m glad you said something. Equal opportunity hate, or no hate at all.”
“Exactly!” I giggle at the dark absurdity. Six days until I leave for Boston, and it seems like that’s all that’s left to do about it.
Or, okay, not all that’s left to do about it.
But close.
“Anyway, I’m proud of you,” Imogen tells me now. “It was gutsy, what you said to them. I think Emily Green would be proud, too.”
I reply with a loud, theatrical retching sound. “Oh my God, gross.”
“I mean . . . the book was good,” Imogen defends herself. “You gotta admit that.”
I shake my head and move the ladder over, climbing to the top to reach a canvas hung way up high. “I don’t, actually,” I counter. “Or at least, not out loud.”
Imogen laughs at that, trilling and familiar. Even after everything, I’m glad I came back. It’s strange to think in a few weeks we’ll have completely different lives again, that we refound each other this summer just in time to say good-bye for good.
“Uh-uh, don’t get mushy on me now,” Imogen says, like she can tell exactly what I’m thinking. “You said it yourself, Boston and Providence aren’t that far.” She reaches over and gently tugs the back of my flannel, so I know she’s behind me.
“We’ll be neighbors,” I tell her, and grin.
Day 95
“Don’t,” Patrick says immediately when I come into the shop the next day, bells above the door ringing out and my wild hair pulled back off my face with an enamel comb I filched off my mom. I wanted to look serious or something. This felt too important for messy hair. Patrick’s standing behind the counter, his whole body tense and rigid like the bars on a birdcage. There’s a green-yellow bruise healing on his face.
“Patrick.” I gasp when I see it even though I knew it would be there, the difference between hearing about a natural disaster and seeing the wreckage yourself. “Is that from—?”
“I said don’t, Molly.” Patrick shakes his head, voice lower than I’ve ever heard it. There’s a bunch of middle school boys scarfing slices at the table by the window, a middle-aged couple lined up side by side on the stools. “It’s done now, okay? It’s finished. You shouldn’t have come here.”
“It’s not, though.” I take a deep breath. It’s all I’ve been able to think about since Connie picked me up by the lakefront. I have to get an answer from him once and for all. “Was this even about me?” I ask, and it feels like all the air is rushing out of me. “This whole summer, everything that happened? Or was it all some kind of messed-up contest with Gabe?”
Patrick looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “Everything that happened?” he parrots back incredulously. “Like you had no part in it.”
“That’s not what I’m saying!” I’m loud enough that the middle-aged couple looks up, but I’m too far gone to be embarrassed. I’m too far gone for anything but this. I’m the girl from the book, I want to tell them. Go ahead and stare. “That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m a big kid,” I tell him, echoing his mom without meaning to. “I made my choices. But what we did—admit it, Patrick. It wasn’t ’cause you missed me, it wasn’t because we’re us and you wanted to try to make this work, whatever it is. It was just ’cause you wanted to take me away from your brother. You wanted to win.”
“I wanted you,” Patrick counters, and the way he says it sounds worse than any curse he’s ever uttered. “I fucking loved you, Mols, how do you not get that?”
“Loved me so much that you messed with me all summer and humiliated me in front of everyone we know?”