“I did not see it coming,” Ryan admitted. “I know it’s probably better in the long run, for my mom at least. But it still sucks a massive wang, Gabby, I will tell you.” He shrugged again. “Thanks for letting me borrow your normal family tonight, is I guess what I’m saying.”
Gabby snorted. “They’re not normal,” she assured him, glancing down and picking at a loose thread in the seam of her jeans. “I think I’m pretty solid evidence of that.”
“Whatever,” Ryan said, and it sounded like he meant it. “Everybody’s got something, right?” When she looked up he was smiling at her, lopsided. She wished she didn’t like his smile so much. “You feeling any better now?” he asked.
Gabby hesitated, realizing with no small amount of surprise that she was. He had, in fact, successfully distracted her out of her panic attack. It wasn’t a thing a lot of people knew how to accomplish, and she doubted he’d done it on purpose or even with any awareness that that’s what he was doing, but there it was.
“Yeah,” she said slowly. “I am. I mean, not better like I want to go into your party? But better like I’m not going to suffocate and die.”
Ryan nodded. “Fair enough,” he said. “Do you want me to—” He broke off as the door opened and a giant dude with a crew cut ambled out through it, beer in hand. “Hey, McCullough,” he said, looking at Gabby with an expression that wasn’t quite a leer. “Who’s your lady?”
Ryan didn’t move at all, sprawled casual and content across the stoop, but Gabby watched as something in his expression changed in a way that made her think of goalies putting on a thousand layers of protective gear. She felt her heart trip again, anxiety spiking, but Ryan’s grin, when it came, was calm as the surface of a lake.
“Don’t be a dick,” he said, tilting his chin in her direction. “This is my friend Gabby.”
NUMBER 8
THE NEAR MISS
SOPHOMORE YEAR, SPRING
RYAN
Halfway through his third Mountain Dew at Langham Lanes on a gray Wednesday afternoon in March, Ryan watched as Gabby hurled a purple bowling ball down the shiny hardwood and knocked down all ten pins.
“Suck it, McCullough,” she said cheerfully, thrusting her arms into the air.
“Yeah, yeah,” Ryan said, but he laughed as she did a dorky little victory dance, her name flashing on the screen above their heads. Gabby’s parents had signed her up for a peewee bowling league when she was in kindergarten and refused to play any other kind of organized sport, which Ryan found hysterical, but it also meant she walloped him soundly every single time they came here. And they came here a lot.
Not that Ryan was complaining. He liked it at the bowling alley, the brightly-colored stain-resistant ’80s-patterned carpet and the wheezy rattle of the ball return, the old lady at the shoe rental desk who had their sizes memorized. He suspected Gabby liked it because there was no chance of running into anyone he knew. From the very beginning, their friendship had taken place separately from the rest of Ryan’s life, away from everything—and everyone—else. And that was exactly how Gabby seemed to want it.
He’d tried integrating her into his group of friends back when they’d first started hanging out a year and a half ago—inviting her to parties and pizza nights, the occasional pep rally—but she always shook her head and said no thanks, an expression on her face like whatever social activity on offer was only slightly worse than walking barefoot on slimy rocks. It was her society disorder talking, Ryan guessed, or otherwise she thought his friends were all just dumb jocks. Either way, eventually he’d learned to quit asking.
“Oh, PS,” Gabby said now, taking a sip of her soda as they waited for the machine to return her lucky purple ball. “Any idea why Felicity Trainor was giving me the stinkeye in the locker room this morning?”
Ryan shook his head. He and Felicity Trainor had been hanging out the last few weeks; she was his homeroom rep for student council and always wore her hair in a complicated braid crown on top of her head. “You always think people are giving you the stinkeye,” he pointed out.
“I do not!” Gabby defended herself. “Or, okay, I do, but I wasn’t making it up this time. It was actual, not imagined, stinkeye.”
“I don’t know,” Ryan said, not quite looking at her. “Anyway, that’s kind of over, so. I’m probably the wrong person to ask.”
“You and Felicity?” Gabby smirked. “That was quick.”
Ryan shrugged. “It wasn’t a big deal,” he said, busying himself scooping the ball out of the return and handing it over. The truth was, he and Felicity had gotten in a fight about Ryan skipping Felicity’s friend Kyla’s birthday party last weekend to go hang out at Gabby’s, but Ryan didn’t necessarily want to mention that part. It felt too close to admitting . . . something.
Ryan wasn’t sure when he’d first realized he liked Gabby as more than a buddy to play Monopoly and rag on people with. He thought maybe he kind of always had. The tipping point could have been that horrible trip to Albany last fall, he guessed, or maybe the very first night in the yard outside Remy Dolan’s house, but just as likely it had been a slow shuffle over the last year and a half, a dozen different nights on the sofa at her house or drinking Cokes at the pizza place in Colson Village after school on the days when he didn’t have practice. At some point things had just . . . changed.
In any case, Ryan thought as he watched her approach the lane again, it didn’t actually matter when it had happened; Gabby had never shown one speck of interest in him that way, and the last thing he wanted to do was screw up their friendship by making things weird. He’d never had a friend like her before. She was a really good question-asker. She remembered all the weird, random stuff he said. She had an opinion about literally everything: the best way to eat eggs (soft scrambled with heavy cream, like her dad made them on the weekends), pigtails on grown women (inappropriate at best, creepy at worst), and the proper way to organize a locker (books in the order you had classes, or what was even the point?). He wasn’t sure how much of it was the fact that she was a girl and how much of it was just the fact of Gabby herself, but either way, Ryan had never been so interested in another person. He’d never been so curious about what someone might say.
Now he dug a handful of fries out of the red plastic basket on the table, then wiped his greasy hands on the seat of his jeans and got a ball of his own out of the return. “My mom has a boyfriend,” he announced, letting go a little crookedly.
“Really?” Gabby asked, both of them watching the ball swerve down the waxy lane toward the pins; it hit six, which was better than nothing. “Who?”
“This client of hers who brings his three dachshunds in to get groomed all the time,” Ryan told her with a grimace. “She thinks I don’t know.”
“Huh.” Gabby tilted her head to the side, considering. “What’s that like?”
“I don’t know.” Ryan shrugged, bowled again. The ball veered into the gutter almost immediately, and he swore under his breath. “It means my parents aren’t getting back together, which I guess I sort of knew.”