“And only if it’s been sitting around a long time,” Gabby put in. “Soft gum he can chew all on his own.”
Celia rolled her eyes at them; Gabby only grinned. But as they said their good-byes, Ryan felt a tiny nip of something unfamiliar, a creeping unease curling up in his stomach like a snake lounging on a rock. He looked at her once more across the yard, lifted his hand to wave at her.
“Pick you up at nine!” Gabby called.
GABBY
It was more like nine thirty by the time she’d gotten to Ryan’s—she’d had a little bit of a wobble over whether her hair looked greasy, had needed a generous sprinkle of dry shampoo and half a dozen reassurances from her sisters before she made it out the door—and Gabby stuck close behind him as they headed up the front walk. The party was at Harrison Chambers’s house, a center-hall colonial full of china cabinets that held enough breakables to make her faintly nervous. The whole senior class had been invited, and from the looks of things most of them had actually showed: bodies crowded the hallways and the stairwells, perched on the arms of couches and sprawled cross-legged on the shag rug in the den. It was hot inside, despite the AC cranking. It felt like there were too many people breathing the air.
“You okay?” Ryan murmured, quiet enough so only she could hear him. Gabby nodded. It was rare for a party to throw her into panic mode anymore, though it still happened sometimes. Lately, for the most part, the anxiety that had plagued her since she’d exited the womb was more of a low simmer than a full-on boil. Which wasn’t to say she didn’t still freak out for no reason on occasion: two days ago she’d had a grade-A panicker in the shower curtain aisle of Bed Bath & Beyond, though she hadn’t told anybody about it. She’d had to sit on a pile of bath mats with her head between her legs while she waited for it to pass.
“Come on,” Ryan said now, wrapping his hand around her wrist and squeezing, as if he suspected he wasn’t getting the full story but wasn’t going to push for it. “Let’s go outside.”
For all the time they’d spent together in the last four years, she and Ryan still didn’t have a ton of friends in common, but the ones they did were camped out on a hammock at the far corner of the backyard: Nate, who’d worked with Ryan at the hot dog hut; Sophie and Anil, who’d been together since they were freshmen. Even Michelle had shown up, though she and Ryan had never quite become the great pals Gabby had once hoped; she was sitting on the grass next to her boyfriend, Jacob, who was wearing skintight jeans and a blazer even though it had to be eighty degrees outside. Jacob always smelled a little bit like BO.
“I’m gonna get beers,” Ryan told her, waving at another guy from the hockey team. “You want a beer?”
“Sure,” Gabby told him, though she didn’t intend to drink it. Sometimes it just helped her to have something to hold. She settled back against an old tree stump, knowing that it would probably be the better part of an hour before Ryan came wandering back; he’d get distracted talking to this buddy or that teammate, catching up with some girl who was in his algebra class sophomore year who he forgot he always thought was really interesting.
Normally this would have been her worst nightmare—Ryan coaxing her out to a party she didn’t really want to go to and then disappearing, leaving her alone with her anxiety like a gnawing animal making a den inside her chest. Tonight, though, Gabby found she didn’t much mind it: the chance to sit back and listen to her friends jabber to one another, her head tilted back to stare up at the tall straight pine trees ringing the yard. Eventually he’d show up again, coming back to her with his tail wagging like a golden retriever’s. He always did.
“We should do something amazing this summer,” Sophie was saying. They were chatting about what, exactly, amazing might mean, here in the farthest, northernmost suburbs of New York City, when Gabby’s phone buzzed inside her pocket. She pulled it out and peered at the screen, heart flipping like it always did when she saw it was from Shay: Happy graduation, Gabby-Girl! So excited to finally have you in the city this fall. Coffee + catching up soon?
Gabby swallowed. They’d been broken up since March, so in theory there was no reason for a few dumb words on a screen to be enough to conjure Shay up as surely as if she was sitting here on the grass at this party: her hair and her smell and her smile, the one crooked tooth at the edge of her mouth.
She was trying to figure out how to answer when she felt a gentle knee in her shoulder: “Don’t be doing phone stuff,” Ryan scolded, like he’d somehow been able to hear Shay’s text from inside the house. “The party is right here.”
Gabby tucked her phone back into her purse and took the can of Bud Light he was proffering. It occurred to her that she didn’t want him to know she and Shay still talked every once in a while, though she wasn’t entirely sure why. “The party being you, in this scenario?”
Ryan sat down beside her, his arm solid and warm against hers. “The party’s always me,” he said.
“Uh-huh.” Gabby rolled her eyes, but it wasn’t like he was wrong. Ryan loved people—and people, in turn, loved Ryan—more than anyone else Gabby had ever met. Celia called him the Great Equalizer. He was Gabby’s social security blanket, her failsafe against miserable, crippling anxiety; she had no idea what she was going to do without him come fall. Thinking about it was terrifying on a physical, visceral level, and so mostly she did her best not to think about it at all.
“Top ten moments of high school,” she conceded now, popping the tab on her beer can and leaning back beside him. A million stars blazed bright high above their heads.
RYAN
It was after one by the time they got back to Ryan’s house, Leon Bridges turned down low on the stereo and the car windows rolled down so the night air spilled in. Even Ryan’s neighborhood, which was on the scruffier, ’60s-ranch side of Colson, looked like the background of a Disney movie: all tall trees and blue-black sky, fireflies flickering away on the lawns.
Gabby turned the car off, everything still and silent. Neither one of them made any attempt to move. It occurred to Ryan that he could stay right here in this passenger seat with her forever and probably be perfectly content, provided of course they could get food delivered carside.
“So, beach tomorrow?” Gabby asked finally, and Ryan nodded. Sophie’s parents had a place down the Jersey Shore they were letting them all use for a couple of days. She kept warning them that it wasn’t anything fancy, although any house reserved specifically for vacations seemed pretty swank as far as Ryan was concerned.
“Beach tomorrow,” he agreed.