Outside was better. The football field was green and sunny, heavy with the smell of freshly mown grass: everywhere you looked was a sea of skirts and cargo shorts, like everyone had suddenly remembered they had legs. Gabby glanced down at her jeans. She’d thought you were supposed to feel different after you lost your virginity, but actually since having sex with Shay she just felt more like herself. And for once, that wasn’t actually such a bad way to feel.
Mr. Caplan took attendance and told them to stay together, but as the minutes ticked by and the all-clear bell didn’t ring, people started drifting away in clusters, finding their friends. Gabby glanced around for Shay but didn’t see her, so she dug the book she was reading out of her backpack, hoping nobody would notice she was sitting off to the side by herself like a giant loser. She’d nearly reached the bleachers when she caught sight of a familiar pair of shoulders and stopped short: standing not three feet away from her, effortlessly casual and improbably alone, was Ryan.
Gabby gulped. She meant to slip away unnoticed, to pretend she hadn’t seen him and continue on toward the bleachers, where she could shove her earphones in and bury herself in her book and quell the anxiety blooming like a fungus in her chest. But just then Ryan turned his head, and their gazes locked.
Gabby winced: she watched him do the same thing as she had, weighing in his mind whether or not he could act like he hadn’t seen her. He must have decided he couldn’t, because after a moment he raised one hand in a wave. Gabby waved back, swallowing something that felt like a wad of paper towel jammed down into her throat. “Hey,” she said.
“Hey, yourself.” He looked different, she realized. She’d caught him out of the corner of her eye around school, obviously, but she hadn’t really let herself see him, and now that she did she found herself vaguely unnerved. His hair was shorter and less messy; his shoulders were broader inside his T-shirt. He looked bigger than she thought of him as being, generally. It was weird. “What’s up?”
“Oh, you know,” Gabby said. “Enjoying the sunshine.” Immediately, she cringed. Enjoying the sunshine? Where were they, the courtyard of their nursing home? She gestured around at the crowded field, the fire trucks parked outside the building. “Is this real?”
Ryan shook his head. “Nah, I don’t think so,” he said. “I think some asshole just pulled it to get outside for a little bit. Not that I’m complaining. I was in the middle of an essay test on The Old Man and the Sea, and it was not going great.”
He hesitated for a moment, then shrugged. “I will say, English is harder without you around to point out the symbols.”
Gabby’s heart did something weird and painful inside her chest, a feeling like a muscle tearing. “I mostly just google,” she admitted.
“Well, still,” Ryan said. Gabby nodded. The silence stretched out between them, like a highway neither one of them could figure out how to cross. Gabby knew there had been a time when it was fine to be quiet around Ryan, when they’d spent entire afternoons sitting around and not talking, but it felt like they’d happened to somebody else entirely. “Well,” he said again, after a moment. “See you around, yeah?”
“Yeah, definitely.” Gabby shoved her hands into her back pockets, told herself she was being ridiculous. They’d been friends—best friends, even. But they weren’t anymore. It was what it was. It was fine. It was—
“Ryan,” she heard herself say, and it came out a lot more urgently than she’d meant for it to; she waited to be embarrassed, but the feeling never came. She had a chance here, and she hadn’t even realized how badly she’d wanted one until she was a second away from wasting it.
He turned around. “What’s up?” he asked, sounding slightly impatient; Gabby forged ahead.
“You want to get out of here?”
That got his attention. He looked at her for a moment, his sandy head tilted to the side. “Like, cut eighth period?”
“Yeah, like cut eighth period,” Gabby said. Then, when he hesitated: “What are you, scared?”
He grinned at her then, wide and tickled and completely himself, and it was like she was seeing him, the real him, for the first time since that awful night in December. “Of course I’m not scared,” he said.
“Okay,” Gabby said, taking a deep breath and grinning back. “Then let’s go bowling.”
RYAN
The weirdest part of hanging out with Gabby again after all these months, Ryan thought, was how it didn’t actually feel that weird at all. “You two!” said the shoe rental lady at Langham Lanes, her head full of tight gray curls and glasses hanging on a chair around her neck. “Haven’t seen you around here in a while. Is it school vacation?”
“Yup,” Ryan lied easily, fixing her with his most dazzling smile. Gabby shook her head.
The alley was mostly empty at this time of day, a couple of harried-looking moms with kids rolling balls down the lanes at a glacial pace. It smelled like it always did, like air-conditioning and the concession stand and underneath that like socks. “Food?” Gabby asked.
“I just ate lunch,” Ryan told her. “So, yes, definitely.”
Gabby smiled at that, digging some bills out of her back pocket and getting their usual without asking, which made Ryan a little sad without totally understanding why. It was the same kind of feeling he got when he saw his parents smiling at each other in his baby pictures.
They didn’t say much as they bowled, just a little idle trash talk. Ryan figured it ought to feel awkward, but it didn’t. Gabby kicked his ass, predictably; he bought her a twenty-five-cent bouncy ball from the machine by the exit to say congrats.
“New car, huh?” he asked as they walked out to the parking lot, Gabby hitting a button on her key ring and unlocking a black Nissan sedan. He’d noticed on the way over here, obviously, but hadn’t said anything.
“Well, my mom’s old car,” Gabby explained hastily—thinking, no doubt, about the fact that Ryan would probably be bumming rides off people until he was thirty, with the exception of the rare occasions he could convince his mom to lend him the Dogmobile. “She’s got a new one. I’m only driving it because Celia’s not allowed to have one at school.”
Ryan nodded. “How is everybody?” he asked. “Your family, I mean.”
Gabby smiled at that. “They’re good,” she told him, filling him in on Kristina’s dance recital and her mom’s book and the Parmesan cheese straws her dad and Shay had made for Monopoly last week.
He’d been wondering about that. “So you and Shay still, huh?” he asked, sitting back in the passenger seat and trying to sound casual. “Where’s she going to school in the fall?”
“Columbia.” They headed through Colson Village, past the bank and the bagel place and the fussy little cheese shop. “So not too far.”
“Are you guys going to stay together?”
“Yup,” Gabby said, no hesitation. Ryan told himself there was no reason to feel a tiny bit disappointed about that. “And you and Chelsea still, yeah? She always seemed, like, really nice.”