The front gate to the pool complex was locked, obviously, on account of it being nighttime and also not summer yet, so they parked the car outside and scaled the fence one after another, Ryan boosting all three of the girls up before finally climbing over himself. “You’re sure there are no cameras?” Gabby asked, hugging herself a bit as they passed the shuttered admission booth. “It feels like there should be cameras for, like, this exact purpose.”
“I’ve never seen any,” Chelsea said, not sounding particularly concerned about the notion. For all her wholesome, all-American girl-jock talk, she had a rule-breaking streak that Ryan really enjoyed. “And I’ve been coming here since I was little.”
Ryan had grown up swimming here in the summers too—he’d done the town’s day camp when he was a real small kid, before his dad switched him over to hockey, and they’d had a pool membership until he was twelve. Still, he’d never been here in the dark before, and it was strange and a little disconcerting, like being at school on a weekend or the only people eating in a restaurant. The snack bar hulked like a bunker in the distance. The locker rooms looked like army barracks from some alien planet. The surface of the pool was placid and still.
Gabby and Shay dropped back as they crossed the concrete pool deck; Gabby had been quiet on the ride over, but she seemed upset again now, this time at Shay.
“You set me up, though,” Ryan could hear her saying.
“I just think you should try it,” Shay replied. Ryan purposely moved far enough away that he couldn’t make out anything else.
“Is this creepy?” he asked Chelsea as they headed for the edge of the water. “This is a little creepy, right?”
“Big tough hockey star!” Chelsea said playfully, scooping her hair up into a knot on top of her head. “What are you, scared?”
“Uh-oh,” Gabby said, laughing as she and Shay caught up. “Gauntlet-throwing.” Then, quietly enough so that only Ryan could hear her, she added, “It’s totally creepy, you’re one hundred percent right. I’m about to run all the way home.”
Ryan smiled at her. “Can’t do that,” he said, just as softly.
Shay pulled her boots off and flung herself into the pool after Chelsea, diving into the deep end graceful as a dolphin. “Everything okay?” Ryan asked, once it was just the two of them up on the pool deck.
“Oh, yeah, it’s fine,” Gabby said, waving her arm like batting away a fruit fly. “Just that summer thing, was all.”
Ryan nodded, not entirely sure what to say about it. On one hand, he thought Shay was probably right about trying to get Gabby to do something outside of her lane. And it sounded like an awesome chance. On the other, he didn’t want to risk saying that when they’d literally just made up and risk throwing them into the shit all over again. “You’ll figure it out,” he finally said.
“Yeah,” Gabby said, “I guess.”
“Hey,” Ryan said, catching her by the elbow. “I mean it. Your anxiety stuff and all that? You will.”
Gabby smiled for real then. “It doesn’t always feel like it, dude, I will tell you that much.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said quietly. “I hear that.”
The two of them stood there for a minute, quiet. Shay and Chelsea were splashing around in the pool, screeching their heads off; Ryan meant to cannonball in after them, but instead he paused and turned to Gabby in the dark. “You know that you can always count on me for stuff, right?” he asked suddenly. “I mean, even if we’re dating other people or living on opposite sides of the world or we don’t speak for five months again for some reason. Like, no matter what. I’m here.”
Gabby’s face twisted; Ryan held up his hands. “I know,” he said, before she could tease him. “Don’t be gross.”
But Gabby shook her head, shifting her weight and hugging herself a little. “That’s not what I was going to say at all, actually,” she told him. “Actually, I was going to say that I’m here too.”
“Hey, the two of you!” Chelsea called from out in the deep end, the pale skin of her arms seeming to glow as she treaded the chilly water. “We thought you were finished arguing about dumb stuff!”
“We are,” Ryan called back, feeling more sure than he had about anything all year. He reached for Gabby’s hand in the darkness, nodded across the concrete at the pool. “You ready?” he asked, and Gabby nodded. They ran across the pavement and jumped in.
NUMBER 5
THE BIG ONE
JUNIOR YEAR, WINTER
RYAN
Ryan didn’t have practice on Wednesdays, so he took the bus home after eighth period, joking around with a few of the underclassmen and screwing around on his phone. Gabby had posted a new photo on Instagram that morning, a shot of Shay in the music room at school with her head bent over her cello; Ryan scrolled past it, then went back and clicked the little heart to like, telling himself not to be such a whiny little dick.
His stop was all the way at the end of the route on the far side of Colson, and it was December-dark by the time he climbed the steps to the front of his house, pulling a stack of mail out of the box on his way inside. When he was a kid he used to really like looking at home furnishings catalogs like a weirdo; sometimes, to be honest, he still did. He flipped past the Stop & Shop circular plus a flyer for the car wash near the high school before landing on an envelope from the bank in Colson Village with THIRD NOTICE stamped on the front in incriminating red letters. OVERDUE.
Ryan frowned, stopping in the narrow hallway to peer at it more closely. There was nothing unusual about it, exactly. He was used to bills piling up. His family had never had a lot of money—or even enough money, probably, though it wasn’t like he’d ever gone hungry or anything like that. But the cable had been cut off a few times when he was a kid, plus the electricity once; he could remember his mom making a game out of it, setting up a blanket fort in the living room, telling stories with a flashlight and making popcorn on the stove. He was used to the odd call from a collection agency on the landline, and the way they periodically ate scrambled eggs for dinner a few nights in a row without ever mentioning why. Still, something about this one seemed particularly nasty.
“Give me that,” his mom said, coming up the basement stairs and plucking the envelope out of his hand, wedging it in between a cluster of others like it on the narrow strip of counter between the refrigerator and the stove. “It’s a federal offense to read other people’s mail, they teach you that at school?”