Chelsea smiled, leaning over and kissing him on the cheek. “They’ll want you,” she assured him.
Ryan smiled back but didn’t say anything. He knew she was trying to be supportive, but sometimes it felt like an extra layer of pressure, trying to figure this whole college thing out with a girlfriend to think about on top of everything else. They hadn’t talked about it explicitly, but he guessed he understood why Chelsea would expect him to take her into account when he was figuring out where he was going to go. After all, they’d been together a full year. That was a lifetime in high school. It was literally twelve times longer than any other relationship Ryan had ever had.
Still, he thought as he took Chelsea’s bag of candy, digging some cash out of his pocket: it was only a year. He’d been offended all those months ago when Gabby had been so sure he was going to get tired of Chelsea like he’d gotten tired of every other girl he’d been with. Part of him had wanted to prove her wrong. But another part of him felt like he’d blinked and all this time had gone by, and now his relationship with Chelsea had all these long-term strings attached that he’d never entirely bargained for. It kind of made him feel a little trapped.
Chelsea leaned in close as they left the candy store, angling her body into his as a buffer from the rushing crowd on the sidewalk. Ryan wrapped a protective arm around her, feeling like a bit of a dick. After all, it wasn’t like he didn’t love her. He totally loved her. She was awesome. But who knew what could happen in another year? Who knew if they’d still be together? Honestly, Ryan had a million friends, and he liked all of them, but the only person he knew for absolute sure he still wanted to be around after graduation was—
Well. Gabby, actually. But somehow he didn’t think that was the kind of thing Chelsea wanted to hear.
Thinking about Gabby had him digging his phone out of his pocket to see if she’d texted to say how it was going; she hadn’t, but Ryan didn’t know if that meant anything or not. It was hard to tell what the deal was with her and Shay lately. When he could get her to talk about it at all, Gabby always said everything was business as usual, but Ryan wasn’t so sure. Maybe he ought to text her, just to che—
“Everything okay?” Chelsea asked, peering at him over the top of her pop-up map.
“Everything’s great,” Ryan said, slipping his phone back into his pocket. “Where to next?”
GABBY
By the time Ryan dropped her in front of Shay’s dorm building, the general anxiety that had been simmering behind her breastbone all day had flared up into something immediate and unignorable; Gabby tried to take a deep breath. Sometimes her panic felt like a stranger handing her a screaming baby and then walking blithely away: She didn’t want it. She couldn’t control it. And her guess was as good as anybody else’s about what would make it stop.
Here! she texted, glancing nervously around the lobby. It looked like a fancy apartment, with a bank of elevators and a reception desk and swarms of college kids rushing across the marble tile in a blur of scarves and boots and slouchy wool hats that somehow hung effortlessly off the very back of people’s heads without ever slipping off. Gabby jammed her hands in the pockets of her parka, feeling like she might as well be wearing a sign around her neck that said Embarrassing High Schooler from the Suburbs. She hovered near the revolving door and stared studiously down at her sneakers, trying not to get in anyone’s way.
Be right down! Shay texted back after what felt like an eternity. Gabby let out a breath.
It was an even longer, more uncomfortable age before Shay finally appeared in the lobby, wearing jeans and a pale gray T-shirt that showed off her collarbones, her long hair in a braid over one shoulder. “Well hey,” she said, planting a kiss on Gabby’s mouth, smiling. Then she pulled back and frowned. “Are you okay?”
“Yup!” Gabby lied. The last thing she wanted was to be showing up on her girlfriend’s college doorstep smack in the middle of a panicker. She thought maybe if she could act like it wasn’t happening, it wouldn’t be. “I’m great. Really happy to see you.”
“Me too.” Shay grinned as she led Gabby up a flight of narrow stairs and down a cinderblock hallway, waving or saying hi to almost everyone they passed. “I have a million things planned for while you’re here.”
Gabby’s eyes widened. “You do?”
“I do,” Shay said, stopping in front of a door festooned with a giant construction-paper heart reading Shay and Adria and letting them inside. “Some things before others, obviously.”
“Obviously.” Gabby looked around hungrily at the twin sets of university-issue furniture, the Christmas lights strung up above the windows. It looked so different from Shay’s room at home—the fact that it was a dorm, obviously, but it wasn’t just that. The bookshelves were crammed with titles Gabby had never even heard of. A poster of a band she didn’t know hung on one wall. She recognized some of the people in the photos tacked to the bulletin board, including herself, but definitely not all of them. When she spotted Shay’s cello leaning up against the corner, she felt herself exhale in recognition. That, at least, was the same.
“Stop staring at my stuff,” Shay said, wrapping her arms around Gabby’s waist and blowing a raspberry into the side of her neck. “Pay attention to me.”
“Oh, I’m paying attention,” Gabby assured her, turning around for a kiss. She closed her eyes, shivering as Shay bit gently along the edge of her bottom lip, tongue and teeth and the faint smell of lavender. This was good, she thought, cupping Shay’s sharp face in her two hands. This was steadying.
“Good,” Shay said, pulling back with a noisy smack and hopping up onto her bed, which was lifted onto a set of plastic risers. “Tell me everything.”
Gabby laughed and climbed up beside her. “Tell you everything?”
“Yeah!” Shay said, settling back against the wall and pulling a pillow into her lap. “Like what’s new, all that stuff.”
“What’s new?” Gabby hesitated, abruptly unable to think of anything. She wasn’t used to having to tell Shay what was new. At home their relationship had been one long and meandering conversation full of tiny, valuable trivialities: new Photoshop filters and what to eat for a snack after cello practice, the chapters of Wuthering Heights that Gabby had to read for homework and Kristina prancing around the house singing all the songs from Funny Girl at the top of her lungs. Nothing had ever been new, because they’d told it all to each other the exact moment it happened. Faced with the task of coming up with her most important headlines, it felt, suddenly and terrifyingly, like maybe Gabby had nothing to say. “Um.”
Shay was laughing, but not in a mean way. “Relax, Gabby-Girl,” she said, kicking her boots off and crossing her ankles on the bedspread. “It’s just me.”