“No,” Gabby said. “No, please don’t do that.” She didn’t want to see a doctor, to be poked and prodded and diagnosed and examined. She didn’t want anyone to look at her ever again. She thought suddenly of the night sophomore year when she’d called 911 on Ryan, how angry he’d been about it. Ryan, who she’d driven away by being insane. “Please, please don’t.”
She made it over to a set of concrete stairs leading to the parking lot, sat down and curled into a ball against the railing. She wanted to make herself as small as she possibly could. She knew intellectually that Michelle was crouched next to her on the sidewalk, whispering calming, quiet nonsense into her ear, but all she could hear was the sound of her own iron panic, her poisoned blood speeding through her veins. How was she ever going to go to college? How was she ever going to have a life? She’d thought she was handling this; she thought she had it under control instead of the other way around. But she’d been wrong. “My brain is broken,” she whispered as Michelle rubbed her back and confused commuters swarmed all around them. “Holy shit, Michelle, I’m so messed up.”
RYAN
Ryan spent the first two weeks of August pulling double shifts at Walter’s and practicing, for the first time in his entire life, a kind of constant performative fineness: acting as if his heart wasn’t broken. Acting as if his head didn’t hurt. He schlepped to Walmart with his mom and let her pick out a comforter for his Minnesota dorm room; he sent in the measurements for his new, university-issued hockey skates. He went on a couple of boring dates with Sophie’s cousin Shannon. He googled “concussion syndrome” and clicked out the window before any results came up.
He’d never made it to the hockey party the night he and Gabby broke up, so he and Remy went for burgers at Applebee’s one hot, stormy Tuesday, the steamy smell of rain on concrete as Ryan crossed the parking lot. DUIs notwithstanding, Remy actually seemed to be doing improbably well at Binghamton: he’d played a year of hockey, then quit so he could pick up a business minor and spend more time with his girlfriend. “I was never going to get any ice time anyway,” he explained, shrugging at Ryan across the shiny, sticky table. “Plus honestly, I’d rather be hooking up with Celeste.”
Ryan nodded. “Can I ask you something?” he said, trying to keep his voice casual. “Those pamphlets they send out with your admission packet about, like, brain injuries and stuff. That’s mostly, like, scare-tactic bullshit, right?”
“Why?” Remy asked, shoveling french fries into his mouth. “Your doctor tell you not to play?”
“What? No,” Ryan said, slightly taken aback. “Nothing like that.”
“Really?” Remy did not look convinced. “With how many times you got cracked at Colson?”
“I didn’t get cracked that many times,” Ryan said, trying not to sound defensive.
Remy shrugged. “If you say so.”
“Why?” Ryan asked in spite of himself. “Do you think I shouldn’t play?”
“Dude,” Remy said, nodding his thanks at the waitress for another soda. “I’m not a doctor. What the fuck do I know?”
“Okay,” Ryan said uneasily. Remy was a lifelong hockey player, just like him. It was weird to hear him hedging like this. “But, like. You know me, and you’ve played at college, so—”
“Dude,” Remy said again, “I have no idea. I can’t make your decisions for you.”
“But—”
“Dude!” Remy laughed a little. “Okay. You want my take so bad? Here’s my take. Hockey is gonna last what, four more years probably? You gotta live with your brain your whole life.” He shrugged again, took a gulp of his soda. “Like I said, I can’t make your decisions for you. But for me?” Remy sighed. “If I was definitely going to the NHL, maybe, like, if I was some Russian superstar who was seven feet tall and ate polar bears for breakfast. Or I guess if I really, really loved it, like if I couldn’t ever imagine myself doing anything else. Then I’d play at the college level with as many knocks on the head as you’ve already had. But neither of those things were true for me.” He took a big bite of his cheeseburger. “I dunno,” he said, like he suddenly realized how much he’d been talking. “Are they true for you?”
On Thursday Ryan was sitting on his bed, in theory getting ready for a party at Remy’s but actually just staring at his hands going through all the girls he’d ever hooked up with to make sure he could remember their first and last names, when his mom knocked on the open door. “You got stuff that needs to go in the laundry?” she asked, the basket in one arm. Then, curiously, “What’s wrong?”
Ryan looked up at her, and then he just said it. “I’m kind of scared about my brain, Mom.”
Ryan’s mom blinked at him. For one terrifying moment it seemed like she might be about to cry, or slap him, or fall apart entirely. Then she took a breath so deep it seemed like it came from her kidneys. “Oh, lovey,” she said, setting the laundry basket down on the carpet and coming to sit beside him on the bed. “Tell me more?”
GABBY
Shay texted for the third time in two weeks wanting to get coffee, so Gabby met her down in Colson Village, wiping her sweaty palms on the backs of her shorts as she crossed the parking lot. In spite of their promise to stay friends, the whole summer had gone and she hadn’t seen Shay at all, and truthfully Gabby had almost let herself forget how pretty she was. She’d cut all her hair off into an asymmetrical bob that made her jaw look even sharper than normal; she was wearing a breezy white tank top, a cluster of jangly bracelets up and down her wrists. Right away, Gabby felt like a bridge troll.
“Are you okay?” Shay asked, once they’d gotten their coffees and found seats at a table by the window, bright sun baking Gabby’s arms and shoulders through the glass. “I feel like you kind of fell off the face of the earth there a little bit.”
“Yeah, no, I’m totally good,” Gabby lied, tearing a paper napkin to pulp on the table. “I’ve just had some stuff going on.”
Shay frowned; she wasn’t buying. “Anxiety stuff?”
“Some,” Gabby allowed. She hadn’t told anyone about her meltdown on the train a few days earlier, swearing Jacob and Michelle to secrecy and promising herself she finally had it under control. She hadn’t had another episode like it since, and she’d almost been able to convince herself it hadn’t been that bad. She was managing. And if occasionally she worked herself up into a little panic just by wondering what was wrong with her to make her panic like she did—wondering if maybe she really did need help—well, she tried to put that out of her mind as much as she could. It was fine, actually. She was good.
Mostly.
Still, Shay knew her too well even now for Gabby to pretend that everything was normal. She took a deep breath. “I was kind of dating Ryan for a while,” she began, then wasn’t sure how to continue.
Shay nodded, plucking at the edge of her plastic to-go cup. “Yeah,” she said, “I heard something about that.”
“It’s over now,” Gabby said. “We’re not—yeah, we’re not anything. And there was never anything between us while you and I were—”
“No, I know,” Shay said quietly. “I wouldn’t think—”