“Really?” Michelle’s eyes were wide. “He was here? You didn’t say that.”
Gabby shrugged. “It wasn’t a big deal,” she lied. The last thing she wanted was to admit what a full-on idiot she’d made of herself that night. She should never have left her room to begin with. “We talked a little, it was just—” She shook her head, pushing the conversation—and Ryan’s dumb smile—out of her mind. “Whatever. I don’t actually think he’s even coming.”
“Uh-huh.” Michelle was looking at her with great skepticism. “Is this going to be like the time you told everyone that Hillary Clinton RSVP’d yes to your birthday party?”
“That was in second grade!” Gabby said, frowning. “I told one lie in second grade. I’d like to be let off the hook now.”
“Girls?” That was Gabby’s mom on the landing, her ash-blond hair in a short, stubby ponytail and her tortoiseshell glasses perched on top of her head. “Daddy’s got snacks ready, if you want to come down and play.”
“Gabby invited a boy to Monopoly,” Kristina reported immediately.
“Really?” her mom asked.
Gabby sighed noisily. She didn’t entirely appreciate the gobsmacked tone they were all using, like she was a dog walking on its hind legs or a chimpanzee using sign language, some kind of circus act. Granted, it wasn’t like she’d ever invited a boy—or a girl who wasn’t just a friend—or a girl who was just a friend who wasn’t Michelle, for that matter, over before. But still. “I mean, technically yes, but again, I don’t think he’s actually going to come, so there’s no reason for everybody to be—”
“What’s going on?” That was her dad at the bottom of the stairs in an apron with the De Cecco pasta logo on it, which he’d gotten by sending in a dozen carefully detached boxtops: her dad was a sucker for both any promotional giveaway and any complex carbohydrate.
“Gabby invited a boy to Monopoly,” her mom informed him.
Celia appeared from the living room in a drapey black sweater, her perfect fashion-blogger hair falling over her shoulders in bouncy yellow waves. “She did?”
“Oh my god, stop!” Gabby almost laughed, but only to avoid some other, less desirable reaction. “Please do not be weird about this. I don’t know how many times I can say there’s no way he’s even going to show.”
Then the doorbell rang.
RYAN
Gabby swung the door open wearing a plaid shirt and a disbelieving expression, her hair a flyaway blond cloud around her face. “You came,” she said, not sounding entirely pleased about it.
“Uh, yeah,” Ryan said. “I hope that’s okay.” He held up the bag of sour-cream-and-onion Ruffles he’d dug out of his mom’s pantry before coming over. “I brought chips.”
“You brought chips,” Gabby repeated, stepping back to let him inside. As she did, a tiny bespectacled girl in a SUNY Binghamton hoodie scrambled down the hallway behind her, peering around Gabby’s shoulder before darting away again.
“He brought chips,” Ryan heard the girl report.
“Jesus Christ, Kristina!” Gabby called over her shoulder. Then, turning back to Ryan, “Come inside, I guess. We’re just about to start.”
The first thing Ryan registered about Gabby’s house was how many girls there were in it. There was Gabby herself, obviously, plus her sister Celia, the junior with the movie-star hair. The littlest sister from the hallway, Kristina, sat on the carpet with her legs pretzeled, next to a girl from school whose name Ryan thought was Michelle and whom he had noticed only because she frowned literally all of the time.
“This is Ryan,” Gabby announced. “He brought chips.”
“Well, that’s very nice,” said a tall woman coming in from the kitchen. She looked like an older version of Gabby, in a crisp Oxford shirt and glasses that took up the whole top half of her face. “Hi, Ryan,” she said. “Welcome.”
“Hi, ma’am,” he said, reaching out to shake her hand.
Gabby rolled her eyes. “Come on,” she said, gesturing for him to sit down on the carpet. “The only piece left is the iron.”
The second thing Ryan registered about Gabby’s house, now that he had the chance to look around in a non-party context, was how nice it was in here. Not fancy, exactly—not like his friend Anil’s house, which was one of the new fake colonials in the golf course development on the other side of town—but definitely decorated in a way that his own house wasn’t. There were built-in bookcases housing an expensive-looking stereo system, brightly colored paintings studding the light gray walls. A giant stag’s head made of papier-maché hung over the fireplace, a stack of newspapers in a mesh basket off to one side. It seemed immediately clear to Ryan that this was a house where people ate their sandwiches on whole wheat bread.
“Is this your friend, Gabby?” asked a tall, heavyset man coming into the living room carrying a big plate heaped with some kind of fancy-looking hors d’oeuvre. To Ryan: “I have to say, it’s rare there’s another man in this house. I’m glad for the reinforcements.”
“Oh my god,” Gabby said, dealing out the money from the bank. “Please stop. What are we eating?”
“Devils on horseback!” Mr. Hart said. “Dates stuffed with blue cheese and wrapped in bacon.”
“He makes something different every week,” Gabby explained, reaching up to pick one off the plate as her dad set it down on the coffee table. “He has a book.”
“1,001 Crowd-Pleasing Party Appetizers,” Mr. Hart crowed. “The girls got it for me for Christmas last year.”
“He only cooks from it on Fridays,” Gabby said. “Which means we’ve got about twenty years before he gets through all of it.”
“People with long-term goals and projects live longer,” her father informed her. “Let’s play.”
It was a quicker-moving game than Ryan usually thought of Monopoly as being, all of them playing with the ruthless efficiency of people who did this a lot. Gabby trounced them all from the outset, buying up all the railroads and utilities and building hotels on all three green properties. “Do you have, like, a strategy for Monopoly?” Ryan asked finally.
“Gabby has a strategy for most things,” the little sister piped up. She’d been watching him carefully, Ryan noticed, all big eyes and intelligent expression behind her giant glasses. All five Harts had that look, actually, like when they weren’t playing board games maybe they sat around the living room discussing the themes of the various works of literature they were reading. It made Ryan, who could not remember the last time he’d read a book that wasn’t for school, feel a little nervous.
“So Ryan,” Mr. Hart said as he scooped the Free Parking money off the board and set about organizing it into neat piles in front of him, “how are you liking high school so far?”
Gabby groaned. “Please don’t interrogate him.”