“Uh-huh.” Gabby barely resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Ever since she’d come out last year Michelle loved to slip that word into conversations, like she wanted to make sure Gabby knew she was hip to the lingo. “Thank you.”
“There’s nothing wrong with liking him, is what I’m saying. But I just think it’s weird to keep up this charade of you guys being such great friends when—”
“Enough,” Gabby demanded, wincing at how shrill she sounded. The halls were emptying out now, lockers slamming as stragglers hurried to their next classes. “Really. I’m done. Forget I brought it up.”
She sulked all the way through her chem lab, her mood getting blacker as the minutes ticked by. She resented herself for being such an anxious, defective person. She resented Michelle for bringing it up. And when she didn’t run into Ryan for the rest of the day—never mind that they didn’t have any classes together—she found herself resenting him most of all. She dug her phone out of her backpack after the last bell rang, fully intending to text him and tell him so, but when she went to compose the message she couldn’t figure out anything that didn’t sound completely demented.
Gabby thought for a minute, staring out the window of the computer lab at the trees starting to bloom in the courtyard. She grimaced.
Hey, she typed, hitting Send before she could chicken out. Take me to a party?
RYAN
Ryan’s dad called to say he was going to make Ryan’s game against Mahopac on Friday afternoon, so Ryan took an extra minute getting suited up in the locker room, tucking his Saint Sebastian medal inside his undershirt for good luck. He didn’t see his dad a ton these days; it was a hike from Schenectady all the way down to Colson, and his dad was busy with work at an ice and beverage distributor up there. He kept saying that one of these days he was going to take Ryan into the city for a Rangers game like he had when Ryan was a kid, but so far it hadn’t happened. Eventually they’d get the timing right, though. Ryan had faith.
Mahopac’s team was solid, and Colson had practiced hard for this game, running drill after drill at practice all week until Ryan’s legs ached and his hands cramped up inside his gloves. Still, he found he didn’t much mind. He’d been skating for as long as he could walk, and he loved hockey: the rush of speed as he whizzed across the rink, the solid thwack of the puck against his stick on a particularly nice pass. The feeling of being a part of a team, useful for something besides a dumb good time.
By the middle of the second period, though, his dad still hadn’t showed. Ryan tried to pay attention to the game, not to scan the rickety bleachers at the ice center for his familiar jacket and cap. He wasn’t surprised, exactly—he knew I’ll be there meant more like I might be as far as his dad was concerned. Still, it was hard not to feel a little bummed.
He wasn’t trying to think about his dad—he wasn’t trying to think about anything except his hustle, actually—but he must have been, and it must have been enough to break his focus, because just then one of Mahopac’s defensemen, a senior who’d been crawling up Ryan’s ass all game long, glided up on his left to try and block his pass, his stick somehow getting caught in the path of Ryan’s skate. Ryan corrected, then corrected again, and in the moment before his head slammed into the ice, there was a fraction of a second in which he thought, Shit.
He came to a moment later, flat on his back on the ice and feeling like a bunch of cartoon birds were fluttering around his skull. Coach Harkin was already skating out toward him, a bunch of his teammates clustering around. “There he is,” Harkin said as Ryan got to his feet on the ice. “You all right, McCullough?”
“Um,” Ryan said, blinking. “Yeah, no, I’m good.”
“You get knocked out, there? You wanna sit for a bit?”
“No, no,” Ryan lied. He shook his head, trying not to wobble. “I’m fine.”
The rest of the game passed by in a smudgy blur, Ryan’s head and neck aching and his reflexes the slightest bit slow. By the time the thing was over, he mostly just wanted to lie down. When he came out of the locker room, though, he found his dad standing in the parking lot next to a beat-up station wagon he’d never seen before, smoking a cigarette. “Hey!” Ryan said, grinning dumbly, his mood swinging sharply upward. “Did you see the game?”
Ryan’s dad shook his head. “Hit traffic,” he explained. “I’m sorry, kiddo. Come on, though.” He swung an arm around Ryan’s shoulders, the air cool and damp with spring rain. “I’ll take you to dinner.”
They went to a Chinese restaurant his dad liked in a strip mall near the highway entrance, greasy plates of shrimp lo mein and sesame chicken and beef in a thick brown garlic sauce. “I’m okay,” Ryan said when his dad tried to sneak him a sip of beer across the table. He’d felt a little out of it since he’d hit the ice earlier, and he still needed to go to this party tonight. He would have bailed, probably—damn, his head really hurt—but when he’d gotten back to the locker room after the game he’d had a weird text from Gabby wanting him to take her out tonight. He had no idea what that was about—Gabby had never asked to go to a party in her entire life—but whatever it was, he didn’t want to disappoint her.
“You okay over there?” his dad asked now, squinting at him across the table. “You look like you just saw your girlfriend in Playboy.”
Ryan didn’t even really understand what that meant, exactly, besides the fact that he didn’t seem happy. He shook his head. “No, I’m good,” he said. “I got hit earlier is all. My brain’s a little fuzzy.”
His dad rolled his eyes. “Poor baby,” he said, but he was smiling with something that looked like pride; Ryan felt himself flush a little, pleased. “I ever tell you about the time I knocked out three teeth in a fight against the Jackals in the quarterfinals?”
His dad had told him, as a matter of fact; he’d played in the minor leagues back in the ’90s but talked about it as vividly as if it had happened last week, getting together with his old buddies every year to rewatch grainy footage of their playoff games on somebody’s big-screen TV. Normally Ryan loved his stories—the day he’d led his team back from a 4–nothing deficit in the last period or the time they’d snuck live chickens into the other team’s hotel room—but tonight he was having a hard time paying attention. “This was kind of different from that, I think.”
Ryan’s dad frowned. “Well, don’t be whining about it too much,” he said. “You don’t want your coach to be benching you because he thinks you can’t handle getting knocked around a little. Here, how many fingers am I holding up?”
“Three,” Ryan answered dutifully. His head throbbed.
“See? You’re fine.” His dad reached for another sparerib. “Eat up.”
RYAN
Ryan knew from the moment they picked Gabby up that night that she was in a foul mood, though he had no idea exactly why. “Whose house is this, even?” she asked as they headed up the front walk, like the party was something he was dragging her to and not an invite she’d specifically requested.
“Jordan Highsmith’s,” he said, touching the side of his head gingerly. He had a bump the size of a fist from where he’d connected with the ice earlier. He thought he might need to get a new helmet.
“And who is Jordan Highsmith?”
“You know who he is,” Ryan chided, glancing around as they made their way through the scrum of people in the hallway. It was a new-construction farmhouse designed to look old, with wide-plank floors and big picture windows. Ryan always noticed where people lived. “He wears a lot of, like, fake-vintage T-shirts.”
“I hate those T-shirts,” Gabby muttered, sticking close beside him as they went into the kitchen to scrounge up some beers. She looked especially pretty, Ryan noticed, a little bit of lip gloss and a slightly fancier shirt than she usually wore, with tiny buttons along one shoulder. Ryan kind of wanted to reach out and touch one with his index finger. The idea of her getting dressed up to go to this party with him, even a little bit dressed up, reached into his chest and squee
zed tight.
Gabby frowned. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked, taking the slightly-warm can of Coors he was holding out. “Are you okay?”
Ryan blinked. “What’s wrong with me?”
“Yeah, you have a weird look on your face. And you keep doing this.” She touched her own head. “Do you have a headache?”
“Nah,” Ryan lied. “It’s fine.” He’d swallowed four Advil when he got home from dinner with his dad and fallen asleep really hard for an hour, waking up in a puddle of his own drool fifteen minutes past the time he’d told Gabby to be ready. He still felt kind of groggy now, actually, like he was trying to have this conversation while someone smothered him gently with a pillow. “Are you okay?” he asked.
Gabby bit her lip; she was opening her mouth to answer when Brayden James bumped into Ryan hard from behind, slinging a beefy arm around his neck. “Hey, McCullough,” he said, grabbing the back of Ryan’s head and shaking it a little. “How’s the dome?”
Ryan tried not to wince. “Still attached,” he said cheerfully, shoving Brayden off him and turning back to Gabby, who was scowling now.
“Seriously,” she said, “what happened to your head?”
“Nothing,” Ryan said. His dad was right; it was nothing. There was no point in worrying her for no reason. “Seriously.”
“Why are you lying to me right now?”
“I’m not.”
“Fine,” Gabby said, sounding irritated. “I just don’t see what’s so fun about this to you,” she said, picking up the thread of their earlier conversation. “Like, do you honestly like all these people?”
“I like most of them,” Ryan said, following her gaze around the kitchen. It was a big party, people spilling out the back door onto the deck and Zac Brown Band blaring from a speaker. He could see his friends Joey and Anil engrossed in a game of beer pong in the living room, plus some girls from the swim team and a weed dealer from his gym class with a horsey laugh. He did like most people here, was the truth.
“I will never understand that part of you,” Gabby said, shaking her head.
Abruptly, Ryan was kind of annoyed—at his headache, at the whole situation, but mainly at Gabby herself. “Why did you come, then?” he asked.
That stopped her; her cheeks got faintly pink. “Because—” she started, then broke off. “Forget it,” she said. “I don’t want to fight with you. I’m just saying I didn’t come here to trail after you all night like I’m your pet.”
“So don’t trail after me,” Ryan said automatically, realizing one second too late that that was absolutely the wrong way to reply. “Not that I mind you trailing after me or anything, I just—”
Gabby’s eyes widened. “Is that what you think I do?” she asked, her voice quiet and brittle. A freshman behind her spilled a cup of something red and sticky, and she scooted out of the way. “Trail around after you?”
“No, not at all, I just—” Ryan was trying to figure out how to backpedal most effectively when Gabby caught sight of something behind him; she frowned, and he glanced over his shoulder, following her gaze. Felicity Trainor was staring back at them, eyes narrowed and lips twisted. Even her braid crown somehow managed to look pissed. They made eye contact for a fraction of a moment, and Felicity shook her head. She was too far away for Ryan to hear what she was saying, but he saw her mouth move in the precise shape of the word perfect. Then she turned on her heels and stalked away.
“See?” Gabby said. “I told you.” She had her arms crossed now, spoiling for a fight. “What is that girl’s issue with me?”
Ryan sighed. His head was throbbing. It felt like a lot of effort to make up a lie. “She got mad that you and me spend so much time together on the weekends,” he explained, feeling his cheeks get a tiny bit pink at the admission. “She thought it was weird.”
Gabby’s eyes narrowed. “Weird how?” she demanded. “Like I’m personally weird, or—”
“No,” Ryan said, sounding more irritated than he meant to. “Like you and me are—you know.” He broke off, shy all of a sudden, and then he just said it. “More than friends, or whatever.”
“Like we’re more—” Gabby broke off, eyebrows crawling. “Oh. Oh.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said, scrubbing an embarrassed hand over his head. It wasn’t how he’d wanted to bring it up with her. He hadn’t planned on bringing it up with her at all, really, but if he had to then the middle of a crowded party was basically the worst possible venue. He could feel the anxiety radiating off her like a cartoon force field. Still, he was in it now. There was nothing to do but forge ahead. “I guess—”
“Yeah,” Gabby interrupted. “Well.” Her hands fluttered in front of her like a pair of demented birds. “That’s ridiculous, obviously.”
Ryan took a deep breath. “Is it?”
“I mean.” Gabby’s eyes widened. “Yes, right?”
Ryan couldn’t read her expression, exactly, but something about the uncertainty in her voice sent him straight into DEFCON One. “I mean, of course it is,” he said quickly. The party was still clattering all around them, somebody’s loud laughter and that dumb song about chicken fries; he had to speak up to be heard. “God, yes.”
Gabby frowned. “Right,” she said, looking a little taken aback. “That’s what I thought. Because obviously you would never—”
“Of course not,” Ryan said, shaking his head to try and clear it. This conversation had veered into dangerous territory somehow when he wasn’t paying attention, and he wasn’t thinking fast enough to steer it back to safer ground. “You’re my friend.”
Gabby looked at him then, her expression perfectly, terrifyingly even. “Am I?”
Ryan blinked at her, his vision doubling for the briefest of seconds before she snapped into focus again. Crap, his head really hurt. “Of course,” he said. “What else would you be?”
“I don’t know,” Gabby said, and it looked like she was going to say something else entirely in the moment before she shook her head. “Maybe we should just hang out apart tonight, okay?”
But you don’t know anybody, Ryan didn’t say. He had no idea what was happening here, how this fight had even started. What they were even fighting about. But by now he knew better than to argue. “Okay,” he said, nodding. “Yeah. Whatever you want.”
GABBY
Gabby realized what a moron she was being pretty much as soon as Ryan disappeared into the dining room, leaving her utterly alone in a sea of people she neither knew nor liked. After all, he’d been right: of course there was nothing between them other than friendship. She didn’t think there was any reason for him to sound so completely horrified by the proposition, but it wasn’t like he was wrong. And if occasionally over the last year and a half she’d thought he was maybe, possibly flirting with her—and if she’d maybe, possibly hoped that he was—what the hell did she know? He was probably like that with everybody. And it wasn’t like she had anything to compare it to. The only time she’d ever been flirted with was—never.
She wanted to take off and run all the way home as fast as her unathletic legs could carry her. She wanted to hide under her bed. Still, it felt like she was too deep in it now, like she’d picked this hill to die on and now she had to . . .
Well. Die, probably.
She made herself do a lap of the first floor of the house, trying to convince herself that nobody was looking at her and wondering why on earth she was wandering around by herself like a huge pathetic loser. Eventually she spotted a couple of girls from her global studies class hanging out in the hallway, forced herself to walk over and say hello.
“Hey, Gabby,” said one of them, an Indian girl named Anita with dark eyeliner and a curious expression. “What are you doing here?”
In her head, Gabby knew it was a benign question—a friendly one, even—but she might as well have told Gabby her fly was down. What was she doing here? Still, she forced herself to smile: “I came with Ryan,” she explained, then immediately winced at how high
and reedy her voice sounded. God, what was wrong with her? She was like an alien from outer space trying to approximate human behavior.
They chatted for a while about the test they’d had this morning, about why Mrs. Mattiace wore the exact same cardigan every single day. Gabby tried to get herself to relax. But her anxiety was like an invisible bully, sitting on her shoulder filing its nails and offering running commentary. Her laugh was weird and wheezy; her forehead was probably shining in the glare of the recessed lights. And why had she worn these jeans? They bagged weirdly at the knees, blown out from too many runs through the dryer. God, she couldn’t even dress herself. The familiar refrain started up in her head again, an overplayed song: You don’t belong here. Everyone thinks you’re an idiot. You’re a giant weirdo, Gabby Hart, and the only reason you’re not actively bullied every day of your life is because usually you know enough to stay out of people’s way.
She could bail, she reasoned. Nobody would need to know. Nobody would even notice, probably. But when she said her good-byes to the global studies girls and started to edge toward the front door, she saw Ryan in the living room, watching a bunch of hockey bros play flip cup and, apparently, having the time of his life. There was no way to get out without him seeing her. Without admitting to him that he’d been right.
Instead she turned sharply into a hallway off the kitchen, scurrying up the staircase to the second floor like a mouse diving for cover in a suddenly lit room. At the very least she could take five minutes of quiet to compose herself before she tried again. When in doubt, she thought, hide.
It was quieter upstairs, the hallway thickly carpeted and the walls hung from ceiling to waist level with a million family photos. Gabby smiled in spite of herself. She loved other people’s pictures: the chance to peek in on lives she’d never live herself, to study faces she’d never actually meet.
She was staring at them—Jordan Highsmith’s family at Disney World a few years ago next to a shot of somebody’s ’90s wedding, a black-and-white snapshot of a cluster of serious-looking people standing in front of a barn—when the bathroom door opened and a startlingly beautiful girl ambled out of it.
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