99 Days

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99 Days Page 2

by Katie Cotugno


  dirty slut

  The panic is cold and wet and skittering in the second before it’s replaced by the hot rush of shame; my stomach lurches. I reach out and snatch the menu off the windshield, the paper going limp and clammy inside my damp, embarrassed fist.

  Sure enough, there it is, idling at the stoplight at the end of the block: the Donnellys’ late-nineties Bronco, big and olive and dented where Patrick backed it into a mailbox in the fall of our sophomore year. It’s the same one all three of them learned to drive on, the one we all used to pile into so that Gabe could ferry us to school when we were freshman. Julia’s raven hair glints in the sun as the light turns green and she speeds away.

  I force myself to take three deep breaths before I ball up the menu and toss it onto the passenger seat of my car, then two more before I pull out into traffic. I grip the wheel tightly so my hands will stop shaking. Julia was my friend first, before I ever met either one of her brothers. Maybe it makes sense that she’s the one who hates me most. I remember running into her here not long after the article came out, how she turned and saw me standing there with my latte, the unadulterated loathing painted all over her face.

  “Why the fuck do I see you everywhere, Molly?” she demanded, and she sounded so incredibly frustrated—like she really wanted to know so we could solve this, so it wouldn’t keep happening over and over again. “For the love of God, why won’t you just go away?”

  I went home and called Bristol that same afternoon.

  There’s nowhere for me to go now, though, not really: All I want is to floor it home and bury myself under the covers with a documentary about the deep ocean or something, but I make myself stop at the gas station to fill my empty tank and pick up more Red Vines, just like I’d planned to.

  I can’t spend my whole summer like this.

  Can I?

  I’m just fitting my credit card into the pump when a big hand lands square on my shoulder. “Get the fuck out of here!” a deep voice says. I whirl around, heart thrumming and ready for a fight, before I realize it’s an exclamation and not an order.

  Before I realize it’s coming from Gabe.

  “You’re home?” he asks incredulously, his tan face breaking into a wide, easy grin. He’s wearing frayed khaki shorts and aviators and a T-shirt from Notre Dame, and he looks happier to see me than anyone has since I got here.

  I can’t help it: I burst into tears.

  Gabe doesn’t blink. “Hey, hey,” he says easily, getting his arms around me and squeezing. He smells like farmer’s market bar soap and clothes dried on the line. “Molly Barlow, why you crying?”

  “I’m not,” I protest, even as I blatantly get snot all over the front of his T-shirt. I pull back and wipe my eyes, shaking my head. “Oh my God, I’m not, I’m sorry. That’s embarrassing. Hi.”

  Gabe keeps smiling, even if he does look a little surprised. “Hey,” he says, reaching out and swiping at my cheek with the heel of his hand. “So, you know, welcome back, how have you been, I see you’re enjoying your return to the warm bosom of Star Lake.”

  “Uh-huh.” I sniffle once and pull it together, mostly—God, I didn’t realize I was so hard up for a friendly face, it’s ridiculous. Or, okay, I did, but I didn’t think I’d lose it quite so hard at the sight of one. “It’s been awesome.” I reach into the open window of the Passat and hand him the crumpled-up take-out menu. “For example, here is my homecoming card from your sister.”

  Gabe smoothes it out and looks at it, then nods. “Weird,” he says, calm as the surface of the lake in the middle of the night. “She put the same one on my car this morning.”

  My eyes widen. “Really?”

  “No,” Gabe says, grinning when I make a face. Then his eyes go dark. “Seriously, though, are you okay? That’s, like, pretty fucked up and horrifying of her, actually.”

  I sigh and roll my eyes—at myself or at the situation, at the gut-wrenching absurdity of the mess I made. “It’s—whatever,” I tell him, trying to sound cool or above it or something. “I’m fine. It is what it is.”

  “It feels unfair, though, right?” Gabe says. “I mean, if you’re a dirty slut, then I’m a dirty slut.”

  I laugh. I can’t help it, even though it feels colossally weird to hear him say it out loud. We never talked about it once after it happened, not even when the book—and the article—came out and the world came crashing down around my ears. Could be enough time has passed that it doesn’t feel like a big deal to him anymore, although apparently he’s the only one. God knows it still feels like a big deal to me. “You definitely are,” I agree, then watch as he balls up the menu and tosses it over his shoulder, missing the trash can next to the pump by a distance of roughly seven feet. “That’s littering,” I tell him, smirking a little.

  “Add it to the list,” Gabe says, apparently unconcerned about this or any other lapses in good citizenship. He was student council president when he was a senior. Patrick and Julia and I hung all his campaign posters at school. “Look, people are assholes. My sister is an asshole. And my brother—” He breaks off, shrugging. His shaggy brown hair curls down over his ears, a lighter honey-molasses color than his brother’s and sister’s. Patrick’s hair is almost black. “Well, my brother is my brother, but anyway he’s not here. What are you doing, are you working, what?”

  “I—nothing yet,” I confess, feeling suddenly embarrassed at how reclusive I’ve been, humiliated that there’s virtually nobody here who wants to see me. Gabe’s had a million friends as long as I’ve known him. “Hiding, mostly.”

  Gabe nods at that. But then: “Think you’ll be hiding tomorrow, too?”

  I remember once, when I was ten or eleven, that I stepped on a piece of glass down by the lake, and Gabe carried me all the way home piggyback. I remember that we lied to Patrick for an entire year. My whole face has that clogged, bloated post-cry feeling, like there’s something made of cotton shoved up into my brain. “I don’t know,” I say eventually, cautious, intrigued in spite of myself—maybe it’s just the constant ache of loneliness but running into Gabe makes me feel like something’s about to happen, a bend in a dusty road. “Probably. Why?”

  Gabe grins down at me like a master of ceremonies, like someone who suspects I need a little anticipation in my life and wants to deliver. “Pick you up at eight” is all he says.

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  day 5

  Gabe’s right on time, two quick taps on the horn of his beat-up station wagon to let me know he’s outside. I hurry down the stairs faster than I’ve done much of anything since I’ve been here, the noisy clunk of my boots on the hardwood. My hair’s long and loose down my back.

  “You going out?” my mom calls from her office. She sounds surprised—fair enough, I guess, since my social circle up until now has pretty much consisted of Vita, Oscar, and the little Netflix robot that recommends stuff based on what you’ve already watched. “Who with?”

  I almost don’t even tell her—the urge to lie like a reflex, to keep myself from winding up fodder for Oprah’s Book Club one more time. Then I decide I don’t care. “With Gabe,” I announce, my voice like a challenge. I don’t wait for her response before I walk out the door.

  He’s idling in the driveway with Bob Dylan in the CD player, low and clanging and familiar. His parents were both giant hippies—Chuck wore his hair to his shoulders until Patrick and Julia were five—and we both grew up listening to that kind of stuff on the stereo in his house. “Hey, stranger,” he says as I climb into the passenger seat, in a voice like I’m not one at all. “Wreck any homes today?”

  I snort. “Not yet,” I assure him, rolling my eyes as I buckle my seat belt. It’s not until I let out a breath I hadn’t quite known I was holding that I realize I’ve been nervous about this moment all day long. I didn’t need to be, though, of course I didn’t need to b
e—it’s just Gabe, who I’ve known since I was in preschool; Gabe, my literal partner in crime. “But, you know. It’s early.”

  We drive fifteen minutes outside of town to Frank’s Franks, a hot dog truck in a parking lot off the side of the road where his mom and dad used to take us all when we were really small. The perimeter’s strung up with Christmas lights, picnic tables gone tacky with the humidity and too many layers of glossy paint. Families eat ice cream in noisy clusters. A baby fusses in a stroller; a boy and a girl play on a jungle gym in the last of the deep blue twilight. Gabe’s arm brushes mine as we wait in line to pay. He’s gotten handsomer, I think, broader in his back since the last time I saw him—two full years ago, before he left for Notre Dame. He’s almost startlingly tall now.

  We sit on a free table instead of at one, my boots and Gabe’s preppy leather flip-flops lined up side by side on the bench. He gets a giant paper boat full of onion rings, the smell of fried batter and grill smoke hanging in the air. His body’s warm next to mine, the closest I’ve been to a boy since Patrick told me he never wanted to see me again. In Tempe, I didn’t exactly date. “So, what are you doing back here anyway, huh?” Gabe asks.

  I take a sip of my soda, swat idly at a mosquito hovering near my bare knee. “School’s out,” I tell him, shrugging a bit. “Nowhere to go after graduation. Could run, I guess, but . . .”

  “Can’t hide,” Gabe finishes, an echo of our conversation at the gas station yesterday. I smile. We sit in comfortable silence for a minute—it’s strange to be with him like this. I was least close to Gabe out of all the Donnellys before everything happened. He wasn’t the person I told my secrets to—at least, not until things fell apart so hard with Patrick. He was never the one who knew my every tell and shudder. Maybe it’s fitting he’s the only one who’ll have anything to do with me now.

  We eat our hot dogs, and Gabe tells me about school in Indiana, where he’s a bio major, how he’s hanging out this summer and working at the pizza shop to help his mom.

  “How’s she doing?” I ask, thinking of Connie’s thick gray ponytail and easy smile, how instead of folding in on herself like an origami swan after Chuck died, her spine only ever got straighter. Gabe, Patrick, and Julia’s dad had a heart attack at their kitchen table one night when I was fourteen and over for dinner, right in the middle of an argument between Gabe and Patrick over whose turn it was to hose down their motorboat, the Sally Forth. Connie sold the boat the following summer. She manages the shop by herself.

  “She’s good,” Gabe tells me now, and I smile. We talk about dumb stuff: a costume party he went to a couple of weeks ago where all the dudes dressed up as their mothers, and what we’ve been watching on TV. “Wow,” Gabe laughs when I let loose with some truly scintillating facts I’ve gleaned about Prohibition and the Transcontinental Railroad from all the documentaries I’ve been mainlining. “You really are starved for human contact, huh?”

  “Shut up,” I tell him, laughing, and he offers me the last of his onion rings with a guilty grin. I make a face but take them anyway—after all, it’s not like he’s wrong.

  “Well,” Gabe says, still smiling. His eyes are a deep, lake-water blue. Across the lot a car hums to life and pulls out onto the parkway, headlights cutting a bright swath through the summer dark. “For what it’s worth, Molly Barlow, I’m really glad you’re back.”

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  HarperCollins Publishers

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  day 6

  “I’m sorry, are you smiling?” my mom asks the following morning, looking at me incredulously across the kitchen island.

  I grin into my coffee cup and don’t reply.

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  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  day 7

  I wake up early in the morning with a long-lost, instantly identifiable itch in my body; I lie there under the duvet for a while, waiting to see if it will pass. The sun spills yellow through the window. The air smells cool and Star Lake–wet. I snooze for ten minutes. I reassess.

  Nope. Still there.

  Finally, I get out of bed and pull an old, ratty pair of leggings out of the bottom dresser drawer, wincing when I realize how tight the waistband is now, cutting into the soft, mushy skin of my midsection. I grimace and set about untying the knots in the laces of my sneakers that are literally a full year old.

  I’ll probably drop dead after a quarter mile, wind up lying there like a fat, flattened raccoon on the side of the road.

  But I want to run.

  My mom’s drinking coffee in the breakfast nook when I come downstairs but—wisely—decides not to comment on my sudden emergence from the third-floor tower, watching wordlessly as I clip Oscar’s leather leash onto his collar. “Be easy on him, will you?” is all she says, probably the first time she’s asked anyone to be easy on anyone else in her entire life. “He doesn’t get much exercise.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I mutter, sticking my headphones into my ears and making for the back door. I wave at Alex, who’s trimming the rhododendrons, and head down the driveway toward the street. “Neither do I.”

  I ran track all through middle and the first three years of high school; sophomore year Bristol tried to recruit me for their track team, which is how I found out about them to begin with. By the time I actually went to Tempe after everything happened, though—the longest, fastest run of my whole life—I was finished. I spent senior year parked on the bleachers, mostly motionless. Now I feel like a pale, doughy Tin Man, creaking stiffly back to life.

  I make my way along the rocky bike path that’s parallel to Route 4, which eventually narrows and becomes Star Lake Road. Patrick and I used to run this route all the time—when it was warm like this but also in the winter, the edges of the lake frozen over and snow coating the delicate-looking branches of the pine tree overhead. He got a bright green pullover for Christmas sophomore year and I remember watching him as we hoofed it through the drab gray landscape, standing out like some exotic bird. I watched him all the time, his fast elegant body—Patrick and I were both serious enough runners back then, I suppose, but mostly our treks around the lake were an excuse to be alone. We’d been dating since the previous fall but everything still felt new and exciting and secret-amazing, like nobody had ever lived it before us.

  “Gabe told me he and Sophie Tabor went skinny-dipping out here in the fall,” he told me when we were done with the loop one afternoon, his bare hand reaching for my gloved one.

  I tucked both our hands into the pocket of my jacket to get warm. “They did?” I asked, distracted by the feeling of having him so close. Then I wrinkled my nose. “Don’t you think skinny-dipping is a gross phrase? There’s something about it that’s, like, off-putting to me. Like moist.”

  “Or panties.”

  “Don’t say panties,” I ordered.

  “Sorry.” Patrick grinned at me, bumping his shoulders against mine as we followed the frozen curve of the lake. A weak halo of sunlight peeked through the winter clouds. “We should try it, though.”

  “What?” I asked blankly. Then: “Skinny-dipping?” I looked at the hard crust of snow covering the ground, then back at him. “We should, huh?”

  “Well, not now,” Patrick clarified, squeezing my hand inside my pocket. “I’d like to get to graduation without my junk freezing off, thank you. But when it gets warmer, yeah. We should.”

  I looked over at him in the chilly white light, intrigued and curious; a shiver skittered through me. So far all we’d done was kiss. “This summer,” I agreed, and popped up onto my toes to peck the corner of his mouth.

  Patrick turned his head and caught my face between two hands. “Love you,” he said quietly, and I smiled.

  “Love you back.”

  I don’t know if it’s the memory or the physical exertion that knoc
ks the wind out of me, but either way it’s less than one wheezy mile before Oscar and I have to stop and walk a bit. The roads are woodsy and winding back here, only an occasional car rolling by. The trees make a canopy over the blacktop but still I’m sweating inside my V-neck T-shirt; the morning air’s beginning to warm. When we pass the turnoff for the Star Lake Lodge, I tug the leash on a whim, making my way down the familiar gravel pathway toward the clearing where the old resort slouches, the Catskills in the distance and the lake itself glittering at their feet.

  I worked at the rumpled Lodge for three full summers before I left here, handing towels out lakeside and manning the register at the tiny gift shop off the lobby—a lot of people from school did, waiting tables in the dining room or teaching swim classes at the pool. Patrick and Julia would come visit between their shifts at the pizza place; even Imogen temped here for a few months sophomore year, when French Roast was closed for renovations. It was fun in a shabby kind of way, all faded cabbage-rose carpet and an old-fashioned elevator that hadn’t worked since before I was born. The whole place was perpetually on the verge of closing, and it looks like that’s exactly what finally happened: The main parking lot is deserted, and the front lawn is speckled with goose poop. The rocking chairs on the sagging front porch sway creepily in the breeze coming off the water. There’s a light on inside, though, and when I try the main door it swings wide open into the empty lobby, full of the same faded, floral-print furniture I remember.

 

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