“But I wanted you to.”
“So you lied?” There’s something about that that really doesn’t sit right with me. Patrick used to complain about it all the time, I remember suddenly—that Gabe was the nicest guy in the world as long as he’s getting his way. I don’t like seeing that side of him turned in my direction. “You wanted me to come, so you lied?”
Gabe’s forehead wrinkles. “I didn’t lie,” he argues. “I was going to tell you at the end of the night, I swear. I just, we were having a good time, you were having a good time, and I knew—”
“Yeah,” I cut him off, wrapping my arms around myself and caring a little more about my missing hoodie now, how I feel so absurdly exposed. “That’s still a bullshit excuse, Gabe.”
Gabe lets a breath out, rubs a bit at the back of his neck. “You’re right,” he says after a minute. I can still hear the sound of the party through the trees, people laughing. “Okay. You’re right. I screwed up. I’m really sorry. It was stupid of me. Look, why don’t we get out of here, go get a coffee or something? I don’t know what’s even gonna be open now, but let me make it up to you.”
I shake my head, holding myself a little bit tighter. I keep picturing the totally disgusted look on Patrick’s face. “I just wanna go,” I tell him quietly. “I just—I’m done for tonight, okay?”
Gabe exhales again, but he doesn’t argue. “Text when you’re home,” is all he says. I don’t tell him I have no idea where that is.
Day 13
I re-up my supply of Red Vines and spend the next day learning about the intricacies of General Sherman’s march to the sea, courtesy of Ken Burns’s The Civil War documentary, wearing sweatpants and a long-sleeved shirt even though it’s seventy degrees outside the house. I get all the way to 1864 before I even leave my room to pee. I was never into documentaries before I went to Bristol, but my roommate, this ferrety brunette named Karla who hung a sheet from the ceiling around her bed to disguise whatever the hell she was doing in there, was surprisingly generous with her Netflix password—probably because she thought it would keep me from doing anything crazy like trying to strike up a conversation. That was when I started working my way through one after another, a chorus of soothing, mostly British narrators explicating the details of various terrifying oddities, both natural and not: the Alaskan frontier, Steve Jobs, the Aryan Brotherhood. The knowledge felt like power, a little. It felt like a way to keep control.
Today I wait until I hear the crunch of my mom’s wheels receding down the gravel driveway before I creep downstairs for some avocado on toast. I’ve been living mostly on corn syrup and red 40 since I got here. I can feel a zit sprouting on my cheek. I fiddle with the fancy coffeemaker and stare out the window at the yard while it gurgles away on the granite counter. Oscar sighs noisily on the black-and-white tiled floor. Used to be when I had a sulk on Patrick would tell me stupid jokes until I snapped out of it: What did the buffalo say when he dropped his kid off at school? (Bye, son) and What’s green and has wheels? (Grass, I lied about the wheels).
I think of his face the first time he ever kissed me. I think of his face when he saw me last night. I take my coffee and my toast and get back under the covers with my laptop, and I do my best not to think at all.
Day 14
I’m not sure if Patrick’s working his old shifts at the shop now that he’s back in Star Lake for the summer, but I can’t get it out of my head that I have to see him, so the next afternoon I find him parked behind the ancient register just like two years ago, ringing a middle-aged lady up for three large extra-cheese pies.
Donnelly’s Pizza is sandwiched between a grubby laundromat and a clog-heavy shoe store on Main Street, has been for as long as I’ve been alive: Connie and Chuck were high school sweethearts, and started up the shop the year after they got married. It was always Chuck’s dream to own a pizza place, and Connie, whose maiden name was Ciavolella, taught him how to cook. The building is cheerfully scruffy, a big plate-glass window emblazoned with curling yellow script and a roof of unpainted wooden shingles, what’s probably the one working pay phone in the entire state of New York mounted on the wall outside the bathrooms. Red-and-white checked oilcloth covers all the tables. Photo collages of sports teams from the high school paper the walls.
Patrick doesn’t notice me right away, sharp face bent over the register and his curly hair falling into his eyes. When we were in first and second grade, all the girls used to try and touch it. It used to make Patrick nuts.
For a second I only just watch him—outside of the party the other night we haven’t shared space since the day more than a year ago when the People article came out. Julia was the one who showed it to Patrick to begin with—she loves any and all things having to do with celebrity, or at least she used to. She had subscriptions to People and Us Weekly and Life & Style, and strong opinions about the veracity of the information contained in each. I woke up to fourteen missed calls from her that morning on my cell phone, plus a series of texts so garbled by disbelief and anger and copious WTFs that I had to read them all twice before I figured out what the hell had happened.
What had happened was that I’d finally been caught.
When Patrick turned up later that day it was with a page yanked from Julia’s magazine, the edges ragged and torn. There was a crease in the middle of the photo of my mom in her office, a fold running right down the center of her face.