Patrick looks at me for a beat across the counter. Then he sighs. Like he’s got nothing left. “I didn’t know how to let you go.”
I stare back at him for a moment—farther away than he ever was the whole time I was in Tempe, my heart leaking something so pungent I feel like he’ll be able to smell it over the sauce and pepperoni. I search his pretty face and his gray-storm eyes, the cut of his angry jaw, but he’s just—he’s not there. My Patrick—the Patrick I know and remember and love—is gone. I broke it, this thing between us. Both of us did. I used to think we could fix it—that what was happening between us all summer was fixing it, bringing us back together in some messed-up way. But some things can’t be repaired. I don’t know if I ever really believed that, not until now. The realization makes me feel as if my ribs have parted ways.
“I shouldn’t have said what I said to you,” he says finally. “In your room that night, I shouldn’t have called you—” The bells above the door jingle then, interrupting; a family of five traipses in. Patrick makes a face and winces, the livid yellow and green on his face. When he speaks again, the spell is broken. “Look, Molly,” he says, like I’m just another customer. Like I’m a stranger right off the street. “I gotta work.”
I feel the air go out of me, like a valve’s been released somewhere. All at once I’m so tired I can hardly stand. “I leave in a few days,” I tell him finally. I take a deep breath. “I’ll miss you.”
Patrick nods. “Yeah, Mols,” he says, and it sounds like the end of the summer. “I’ll miss you back.”
Day 96
I’ve got a ton of packing left to do after dinner, my same old duffel openmouthed and gaping on the bed. I made myself more at home here than I ever meant to: clothes spilling out of drawers, and crinkled Lodge stationery scattered across the desktop.
I think of the last time I packed up like this, grabbing huge handfuls of socks and underwear and shoving them into my bag to bring to Arizona, the whole affair taking roughly twenty minutes and completed in total silence: I’d turned off my phone and computer to dam the incessant ping of text and email and Facebook, one nasty message piling up on top of another and never a single word from Patrick himself. The Bristol track team didn’t need me anymore, they’d told me primly—though I was welcome to try out in the fall—but they’d agreed to take me anyway, the only new senior girl in a class of sixty-five.
One year later and I take my careful time with it, packing up my jeans and my boots and my hair ties; I take the Golly, Molly artwork and the collage of the lakefront Imogen sent me home with the other night. It made me cry when she handed it over. After a minute, it made her cry, too.
I’ve got Netflix for company, the same low drone that’s ferried me through this whole summer, and I’m halfway through a documentary about the secret lives of birds when my phone rings, a number I don’t recognize appearing on the screen. I answer with some trepidation, wondering briefly if it’s someone new and different calling to whisper something poison in my ear: “Hello?”
“Molly?”
“Yes?”
“It’s Roisin,” an unfamiliar girl’s voice says, pronouncing it RO-sheen, and it’s only after she adds, “Your roommate?” before I put things together.
“Oh my God, Roisin!” I exclaim. Then, not wanting to explain I’ve been pronouncing your name like Raisin in my head all summer: “Sorry. I had, like, a brain fart there, I don’t know.”
“The name thing?” she guesses, laughing a little. “You’re . . . definitely not the only one. I couldn’t spell it until I was in, like, seventh grade.”
We spend a few minutes small-talking about our parents and if we have any brothers and sisters, the logistics of who’s going to bring a TV (me) and mini fridge (her). “Do you know what you’re going to major in?” she asks me.
“Business, I think.” It’s the first time that anyone’s asked me that question and I’ve had a answer ready. “I think business.”
“Yeah?” Roisin asks. “I always think that’s so neat, when people can just answer that question. I have no freaking idea what I want to do with my life, so those emails the dean was sending out every three seconds about declaring a major were, like, super appreciated.”
“Ugh, I know,” I say, laughing. She has a Southern accent, Roisin from Georgia. It’s nice. “He’s eager, for sure.”
“I told myself I was going to figure it out this summer,” she continues, “but instead I got bogged down in all this drama with my boyfriend. I’ll bore you with the details of that mess during orientation, I guess, but basically it’s just really hard to remember your hometown isn’t the only place in the world, you know?”
That lands for me, sharp and sudden. I look at the lush green trees outside. In five days I’ll be in Boston, someplace where I’ve got no reputation. Where everyone, not just me, will be fresh and clean and new. “Yeah,” I say slowly, pressing my forehead against the cool glass of the windowpane. “Yeah, I know.”
Day 97
I stay way past the end of my shift putting paperwork together, a bible for whoever comes next. The sun’s already setting, and Penn and the kids are long gone by the time I head out to the lot and realize with a sharp, fast intake of breath that there’s somebody sitting on the hood of my car, waiting.
Gabe.
“Hi,” I say, my eyes filling up unexpectedly at the sight of him, how every day this summer his face has been my good, good thing. I want to hug him, want to hold tight and keep on holding. I wrap my arms around myself instead. “What are you doing here?”