“Did you want them to?”
Ryan hesitated. It was no secret that Gabby wasn’t his dad’s biggest fan. Finally he shrugged again, residual months-old embarrassment prickling up the back of his neck. “I mean, no.”
Gabby wasn’t buying. “It’s okay if you do,” she said, nibbling delicately on the end of a french fry: she liked the extra-crispy ones only, ketchup on the side. He’d made the mistake of putting it on top once and she’d basically called him a serial killer. “They’re your parents.”
“I don’t,” Ryan insisted. “I just think it’s weird for one dude to have three little dogs, is all.”
“More than two of any animal is hoarding behavior,” Gabby agreed, then grinned. “I mean, I say that now. You can ask me again when I’m seventy and living alone in a mansion somewhere with my hundred ferrets.”
“All named after famous photographers, and which you dress up for holidays in little ferret clothes.”
Gabby’s eyes narrowed. “Okay, maybe paint a little less of a picture, how about.”
“I’m kidding,” Ryan said, handing her the ball again. “You’re definitely more cat lady than ferret lady.”
“You know what?” Gabby started, but she was laughing. She had a great laugh, this loud, unselfconscious cackle. Ryan always felt like the funniest guy in the universe when he got it out of her.
“Just bowl,” he told her, sitting back in the molded plastic chair and watching as she considered the pins in front of her. She’d gotten her hair cut earlier that week, so that it only brushed her shoulders. It made her eyes look bigger and, weirdly, more blue. Just for a second, he let himself imagine what it would be like to reach out and tuck it behind her ears.
“What?” Gabby asked, glancing over her shoulder.
Ryan realized abruptly that he’d been staring. “What?”
“You’re looking at me like I have something on my face. Do I have something on my face?”
Ryan felt the beginnings of a blush, distracted himself by picking through the last of the french fries. What the fuck was that? That was absurd. He’d promised himself he was never going to make a move—wasn’t even going to hint at anything—unless she ever gave him a concrete reason to. But he knew it would probably never happen.
He swallowed his mouthful of french fries, shrugged as jovially as he could. “Just a giant pulsing whitehead on the end of your nose,” he said.
Gabby’s eyes widened in horror before she realized he was kidding. “You’re an asshole,” she announced with relish, and bowled another perfect strike.
GABBY
Aunt Liz sent all three of them Sephora gift cards for Easter, so on Saturday Celia drove Gabby and Kristina to the Galleria. Gabby wasn’t really a huge mall person—the place was always so crowded—but it was basically Kristina’s own private holy site. “Can we go to Forever 21?” she asked as they headed across the parking lot. It was the beginning of April, crocuses just starting to break through the mulch in the planters outside the entrance. “Also can we go to Claire’s?”
Celia shook her head. “That stuff is all made in sweatshops, you realize.”
“So is the stuff you wear, I bet,” Kristina pointed out. Then, hopefully: “Can I get my belly button pierced?”
They settled on soft pretzels as a compromise, were standing in line at the kiosk when Celia bumped Gabby hard in the arm. “Incoming,” she said, nodding in the direction of the Sears.
Gabby looked. There was Ryan heading across the atrium in his Colson Cavs jacket with a bunch of his hockey buddies, plus a couple of girls who Gabby always thought of uncharitably as their fan club. He was laughing at something one of them was saying, his arm slung loosely around the shoulders of a brunette named Nina from Gabby’s English class.
“Oh yeah, there he is,” Gabby said, purposely angling her body away from them and toward the pretzel counter. “So do we want cinnamon sugar or Parmesan cheese?”
“Wait a minute,” Celia said. “I mean, cinnamon sugar, but. Aren’t you going to say hi?”
Gabby shrugged. “I wasn’t planning on it, no.”
“Wait, really?” Even Kristina, who normally stayed out of conversations like this, looked incredulous. “Why not?”
“Because,” Gabby said, taking longer to dig her wallet out of her shoulder bag than necessary, her face tilted away from them as she rooted around.
“Because why?” Celia pressed her.
“Did you guys have a fight?” Kristina asked.
“No, nothing like that.” Gabby fished a few wrinkly dollars out of her wallet and handed them to the cashier. “He’s with other people,” she finally said.
“So what?” Celia asked, at the same time that Kristina chimed in, “He was literally at our house last night.”
That was kind of Gabby’s entire point, although she had no idea how to articulate it to her sisters in a way they could possibly understand. It was one thing to hang out with Ryan at her own house basically every Friday for the last year and a half—on her own terms, with her own people, alone. It was quite another to subject herself to all his other friends.
Back at the beginning, her friendship with Ryan had seemed like kind of a joke, the novelty prize at the bottom of a cereal box—amusing for five minutes, maybe, but unlikely to provide any long-term satisfaction. After that first Monopoly night at the start of freshman year, she’d fully expected never to see him again—and sure enough, they’d barely talked all week, just the occasional nod in the hallway, a wave from across the lawn at school. But the following Friday he’d shown up by her locker after the last bell rang.
“So,” he’d said, leaning against the cinder-block wall in his varsity jacket like they were the oldest and dearest of friends, wavy hair sticking out from underneath a Rangers cap. He had a coolly beat-up backpack slung over one shoulder. It looked too way light to have any actual books in it. “Monopoly tonight?”
Gabby gaped. “Are you serious?”
Ryan made a little face at that, like they’d been through this already and he’d expected her to know better by now. “Yeah, Gabby,” he’d told her. “I’m serious. Same time, same place?”
Gabby had no idea what to say to that. “Sure,” she’d managed finally, shaking her head with disbelief and—secretly—the thrill of shocked, unexpected pleasure. “I think my dad’s making guacamole.”
“Sounds great.” Ryan grinned. “I love guacamole.”
And that had been that.