It was the weirdest relationship in her life, certainly. They hardly ever hung out at school, where Ryan was perpetually surrounded by a million different people, whatever girl he was currently hooking up with dangling off his arm like so much jewelry. Gabby spent her free periods by herself editing photos in the computer lab or eating lunch at a table near the back of the cafeteria with Michelle, trying not to attract any unnecessary attention. They had virtually nothing in common. It made no sense.
But he was funny. He was a genuinely good listener. And he had an odd emotional intelligence, was the kind of person who instinctively knew if her mom had had a bad day at work or how to talk Kristina through a fight she’d had with her middle school friends.
And, most surprisingly of all: he kept showing up.
They were like one of those picture books about a tiger cub making friends with a mongoose, Gabby reasoned. She couldn’t explain it. It just was. And it worked—Gabby was quite sure of this part—only because they’d both tacitly agreed to adhere to certain rigid, irrevocable rules about where and when their friendship occurred.
“Are they jerks?” Kristina asked now, motioning across the atrium at Ryan and his cluster of freshly-scrubbed compatriots. She took her glistening, wax paper–wrapped pretzel and looked at Gabby with a worried, earnest expression. “Is that it?”
“No,” Gabby said. Granted, Ryan was usually surrounded by so many people it was impossible for a mere mortal to keep track of their individual personalities, but it wasn’t that she didn’t think they’d be nice to her, exactly. Still, the idea of strolling right up to a group of virtual strangers like that—the thought of their curious glances, the list of dumb things she might possibly say—made her want to dive underneath a pile of J.Crew twinsets and hide until summer. She could feel her pulse getting quicker, the palms of her hands beginning to sweat. It was impossible. There was no way. She was too awkward. She was too afraid.
“Do you guys hang out at school?” Celia was asking now, head tilted to the side like she thought she was a freaking psychologist. “Or do you avoid him there, too?”
“Can you stop interrogating me?” Gabby asked. “I don’t actually see why this is any of your business.”
“I’m sorry,” Celia said. “But from the way you are when he comes over, I just assumed you guys were these great friends, so—”
“We are,” Gabby snapped. God, she did not want to have an anxiety attack standing in front of the Hot Topic in the Yorktown Galleria. “Okay? I’m done having this conversation.”
Celia looked from her and back to Ryan, who was ambling down toward the food court at the other end of the mall. For a second Gabby thought, with raw terror, that Celia might be about to say hi for her, to yell his name or run after him in some kind of misguided attempt at immersion therapy. In the end, though, she only shook her head. “I don’t understand you at all sometimes, Gabby.”
“Lucky for you, you don’t have to,” Gabby retorted, and took a giant bite of her pretzel.
GABBY
She was still stewing on it come Monday, slouched in her seat in the back of the room in the sixth-period study hall she shared with Michelle. “It just kills me how smug Celia is about everything,” Gabby complained, stabbing at the glossy page of her history textbook with a pencil eraser. “Like she’s some kind of authority on human relationships just because she’s popular and has better hair than Kristina and me.”
“Her hair is very good,” Michelle conceded.
Gabby sighed loudly. “Yeah, I know that, thank you. But it doesn’t mean she knows anything about me and Ryan.” She paused to give Michelle a moment to agree with her; when Michelle didn’t, Gabby frowned. “Right?”
“Girls,” Ms. Fernandes called from her desk, where Gabby was pretty sure she was reading an Us Weekly. “That doesn’t sound like studying to me.”
“Sorry, Ms. Fernandes,” Michelle called back. Then, to Gabby: “Right. I mean, absolutely.” She nodded enthusiastically, then turned around and looked back at her notebook.
“Absolutely,” Gabby parroted, sitting back in her chair and knowing full well Michelle wasn’t actually finished. She looked down at her history textbook and read a couple of sentences about the 101st Airborne, waiting.
Sure enough: “You don’t think it’s a little weird, though?” Michelle asked, turning around again a second later. “That you guys hang out all the time, but only ever, like, one-on-one?”
Suddenly Gabby did not like the trajectory of this conversation. “You and I hang out one-on-one all the time,” she pointed out.
Michelle made a face. “That’s not the same, and you know it.”
“Why is it not the same?” Gabby asked, although of course by now she already knew what Michelle was getting at. But she and Ryan hung out by themselves because Gabby liked it that way. It wasn’t as if—as if—
“If I were you,” Michelle said crisply, “I might be worried he was embarrassed of me.”
The words hit Gabby like a stack of textbooks to the stomach—not because they’d never occurred to her before, but because they sort of had. She’d always told herself she was maintaining this particular relationship on her own terms, the way she liked it. But what if that wasn’t what was happening at all?
“I’m sorry,” Michelle said. “I’m not trying to start a fight or make you feel bad or anything.”
“Really? Could have fooled me,” Gabby muttered, just as the bell rang for the end of the period. She shoved her chair out with more force than was really necessary, dumping her books into her bag and slinging it over one shoulder.
Michelle scrambled up from her own seat and followed Gabby out of the classroom. “I’m not,” she said again, taking Gabby’s arm and tugging her over to a bank of lockers as the noisy current of bodies rushed around them. “I’m not, seriously. It’s just—can I ask you what the appeal is, exactly? Of being Ryan McCullough’s secret sidekick?”
“Okay,” Gabby said, stepping past her and heading down the crowded hallway. “Enough. I don’t know what your problem is with me today, Michelle, but—”
“Can you listen to me?” Michelle asked, raising her voice over the ruckus. Gabby winced, not wanting anyone else to hear. “I’m just trying to get you to look at this relationship from the outside. You’re like, the one girl he’s ever met that he’s never put a move on—”
Gabby’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know he’s never put a move on me?”
“Oh, please,” Michelle said. “Because he hasn’t.”
“I don’t even want him to put a move on me,” Gabby said. It was true, too. There was a point when she’d wanted it—she’d spent all of freshman year wanting it, basically—and there had been a time, when he first started coming around every week, when she’d thought maybe . . . well. She’d thought maybe. But she was over that now. The truth was that couples like Ryan and her didn’t exist outside of teen movies from the ’80s. Gabby knew this. There was no point in pretending otherwise.
They were friends. Good friends. Real friends, no matter what Michelle seemed to think. But that was all.