9 Days and 9 Nights Page 7

  “I know,” I say quickly. “Me either.”

  Gabe nods, both hands submerged in the soapy, lemon-scented water. “So I’m taking it you haven’t talked to Ian about—”

  “No,” I say, rubbing hard at a spot on a water glass and not looking at him. “Have you told—?”

  “I haven’t,” he admits. “I mean, not that there’s any reason to keep it from her or anything like that, I just—”

  “No, I get it,” I interrupt. “Totally. It’s complicated.”

  Gabe hums a sound that might or might not be agreement, smiling wryly. “That’s one word for it,” he says.

  We’re quiet for another moment then, just the hiss of the running water and the clink of dishes as Gabe pulls them from the sink and hands them to me to dry; I can hear Imogen’s muffled voice from the living room, Ian’s full-throated laugh.

  “He seems like a good dude,” Gabe says. “Ian, I mean.”

  “He is,” I agree, standing on my tiptoes and setting a plate in the narrow cupboard. “Sadie, too.”

  Gabe nods. “Yeah,” he agrees, mouth quirking. “She’s a good dude.”

  “So how’s things?” I ask as we finish up, wiping my hands on the threadbare dish towel and then on the back of my jeans for good measure. “How’s school, how’s everybody at home, how’s Pilot?” Pilot is the Donnellys’ hound mix, a loyal rescue with soulful eyes and terrible breath; he used to rest his head in my lap while I did homework at the kitchen table in the farmhouse, leaving damp spots of drool on my thigh.

  “Everything’s good,” Gabe replies, though he’s angling his body slightly away from mine so I can’t get a real look at his face as he says it. “Same as always. Not a ton to report.” He hesitates for a minute, draping a dish towel over the edge of the sink to dry. “The shop had kind of a slow summer, I guess, but other than that.”

  “Really?” I’m surprised—when I think of his family’s pizza place it’s always packed, old Motown on the jukebox and pies coming out of the brick oven at breakneck speed, little kids and their tired-looking parents lined up on the bench outside the front window to wait. “What’s going on?”

  Gabe shrugs almost violently, all shoulders and elbows. “Who knows?” he says. “It’s fine, it’s not a big deal or anything. We’ll bounce back.”

  I nod cautiously. There’s something about his delivery I don’t entirely buy—it’s a reasonable facsimile of breezy coolness, maybe, but not the real thing. Still, I keep my mouth shut. After all, he isn’t mine to press.

  “So how you doing, Molly Barlow?” he asks, leaning back against the orange laminate countertop and crossing his arms. He always used to call me by my first and last names when we were dating, paradoxically intimate, and the nickname combined with the fact that he hasn’t bolted from the room at his first available opportunity does something to the inside of my body, wringing all my organs out like a sponge. “You taking the business world by storm up in Boston?”

  “I mean, I don’t know about that,” I say carefully. “But I really, really love it there.”

  Gabe’s smile falls then—just a little bit, around the eyes, and nothing you’d notice if you hadn’t spent your whole life getting intimately acquainted with the finer details of his face—and I wonder if he’s thinking of his own brush with Boston life. Last summer while we were dating he got pretty far along in the interview process for an undergrad program at Mass General, which would have put him just down the road from my dorm near Kenmore Square. He and I were already broken up by the time he found out he didn’t get in, but for a while at least, Boston was a thing Gabe and I were going to do together. “Yeah,” he says now, “I can tell.”

  It doesn’t sound precisely like a compliment, and I raise my eyebrows. “What?” I ask. “How do you mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Gabe says. “You’re different, is all.”

  I shake my head, suddenly self-conscious, lifting a hand to the back of my neck as I remember what Imogen said outside in the plant hospital. “It’s just a haircut,” I protest, trying not to sound defensive. “Some new clothes.”

  “I don’t mean your haircut.” Gabe picks the dish towel up again, wipes at the already clean countertop. “So what,” he asks, not quite looking at me, “you did the whole college reinvention thing? New year, new you?”

  His tone riles me—like he thinks it’s stupid or immature, something I read about in Cosmo. “It has nothing to do with college,” I tell him, although of course it does, a little—after all, when else was I going to get the chance to start so entirely over? The chance to be someone so perfectly new? But that’s not the only reason why. “Maybe I just didn’t like who I was back in Star Lake.”

  Gabe shrugs. “Seems like kind of a big transformation, is all.”

  “Does it?” I ask, prickly. “Well, next time I’ll check with you before I make any significant lifestyle changes, how about.”

  Gabe rolls his eyes. “I’m not trying to pick a fight with you,” he says, although actually it feels like that’s exactly what he’s doing. “I’m just saying, I never thought you were so bad to begin with.”

  I laugh out loud, I can’t help it, a mean witchy cackle that doesn’t sound anything like my normal laugh. “Oh, really?” I demand, emboldened by the naked nerve of him. “’Cause I’ll be honest, you could have fooled me.”

  Gabe opens his mouth, closes it again. “I—” He breaks off. “Look, Molly,” he tries. “What happened last summer was—”

  “Hurry up in here!” comes Imogen’s voice from behind me. When I turn she’s standing in the doorway with her arms crossed, a skeptical look on her face like she suspects she’s saving me from myself. It’s not like that, I want to tell her, except for the part where maybe it actually is. “Everything okay?”

  I nod, pushing my hair behind my ears and smiling sunnily, turning purposefully away from Gabe. “Everything’s super,” I tell her, wrapping an arm around her waist and squeezing. “Just catching up. Is there more wine?”

  “There sure is,” Imogen says, picking the bottle up by the neck and waving it in my direction. “Come on.”

  Out in the living room Beyoncé has given way to Amy Winehouse, moody and mournful; I plunk down next to Ian on the carpet, breathing in his whiskey-skin smell. “Hi,” I say, more enthusiastically than I mean to. It occurs to me that I’m really glad to see his face.

  “Come sit,” Sadie calls to Gabe, who’s still skulking in the kitchen doorway. She scoots over on the sofa to make room for him, tucking her bare, callused feet underneath her. “We’re playing Never Have I Ever.”

  “We’re playing what?” I all but squawk. Oh, that does not feel like a good idea at all. Back at school I made it my mission to avoid getting-to-know-you games of any stripe, up to and including the throwback rum-soaked rounds of Truth or Dare Roisin and her sorority sisters liked to play after their meetings on Monday nights. I liked those girls, the gaggle of them huddled on Roisin’s bed in a cloud of perfectly drapey Madewell sweaters, but I always smiled and shook my head when they asked me to come play. “Really?”

  “I was pushing for Quarters,” Imogen tells me, topping off my wineglass by way of apology. “But we don’t have enough beer.”

  “Can you not play Quarters with wine?” I ask hopefully.

  “How sophisticated,” Ian teases. “Very French.”

  I’m about to suggest a list of more desirable alternatives—a late-night nature walk, a game of charades, ritual blood sacrifice—when Gabe speaks up. “I think it sounds fun,” he says as he crosses the living room and settles down beside Sadie, slinging one ropy arm around her shoulders and putting his feet up on Imogen’s rickety coffee table. “I’ll play.”

  That throws me: after all, I’d have expected him to be at least as unwilling to go dredging up the past as I am. For a second I wonder what he’s after, if maybe he’s only agreeing for the sake of giving me a hard time—but that’s something Patrick would have done, not Gabe. Not every
decision he makes is about you, I remind myself firmly. If he doesn’t think it’s a big deal, then neither do I. I can’t live the rest of my life desperate to control every single social interaction, can I? Maybe I really do just need to loosen up.

  “I mean, if everybody’s doing it,” I say, taking a generous gulp of my wine. “I’m in.”

  “Really?” Ian looks over at me, surprise written all over his face.

  “Sure,” I say, a little too forcefully. “Why not?”

  “Just surprised, that’s all.” Ian shrugs. “It’s not usually your kind of thing.”

  “Well,” I reply with a smile, trying to keep my voice light. “I guess tonight it is. Kuddelmuddel, right?”

  Ian smiles back at that, easy. “Fair enough,” he agrees, reaching behind me and running a finger over the small of my back inside my tank top.

  “Okay, I’m starting,” Imogen announces, then grins wickedly. “Never have I ever been to London this morning.”

  All of us groan. “Oh, come on!” I shout in mock outrage. “That’s how it’s going to be?”

  “That is exactly how it’s going to be,” Imogen says primly. “Now drink, all of you.”

  Forty-five minutes later we’ve polished off the rest of the wine, plus some Jameson and an ancient, dust-furred bottle of Sambuca Ian found at the back of a kitchen cabinet. Imogen is warm and giggly, lying on her back with her head propped up on a stack of throw pillows. There’s a humming looseness in my limbs. Only Sadie, who has apparently never so much as jaywalked, is still resolutely sober, sitting with her tan fingers wrapped around the bowl of her wineglass as the rest of us confess to cheating on finals (Gabe and Imogen), shoplifting (me and Imogen together, plus Ian in an incident involving a plastic dinosaur when he was six), and having sex in a public place (Imogen again). I know that shouldn’t irritate me—the fact that I’m even registering it makes me feel like a mean girl in a nineties movie, judging some fresh-faced ingenue for her lack of debaucherous behavior—but the longer we sit here the clearer it becomes that Gabe has chosen someone as unlike me as humanly possible, like she and I are a study in chiaroscuro out of one of Imogen’s art books.

  “Really?” Imogen asks, looking at Sadie incredulously as the rest of us raise our glasses yet again. “You’ve never broken curfew?”

  Sadie shrugs. “I never had a curfew to break!” she says, smiling a helpless, what can you do kind of smile. “My parents just trusted me, I guess.”

  “Oh, you’re one of those,” Ian says, grinning; he’s enjoying himself, his cheeks flushed a ruddy pink under his beard. “Okay, my turn. Never have I ever . . .” He trails off, thinking a moment. “Never have I ever cheated on anybody.”

  Oh, for God’s sake. It was inevitable, I guess, from the moment we started playing; still, just like that, the game is done. Suddenly I’m furious—at Sadie for her cheerful guilelessness, at Gabe for saying any of this sounded like fun to begin with, at myself most of all for the million and one bad decisions that led up to this point. The rules of the game are clear: I need to pick up my glass, take a sip, and own up to my past indiscretions.

  But I don’t.

  Instead I hold my drink resolutely in my lap, silently daring Gabe to call me out in front of everyone and gambling on the notion I still know him well enough that he won’t. After all, we’ve both moved on, haven’t we? What could he possibly have to gain?

  My bet pays off: the room goes quiet, save the low croon of Imogen’s speakers, Amy Winehouse wondering who’ll still love her tomorrow. “Nobody, huh?” Ian asks, looking around the silent circle with interest. “What upright emotional citizens we all are.”

  “Seriously,” Imogen says, then—and God, have I ever loved anyone like I love Imogen?—lets out a big, exaggerated yawn. “Probably best to quit while we’re ahead,” she says. “Time for bed, yeah? Which means the rest of you need to clear out of here so I can put sheets on the pullout for these two.” She motions to Sadie and Gabe, stopping to think for a minute. “Assuming I have sheets for the pullout. Huh.”

  “I’ll help you look,” Sadie says, climbing to her feet with an easy, athletic grace and following Imogen in the direction of a tiny front closet. I escape down the hallway to the bedroom I’m sharing with Ian, and I don’t look back as I go.

  Day 4

  Ireland in the early morning reminds me of Star Lake at the very end of winter when the ground has just thawed, everything damp and fresh and green-smelling. I dig my sneakers out of the bottom of my suitcase and do a few loops around the grounds of the convent, taking deep sips of the cool morning air. I ran competitively in high school, but now it’s just a thing I like to do to shake the cobwebs out, a way to clear my head; in Boston I went every morning even in the dead of winter, icy pavement slippery under my feet and the cold wind rattling deep inside my chest cavity. Roisin thought I was a maniac. “Who’s chasing you?” she liked to joke.

  “Myself,” I always told her, and jammed my headphones into my ears.

  This morning it’s more of a shuffle than a sprint, jet lag coupled with the sticky residue of last night’s wine fog; still, I’m pink-cheeked and puffing when I make it back, stopping to stretch for a minute before heading inside. I stumble into the bathroom, bumping the door open with my hip as I untangle my headphones—and find Gabe standing in front of the ancient enamel sink wearing a pair of gray boxer briefs and nothing else.

  “Oh my God!” I yelp, louder than is probably necessary, holding my hands up in raw, shocked panic. “Sorry sorry sorry, I didn’t know anybody was in here.”

  “Um, yeah,” Gabe says quickly, sounding a bit rattled himself. “I am.”

  “I . . . see that,” I agree. My eyes flick around the green-tiled bathroom for a second, desperately trying to find somewhere safe to land, but it’s like everywhere I look there’s Gabe and his mostly naked body, his chest and his collarbones and the faint trail of dark hair between his navel and his waistband. “Sorry. I’ll—” I motion toward the door so enthusiastically that one of my headphones flies out of my hand and lassoes itself around the doorknob. I grimace.

  “No, it’s cool,” Gabe says as I’m desperately trying to set myself free. “I’m just finishing up. You can—”

  “Oh, no, that’s fine, I—” I shake my head, finally getting the cord untangled with a brutal yank and straightening up again. He and I dance an awkward two-step, both of us moving from side to side in tandem to try and get out of each other’s way. He smells like toothpaste and like sleep, his body radiating that just-woke warmness. “Sorry,” I say again. He shared a bed with Sadie last night, I remind myself. “Hangover brain, or something.”

  Gabe smiles at that, just faintly. “Yeah,” he admits, “I guess everybody hit it kind of hard last night.”

  Well, not everybody, I think, then immediately feel ashamed of myself. God, I have no chill at all. I remember how riled I got last night during our argument in the kitchen, remind myself to get a grip. “Yeah,” I echo, then lower my voice. “Um, about that. Sorry about the whole Never Have I Ever thing.”

  Gabe waves a hand to stop me. “Don’t worry about it,” he says. “I had fun, for a while at least. And it’s a complicated situation, right? Bound to get a little awkward now and then.”

  Well, that’s an understatement. “Yeah,” I finally agree. “I guess you’re right.”

  We stand there for a moment, neither one of us talking. Gabe rubs at his bare, freckly shoulder, self-conscious; it occurs to me that I’m definitely not the only person aware of just how small this space is. Still, I can’t help but notice he isn’t moving anymore. In fact, neither one of us is.

  “So I’m going to go,” I blurt, even though he literally just said he was finished. “Um. Sorry again. Bye!” I turn around and bail out of the tiny bathroom before I can catch sight of the expression on his face—or, I think guiltily, before he can read anything into the expression on mine.

  I find Imogen in the kitchen. “I just walked in on Gabe
in the bathroom,” I announce, compelled to unburden myself. Then I turn around and see Sadie standing at the table with a mixing bowl and wooden spoon.

  “Um,” I amend immediately, “I didn’t see anything.” I smile at Sadie, looking at her with wide, interested eyes and changing the subject. “What are you making?”

  “They’re trail mix muffins,” she says, scraping down the sides of the bowl. “I went down into town this morning to get the ingredients. It felt like the least I could do to say thank you to Imogen for letting us crash here.”

  “I keep telling her it’s nothing,” Imogen says, hopping up on the counter, her bare heels bumping lightly along the cabinets. “But I’ve also never turned down a baked good in my life, so. Trail mix muffins for everybody.”

  “We used to make them at base camp and eat them on hikes,” Sadie says. She sets the bowl down on the table and reaches for an ancient-looking muffin tin that Imogen must have scrounged up from the back of some dusty cabinet. “The kids couldn’t get enough of them.”

  “Gabe wasn’t a camp counselor too, was he?” Imogen asks, sneaking a chocolate chip out of the open bag on the counter. “I can’t really picture him out there on the mountain starting fires with, like, a piece of string and one safety pin.”

  Sadie shakes her head. “He was back at home with his family this summer,” she says, voice quiet. She pauses for a moment, eyes cast down as she spoons the batter into the greased tins. “So hey, can I ask you two something?” she begins, still not looking at us. “You’ve known Gabe a long time, right?”

  I feel Imogen’s dark gaze flick in my direction; I nearly swallow my tongue. “Um, yeah,” I manage, a flush that’s got nothing to do with my run creeping up my back underneath my T-shirt. “Both of us have, since we were little kids.”

  Sadie nods. She wipes a smear of batter from the back of her hand with a dish towel, not licking it off like I would have. “Does he seem—” She stops, seeming to reconsider. “I don’t know. Never mind.”