Top Ten

by Katie Cotugno

  Outside was better. The football field was green and sunny, heavy with the smell of freshly mown grass: everywhere you looked was a sea of skirts and cargo shorts, like everyone had suddenly remembered they had legs. Gabby glanced down at her jeans. She’d thought you were supposed to feel different after you lost your virginity, but actually since having sex with Shay she just felt more like herself. And for once, that wasn’t actually such a bad way to feel.

  Mr. Caplan took attendance and told them to stay together, but as the minutes ticked by and the all-clear bell didn’t ring, people started drifting away in clusters, finding their friends. Gabby glanced around for Shay but didn’t see her, so she dug the book she was reading out of her backpack, hoping nobody would notice she was sitting off to the side by herself like a giant loser. She’d nearly reached the bleachers when she caught sight of a familiar pair of shoulders and stopped short: standing not three feet away from her, effortlessly casual and improbably alone, was Ryan.

  Gabby gulped. She meant to slip away unnoticed, to pretend she hadn’t seen him and continue on toward the bleachers, where she could shove her earphones in and bury herself in her book and quell the anxiety blooming like a fungus in her chest. But just then Ryan turned his head, and their gazes locked.

  Gabby winced: she watched him do the same thing as she had, weighing in his mind whether or not he could act like he hadn’t seen her. He must have decided he couldn’t, because after a moment he raised one hand in a wave. Gabby waved back, swallowing something that felt like a wad of paper towel jammed down into her throat. “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey, yourself.” He looked different, she realized. She’d caught him out of the corner of her eye around school, obviously, but she hadn’t really let herself see him, and now that she did she found herself vaguely unnerved. His hair was shorter and less messy; his shoulders were broader inside his T-shirt. He looked bigger than she thought of him as being, generally. It was weird. “What’s up?”

  “Oh, you know,” Gabby said. “Enjoying the sunshine.” Immediately, she cringed. Enjoying the sunshine? Where were they, the courtyard of their nursing home? She gestured around at the crowded field, the fire trucks parked outside the building. “Is this real?”

  Ryan shook his head. “Nah, I don’t think so,” he said. “I think some asshole just pulled it to get outside for a little bit. Not that I’m complaining. I was in the middle of an essay test on The Old Man and the Sea, and it was not going great.”

  He hesitated for a moment, then shrugged. “I will say, English is harder without you around to point out the symbols.”

  Gabby’s heart did something weird and painful inside her chest, a feeling like a muscle tearing. “I mostly just google,” she admitted.

  “Well, still,” Ryan said. Gabby nodded. The silence stretched out between them, like a highway neither one of them could figure out how to cross. Gabby knew there had been a time when it was fine to be quiet around Ryan, when they’d spent entire afternoons sitting around and not talking, but it felt like they’d happened to somebody else entirely. “Well,” he said again, after a moment. “See you around, yeah?”

  “Yeah, definitely.” Gabby shoved her hands into her back pockets, told herself she was being ridiculous. They’d been friends—best friends, even. But they weren’t anymore. It was what it was. It was fine. It was—

  “Ryan,” she heard herself say, and it came out a lot more urgently than she’d meant for it to; she waited to be embarrassed, but the feeling never came. She had a chance here, and she hadn’t even realized how badly she’d wanted one until she was a second away from wasting it.

  He turned around. “What’s up?” he asked, sounding slightly impatient; Gabby forged ahead.

  “You want to get out of here?”

  That got his attention. He looked at her for a moment, his sandy head tilted to the side. “Like, cut eighth period?”

  “Yeah, like cut eighth period,” Gabby said. Then, when he hesitated: “What are you, scared?”

  He grinned at her then, wide and tickled and completely himself, and it was like she was seeing him, the real him, for the first time since that awful night in December. “Of course I’m not scared,” he said.

  “Okay,” Gabby said, taking a deep breath and grinning back. “Then let’s go bowling.”

  RYAN

  The weirdest part of hanging out with Gabby again after all these months, Ryan thought, was how it didn’t actually feel that weird at all. “You two!” said the shoe rental lady at Langham Lanes, her head full of tight gray curls and glasses hanging on a chair around her neck. “Haven’t seen you around here in a while. Is it school vacation?”

  “Yup,” Ryan lied easily, fixing her with his most dazzling smile. Gabby shook her head.

  The alley was mostly empty at this time of day, a couple of harried-looking moms with kids rolling balls down the lanes at a glacial pace. It smelled like it always did, like air-conditioning and the concession stand and underneath that like socks. “Food?” Gabby asked.

  “I just ate lunch,” Ryan told her. “So, yes, definitely.”

  Gabby smiled at that, digging some bills out of her back pocket and getting their usual without asking, which made Ryan a little sad without totally understanding why. It was the same kind of feeling he got when he saw his parents smiling at each other in his baby pictures.

  They didn’t say much as they bowled, just a little idle trash talk. Ryan figured it ought to feel awkward, but it didn’t. Gabby kicked his ass, predictably; he bought her a twenty-five-cent bouncy ball from the machine by the exit to say congrats.

  “New car, huh?” he asked as they walked out to the parking lot, Gabby hitting a button on her key ring and unlocking a black Nissan sedan. He’d noticed on the way over here, obviously, but hadn’t said anything.

  “Well, my mom’s old car,” Gabby explained hastily—thinking, no doubt, about the fact that Ryan would probably be bumming rides off people until he was thirty, with the exception of the rare occasions he could convince his mom to lend him the Dogmobile. “She’s got a new one. I’m only driving it because Celia’s not allowed to have one at school.”

  Ryan nodded. “How is everybody?” he asked. “Your family, I mean.”

  Gabby smiled at that. “They’re good,” she told him, filling him in on Kristina’s dance recital and her mom’s book and the Parmesan cheese straws her dad and Shay had made for Monopoly last week.

  He’d been wondering about that. “So you and Shay still, huh?” he asked, sitting back in the passenger seat and trying to sound casual. “Where’s she going to school in the fall?”

  “Columbia.” They headed through Colson Village, past the bank and the bagel place and the fussy little cheese shop. “So not too far.”

  “Are you guys going to stay together?”

  “Yup,” Gabby said, no hesitation. Ryan told himself there was no reason to feel a tiny bit disappointed about that. “And you and Chelsea still, yeah? She always seemed, like, really nice.”

  “She is,” Ryan said. “You guys would like each other.” Actually he had no idea if that was the case, but clearly Gabby was trying, and it seemed like the right thing to say. “Her family rents a place in the Poconos at the start of every summer, which is cool. I think I’m going to go with them this year.”

  “Ugh, summer plans.” They were stopped at a red light, and she banged her skull lightly against her headrest. “Mr. Chan thinks I should do this photo thing.”

  Ryan looked over at her. “What kind of photo thing?”

  “Like with professionals and stuff. But it’s all the way in California and sounds kind of like a misery, so.”

  “But you want to do it?”

  “No,” Gabby said as the light turned green; she hesitated for a moment before stepping on the gas, then sighed. “It’s just—well. I mean. Sure, in a perfect world. Yes.” She huffed out a wry, quiet sound then, not quite a laugh. “I haven’t said that out loud to anybody else, you know
that? I haven’t even really thought it. But you show up, and five seconds later I’m, like, falling all over myself to—” She broke off. “Anyway,” she said, clearing her throat. “I’m not going to go.”

  Ryan’s heart did something strange and complicated inside his chest then, a feeling like both swelling up and cracking at once. He thought he should probably push her, ask what exactly was keeping this world from being perfect, but he was so relieved that she was talking to him at all that he didn’t want to risk ruining it. “I’m glad you told me about it,” he finally said.

  It was late afternoon when they got back to his mom’s house; they sat there for a moment with the engine off, Gabby’s hands still on the wheel. “Can I ask you what happened, with your head?” she asked him. “I mean, you don’t have to tell me. But.”

  Ryan took a breath. “I sat out the season,” he said, trying as hard as he possibly could not to sound like he blamed her. “I’ll start again in the fall. Coach is supposed to talk to some scouts for me. Hopefully there’s still a spot for me at a school somewhere.”

  Gabby nodded. “I know you wanted me to say I was sorry,” she said. “And I am sorry for how it all went down.”

  Ryan didn’t really want to talk about this, truthfully. “It was a stupid fight.”

  “I don’t actually think it was stupid,” Gabby said. “I was freaked out and worried for you, but I said a lot of garbage-y stuff, and I’m sorry about that. And I’m really sorry we lost our whole friendship over it.”

  “We didn’t lose our whole friendship,” he protested.

  “Ryan,” Gabby said, and for the barest fraction of a second she looked like she might be about to cry. “We haven’t talked in five months.”

  Ryan couldn’t argue with that, he guessed. “We’re talking now,” he pointed out.

  Gabby nodded. “Yeah,” she allowed finally. “We’re talking now.”

  They sat there for another minute, the air through the open windows springtime cool and his house a shadowy outline against the streaky orange-pink sky. “It was good to see you,” Gabby said, looking down at her hands on the steering wheel. “I owe a thank-you to whoever pulled that fire alarm.”

  Ryan nodded. “Yeah,” he said, “definitely.” He felt weirdly nervous all of a sudden, like he’d finally taught himself not to miss her and this afternoon was undoing it. He kind of didn’t want to let her out of his sight. “What are you doing this weekend, huh?” he blurted, before he could think better of it.

  Gabby shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Nothing super special.”

  “Monopoly Friday?”

  She huffed out a little breath at that, like Yes, I know I’m predictable. Ryan had missed the way she breathed. “Yeah, probably.” She looked over at him then, her face half in shadow. “Why,” she asked, sounding timid and wry at once, “you wanna come?”

  Ryan did. He wanted it like all hell, and the wanting was so fierce and sudden that it knocked him back a little. He was homesick, he realized. He was homesick for her. He made himself wait a beat before he answered. “Can I bring Chelsea?”

  Gabby blinked at that. “I—sure,” she said, pausing exactly one second too long for it to sound entirely natural. “Of course.”

  Ryan nodded anyway. “Great,” he said. “We’ll be there.”

  GABBY

  “Taste these,” Gabby’s dad said to Shay on Friday night, crunching thoughtfully on the marinated cocktail nuts he was about to slide into the oven, 1,001 Crowd-Pleasing Party Appetizers open on the counter beside him. “They taste boring to me.”

  Shay plucked a few off the baking sheet. “Cumin, maybe?” she asked after a moment. “My mom always puts cumin on her microwave popcorn.”

  “Cumin!” Gabby’s dad said happily, and Gabby smiled. Her family had never given her any grief about being bi—she’d accidentally blurted out her giant crush on Zendaya in front of her mom and Celia in the car one day the summer before ninth grade, after which her parents had sat her down over bowls of ice cream and told her, in a nice but exceedingly embarrassing way, that they only ever wanted her to be happy. Still, she’d been kind of nervous to introduce an actual, nontheoretical girlfriend to her parents, but it turned out that her dad and Shay had a weird amount in common: cooking and disaster movies and a dorky, fanatical love of the US Women’s Soccer team. Normally it made Gabby really happy; tonight, she was too anxious to care.

  “We’ll finish these,” she said now, jumping at the chance for a project, something to do with her nervous hands. She wasn’t entirely sure what had possessed her to invite Ryan over tonight. It felt like too much too soon, like they’d barely even made up yet. “Cumin, yeah?”

  She and Shay were just sliding the trays into the oven when the doorbell rang. “Ryan!” Gabby’s dad cried when he answered it, looking so delighted that Gabby almost felt embarrassed for him. If he’d had a tail he probably would have wagged it. Gabby rolled her eyes.

  “Hey, Mr. Hart,” Ryan said, handing over his customary bag of sour-cream-and-onion Ruffles. “This is my girlfriend, Chelsea.”

  Chelsea smiled at her dad, then past him at Gabby. “Thanks for inviting me,” she said.

  Gabby smiled back. She’d hung out with Chelsea a couple of times before she and Ryan had their fight, although honestly Gabby hadn’t expected her to last this long and hadn’t really paid a ton of attention. She couldn’t repress the urge to stare a little bit now. It was odd: she’d always thought that if Ryan ever got a serious girlfriend it would be someone . . . prettier. Not that Chelsea wasn’t pretty—she was, with dark curly hair and friendly brown eyes. But she was normal pretty, not Instagram-model pretty. It kind of weirded Gabby out. Having Chelsea here in the first place weirded her out, honestly; the truth was, Gabby had been instantly irritated when Ryan had asked to bring her tonight, even though she knew that made her a giant bitch. She just felt so invaded.

  “Hey,” Ryan said, looking at her curiously.

  “Hey,” Gabby said, and turned toward the kitchen door.

  They got snacks and drinks and rounded up Kristina from the basement; as they were heading back into the living room, Shay pulled Gabby into the darkness of the stairwell. “Hi,” she said, pressing a ChapSticked kiss against Gabby’s mouth.

  Gabby grinned. “Hi,” she said, and kissed Shay back, hooking her fingers in Shay’s belt loop and tugging her close. Shay made a quiet sound, cupping Gabby’s face in two warm hands. “You realize there’s a room full of people like, right around the corner.”

  “I do, in fact,” Shay said. Her hands were wandering now, slipping up under Gabby’s button-down, her fingertips whisper-light against Gabby’s skin. “I’m trying to distract you. Is it working?”

  Gabby swallowed hard. She’d worried things might feel awkward and different after they’d had sex, but instead it was like she just wanted to be around Shay more, if that was possible. “I mean, yes,” she said, pushing herself against Shay’s hip; Shay smiled, pleased. “Do I seem like I need to be distracted?”

  She was teasing, expecting to be teased in return, but instead Shay pulled back and considered her for a moment. “I don’t know,” she said quietly. “You okay out there? You have a look on your face like maybe you feel weird.”

  “This is my normal face,” Gabby said, then, gesturing between them: “I mean, this is not my normal face, but that”—she tilted her head toward the living room—“totally normal.”

  “Okay,” Shay said, like she thought Gabby was full of garbage but wasn’t going to push her. “If you say so.”

  Gabby huffed a breath out, frustrated. She did feel weird, obviously she felt weird, and obviously it was about Ryan being here in her living room with his girlfriend. But it wasn’t because she wanted to be Ryan’s girlfriend, and there was no way to describe what she was feeling to Shay without making it sound like that’s what was going on. That had always been the problem with her friendship with Ryan: she couldn’t explain it properly to anyone, not rea
lly. Sometimes it was like she couldn’t even explain it properly to herself. “I get strange about new people at my house,” she said finally. “You know that.”

  “You get strange about new people everywhere,” Shay pointed out, but she was smiling like that was a thing she found charming. Gabby felt herself relax.

  They kissed another long minute, Gabby letting herself sink into it: Shay’s plush mouth and the lavender smell of her perfume, how soft her body was. Before they headed back into the living room, Gabby grabbed her by the sleeve. “Hey,” she said, pulling her back into the darkness of the hallway. “I’m glad I have you on my team, you know that? For, like, Monopoly, and also life.”

  Shay smiled her you’re such a dork, Gabby Hart smile, but she also squeezed Gabby’s hand. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  They went back out into the living room, plopped down around the coffee table. Kristina was banker, carefully doling out everybody’s colorful cash. “I know you’re all quaking in your boots now that the reigning champ is back,” said Ryan, who had literally never won a game in all the time he’d been coming to Monopoly. “I’ll try to go easy on you, let you reacclimate and all.”

  “You do that,” Gabby said, smiling in a way she hoped was convincing. She should have been happy. She was happy. These were all her most important people, weren’t they? Back in one place where they belonged.

  Well, she guessed. All her most important people, plus Chelsea.

  Gabby tore her paper napkin into shreds on the carpet, glancing around as the game went on. She could only imagine the kind of conversation the two of them would have had on the ride over here: Monopoly? Chelsea must have asked, face crinkling in confusion and contempt. Really? Why were you friends with this person again?

  Still, Gabby couldn’t deny that Chelsea didn’t seem like the kind of person who would actually say anything like that. In fact, her niceness was almost aggressive. She was a good question-asker, a person with a lot of stories to tell: about her mom, who’d been her dad’s boss in a medical lab in Stanford, about the wilderness camp she was going to be a counselor at this summer once they got back from the Poconos.