“I have not,” Gabby said. She tucked her hands up into the sleeves of her jacket—she’d put it on backward, was wearing it like a blanket with her knees curled up underneath. She hated everything about being long-distance. She’d spent her life curating a tiny collection of people she cared about desperately, and she wanted to have all of them around her always, the way she’d arranged her army of stuffed animals on her bed when she was small.
She and Shay had planned to visit every few weeks—after all, it was only two hours on the commuter train, one end of the line to the other—but all autumn things had been getting in the way. They’d seen each other for Thanksgiving, although Shay had a paper to write and Gabby’s aunt Liz had been in town from Cincinnati and Shay had to get back early on Sunday for a meeting, so they’d only had a little bit of time to hang out. All Gabby wanted to do was lie in Shay’s college bed all weekend, to smell her smell and eat crispy M&M’s while watching shows she’d already seen on Netflix. All she wanted was to feel like things were normal again.
“You nervous?” Ryan asked, looking at her one more time over his shoulder.
“Nope,” Gabby lied, and stared out the window at the trees.
RYAN
Ryan and Chelsea checked into the hotel in Midtown, dropping their bags in a teeny room with a window overlooking the roof of the building next door and a bathroom hardly big enough to turn around in. “This is cool,” Chelsea said, bouncing a bit on the mattress. “I’m not going to lie, I feel very grown-up right now.”
Ryan felt very grown-up too, although his dad had given him the credit card number to make the reservation, Ryan paying him back with the rest of the money he’d socked away working at Walter’s. “Good job, kid,” he’d said when Ryan had explained the situation, slapping him a little too hard between his shoulder blades. “Popular with the girls just like your old man, huh?” Ryan knew the whole thing was probably a little messed up—maybe more than a little—but it was also nice to feel like his dad was proud of him, even if it was only for something like this.
“So, what first?” Chelsea asked, pulling a pop-up map of Manhattan out of her purse as they rode the tiny elevator downstairs to the lobby. Chelsea had a long list of things she wanted to do while they were here, more than they could ever cram into eighteen hours: the Empire State Building, a park that was built on old railroad tracks, some haunted theme restaurant with animatronic monsters. “Should we take the subway? The internet says it’s almost always faster to take the subway, but I don’t want to get lost and wind up wandering around underground the whole time.”
Ryan had no idea; he hadn’t spent a ton of time in the city either, beyond a couple of Rangers games with his dad when he was a kid. He’d booked the hotel, but Chelsea was the one who had done all the research. She’d make an excellent cruise director, he thought. “You’re the boss,” he said, and Chelsea grinned at him.
“That’s a fact.”
They ended up walking until they hit Times Square, all crowded sidewalks and biting air, the smell of car exhaust and roasting meat and the mysterious smoke coming up out of the sewers. Ryan couldn’t get over how tall everything was here, the way the buildings loomed above him. He couldn’t decide if he liked it or he didn’t, and he wished for a moment that Gabby was here so that he could ask her what she thought.
“So that was the Sacred Heart scout at the ice center again last night, huh?” Chelsea asked as they poked through a store devoted entirely to M&M’s.
Ryan nodded. It was the second time the guy had shown up, which was promising; he’d had a decent game, though there was no guarantee he was what the coaches there were looking for. The powerless uncertainty of this whole stupid process was driving him a little bit insane. Even if he got recruited, there was no guarantee of a scholarship. Even if he got a scholarship, there was no guarantee it would be enough. “We’ll see,” he hedged after a moment.
Chelsea was undeterred. “That’s exciting, though,” she pointed out, filling a plastic baggie with bright purple candy; the whole gimmick of this place seemed to be how many different colors you could get, which seemed beside the point to Ryan since they all tasted exactly the same. “Their team is pretty good.”
Their team was average at best, actually, but Ryan knew what she was hinting at. Chelsea was staying at home for college, so if he wound up at school in Connecticut it would be easy for them to see each other. Still, it was weird of her not to just come out and say it. Normally, she was incredibly direct. It was one of the things Ryan liked most about her.
“It’ll depend on where they want me,” he said again, helping himself to a sample of white M&M’s and ignoring a nasty look from the cashier. “If they want me anywhere.”
Chelsea smiled, leaning over and kissing him on the cheek. “They’ll want you,” she assured him.
Ryan smiled back but didn’t say anything. He knew she was trying to be supportive, but sometimes it felt like an extra layer of pressure, trying to figure this whole college thing out with a girlfriend to think about on top of everything else. They hadn’t talked about it explicitly, but he guessed he understood why Chelsea would expect him to take her into account when he was figuring out where he was going to go. After all, they’d been together a full year. That was a lifetime in high school. It was literally twelve times longer than any other relationship Ryan had ever had.
Still, he thought as he took Chelsea’s bag of candy, digging some cash out of his pocket: it was only a year. He’d been offended all those months ago when Gabby had been so sure he was going to get tired of Chelsea like he’d gotten tired of every other girl he’d been with. Part of him had wanted to prove her wrong. But another part of him felt like he’d blinked and all this time had gone by, and now his relationship with Chelsea had all these long-term strings attached that he’d never entirely bargained for. It kind of made him feel a little trapped.
Chelsea leaned in close as they left the candy store, angling her body into his as a buffer from the rushing crowd on the sidewalk. Ryan wrapped a protective arm around her, feeling like a bit of a dick. After all, it wasn’t like he didn’t love her. He totally loved her. She was awesome. But who knew what could happen in another year? Who knew if they’d still be together? Honestly, Ryan had a million friends, and he liked all of them, but the only person he knew for absolute sure he still wanted to be around after graduation was—
Well. Gabby, actually. But somehow he didn’t think that was the kind of thing Chelsea wanted to hear.
Thinking about Gabby had him digging his phone out of his pocket to see if she’d texted to say how it was going; she hadn’t, but Ryan didn’t know if that meant anything or not. It was hard to tell what the deal was with her and Shay lately. When he could get her to talk about it at all, Gabby always said everything was business as usual, but Ryan wasn’t so sure. Maybe he ought to text her, just to che—
“Everything okay?” Chelsea asked, peering at him over the top of her pop-up map.
“Everything’s great,” Ryan said, slipping his phone back into his pocket. “Where to next?”
GABBY
By the time Ryan dropped her in front of Shay’s dorm building, the general anxiety that had been simmering behind her breastbone all day had flared up into something immediate and unignorable; Gabby tried to take a deep breath. Sometimes her panic felt like a stranger handing her a screaming baby and then walking blithely away: She didn’t want it. She couldn’t control it. And her guess was as good as anybody else’s about what would make it stop.
Here! she texted, glancing nervously around the lobby. It looked like a fancy apartment, with a bank of elevators and a reception desk and swarms of college kids rushing across the marble tile in a blur of scarves and boots and slouchy wool hats that somehow hung effortlessly off the very back of people’s heads without ever slipping off. Gabby jammed her hands in the pockets of her parka, feeling like she might as well be wearing a sign around her neck that said Embarrassing High Schooler f
rom the Suburbs. She hovered near the revolving door and stared studiously down at her sneakers, trying not to get in anyone’s way.
Be right down! Shay texted back after what felt like an eternity. Gabby let out a breath.
It was an even longer, more uncomfortable age before Shay finally appeared in the lobby, wearing jeans and a pale gray T-shirt that showed off her collarbones, her long hair in a braid over one shoulder. “Well hey,” she said, planting a kiss on Gabby’s mouth, smiling. Then she pulled back and frowned. “Are you okay?”
“Yup!” Gabby lied. The last thing she wanted was to be showing up on her girlfriend’s college doorstep smack in the middle of a panicker. She thought maybe if she could act like it wasn’t happening, it wouldn’t be. “I’m great. Really happy to see you.”
“Me too.” Shay grinned as she led Gabby up a flight of narrow stairs and down a cinderblock hallway, waving or saying hi to almost everyone they passed. “I have a million things planned for while you’re here.”
Gabby’s eyes widened. “You do?”
“I do,” Shay said, stopping in front of a door festooned with a giant construction-paper heart reading Shay and Adria and letting them inside. “Some things before others, obviously.”
“Obviously.” Gabby looked around hungrily at the twin sets of university-issue furniture, the Christmas lights strung up above the windows. It looked so different from Shay’s room at home—the fact that it was a dorm, obviously, but it wasn’t just that. The bookshelves were crammed with titles Gabby had never even heard of. A poster of a band she didn’t know hung on one wall. She recognized some of the people in the photos tacked to the bulletin board, including herself, but definitely not all of them. When she spotted Shay’s cello leaning up against the corner, she felt herself exhale in recognition. That, at least, was the same.
“Stop staring at my stuff,” Shay said, wrapping her arms around Gabby’s waist and blowing a raspberry into the side of her neck. “Pay attention to me.”
“Oh, I’m paying attention,” Gabby assured her, turning around for a kiss. She closed her eyes, shivering as Shay bit gently along the edge of her bottom lip, tongue and teeth and the faint smell of lavender. This was good, she thought, cupping Shay’s sharp face in her two hands. This was steadying.
“Good,” Shay said, pulling back with a noisy smack and hopping up onto her bed, which was lifted onto a set of plastic risers. “Tell me everything.”
Gabby laughed and climbed up beside her. “Tell you everything?”
“Yeah!” Shay said, settling back against the wall and pulling a pillow into her lap. “Like what’s new, all that stuff.”
“What’s new?” Gabby hesitated, abruptly unable to think of anything. She wasn’t used to having to tell Shay what was new. At home their relationship had been one long and meandering conversation full of tiny, valuable trivialities: new Photoshop filters and what to eat for a snack after cello practice, the chapters of Wuthering Heights that Gabby had to read for homework and Kristina prancing around the house singing all the songs from Funny Girl at the top of her lungs. Nothing had ever been new, because they’d told it all to each other the exact moment it happened. Faced with the task of coming up with her most important headlines, it felt, suddenly and terrifyingly, like maybe Gabby had nothing to say. “Um.”
Shay was laughing, but not in a mean way. “Relax, Gabby-Girl,” she said, kicking her boots off and crossing her ankles on the bedspread. “It’s just me.”
“I know,” Gabby said, a little too shrilly. “I know that. Things are just kind of the same, is all. School, yearbook. All the usual things.”
“Okay,” Shay said, still smiling a little bit indulgently. “Then I’ll start, how about?”
“Sure,” Gabby said. God, why did this feel so awkward? “Absolutely.”
Shay didn’t seem to have any trouble coming up with newsworthy updates. In fact, she was overflowing with them: the Western Civ professor she was in love with, the girls from her public speaking class who all lived together in an off-campus apartment called the Coven, the plays and concerts she and her roommate were always going to. “I can’t wait to introduce you to everybody on my floor,” Shay said, dark eyes shining. “We’re all kind of obsessed with each other. Everybody leaves their doors open, it’s like one big hangout all the time.”
That sounded completely horrible, actually, but Gabby knew better than to say so out loud, even to Shay. Especially to Shay. Instead she smiled and nodded and asked the occasional question, trying for all the world not to betray the panic thrumming under her skin. God, how boring was she, that she couldn’t come up with one new thing to add to this conversation? How boring did Shay probably think she was? Here she was in New York City having all these incredible new experiences; probably the last thing she wanted to do was spend all weekend entertaining her wet-blanket high school girlfriend, who was the same as ever only somehow duller, with nothing whatsoever to report.
Eventually Shay got tired of talking, though. “Come lie down with me,” she muttered, curling her chilly fingers around Gabby’s waist and squeezing. For the first time in the better part of an hour, Gabby felt herself relax. They stretched out on the narrow twin bed, which was pushed up against a window affording a view of the dirty brick building next door and a sliver of dove-colored sky. “I missed you,” Shay said, tucking her face up under Gabby’s chin and reaching up to twirl a hank of Gabby’s hair between two fingers. “Jesus Christ, Gabby-Girl, I missed you so much.”
Just then the door opened. “Whoops!” said a startled voice. “Oops, sorry. I’ll go, sorry sorry.”
“No no no,” Shay said, sitting up and pushing her own hair out of her eyes. “You’re fine, stay.” She gestured to the short, curvy Korean girl standing in the doorway. “Gabby, this is my roommate, Adria. Ade, this is Gabby.”
“I’m so sorry,” Adria said. “I texted you. My thing got canceled.”
“No no no, it’s totally fine!” Shay grinned, blushing prettily. “I’m glad you guys could meet, anyway.”
Adria was a studio art major who made intricate collages using tissue paper and tweezers; she was also colossally beautiful, although Gabby tried her best not to notice that part. She was so busy not noticing, in fact, that it took her a moment to realize that Adria had asked her a question. “What?” she asked dumbly after a too-long pause, then immediately felt like a moron. “Sorry. What?”
RYAN
“Can you stop screwing around with your phone?” Chelsea asked Ryan later that afternoon, flicking him in the arm with mitten-covered fingers. They were weaving through the thick, bundled crowds in Rockefeller Center; she’d wanted to get a look at the tree. It was coming on sunset now, though you could barely tell what with how brightly everything was lit up down here. “What are you even doing?”
Ryan tucked his phone back into his jacket pocket. “Looking at porn,” he joked.
Chelsea wasn’t amused. “Gabby’s fine,” she said, grabbing his elbow and steering him out of the path of an overcoated businessman jabbering into a cell phone. Trying to walk down here without bumping into anyone was harder than navigating the other side of the rink during playoffs. “That’s what you’re doing, right? Checking to see if she texted?”
Ryan shook his head, embarrassed without being able to articulate exactly why. “I just have a weird feeling it’s going to go sideways for her,” he said.
“Okay,” Chelsea said, eyes wide like, And that’s your business because . . . ? “Well, she’ll cross that bridge when she comes to it.”
“She’s my friend, Chels.”
“I know that,” Chelsea said, opening the glass door to a fancy, expensive-looking bakery and shooing him inside; her glasses steamed up immediately, and Ryan grinned in spite of himself. “She’s my friend too. I like Gabby a lot. You know I like Gabby a lot. This isn’t some gross thing where I’m being a bitch and telling you I’m jealous of your girl best friend. This is me saying we’re supposed to be having
this night in the city together, I told a bunch of giant lies to my parents to make it happen, so please pay attention to me.”
Right away, Ryan felt like a dick of the first order. “You’re right,” he said, swinging his arm around her and swiping a finger through the fog on her glasses. “You’re right, totally.”
Chelsea smiled. “I usually am.”
They got giant hot chocolates with whipped cream and drank them while they watched the ice skaters swirl around the sunken rink beneath the Christmas tree; they sat under a smelly, moth-eaten blanket on a horse-drawn carriage ride through Central Park. Ryan knew Gabby and Shay would probably think it was dumb suburban-kid stuff, but he didn’t really care. Chelsea was having a really good time, he was having a really good time with her, and frankly he was really psyched about the idea of having sex in a hotel bed later tonight like he was James Bond or something.
But he couldn’t stop worrying about Gabby.
Ryan couldn’t figure out what his problem was. Ordinarily he was great at putting weird, unpleasant stuff out of his head in the name of a fun night. It was basically his superpower. But this reminded him of when he was eight and had gotten poison ivy, of lying in bed trying desperately not to scratch it: in the end he hadn’t been able to hold off and wound up spreading the rash everywhere, including on his balls. This was like that, only somehow worse.
“Hey,” Chelsea said now, snapping her fingers in front of his face to get his attention. They were eating dinner at a fake-old diner in Midtown where all the waiters and waitresses periodically burst into song. “Where did you go?”
Ryan blinked. “What?” he asked, realizing abruptly he was holding a bacon cheeseburger he had no recollection of picking up—or, for that matter, even ordering. “Nowhere.”
“Really?” Chelsea frowned. “Because you are not here.”
“I am,” Ryan protested, taking a big bite of his burger to illustrate and washing it down with a giant gulp of soda.
Top Ten Page 17