Top Ten(12)

RYAN


Gabby swung the door open wearing a plaid shirt and a disbelieving expression, her hair a flyaway blond cloud around her face. “You came,” she said, not sounding entirely pleased about it.

“Uh, yeah,” Ryan said. “I hope that’s okay.” He held up the bag of sour-cream-and-onion Ruffles he’d dug out of his mom’s pantry before coming over. “I brought chips.”

“You brought chips,” Gabby repeated, stepping back to let him inside. As she did, a tiny bespectacled girl in a SUNY Binghamton hoodie scrambled down the hallway behind her, peering around Gabby’s shoulder before darting away again.

“He brought chips,” Ryan heard the girl report.

“Jesus Christ, Kristina!” Gabby called over her shoulder. Then, turning back to Ryan, “Come inside, I guess. We’re just about to start.”

The first thing Ryan registered about Gabby’s house was how many girls there were in it. There was Gabby herself, obviously, plus her sister Celia, the junior with the movie-star hair. The littlest sister from the hallway, Kristina, sat on the carpet with her legs pretzeled, next to a girl from school whose name Ryan thought was Michelle and whom he had noticed only because she frowned literally all of the time.

“This is Ryan,” Gabby announced. “He brought chips.”

“Well, that’s very nice,” said a tall woman coming in from the kitchen. She looked like an older version of Gabby, in a crisp Oxford shirt and glasses that took up the whole top half of her face. “Hi, Ryan,” she said. “Welcome.”

“Hi, ma’am,” he said, reaching out to shake her hand.

Gabby rolled her eyes. “Come on,” she said, gesturing for him to sit down on the carpet. “The only piece left is the iron.”

The second thing Ryan registered about Gabby’s house, now that he had the chance to look around in a non-party context, was how nice it was in here. Not fancy, exactly—not like his friend Anil’s house, which was one of the new fake colonials in the golf course development on the other side of town—but definitely decorated in a way that his own house wasn’t. There were built-in bookcases housing an expensive-looking stereo system, brightly colored paintings studding the light gray walls. A giant stag’s head made of papier-mâché hung over the fireplace, a stack of newspapers in a mesh basket off to one side. It seemed immediately clear to Ryan that this was a house where people ate their sandwiches on whole wheat bread.

“Is this your friend, Gabby?” asked a tall, heavyset man coming into the living room carrying a big plate heaped with some kind of fancy-looking hors d’oeuvre. To Ryan: “I have to say, it’s rare there’s another man in this house. I’m glad for the reinforcements.”

“Oh my god,” Gabby said, dealing out the money from the bank. “Please stop. What are we eating?”

“Devils on horseback!” Mr. Hart said. “Dates stuffed with blue cheese and wrapped in bacon.”

“He makes something different every week,” Gabby explained, reaching up to pick one off the plate as her dad set it down on the coffee table. “He has a book.”

“1,001 Crowd-Pleasing Party Appetizers,” Mr. Hart crowed. “The girls got it for me for Christmas last year.”

“He only cooks from it on Fridays,” Gabby said. “Which means we’ve got about twenty years before he gets through all of it.”

“People with long-term goals and projects live longer,” her father informed her. “Let’s play.”

It was a quicker-moving game than Ryan usually thought of Monopoly as being, all of them playing with the ruthless efficiency of people who did this a lot. Gabby trounced them all from the outset, buying up all the railroads and utilities and building hotels on all three green properties. “Do you have, like, a strategy for Monopoly?” Ryan asked finally.

“Gabby has a strategy for most things,” the little sister piped up. She’d been watching him carefully, Ryan noticed, all big eyes and intelligent expression behind her giant glasses. All five Harts had that look, actually, like when they weren’t playing board games maybe they sat around the living room discussing the themes of the various works of literature they were reading. It made Ryan, who could not remember the last time he’d read a book that wasn’t for school, feel a little nervous.

“So Ryan,” Mr. Hart said as he scooped the Free Parking money off the board and set about organizing it into neat piles in front of him, “how are you liking high school so far?”

Gabby groaned. “Please don’t interrogate him.”