Gabby waited until Celia was gone, then turned back to him. “So?” she prodded. “Are you gonna answer me or what?”
Ryan shrugged. “I really like Monopoly,” he lied.
Gabby heaved out a noisy sigh, like she’d expected about as much from him. “Whatever,” she said. “Don’t you have a party to be at?”
Ryan considered that. “I do, actually,” he admitted after a moment. “You wanna come?”
GABBY
“Really?” Celia asked ten minutes later as Gabby shrugged into her jacket, Ryan’s friends waiting in their SUV outside. “You’re going to a party?”
“Can you stop?” Gabby asked sharply, eyes cutting to Ryan. She didn’t want him to know what a weirdo she was any more than he already knew it, and she didn’t want to think about why.
“Sorry,” Celia said. Then, to Ryan, in a voice like she was explaining a terrible illness: “Gabby just doesn’t usually like parties that much, is all.”
“I already told him that,” Gabby said, although the look on Ryan’s face clearly indicated he had no recollection of the event—just like he apparently had no recollection of most of last Saturday night, which was a blessing. The more Gabby thought about it, the surer she was that the memory lapse on his part was for the best. So she’d had a little crush on him for five minutes before she realized what an idiotic proposition that was on her part. Who cared? No harm, no foul.
She’d fully intended to tell him to go screw when he’d asked her to go to this party. After all, there was no effing way. She could just imagine the baffled looks on people’s faces when they walked in, everybody wondering what on earth somebody like her was doing there with Ryan McCullough, like maybe he was part of some outreach program that paired popular kids with socially inept shut-ins. On top of which, it probably wasn’t even a real invitation—after all, why would he want her hanging around when he was with his actual friends? She was weird. She was awkward. She played Monopoly with her family every Friday night, for Pete’s sake. Gabby knew herself well enough to know she was nobody’s idea of a fun time.
But: “I mean it,” Ryan had said, leaning comfortably against the counter in her parents’ kitchen, that dumb earnest expression on his face like he was sincerely interested in having her around. He was stupidly, annoyingly good-looking. It made Gabby want to knee him in the nuts. “It’ll be a good time.”
She opened her mouth again to say she couldn’t. She opened her mouth to tell him he should leave. She could feel herself starting to get anxious just thinking about it, heart skipping like a stone across a pond, but then she’d remembered how he’d talked to her last weekend in her bedroom. How he’d looked at her like she wasn’t odd at all.
“Sure,” Gabby said, before she could talk herself back out of it. “I can tag along.”
Now her mom pulled her into the stairwell, reaching out and tucking Gabby’s hair behind her ears. “Hey. You want me to say you can’t go?”
That was exactly what Gabby wanted, actually; she’d used her mom as a fall guy a million times before, starting back when she was seven and didn’t want to go to Lily Jackson’s trampoline party. But this felt different, for some reason. Being with Ryan felt different.
“No,” she said, surprising herself. “It’s okay.”
And it was okay, she thought, sitting sandwiched in the middle of the backseat of some upperclassman’s SUV, Ryan on her left side and a kid from her biology class on her right. Rihanna blared on the stereo; the autumn wind ruffled Gabby’s hair through the open window as they pulled up to a tidy-looking Cape Cod–style house on the corner. This was normal; this was what people did. Totally, totally fine.
She made it almost all the way up to the front door before the panic hit.
Gabby closed her eyes for a moment, though she knew she was powerless to stop it. All she could do was hang on. She’d been anxious as long as she could remember; she’d been having panic attacks since she was eleven, when Kristina found her curled into a hysterical ball underneath her bed. Sometimes, like now, Gabby knew why they were happening. Other times they came on for what felt like no reason, halfway through math class or in the middle of the night. They always started the same way: her heart skittering in her chest like she’d been electrocuted, her armpits prickling damply with sweat. In another second she was going to be gasping for air like a hooked fish, and she did not not not want to be walking into a stranger’s party when that happened.