Top Ten(20)

Suddenly Gabby did not like the trajectory of this conversation. “You and I hang out one-on-one all the time,” she pointed out.

Michelle made a face. “That’s not the same, and you know it.”

“Why is it not the same?” Gabby asked, although of course by now she already knew what Michelle was getting at. But she and Ryan hung out by themselves because Gabby liked it that way. It wasn’t as if—as if—

“If I were you,” Michelle said crisply, “I might be worried he was embarrassed of me.”

The words hit Gabby like a stack of textbooks to the stomach—not because they’d never occurred to her before, but because they sort of had. She’d always told herself she was maintaining this particular relationship on her own terms, the way she liked it. But what if that wasn’t what was happening at all?

“I’m sorry,” Michelle said. “I’m not trying to start a fight or make you feel bad or anything.”

“Really? Could have fooled me,” Gabby muttered, just as the bell rang for the end of the period. She shoved her chair out with more force than was really necessary, dumping her books into her bag and slinging it over one shoulder.

Michelle scrambled up from her own seat and followed Gabby out of the classroom. “I’m not,” she said again, taking Gabby’s arm and tugging her over to a bank of lockers as the noisy current of bodies rushed around them. “I’m not, seriously. It’s just—can I ask you what the appeal is, exactly? Of being Ryan McCullough’s secret sidekick?”

“Okay,” Gabby said, stepping past her and heading down the crowded hallway. “Enough. I don’t know what your problem is with me today, Michelle, but—”

“Can you listen to me?” Michelle asked, raising her voice over the ruckus. Gabby winced, not wanting anyone else to hear. “I’m just trying to get you to look at this relationship from the outside. You’re like, the one girl he’s ever met that he’s never put a move on—”

Gabby’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know he’s never put a move on me?”

“Oh, please,” Michelle said. “Because he hasn’t.”

“I don’t even want him to put a move on me,” Gabby said. It was true, too. There was a point when she’d wanted it—she’d spent all of freshman year wanting it, basically—and there had been a time, when he first started coming around every week, when she’d thought maybe . . . well. She’d thought maybe. But she was over that now. The truth was that couples like Ryan and her didn’t exist outside of teen movies from the ’80s. Gabby knew this. There was no point in pretending otherwise.

They were friends. Good friends. Real friends, no matter what Michelle seemed to think. But that was all.

“It’s fine to admit you like him,” Michelle continued. “It’s normal to like him! He is, objectively, a physically attractive hockey player. You’re a red-blooded bisexual American woman.”

“Uh-huh.” Gabby barely resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Ever since she’d come out last year Michelle loved to slip that word into conversations, like she wanted to make sure Gabby knew she was hip to the lingo. “Thank you.”

“There’s nothing wrong with liking him, is what I’m saying. But I just think it’s weird to keep up this charade of you guys being such great friends when—”

“Enough,” Gabby demanded, wincing at how shrill she sounded. The halls were emptying out now, lockers slamming as stragglers hurried to their next classes. “Really. I’m done. Forget I brought it up.”

She sulked all the way through her chem lab, her mood getting blacker as the minutes ticked by. She resented herself for being such an anxious, defective person. She resented Michelle for bringing it up. And when she didn’t run into Ryan for the rest of the day—never mind that they didn’t have any classes together—she found herself resenting him most of all. She dug her phone out of her backpack after the last bell rang, fully intending to text him and tell him so, but when she went to compose the message she couldn’t figure out anything that didn’t sound completely demented.

Gabby thought for a minute, staring out the window of the computer lab at the trees starting to bloom in the courtyard. She grimaced.

Hey, she typed, hitting Send before she could chicken out. Take me to a party?





RYAN


Ryan’s dad called to say he was going to make Ryan’s game against Mahopac on Friday afternoon, so Ryan took an extra minute getting suited up in the locker room, tucking his Saint Sebastian medal inside his undershirt for good luck. He didn’t see his dad a ton these days; it was a hike from Schenectady all the way down to Colson, and his dad was busy with work at an ice and beverage distributor up there. He kept saying that one of these days he was going to take Ryan into the city for a Rangers game like he had when Ryan was a kid, but so far it hadn’t happened. Eventually they’d get the timing right, though. Ryan had faith.