Top Ten(25)

“Oh yeah?” Shay asked, sounding interested. “Did you work on it last year? I really liked that one picture that was right at the front of it, you remember that one? Of all the cars leaving in the rain after that football game?”

Gabby’s stomach flipped with recognition. “I took that picture,” she blurted. “That was me.”

“No way!” Shay grinned. She had a nice smile, one crooked canine tooth and a soft-looking mouth. “Well, okay. I’m a big fan, then.”

They sat down at the top of the staircase as they chatted, noise from the party drifting upward. It felt like hiding out in a fort. They talked about all kinds of random stuff: the best frozen yogurt at the mall in Yorktown, the woman on Gabby’s block who had a whole battalion of dolls lined up in her bay window, how Shay used to watch reruns of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman every Saturday night on the Christian channel at her grandma’s house. “She’s the head of the women’s group at her church up in Amenia,” Shay explained off Gabby’s grin. “All things considered, she took it weirdly well when she found out I was gay.”

There it was. Gabby felt her stomach flip, everything getting realer all of a sudden. She herself was still trying to figure out how to slip being bi into casual conversations, but Shay made it seem easy, like no big deal. And that was Gabby’s main impression of her, really: that here was a person who had things figured out but wasn’t a jerk about it. Here was a person Gabby wanted to be around. It was strange: the only person she’d ever liked this completely and immediately was—Ryan, actually.

Gabby didn’t feel like thinking about Ryan right now. After all, he’d been pretty clear about where exactly they stood. So instead she crossed her ankles on the carpet and leaned back, listening as Shay chatted about a movie she’d seen with her parents last weekend, some arty independent thing Gabby had never heard of. The longer they sat here, the closer they seemed to be, she realized; when Shay leaned back on her palms the tips of her fingers brushed Gabby’s, and Gabby noticed she didn’t pull them away.

“I know,” Shay said when she saw Gabby glancing down at them. “I have, like, freakishly small hands. I’m like that Kristen Wiig character on SNL. Don’t judge me.”

“What?” Gabby shook her head, blushing. “You do not. Our hands are, like, the exact same size.”

“No way.”

“They are!”

Shay held her hand up, palm out and facing Gabby. “Measure,” she said.

Gabby’s stomach swooped like a tire swing. “Okay,” she said, and flattened her hand against Shay’s warm, smooth one.

“See?” Shay said. “Freakishly small.”

“Delicate,” Gabby corrected, them immediately wished she could grab the word out of the air and shove it back into her mouth. God, she was so bad at every conceivable form of social interaction. “I mean—”

But Shay just smiled, the corners of her eyes crinkling up appealingly. She rotated her wrist a fraction of an inch, lacing her fingers through Gabby’s. “Oops,” she said, and squeezed Gabby’s hand.

Gabby breathed in. “Oops,” she echoed quietly, and smiled.

Shay’s expression clouded a little bit at that, like maybe she thought Gabby meant the oops in a stop-holding-my-hand kind of way; it was the look of someone suddenly worried they’d calculated wrong. You calculated right, Gabby wanted to tell her, but she didn’t know how to, so instead before she could think better of it, she used her grip on Shay’s hand to pull her forward and pressed a kiss against her mouth. Shay tasted like beer and like gum and like summer coming, like possibilities. Gabby could not believe what she’d just done.

“Sorry,” she said immediately when it was over, feeling herself blush down to the soles of her feet inside her boots. “Was that—? That was forward.”

But Shay grinned. “I like forward,” she said, and kissed Gabby again.

It went on like that for a long minute, Shay’s hands on her shoulders and her neck and her cheekbones; Gabby reached up and twisted two fingers in Shay’s hair. She felt like she’d jumped out of an airplane. She felt like she could reach out and grab the sky.

Finally Shay pulled back, grinning, her face flushed and her hair a little frizzy. “You wanna grab a drink and go find a place to hang out that doesn’t have quite so many dead ancestors watching?” she asked, gesturing to the photo wall. “These guys are kind of starting to give me the creeps a little bit, I won’t lie.”

Gabby felt herself smile back, felt something swinging open like a gate inside her chest. “Yeah,” she said, letting Shay pull her to her unsteady feet on the carpet. “Sounds good to me.”