Normally this would have been her worst nightmare—Ryan coaxing her out to a party she didn’t really want to go to and then disappearing, leaving her alone with her anxiety like a gnawing animal making a den inside her chest. Tonight, though, Gabby found she didn’t much mind it: the chance to sit back and listen to her friends jabber to one another, her head tilted back to stare up at the tall straight pine trees ringing the yard. Eventually he’d show up again, coming back to her with his tail wagging like a golden retriever’s. He always did.
“We should do something amazing this summer,” Sophie was saying. They were chatting about what, exactly, amazing might mean, here in the farthest, northernmost suburbs of New York City, when Gabby’s phone buzzed inside her pocket. She pulled it out and peered at the screen, heart flipping like it always did when she saw it was from Shay: Happy graduation, Gabby-Girl! So excited to finally have you in the city this fall. Coffee + catching up soon?
Gabby swallowed. They’d been broken up since March, so in theory there was no reason for a few dumb words on a screen to be enough to conjure Shay up as surely as if she was sitting here on the grass at this party: her hair and her smell and her smile, the one crooked tooth at the edge of her mouth.
She was trying to figure out how to answer when she felt a gentle knee in her shoulder: “Don’t be doing phone stuff,” Ryan scolded, like he’d somehow been able to hear Shay’s text from inside the house. “The party is right here.”
Gabby tucked her phone back into her purse and took the can of Bud Light he was proffering. It occurred to her that she didn’t want him to know she and Shay still talked every once in a while, though she wasn’t entirely sure why. “The party being you, in this scenario?”
Ryan sat down beside her, his arm solid and warm against hers. “The party’s always me,” he said.
“Uh-huh.” Gabby rolled her eyes, but it wasn’t like he was wrong. Ryan loved people—and people, in turn, loved Ryan—more than anyone else Gabby had ever met. Celia called him the Great Equalizer. He was Gabby’s social security blanket, her failsafe against miserable, crippling anxiety; she had no idea what she was going to do without him come fall. Thinking about it was terrifying on a physical, visceral level, and so mostly she did her best not to think about it at all.
“Top ten moments of high school,” she conceded now, popping the tab on her beer can and leaning back beside him. A million stars blazed bright high above their heads.
RYAN
It was after one by the time they got back to Ryan’s house, Leon Bridges turned down low on the stereo and the car windows rolled down so the night air spilled in. Even Ryan’s neighborhood, which was on the scruffier, ’60s-ranch side of Colson, looked like the background of a Disney movie: all tall trees and blue-black sky, fireflies flickering away on the lawns.
Gabby turned the car off, everything still and silent. Neither one of them made any attempt to move. It occurred to Ryan that he could stay right here in this passenger seat with her forever and probably be perfectly content, provided of course they could get food delivered carside.
“So, beach tomorrow?” Gabby asked finally, and Ryan nodded. Sophie’s parents had a place down the Jersey Shore they were letting them all use for a couple of days. She kept warning them that it wasn’t anything fancy, although any house reserved specifically for vacations seemed pretty swank as far as Ryan was concerned.
“Beach tomorrow,” he agreed.
They were quiet for another moment. Ryan glanced over at her in the dark. He knew he ought to go inside, let her get home, but something stopped him: he felt irrationally nervous all of a sudden, like maybe he was never going to see her again.
“What?” Gabby was looking at him, suspicious. She’d changed her clothes for the party: a tank top with a low, swooping neckline, her hair scooped into a loose knot at the base of her skull. He knew she was pretty—of course he knew she was pretty—but he forgot about it sometimes, the way you get used to a smell. Noticing it now, or re-noticing, he suddenly felt very warm.
Ryan cleared his throat. They’d had enough near-misses over the last four years for him to know that kind of thinking wasn’t going to get him anywhere. He and Gabby were friends; they’d always been friends. And if he occasionally still thought about what it would be like to be more than that, well. That was his secret to keep. “No,” he said, “nothing.”
Gabby frowned. “Is your head bothering you?” she asked.
“You always think my head is bothering me,” Ryan said.