“That you’re embarrassed of me,” she said. “And that’s why we only ever hang out one-on-one.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Ryan said, suddenly more alert than she’d seen him all night. “We only ever hang out one-on-one because every time I asked you to hang out with other people for like a year you said no. So I stopped asking.”
“I mean, I know that,” Gabby said, though in truth she’d never articulated it to herself in quite those words. She blushed a little at the knowledge that he was, unequivocally, right. “But hearing her say it, I just—I don’t know.” She waved her hand again. “I meant it, though. I don’t want you or anybody else to think I’m like, your weird sidekick. I don’t want it to be like you’re Charlie Brown and I’m Snoopy. Or I’m Calvin and you’re Hobbes.”
“I think Hobbes is the tiger,” Ryan said.
“Whichever!”
“Whichever,” Ryan agreed. He shifted his weight in the bed, like he couldn’t quite get comfortable. “You’re not my weird sidekick,” he said finally. “Like, not even a little. You’re—you’re—” He stopped for a minute, looking at her in a way she’d never seen before. “Gabby,” he said, and his voice was so quiet. “That’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about tonight, actually. You’re—” He broke off again.
Gabby thought of kissing Shay on the side porch of Jordan Highsmith’s. She thought of the very first night she and Ryan had met. She thought of the sheer improbability of being here in this hospital room with him, the incredible luckiness of it: “You’re my best friend,” she blurted.
Ryan looked at her for half a second, unreadable. Then he nodded, and it was like he was agreeing to something she hadn’t asked out loud. “Yeah,” he said, clearing his throat a little. “You’re my best friend.” He glanced down at his hands then, shyer than she’d ever seen him. “Sorry I busted up your good time,” he said.
“What, at the party?” Gabby shook her head. “No, you didn’t.”
Ryan smiled ruefully. “I don’t know about that,” he said. Then, off her questioning expression: “I kind of saw you,” he admitted. “With that girl on the porch.”
Gabby felt some kind of trapdoor open inside her chest. “With Shay?”
“Yeah, is that her name?” Ryan nodded. “I wasn’t trying to be a creep, I was just—I was looking for you, and, you know. I found you.”
“Oh,” Gabby said, feeling her face flush. “Yeah.”
“We can talk about that stuff, you know,” Ryan told her.
Gabby huffed. “Oh my god, stop. Don’t be corny.”
“How is that corny? I literally just told you you’re my best friend, you fucking cyborg.”
“Okay, I know, I just—” Gabby broke off. “Okay.”
Ryan made a goofy face. “Okay.”
Gabby fussed with the zipper on her bag for another moment. “There’s one thing you can tell me, I guess.”
“Name it.”
“All right.” She tucked one knee up underneath her, settling in. “Can you help me figure out how to get a girl’s number?”
NUMBER 7
THE DAD THING
SOPHOMORE YEAR, FALL
RYAN
“Can you even name ten, though?” Ryan asked, leaning back in the wobbly Adirondack chair in Gabby’s backyard and crossing his legs at the ankles. “Ten Halloween costumes that don’t have, like, a corresponding sexy version?”
“Sexy Mr. Potato Head,” Gabby said immediately, and Ryan laughed. “Sexy Dr. Kevorkian. Sexy Margaret Thatcher. Sexy Teletubbie. Sexy—”
“So clearly this is something you’ve already given a lot of thought to, then,” Ryan said, reaching for his soda. It was Friday, Monopoly night, fall of their sophomore year; Gabby’s dad had made a flatbread pizza with honey and goat cheese that should have been gross but was in fact actually delicious, like most things Gabby’s dad had made in the year that Ryan had been coming over. Now they were camped out on the back patio, Gabby stretching her oversized sweatshirt down over her knees while the wind rustled the papery brown leaves still clinging to the trees in the yard.
“Obviously.”
“What did you go as last year?” Ryan asked.
“I didn’t,” Gabby said. “I hate Halloween.”
Ryan snorted. “Of course you do.” He was opening his mouth to suggest Sexy Kool-Aid Man when Celia slid the kitchen door open.