Top Ten(41)

“Hey,” Gabby said now, hurriedly closing her laptop. It wasn’t that she didn’t want Shay to know about the UCLA program, exactly—more like she didn’t want anyone to know about it. She didn’t want to open it up to debate. There was no way she could go; Gabby knew that already. Still, for some reason she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it ever since Mr. Chan had mentioned it the other day, clutching it like a talisman in her sweaty, anxious palm.

Shay wasn’t interested in snooping over her shoulder, though. “I got in off the waitlist,” she announced, dropping her bag on the desktop. Her eyes were wide and shining. “I finally got the email.”

“To Columbia?” Gabby scraped her chair back with a clatter. “You did?” She let out a delighted cackle and jumped out of her seat, ignoring the nasty look from the librarian and throwing her arms around Shay’s neck. “I mean, of course you did, of course you were always going to get in. Shay! You’re a champion.”

“I am kind of a champion,” Shay agreed, preening goofily, but Gabby could tell from the fall of her shoulders how relieved she was. Gabby was relieved, too, letting out a breath she’d been holding more or less since she and Shay had started dating a year ago: Columbia was literally the best possible scenario, only two hours away from Colson on the train. Sure, Shay had always talked like they’d stay together even once she left for school, but Gabby wasn’t an idiot. She knew it would be way harder to make it work if Shay was at one of the conservatory programs she’d auditioned for in Chicago or even Boston. New York City, though, felt strangely manageable. New York City felt safe.

“We should celebrate,” Gabby said.

“So weird,” Shay said with a grin. “I was thinking the same thing.”

She picked up Gabby’s backpack and led her back into the stacks, the dusty old nonfiction section where nobody ever went unless they wanted to talk on their cell phones or fool around. “Top ten places for a clandestine makeout?” Gabby joked.

“Huh?” asked Shay, and Gabby shook her head.

“Nothing,” she said, glancing over her shoulder. Shay made a face.

“Nobody’s looking,” she promised, curling her hand around Gabby’s waist and pulling her closer.

“I know.” Gabby felt herself blush. Despite the fact that their very first encounter had involved a semi-public makeout, it had taken Gabby a little time to be okay with Shay being affectionate with her when they were at school or out in town, kissing her hello in the mornings or nuzzling her neck in the coffee line. Colson was a pretty progressive place to grow up, as suburbs went, but as somebody whose entire life’s work was basically to be looked at as little as humanly possible, Gabby still couldn’t always shake the feeling of being on display.

Shay, though. Shay never seemed to mind. Gabby had never met someone who seemed so preternaturally comfortable in her own skin before. She’d had three different girlfriends before Gabby; she’d played the classical cello since she was four. She’d read more books than Gabby could ever keep track of and knew exactly how smart she was, loved nothing more than to debate and spar and argue—occasionally whether Gabby wanted to or not. Sometimes being around her could be the tiniest bit exhausting, that constant pressure for Gabby to always be the smartest, sharpest, most articulate version of herself. Every once in a while it made her miss Ryan, whose house motto was basically “go along to get along”—and who liked a dopey YouTube video more than anyone Gabby had ever met.

Not that she spent her time thinking about Ryan these days. Their friendship had gone the way of the dinosaurs that night outside the ice center almost five months ago, after which they’d extricated themselves from each other’s lives with a totality so breathtakingly neat it made Gabby wonder if they’d ever been friends at all. To look at them now, you’d think they’d never even met. But that was high school, Gabby reminded herself. This kind of stuff happened; friends came and went. And if occasionally it made her want to scream like her heart had been ripped right out of her stupid chest, well, it was nobody’s business but her own.

“Speaking of celebrating,” Shay said now, lacing her fingers through Gabby’s and pulling her close in a shadowy corner next to a shelf full of faded, sticky-looking biographies, “my parents are going to Jersey to see Lanie this weekend.”

Gabby smirked. “Oh, they are, huh?” Lanie was Shay’s older sister, who lived in Hoboken with her IT-guy husband and two little kids; according to Shay, she used to be really cool but was now the kind of person who sniffed her baby’s butt in restaurants. “You going with?”