“Is this okay?” she asked after a few minutes, resting her cheek against Shay’s inner thigh. “I mean, am I doing it right?”
Shay reached down and traced the line of Gabby’s jaw gently. “Yeah, Gabby,” she promised, her voice pleasingly breathless. “You’re doing it right.”
Afterward they hid out under the covers and watched Netflix, sharing a carton of ice cream Shay had scavenged from downstairs. “I kind of love you,” Shay said quietly, lacing their fingers together. Her nail polish was chipping, a floss-thin ring around her thumb.
Gabby propped herself up on one elbow. “Kind of?”
“Not kind of,” Shay amended. “I—yeah. Not kind of.”
“That’s convenient, then,” Gabby mumbled, burying her face in Shay’s warm, lavender-smelling neck and closing her eyes, wanting to stay here forever. “Because I love you back.”
RYAN
In a cavernous function room at a Knights of Columbus hall on the other side of Colson, Ryan was attempting to finagle himself a second slice of birthday cake from a cater waiter when Chelsea put her carefully manicured hands on his shoulders. “Come on,” she said cheerfully, then sang along with the song the DJ was blaring: “‘I will teach you the Electric Slide.’”
Ryan laughed, tilting his head back to look at her. “You will, huh?”
“I will!” Chelsea crowed, pulling him toward the middle of the scrum on the dance floor. The DJ swirled purple lights around the crowded parquet, illuminating a sea of girls in tight dresses and dudes in badly-knotted ties. A Happy Sweet Sixteen, Talia banner was strung up along one wall. “It’s electric.”
“Boogie-woogie-woogie,” Ryan answered dutifully, but he was smiling. He knew the Electric Slide, actually—he and his mom used to do it in their socks in the living room when his dad was out, the two of them eating popcorn for dinner and watching Finding Nemo on DVD—but he let Chelsea show him anyhow. He liked that she wanted to: it was maybe the thing he liked most about her, how she was confident enough to let herself look silly in front of other people in the name of a good time.
Well, Ryan thought, gazing at the lacy blue dress she was wearing, her strappy sandals. There were some other things he liked more than that, possibly.
“Ryan,” Chelsea said, and Ryan realized he hadn’t been listening.
“Sorry,” he amended. “What did you just say?”
Chelsea rolled her eyes at him, but she was smiling. “I saaaaaaaid, do you want to get out of here and take a walk with me?”
The DJ had switched over to a Taylor Swift dance remix; the air smelled like body spray and a little bit like sweat. Chelsea was wearing her glasses along with her dress and heels, which gave her a sexy librarian look he was really digging. “Yeah,” Ryan told her. “I definitely do.”
Chelsea took his hand and led him out past the bathrooms, down a dim, carpeted corridor and through a plate-glass door. The night air was chilly and wet-smelling. Out in the overgrown garden was a gazebo of indeterminate structural integrity that Ryan assumed was for brides and grooms to take pictures of themselves staring goonily at each other, should they be lucky enough to get married in such an illustrious venue. “This place is something else,” he said.
“Why?” Chelsea frowned, shivering a little in the breeze. “I think it’s kind of romantic.”
“Yeah, no, it is,” Ryan corrected himself, shrugging out of his too-small sport coat and handing it over to her. “You’re right.” Secretly, though, he was wondering what Gabby might say about it—Top ten methods by which one might get brutally murdered at Knights of Columbus hall in Yorktown or top ten reasons traumatized patrons have asked for their deposits back. He wanted her to see it. He wished she was—
“Hey.” Chelsea climbed the short flight of steps up into the gazebo, leaned against the white wooden railing. Ryan backed her up against a post. “How you doing over there?” she asked, tilting her head to the side and considering him.
“I’m good,” Ryan told her, then pulled her close by the lapels of her borrowed jacket and ducked his head down for a kiss.
GABBY
The fire alarm went off right at the end of seventh period, just as Gabby filled in the last bubble on her Scantron sheet; right away the whole room erupted into assorted sighs and murmurs, the squeak of rubber-tipped chair legs on the linoleum floor.
Gabby frowned. She hated fire drills the same way she hated assemblies, the noise and crowds and the slow-moving press of bodies, everybody trying to occupy the same space at once. “All right, people,” Mr. Caplan said, herding them out the door and into the rapidly filling hallway. “Orderly fashion, et cetera.”