“You wanna swim?” Gabby asked. God, she barely wanted to go to the diner.
But Shay was grinning, electric. “I wanna swim,” she said.
Gabby looked at them for a moment. Then she looked at Ryan. “Okay,” she said slowly. “Let’s go swim.”
RYAN
The front gate to the pool complex was locked, obviously, on account of it being nighttime and also not summer yet, so they parked the car outside and scaled the fence one after another, Ryan boosting all three of the girls up before finally climbing over himself. “You’re sure there are no cameras?” Gabby asked, hugging herself a bit as they passed the shuttered admission booth. “It feels like there should be cameras for, like, this exact purpose.”
“I’ve never seen any,” Chelsea said, not sounding particularly concerned about the notion. For all her wholesome, all-American girl-jock talk, she had a rule-breaking streak that Ryan really enjoyed. “And I’ve been coming here since I was little.”
Ryan had grown up swimming here in the summers too—he’d done the town’s day camp when he was a real small kid, before his dad switched him over to hockey, and they’d had a pool membership until he was twelve. Still, he’d never been here in the dark before, and it was strange and a little disconcerting, like being at school on a weekend or the only people eating in a restaurant. The snack bar hulked like a bunker in the distance. The locker rooms looked like army barracks from some alien planet. The surface of the pool was placid and still.
Gabby and Shay dropped back as they crossed the concrete pool deck; Gabby had been quiet on the ride over, but she seemed upset again now, this time at Shay.
“You set me up, though,” Ryan could hear her saying.
“I just think you should try it,” Shay replied. Ryan purposely moved far enough away that he couldn’t make out anything else.
“Is this creepy?” he asked Chelsea as they headed for the edge of the water. “This is a little creepy, right?”
“Big tough hockey star!” Chelsea said playfully, scooping her hair up into a knot on top of her head. “What are you, scared?”
“Uh-oh,” Gabby said, laughing as she and Shay caught up. “Gauntlet-throwing.” Then, quietly enough so that only Ryan could hear her, she added, “It’s totally creepy, you’re one hundred percent right. I’m about to run all the way home.”
Ryan smiled at her. “Can’t do that,” he said, just as softly.
Shay pulled her boots off and flung herself into the pool after Chelsea, diving into the deep end graceful as a dolphin. “Everything okay?” Ryan asked, once it was just the two of them up on the pool deck.
“Oh, yeah, it’s fine,” Gabby said, waving her arm like batting away a fruit fly. “Just that summer thing, was all.”
Ryan nodded, not entirely sure what to say about it. On one hand, he thought Shay was probably right about trying to get Gabby to do something outside of her lane. And it sounded like an awesome chance. On the other, he didn’t want to risk saying that when they’d literally just made up and risk throwing them into the shit all over again. “You’ll figure it out,” he finally said.
“Yeah,” Gabby said, “I guess.”
“Hey,” Ryan said, catching her by the elbow. “I mean it. Your anxiety stuff and all that? You will.”
Gabby smiled for real then. “It doesn’t always feel like it, dude, I will tell you that much.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said quietly. “I hear that.”
The two of them stood there for a minute, quiet. Shay and Chelsea were splashing around in the pool, screeching their heads off; Ryan meant to cannonball in after them, but instead he paused and turned to Gabby in the dark. “You know that you can always count on me for stuff, right?” he asked suddenly. “I mean, even if we’re dating other people or living on opposite sides of the world or we don’t speak for five months again for some reason. Like, no matter what. I’m here.”
Gabby’s face twisted; Ryan held up his hands. “I know,” he said, before she could tease him. “Don’t be gross.”
But Gabby shook her head, shifting her weight and hugging herself a little. “That’s not what I was going to say at all, actually,” she told him. “Actually, I was going to say that I’m here too.”
“Hey, the two of you!” Chelsea called from out in the deep end, the pale skin of her arms seeming to glow as she treaded the chilly water. “We thought you were finished arguing about dumb stuff!”
“We are,” Ryan called back, feeling more sure than he had about anything all year. He reached for Gabby’s hand in the darkness, nodded across the concrete at the pool. “You ready?” he asked, and Gabby nodded. They ran across the pavement and jumped in.