Top Ten(52)

It was Ryan’s job to make sure she got a return.

“Yeah, definitely,” he said now, hugging her one more time before gently extricating himself, glancing at the pile of envelopes next to the refrigerator before heading down the hallway to his room. “Consider it done.”





GABBY


Gabby got home from school and found her mom sitting in her tiny office off the living room, clicking through the accounting files on her computer. A giant iron horse’s head was propped in a chair beside her.

“That’s for a client, right?” Gabby asked, eyeing it suspiciously. Her mom was an interior designer; she’d worked for a famous lady in Greenwich until Gabby was in fourth grade, when she’d started her own business. Gabby’s dad had always said she should write a book, and this winter she was actually doing it, the desk in the office heaped with even more fabric swatches and mood boards than usual. “Not for us?”

“What, you don’t like it?” Her mom grinned. “I found it at a church sale down in Hartsdale,” she said, swiveling around and offering Gabby the last of the iced tea she’d been drinking. “Isn’t it the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen?”

“It’s kind of threatening,” Gabby agreed.

“It’s heavy as anything, too. I had to have one of the priests help me carry it to my car. Now I have to figure out how to ship it to the client in Wisconsin. I might buy it a seat on a Greyhound bus.” She sat back in her chair, clearly delighted with herself. “How was Shay, hm? She get all her applications in?”

“Uh-huh,” Gabby reported, slurping the last of the tea and chewing on the straw a bit. Shay was applying to colleges: Columbia and the New School and Purchase, plus a couple of conservatory programs Gabby was secretly hoping she didn’t get into because they were so impossibly far away. “She sent the last one yesterday.”

“Good for her. That’ll be you next year,” her mom pointed out. “Can you believe it? Crazy to think about, right?”

Gabby nodded, rattling the ice in the plastic cup. “Yup.” The truth was that college might as well have been parachuting into the Grand Canyon or climbing Mount Everest: something ridiculous and far-fetched that required a lot of special equipment, something for people who were far braver than her. It wasn’t that she didn’t think she could get in. That part would be easy. But the actual going, the moving, the idea of being surrounded by total strangers twenty-four hours a day—it gave Gabby vague waves of nausea to think about it, so mostly she didn’t.

If she’d turned faintly green, her mom didn’t seem to notice. “I ought to start dinner,” she said, getting up and motioning for Gabby to follow her into the kitchen. “Hey, this reminds me,” she said, opening the fridge, “I saw Luann at Stop & Shop on my way back from the church sale. It got me thinking, everything okay with Ryan?”

That got Gabby’s attention. “Yeah,” she said, leaning against the kitchen doorway. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

“I don’t know.” Her mom set a shrink-wrapped package of chicken on the counter. “Just curious. We just haven’t seen a whole lot of him lately, I guess.”

Gabby shrugged. She and Ryan had been hanging out a little less since she’d started dating Shay the previous spring, but that was normal, wasn’t it? All friendships went through stuff like that. “Hockey, I guess,” she said, although hockey had never kept them from seeing each other before. “He’s busy.”

Gabby’s mom nodded, didn’t push. She never questioned Gabby as hard as she questioned Celia and Kristina, and on one hand, Gabby thought it was probably one of the reasons the two of them didn’t fight as much as her mom and sisters did. On the other hand, sometimes she wondered if it was because her mom was afraid of what might possibly happen if she did.

“Dinner in half an hour, yeah?” her mom said, setting a skillet on the stovetop. Gabby nodded, headed up to her room.





RYAN


Ryan was still thinking about the mortgage notice that night at work, scrolling through the admissions requirements for D1 hockey schools in between sprinkling cheese onto chili dogs and dumping handfuls of frozen onion rings into the fryer. Since the previous summer, he’d been working at Walter’s, a hot dog hut on Route 117, where he took orders and ran the grill and brought the trash out at the end of the night. Walter himself had played football in high school and was easygoing about Ryan’s practices and games and stuff, which made it a good gig even if he did wind up smelling faintly of cured pork products all the time.