Top Ten(63)

“Gabby—” Celia started, but Gabby was already gone. She didn’t have the car keys, but she was too worked up to go back inside and get them from her mom, so instead she leaned against the trunk and dug her phone out of her coat pocket, scrolling through until she got to Ryan’s name. Hey, she keyed in, then swallowed her pride like a mouthful of cough syrup and hit send.

Ryan didn’t text back.





NUMBER 4


THE NEW YORK TRIP


SENIOR YEAR, WINTER





GABBY


Ryan put his signal on, glanced over his shoulder, and merged onto the Taconic Parkway South. “Top ten nontouristy things to do in New York City,” he announced.

“I have no idea,” Gabby said from the backseat. Even though they only lived just up the river from Manhattan, her family went down rarely, to see the dinosaurs at the Museum of Natural History or the occasional Broadway matinee. “I only know touristy things.”

“I kind of like touristy things,” Chelsea offered. She and Ryan were doing an overnight in the city to celebrate their one-year anniversary, had plans to go to dinner and see the Rockefeller tree. Gabby wasn’t exactly sure how Ryan had managed to book a hotel room—she had a feeling his dad had probably been involved—but it was her first time visiting Shay down at college, and she was grateful for the ride.

“What are you guys doing tonight, huh?” Ryan asked over his shoulder. “I mean, knowing Shay, she’s probably taking you to hear a jazz trio where all the musicians are subway rats, but—”

Gabby snorted. “You’re a dick,” she said, not without amusement.

“And they’re all wearing little rat turtlenecks—”

“Uh-huh.”

“And little rat berets—”

“All right, now you’re just stealing from The Muppet Show,” Chelsea pointed out, but Gabby was laughing.

“There you go,” Ryan said, glancing at her in the rearview. The car was a new acquisition, a prehistoric beater sedan he’d found on Craigslist and paid for with money from overtime at Walter’s. Ryan loved it like it was his own child. “You’ve been sitting there since you got in looking like you’re about to die.”

“Leave her alone,” Chelsea chided.

“I have not,” Gabby said. She tucked her hands up into the sleeves of her jacket—she’d put it on backward, was wearing it like a blanket with her knees curled up underneath. She hated everything about being long-distance. She’d spent her life curating a tiny collection of people she cared about desperately, and she wanted to have all of them around her always, the way she’d arranged her army of stuffed animals on her bed when she was small.

She and Shay had planned to visit every few weeks—after all, it was only two hours on the commuter train, one end of the line to the other—but all autumn things had been getting in the way. They’d seen each other for Thanksgiving, although Shay had a paper to write and Gabby’s aunt Liz had been in town from Cincinnati and Shay had to get back early on Sunday for a meeting, so they’d only had a little bit of time to hang out. All Gabby wanted to do was lie in Shay’s college bed all weekend, to smell her smell and eat crispy M&M’s while watching shows she’d already seen on Netflix. All she wanted was to feel like things were normal again.

“You nervous?” Ryan asked, looking at her one more time over his shoulder.

“Nope,” Gabby lied, and stared out the window at the trees.





RYAN


Ryan and Chelsea checked into the hotel in Midtown, dropping their bags in a teeny room with a window overlooking the roof of the building next door and a bathroom hardly big enough to turn around in. “This is cool,” Chelsea said, bouncing a bit on the mattress. “I’m not going to lie, I feel very grown-up right now.”

Ryan felt very grown-up too, although his dad had given him the credit card number to make the reservation, Ryan paying him back with the rest of the money he’d socked away working at Walter’s. “Good job, kid,” he’d said when Ryan had explained the situation, slapping him a little too hard between his shoulder blades. “Popular with the girls just like your old man, huh?” Ryan knew the whole thing was probably a little messed up—maybe more than a little—but it was also nice to feel like his dad was proud of him, even if it was only for something like this.

“So, what first?” Chelsea asked, pulling a pop-up map of Manhattan out of her purse as they rode the tiny elevator downstairs to the lobby. Chelsea had a long list of things she wanted to do while they were here, more than they could ever cram into eighteen hours: the Empire State Building, a park that was built on old railroad tracks, some haunted theme restaurant with animatronic monsters. “Should we take the subway? The internet says it’s almost always faster to take the subway, but I don’t want to get lost and wind up wandering around underground the whole time.”