“What?” Ryan looked at her like she was ridiculous. “Why?”
“Because you’re eighteen years old and you’ve had three concussions and you just forgot your new stepdad’s name.”
“Don’t do that,” Ryan said immediately, standing up straighter. “First of all, I forgot his name for one second because I always call him Dachshund Guy. Second of all—”
“It’s getting worse, right?” Gabby asked, though she already knew it, the certainty like a sickness deep inside her gut. Right away she thought of a bunch of different times this summer she hadn’t let herself articulate it, the memories flooding in like a tidal wave: The night they’d gotten to the movie theater and realized he’d bought tickets to the wrong show on the website. The time he’d gotten cut off in traffic on the parkway on the way back and completely lost his mind, yelling and swearing even though he was normally the most laid-back driver Gabby knew. Normal stuff, she’d told herself, dumb stuff. But taken together, she couldn’t act like they didn’t start to add up. “Your head is getting worse. And in a month you’re going to be showing up for practice in Minnesota with guys who are three times your size and—”
“Thanks a lot,” Ryan said.
“Really?” Gabby asked. “That’s the part of what I’m saying that you’re choosing to hear?”
“Gabby, I can’t have this argument with you, I mean it. Not again. Not now.”
“What does that mean, not now?”
“It means it’s my mom’s fucking wedding and I would love if you could act like my girlfriend and not the police.”
“I—” Gabby shook her head. “Wow.”
“I’m sorry,” Ryan said immediately, taking her hands and lacing their fingers together. “I just—I really, really don’t—” He sighed loudly, looking out at the water for a moment. “Look, let’s go back inside, okay? You know at some point this guy is going to play ‘New York, New York’ and all my mom’s old-lady friends are going to want to do a kick line. You don’t want to miss that, do you?”
Gabby hesitated. She wanted to push him. She would have pushed him—she had pushed him on stuff like this, in the past—but something about the look on his face, something about his act like my girlfriend made her feel like it wasn’t a good idea. And that was wrong, Gabby thought. That wasn’t how it was supposed to work. They were supposed to be closer than ever now, weren’t they? Instead it was just this weird, sick anxiety all the time, like something bad was perpetually about to happen. Like she was going to lose him either way.
“Okay,” she said, and banged her head against his, just lightly. “Let’s go inside.”
It was time for cake anyway, a dense slab of chocolate and buttercream. It tasted like sand in her mouth.
GABBY
Gabby’s parents were sitting on the couch watching a movie about a giant tsunami when she came in that night, holding her pinching shoes by their skinny heels. They looked utterly relaxed, her dad leaning slightly forward—he was bonkers for disaster movies—while her mom paged idly through a design magazine, stretched out with her ankles crossed in his lap. They looked like they belonged together. They looked like they fit.
“How was the wedding?” Gabby’s mom called, motioning for Gabby to come into the living room; Gabby would have, except that all of a sudden she felt that awful tightness in her throat that suggested she might be about to burst into tears.
“Good!” she called over her shoulder, making a beeline for the staircase. God, what was wrong with her?
She had wriggled out of her dress and into her pajamas by the time her mom’s knock sounded on the other side of her bedroom door. “You want to try that again, maybe?” her mom asked softly, easing it open.
“Not really,” Gabby said, which was the truth, but then before she could stop herself she was sitting down hard on the bed and it was all coming out: his distance and his crankiness and their argument at the wedding, how worried she was about his brain.
“I mean, we fought before we were together, too, obviously,” she finished, feeling oddly embarrassed: she never unloaded on her mom this way. It made her feel exposed and incapable of handling herself. It made her feel like one of her sisters. “But we didn’t, like . . . bicker.”
Gabby’s mom nodded, sitting down beside her on the mattress. “That sounds hard.”
“It is hard,” Gabby blurted, before she could stop herself. “I miss him. Which is idiotic, because we’re—” She broke off. “Well, theoretically we’re closer than ever, right? We’re dating.”