“Yes!” Gabby laughed and then stopped just as quickly, her face falling and her eyes filling with tears. “Hi,” she said, shaking her head and sniffling a little. “I missed you.”
“Hey hey, easy. I missed you too,” Ryan said, leaning forward to swipe at the tears on her face, licking them off his own thumb before he could think better of it. “I’m sorry I fucked it up so bad,” he blurted. “You and me.”
Gabby shook her head. “You didn’t fuck it up,” she said. “I fucked it up. Or, like, we both fucked it up.”
“Yeah, but you called it right from the beginning,” Ryan argued. “Maybe if I hadn’t pushed—”
“You didn’t push,” Gabby said. “I wanted it to work just as bad as you did. I guess I thought it would make everything better, right? Us being together.”
Ryan nodded, scrubbing his hand through his hair. “But it didn’t.”
“Why?” Gabby asked, sounding genuinely curious. “Like, what is it about us that—”
“That makes us better off as friends?” Ryan shrugged. “I don’t know, really. But I know I’d rather have you in my life that way than not at all.”
“Yeah?” Gabby asked, voice hopeful. “Me too.”
Ryan smiled. “Good,” he said. “Okay.”
They were quiet for a long minute then, watching the cars speed by on the street beyond the parking lot. Across the blacktop, a couple of kids skipped toward a station wagon, trailing brightly colored balloons.
“My parents think I need to be in therapy,” Gabby said.
That got Ryan’s attention. There was a tiny edge in her voice, like she was hoping he was going to contradict her; there had been a time when he might have for the sake of avoiding an argument, but now he only nodded. “Maybe,” he agreed.
Gabby sighed. “Probably,” she admitted, and lay back on the hood of the car. “I’m scared,” she confessed, looking up at the sky.
Ryan nodded. He was scared too, to be honest: of who he might be now that he wasn’t who he’d been planning, of the future and whatever it held. But sitting here with Gabby made him feel like he could handle it. Sitting here with Gabby made him feel weirdly brave.
“It’s okay,” Ryan told her, then took a chance and reached his hand out, lacing his fingers through hers. “You’re not by yourself.”
GABBY
“Okay,” Ryan said as he pulled the car into the loading area outside Gabby’s freshman dorm, an old brick building in downtown Manhattan with oxidized copper details around the tall, narrow windows. Cars and trucks and taxis crawled down the wide city street, horns honking and people shouting and late-summer sunlight glinting off the windshields; Gabby thought she could smell fall coming underneath the trash and car exhaust. “Did you pack shower shoes? You need shower shoes, otherwise you’ll get a foot fungus and all your toes will fall off.”
“Thank you.” Gabby rolled her eyes, fingers clutching nervously at the seat belt. “Do you want me to get out of your car or not?”
Ryan tilted his head to the side. “I mean, only if you’re ready,” he said, looking at her closely. “You ready?”
Gabby nodded. Her parents had been planning to drive her down into the city, but when Ryan volunteered to do it, she’d jumped at the offer: “I don’t want to say good-bye to you in front of a bunch of strangers,” she’d explained to her mom, perched on the arm of an Adirondack chair out in the yard earlier that week. “I’ll never be able to let you leave if that’s how we do it.”
It was kind of awkward, but Gabby was trying to say this stuff lately: how to figure out what would help her and then ask for it, how to let other people give her a hand. She’d started seeing a therapist the day after she and Ryan had talked in the Langham Lanes parking lot; she was learning to breathe through the panic, learning how to talk herself down. She had a roommate and a shower caddy and an appointment at the counseling center for first thing on Monday. She wanted to barf, more than a little bit. But she also felt weirdly okay.
“All right,” she said to Ryan now, hand curled around the handle of the passenger side door, feeling her lips twist in a smile. “Let’s go.”
They unloaded her suitcases and her desk lamp and her camera bag; they put everything in a canvas laundry cart, wheeled it over the bumpy, uneven sidewalk into the lobby of the dorm. All around them was the crush of other new freshmen and their families, the smells of perfume and sweat and the heat of eager bodies: A million new faces. A whole new life.