As Quinn walked back to the Butternut Motel, she formulated a plan. She would check out, pay a visit to Jake’s parents, and then go see Gabriel again before checking in to Loon Bay Cabins. When she got back to the room, though, she reached for her laptop and flipped it open. There was something she wanted to write about. Bumping into Annika this morning had unearthed another memory from ten years ago, though it was a memory that Annika had played only a tangential role in. This was a memory that was mostly about Gabriel.
September, Senior Year, Gabriel (and Annika) at Pearl’s
“One iced tea,” Annika said, putting the glass down on the Formica-topped table a little too firmly. She turned abruptly and left the table before Quinn could ask for an order of fries. She watched as Annika crossed the room and deposited some dishes, roughly, into a dishpan behind the counter. Annika had graduated two years ago. And since then Quinn hadn’t seen much of her, until recently, when Annika had started waitressing at Pearl’s.
“She does not like you,” Gabriel said, smiling for the first time since Quinn had slid into the booth at Pearl’s five minutes ago.
“You mean, ‘she doesn’t like us,’” Quinn corrected, reaching for the first of the five packets of sugar she put in her iced tea.
“No, I mean she doesn’t like you,” Gabriel said. “She was perfectly pleasant when she took my order. In fact, she was more than pleasant. Before you got here. Late.”
Quinn frowned. Gabriel was still rankled about her being late. She was never late. Not to their afternoons together after school. Usually, they met in the communications room—when they were rushing to get the newspaper out—but today they were meeting at Pearl’s.
She watched as Gabriel squirted mustard onto his open-faced burger and flipped the top bun back into place. He didn’t take a bite of it, though. He looked out the window instead. It was raining, for the third day in a row. And it was not a gentle rain, either, but a hard, unforgiving rain that sent the few people who were out on Main Street scurrying from one business’s awning to another in a vain attempt to stay dry. The bells on the front door of Pearl’s jingled, and another customer came in, closing their dripping umbrella, the rain still running off their raincoat.
“Another lovely day,” Quinn said, under her breath, dumping another packet of sugar into her iced tea. Weather like this—this wet, for this long—made her feel claustrophobic. The simplest act—getting from school to your car in the parking lot, for instance—was fraught with difficulty. And nothing stayed dry. The cuffs of her blue jeans were wet, her Converse sneakers were positively soggy, and the plateglass window in front of them was starting to cloud with moisture from the inside.
But the weather, of course, wasn’t why Gabriel was in a bad mood. The reason for that, Quinn suspected, was Quinn. Or, more specifically, Quinn and Jake. Quinn had told Gabriel back in July that she’d gone out on a couple of dates with Jake, and he’d been surprised. More than surprised, actually. “Jake Lightman? Seriously,” he’d said. “What do you two even have in common?” At the time, though, she’d made light of it. “Not a lot,” she’d said. “But he’s fun.” And she’d left it at that. The truth was she was as surprised as Gabriel at her growing attraction to Jake. Still, she tried not to dwell on this in her conversations with Gabriel. She sensed that he was not interested.
But by the time Gabriel had returned from his summer in Chicago, a couple nights ago, Quinn had heard Jake refer to her as his girlfriend and Quinn had told her dad Jake was her boyfriend. She’d gone to see Gabriel the day he got back and she’d told him this too. “I thought this was a summer thing,” he’d reminded her. And when she’d said it was more than that, he’d been silent.
“Have a little iced tea with your sugar,” Gabriel said now, watching her pour another packet of sugar into it.
“Hey, you know me. I’m a five-sugar girl,” she said, picking up a spoon and stirring her drink vigorously. “It’s all about the viscosity. I want it right at the point of changing from a liquid into a solid.”
This didn’t get a smile from him, though. He picked up his burger. She noticed his hair had gotten a little longer this summer, and his face was a little tanner. There was something else—in the ten weeks that he’d been away he’d changed. It was almost imperceptible. But it was still there. He seemed older. More worldly? Was that even possible? Quinn wondered. After all, he’d only been two states away.
“Hey, you’ve barely told me anything about the summer program,” she said now, sticking a straw into her iced tea and taking a long pull on it. “And I don’t mean what you learned, either. Didn’t you say something about a girl in your class? The one who kept flirting with you. What happened with her?”
“Nothing, really,” he said, taking a bite of his burger.
“Nothing, really? What does that mean, Gabriel?” She said this part teasingly, but she was also curious.
“Forget it, Quinn. Nothing happened. She wasn’t my type.”
“What is your type, by the way?” she asked him, again teasing. “Because you said Emma Raible wasn’t your type either.”
He looked at her, a wary expression on his face.
“Never mind,” she said, lifting a french fry off his plate and popping it into her mouth. She realized she needed to tread carefully here; Gabriel and girls was one subject they only discussed superficially.
“Quinn, tell me again. How did it happen, you and Jake?” he said, pushing his plate away. And he looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time since she’d slid into the booth.
“I told you,” Quinn said. “I wrote a profile of him for the Butternut Express.” The truth was, she’d started seeing him less than two days after she’d interviewed him. He’d pursued her then. There was no other word for it. It was a new experience for Quinn. No one had done that to her before, not with that kind of intensity.
“So . . . you did an interview, and then what?” Gabriel asked.
“After that,” Quinn said, “he stopped by the Butternut Express office and asked if I wanted to go for a swim.” It had been a sultry afternoon, and she was alone in the office, the air conditioner on the fritz, as usual, and she’d had nothing to do. Before he’d shown up she couldn’t stop yawning. Afterward, she’d felt like she’d drunk three iced teas, each with five packets of sugar in it. The two of them had gone to the town beach, and after they’d come out of the water, they’d lain on a blanket. As the sun was setting, Jake had leaned down and kissed her. She’d never been kissed like that before; it wasn’t your usual polite or tentative first kiss. It was so sexy. The next week, she’d gone out on two dates with him, and after that they’d started seeing each other several times a week. By mid-August, they’d fallen into a pattern, a pattern both languorous and thrilling. Late-afternoon swims at the beach, after she was done working and he was done training. Evenings driving over to another town for dinner. Nights spent back at the beach, on a blanket, under the stars, or, weather not permitting, at his house, on the couch, watching DVDs in his family’s basement rec room. He’d told her during their time together that she was beautiful and intelligent and utterly unlike anyone else he’d ever known. He’d told her he couldn’t stop thinking about her. Couldn’t wait to be with her. And when he was with her he couldn’t be with her enough. If Quinn were to be blunt—he wanted her. And here was the thing: she wanted him right back.
“Are you there, Quinn?” Gabriel asked, breaking into her reverie.
“Sorry,” she said.
“So that’s it. You went for a swim with him. That must have been one hell of a swim,” Gabriel said now.
Quinn rolled her eyes and helped herself to another french fry. She knew that her having a boyfriend was an adjustment for Gabriel, the same way that his having a girlfriend would have been an adjustment for her. After all, she and Gabriel had spent all their time together. That might change now. Maybe, she reasoned, it would be easier if the three of them, she and Jake and Gabriel, did something together, something outside of school. They could come here. But then she remembered that Jake didn’t like Pearl’s. He wouldn’t even come in here with her to get an iced tea.
“Look, Quinn. Forget it,” Gabriel said. “I don’t need to know the details. I just . . . I mean, it doesn’t matter if he’s your type, or whether I think he’s your type. But do you think you can trust him? Is he, you know, trustworthy?”
“Well, yeah. I think so. Why would you even ask that, though?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.” He polished off the rest of his hamburger.
“It does matter. You wouldn’t have said anything about it if it didn’t. Why did you ask me if I could trust him?” she persisted.
He pushed his plate away as if he already regretted saying this. “Because I saw something once. Or I heard it.”
“What? Tell me.”
“It was last year. Like, in September, I think. I was studying in that alcove outside the library and I heard Jake and Ashlyn arguing in the hallway.” Ashlyn was a girl that Jake had gone out with in tenth grade and had broken up with sometime last year. “She said . . . she said a lot of stuff to him. But the thing she kept saying was that he was lying to her.”
“And you just happened to remember this now?” Quinn asked, suddenly tense.
“I remember it because Ashlyn was crying, Quinn. I felt sorry for her.”
Quinn shook her head. She didn’t want to hear this. She didn’t want to hear about Jake’s past relationships. “Gabriel, we don’t know what happened between them,” she said now. “We don’t know the whole story.”
Gabriel looked at her for a long moment. “You’re right,” he said, picking up his camera from the seat next to him and putting it on the table. “Maybe Ashlyn was wrong. Besides, I can’t imagine a guy lying to you anyway. Not Quinn LaPointe.” He gave her a playful kick under the table, and Quinn smiled and kicked him back. She was relieved. The tension between them had dissipated. Gabriel would see, her being with Jake didn’t have to interfere with their friendship. She honestly didn’t know how much time she could spend with Jake anyway. At least during cross-country season. He trained all the time. He was training right now, running eight miles outside in this weather. She glanced out the window where a car was driving down Main Street, sending a cascade of water up onto the sidewalk. She would have to drive back to school in this rain soon. She was picking Jake up after practice. And if this was like yesterday, there would be making out, she knew, in the parking lot when they got into her car, and more, again, before she dropped him off at his family’s house, the rain sheeting down the car’s windows, the music barely audible on the radio.
“Are you done with this?” Annika asked Gabriel, reappearing at their table. She was joking; the only thing left on his plate was a tired scrap of lettuce.
“Yep. Thanks,” he said, smiling at Annika. Was he flirting with her? Quinn wondered. Annika picked up his plate and, ignoring Quinn, whisked her still half-full glass of iced tea away. Quinn almost called after her.
“I wasn’t done with that,” she said to Gabriel instead.
“I told you she doesn’t like you,” Gabriel said.
“I think you might be right. I have no idea what I did to her. Or what you did to her to get her attention.”
“She’s pretty.” Gabriel shrugged. For some reason this annoyed Quinn. She raised an eyebrow at him.
“What? She is.” He picked up his camera and popped off the lens cap. “I think she’s a lifer, though. Like my brothers.”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s what I call someone who never leaves here,” Gabriel explained.
“But how do you know?”
“It’s just a feeling,” he said.
“Well, I love Butternut,” Quinn said. “But I don’t want to be a lifer.”
“Me neither. Another year, and I’m gone,” he said. He looked at her through his camera and adjusted the lens.
“Don’t forget about me,” Quinn said.
“How could I,” he said, still fiddling with the lens.
“I missed you this summer. It’s been weeks since I’ve been in one of your photo shoots.”
“Look at me,” he said. “Look right into the camera.”