“Okay,” Gideon said, giving me a half smile. He looked at me for a long moment before he spoke again. “It’s good to see you, Emily.”
“You too,” I said automatically, then wondered a second later if it really was. While I was happy to have someone to talk to and I was no longer the most pathetic person at the Orchard, I didn’t particularly want to talk to Gideon, especially after the way we’d left things.
Gideon looked the same as he had the last time I’d seen him, the night in May when everything had crashed and burned. I’d gotten used to his tallness when we were hanging out—or whatever it was we’d been doing—every weekend, but it had been long enough since I’d seen him that it struck me again. His blue eyes were still inscrutable, and his dark hair looked freshly cut. I was surprised and a little impressed he’d come over to me. I knew that if I’d seen him here, I wouldn’t have done the same thing. But maybe that’s how pitiful I’d looked standing here on my own—he’d felt he needed to come and rescue me. “So,” I said, after a long pause when it became clear Gideon wasn’t going to say anything. “How have you been?”
“Well,” he said, then took another pause. Gideon had always skipped the small talk with me, always thought about his answers and always wanted real answers in return. He had never given the flip, easy responses like everyone else. I thought now that we were no longer the something we’d once been, he’d stop this and go back to the superficial. But apparently not. “I’m all right,” he finally said. He turned his head slightly to the right, and nodded behind him. “Sam wanted to come out tonight, so . . .”
I lost whatever else Gideon was saying as I followed his nod and saw Sam. Just the sight of him was enough to make my stomach drop. He was leaning against a picnic table, and there was a girl sitting on top of it, talking to him, smiling wide and gesturing big, telling him some story while Sam nodded occasionally, one eyebrow raised. Why hadn’t I put this together as soon as I’d seen Gideon? He and Sam went places together, especially places like the Orchard. Before I could look away, Sam’s gaze drifted from the girl and landed on me. We just stared at each other for a moment, my heart thudding, before I looked away, down at the ground.
I could still sense his eyes on me, and I felt myself get closer to panic, wondering if he was going to come over, if I was going to have to talk to him. But when I glanced back, I saw that he was looking away, clearly barely listening to the girl at his side. And I could feel myself relax a little. Of course he wasn’t going to come over here. He had always been a coward.
“Emily?” I made myself focus back up at Gideon, who was looking at me with his eyebrows raised, waiting for an answer to a question I hadn’t heard him ask.
“Sorry,” I said quickly. “What was that?”
“Nothing,” Gideon said, with a smile that disappeared immediately. He took a breath, and I realized he looked nervous, that he was swallowing hard. “Emily. I—”
“Sorry,” I said, quickly, needing to cut off whatever he was about to say. I wasn’t even sure what it was, only that he would probably want some explanation for what had happened, and I much preferred to keep that can of worms closed. “I just . . . I have to go,” I said, starting to edge away from him. “I actually—there’s someone I need to talk to.”
Gideon just looked at me in silence, and I could feel a long-dormant frustration bubbling up to the surface. Half my conversations with Gideon seemed to consist of these long, charged pauses, and after a while I’d just found it exhausting—like being a character inside a Pinter play. Like there were all these meanings that I was supposed to understand in his silences, but never quite did. “Okay,” he said slowly.
“Bye,” I said, then I turned and walked away, toward the guy with the keg, simply because I couldn’t think of any other options. I realized only after it was going to be too late to change direction—without it being super obvious—that I was going to pass Sam. I tried to keep my eyes fixed in front of me, but couldn’t help glancing in his direction just as I passed. The girl next to him was still talking, her gestures bigger than ever, while he just looked on, impassive. It was something that had always really bothered me about him: he rarely laughed at anything, making you feel like you were somehow obligated to entertain him. And even though I didn’t want it to, when you did get him to laugh, it somehow felt like an achievement. I pointedly looked away before our eyes could meet again, keeping my head down until I got to the keg.
The guy selling the beer was perched on one of the more rickety-looking picnic tables with a girl next to him, sitting close. I didn’t recognize either of them—I was pretty sure they went to Hartfield.
I waited for a moment, until it became clear that he was not paying attention, then cleared my throat and said, “Um, beer? Please?”
“Five bucks,” the guy said, not looking away from the girl, even when I pulled a crumpled bill out of my pocket and handed it to him. He pointed to the remaining red cups, and then toward the keg.
“Thanks,” I said, taking a cup and walking toward the keg while the girl burst out laughing. Even though I knew it wasn’t about me, I still felt my heart pound as I pressed the spigot. The keg was nearly tapped, and I’d never been great at working them to begin with, so I mostly got a cup of foam. It didn’t really matter to me, though, since I was basically just using it as a prop. I took a tiny sip, wincing at the warm, metallic taste, wondering how much longer I had to stay.
An hour later, I had solved the problem of looking like a total loser hanging out alone by removing myself from public view. I had found a spot in the rows of trees, the ones away from the picnic tables that nobody would be climbing as a dare, and had sat down, my back against one of them, trying not to cry. I had known, of course, that Sloane wasn’t here anymore. But I hadn’t quite understood what that meant until tonight. As I’d walked across the Orchard with my beer, I’d seen people I knew from school, and occasionally they would give me half a nod, but some people’s eyes slid right over me, as though without Sloane by my side, I’d become invisible. I’d pretended like I had somewhere to go, biting my lip hard as I walked into the trees and then sat down.
The reality of life without Sloane was, it turned out, much worse than I’d imagined. The reality was me, sitting by a tree with a prop cup of beer, totally alone, while other people laughed with their friends. I poured the beer out onto the tree’s roots and pushed myself to my feet. I was going home. I had surely spent enough time at the Orchard to satisfy Sloane’s list, though I had no idea what it might have accomplished beyond making me feel the loss of her even more sharply.