Top Ten by Katie Cotugno
DEDICATION
For Tom Colleran, my best friend from high school
CONTENTS
Dedication
Number 10: The Hookup: Graduation
Number 9: The Beginning: Freshman Year, Fall
Number 8: The Near Miss: Sophomore Year, Spring
Number 7: The Dad Thing: Sophomore Year, Fall
Number 6: The Reunion: Junior Year, Spring
Number 5: The Big One: Junior Year, Winter
Number 4: The New York Trip: Senior Year, Winter
Number 3: The Meet Cute: Freshman Year, Fall
Number 2: Finally: Morning After Graduation
Number 1: The New Beginning: Summer After Senior Year
Acknowledgments
Back Ad
About the Author
Books by Katie Cotugno
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
NUMBER 10
THE HOOKUP
GRADUATION
RYAN
Sitting with his ankles crossed in Gabby’s leafy green backyard two hours after their high school graduation, Ryan tilted his head back and squinted up at the proud June sun. “Okay,” he said, breathing in grill smoke and the smell of new grass, the yard buzzing with the hum of a couple dozen people all talking at once. “Top ten moments of senior year, go. Actually no,” he amended, before Gabby could say anything. “Top ten moments of high school.”
Gabby groaned. “That’s an ambitious list, my friend,” she told him, heaving herself indelicately out of the hammock they’d been sharing and edging through the crowd of her aunts and uncles, neighbors and family friends. “Also, extremely corny.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Ryan followed her over toward the folding tables at the far end of the lawn, watched her fill a plastic cup with an exacting assortment of chips and pretzels and M&M’s. She was still in the outfit she’d worn to the ceremony that morning, a silky blue dress that was cut like a big V-neck T-shirt and made her eyes look very bright. Her blond hair hung long and smooth down her back. “You’re just embarrassed that all the most important moments of your adolescence include me.”
“Screw off,” Gabby said cheerfully, dropping a couple of pretzels into his outstretched palm. Ryan looked out at the yard as he crunched. He and Gabby had been best friends since freshman year, but it was rare for their families to spend any actual time together. He’d thought it might be weird, but the party seemed to be going fine so far. His mom was yakking away with Gabby’s aunt Liz while Gabby’s sisters, Celia and Kristina, set up a game of cornhole on the long stretch of grass on the side of the house. Her little cousins ran circles around the Adirondack chairs, bright red Popsicles dripping in their hands.
“Hi, lovey,” Ryan’s mom said, coming up behind him in her sundress and off-brand Birkenstocks, tucking herself under his arm. He was a full foot taller than her by now, which made him feel like a giant. “How you doing?”
“I’m good,” Ryan said, ducking his head away. He knew why she was asking—and why she’d asked him twice already—which was that his dad had made noise about coming to graduation and then just blatantly hadn’t, not even bothering with a perfunctory sorry, kid text this time. Ryan knew he ought to be used to stuff like that by now, but it always managed to surprise him. Still, he definitely did not want to have a moment with his mom about it in the middle of Gabby’s backyard. He didn’t want to have a moment about it, period. It was what it was. It was fine.
Over by the grill Mr. Hart was holding his cup in the air now, proposing a toast: “To the graduates,” he began, “our daughter Gabby, National Merit Scholar and winner of the Colson High Prize for Photography, and to her best friend, Ryan, who—”
“Who managed to graduate at all,” Ryan called out. He liked Gabby’s dad, and wanted to let him off the hook before he got to the end of that sentence and realized Ryan had virtually nothing to distinguish him.
Gabby shot him a look. “Don’t do that,” she murmured, shaking her head. Then, loud enough so the whole party could hear her, she called out, “And who also got a giant hockey scholarship to University of Minnesota, PS.”
Ryan was surprised at that, and dorkily pleased that she’d said it—it wasn’t like Gabby at all to draw attention to herself in any context, but especially not in a big group of people. He grinned, lifting his can of Coke in the air amid everyone’s assorted congratulations. Gabby made a face in return. The sun shone through the gaps between the leaves in the oak trees, making patterns on the early-summer grass.
Kristina turned the music up, the yuppie Paul Simon–type stuff they were always listening to at the Hart house. He and Gabby wandered back over to the hammock, made themselves comfortable for the rest of the afternoon. It was weird, thinking all this would be ancient history in less than three months, everybody he knew scattering in all different directions. Ryan wasn’t one of those people who thought life would never get better than high school, but at least he knew where he fit in, as far as Colson High went. He wasn’t sure about the rest of the world.
He rubbed a hand over his head, which was aching a little—although, he told himself firmly, not any worse than usual. Probably he was thinking too much. After all, it wasn’t like he didn’t want to play hockey for Minnesota. It just didn’t always feel like something he’d actively picked.
He was trying to figure out how to ask Gabby about it when one of her little cousins flung himself onto the other side of the hammock, shifting their center of gravity enough that Gabby tumbled over into Ryan’s side, her long hair brushing the bare skin of his arm. “Easy, tiger,” Gabby called as the kid picked himself up and careened off in the opposite direction, but she didn’t straighten up right away. “You smell nice today,” she said to Ryan, the weight of her body warm against him. “Did you bathe or something?”
“It was a special occasion,” Ryan informed her, his skin prickling in a way that wasn’t entirely unpleasant. Ugh, this was stupid, dangerous ground. “Come on,” he said, standing up too quickly in an attempt to shake off whatever dumb old feelings were bubbling up, ghosts of crushes long past. It was because of graduation, probably, because things were changing. It didn’t actually mean anything. “I want more cake.”
The party wound down past four o’clock, the crowd starting to thin, Mrs. Hart pressing leftover potato salad and slices of six-foot Italian sub on everybody to take home. “You driving to the thing at Harrison’s tonight?” Ryan asked Gabby as her mom handed him a Tupperware full of magic bars. “Or do you want me to?”
Gabby grimaced. “We’re going to the thing at Harrison’s tonight?”
“Yes, dear.” Ryan smiled at the familiarity of it. This was their routine: she dragged her feet about going out places, and Ryan either convinced her or didn’t. Today, he was hoping he could.
She was an easier sell than he was expecting, actually. “Well,” she said, lips twisting, the sun catching the golden threads in her hair. “I suppose.”
“What are you guys going to do at college?” asked Celia, appearing behind them holding a crumbly brownie on a napkin. She was home from Swarthmore for the summer, where she was learning to be a psychologist and also to act like she knew more than anyone else, although she basically already had a PhD in that last part. “Without each other to chew your food for you, I mean?”
“Oh, come on now, I chew my own food,” Ryan defended himself. “It’s only gum Gabby helps me with.”
“And only if it’s been sitting around a long time,” Gabby put in. “Soft gum he can chew all on his own.”
Celia rolled her eyes at them; Gabby only grinned. But as they said their good-byes, Ryan felt a tiny nip of something unfamiliar, a creeping unease curling up in his stomach like a snake lounging on a rock. He looked at
“Pick you up at nine!” Gabby called.
GABBY
It was more like nine thirty by the time she’d gotten to Ryan’s—she’d had a little bit of a wobble over whether her hair looked greasy, had needed a generous sprinkle of dry shampoo and half a dozen reassurances from her sisters before she made it out the door—and Gabby stuck close behind him as they headed up the front walk. The party was at Harrison Chambers’s house, a center-hall colonial full of china cabinets that held enough breakables to make her faintly nervous. The whole senior class had been invited, and from the looks of things most of them had actually showed: bodies crowded the hallways and the stairwells, perched on the arms of couches and sprawled cross-legged on the shag rug in the den. It was hot inside, despite the AC cranking. It felt like there were too many people breathing the air.
“You okay?” Ryan murmured, quiet enough so only she could hear him. Gabby nodded. It was rare for a party to throw her into panic mode anymore, though it still happened sometimes. Lately, for the most part, the anxiety that had plagued her since she’d exited the womb was more of a low simmer than a full-on boil. Which wasn’t to say she didn’t still freak out for no reason on occasion: two days ago she’d had a grade-A panicker in the shower curtain aisle of Bed Bath & Beyond, though she hadn’t told anybody about it. She’d had to sit on a pile of bath mats with her head between her legs while she waited for it to pass.
“Come on,” Ryan said now, wrapping his hand around her wrist and squeezing, as if he suspected he wasn’t getting the full story but wasn’t going to push for it. “Let’s go outside.”
For all the time they’d spent together in the last four years, she and Ryan still didn’t have a ton of friends in common, but the ones they did were camped out on a hammock at the far corner of the backyard: Nate, who’d worked with Ryan at the hot dog hut; Sophie and Anil, who’d been together since they were freshmen. Even Michelle had shown up, though she and Ryan had never quite become the great pals Gabby had once hoped; she was sitting on the grass next to her boyfriend, Jacob, who was wearing skintight jeans and a blazer even though it had to be eighty degrees outside. Jacob always smelled a little bit like BO.
“I’m gonna get beers,” Ryan told her, waving at another guy from the hockey team. “You want a beer?”
“Sure,” Gabby told him, though she didn’t intend to drink it. Sometimes it just helped her to have something to hold. She settled back against an old tree stump, knowing that it would probably be the better part of an hour before Ryan came wandering back; he’d get distracted talking to this buddy or that teammate, catching up with some girl who was in his algebra class sophomore year who he forgot he always thought was really interesting.
Normally this would have been her worst nightmare—Ryan coaxing her out to a party she didn’t really want to go to and then disappearing, leaving her alone with her anxiety like a gnawing animal making a den inside her chest. Tonight, though, Gabby found she didn’t much mind it: the chance to sit back and listen to her friends jabber to one another, her head tilted back to stare up at the tall straight pine trees ringing the yard. Eventually he’d show up again, coming back to her with his tail wagging like a golden retriever’s. He always did.
“We should do something amazing this summer,” Sophie was saying. They were chatting about what, exactly, amazing might mean, here in the farthest, northernmost suburbs of New York City, when Gabby’s phone buzzed inside her pocket. She pulled it out and peered at the screen, heart flipping like it always did when she saw it was from Shay: Happy graduation, Gabby-Girl! So excited to finally have you in the city this fall. Coffee + catching up soon?
Gabby swallowed. They’d been broken up since March, so in theory there was no reason for a few dumb words on a screen to be enough to conjure Shay up as surely as if she was sitting here on the grass at this party: her hair and her smell and her smile, the one crooked tooth at the edge of her mouth.
She was trying to figure out how to answer when she felt a gentle knee in her shoulder: “Don’t be doing phone stuff,” Ryan scolded, like he’d somehow been able to hear Shay’s text from inside the house. “The party is right here.”
Gabby tucked her phone back into her purse and took the can of Bud Light he was proffering. It occurred to her that she didn’t want him to know she and Shay still talked every once in a while, though she wasn’t entirely sure why. “The party being you, in this scenario?”
Ryan sat down beside her, his arm solid and warm against hers. “The party’s always me,” he said.
“Uh-huh.” Gabby rolled her eyes, but it wasn’t like he was wrong. Ryan loved people—and people, in turn, loved Ryan—more than anyone else Gabby had ever met. Celia called him the Great Equalizer. He was Gabby’s social security blanket, her failsafe against miserable, crippling anxiety; she had no idea what she was going to do without him come fall. Thinking about it was terrifying on a physical, visceral level, and so mostly she did her best not to think about it at all.
“Top ten moments of high school,” she conceded now, popping the tab on her beer can and leaning back beside him. A million stars blazed bright high above their heads.
RYAN
It was after one by the time they got back to Ryan’s house, Leon Bridges turned down low on the stereo and the car windows rolled down so the night air spilled in. Even Ryan’s neighborhood, which was on the scruffier, ’60s-ranch side of Colson, looked like the background of a Disney movie: all tall trees and blue-black sky, fireflies flickering away on the lawns.
Gabby turned the car off, everything still and silent. Neither one of them made any attempt to move. It occurred to Ryan that he could stay right here in this passenger seat with her forever and probably be perfectly content, provided of course they could get food delivered carside.
“So, beach tomorrow?” Gabby asked finally, and Ryan nodded. Sophie’s parents had a place down the Jersey Shore they were letting them all use for a couple of days. She kept warning them that it wasn’t anything fancy, although any house reserved specifically for vacations seemed pretty swank as far as Ryan was concerned.
“Beach tomorrow,” he agreed.
They were quiet for another moment. Ryan glanced over at her in the dark. He knew he ought to go inside, let her get home, but something stopped him: he felt irrationally nervous all of a sudden, like maybe he was never going to see her again.
“What?” Gabby was looking at him, suspicious. She’d changed her clothes for the party: a tank top with a low, swooping neckline, her hair scooped into a loose knot at the base of her skull. He knew she was pretty—of course he knew she was pretty—but he forgot about it sometimes, the way you get used to a smell. Noticing it now, or re-noticing, he suddenly felt very warm.
Ryan cleared his throat. They’d had enough near-misses over the last four years for him to know that kind of thinking wasn’t going to get him anywhere. He and Gabby were friends; they’d always been friends. And if he occasionally still thought about what it would be like to be more than that, well. That was his secret to keep. “No,” he said, “nothing.”
Gabby frowned. “Is your head bothering you?” she asked.
“You always think my head is bothering me,” Ryan said.
“Your head is always bothering you,” Gabby pointed out.
Ryan ignored that. First of all, it wasn’t true: a couple of hockey-related headaches were hardly a big deal, in the scheme of things. Second of all, even if it was true, it wasn’t worth dwelling on; after all, he was due at practice in Minneapolis in two months.
Two months.
The thought of it gave Ryan that same uneasy feeling from earlier, like everything was about to change whether he wanted it to or not and he couldn’t do one single thing to stop it. “Can I tell you something without you calling me a pussy?” he heard himself blurt.
Gabby made a face. “I would never use the word pussy, first of all.”
&nbs
“When have I ever called you a wimp?”
Ryan rolled his eyes. “Like a thousand times, actually, but—”
“Okay, okay,” Gabby conceded, “sorry, go. I promise I won’t denigrate your manhood.”
“That’s sweet of you, considering I’m trying to tell you a nice fucking thing here.” He blew a breath out, nervous all of a sudden. His friendship with Gabby was different from any other relationship in his life for a lot of reasons, but this was one of them: the careful reveal of information, the unspoken agreement they had about what they said to each other and what they didn’t. He wondered if even this was crossing the line. “It kind of scared the shit out of me, when your sister was talking about us being apart this afternoon.”
Promise or not, Ryan was expecting her to make fun of him a little, but Gabby just nodded. “Yeah,” she said quietly, glancing down and picking at her cuticles. “Me too.”
Ryan looked at her in surprise. Usually she met feelings talk of any kind with enthusiastic retching noises. “Really?”
“Of course I’m scared!” Gabby exclaimed. “Are you kidding me? I’m terrified. I have no idea what I’m going to do without you around every second. It’s entirely possible I’ll freak out and never leave my dorm and grow into my sheets like a science experiment.”
Ryan shook his head. “That won’t happen.”
“Oh no?” Gabby asked dubiously.
“Of course not,” he said, with more confidence than he actually felt about it. “You’re a graduate of the Ryan McCullough Party Project. We have a 100 percent success rate.”
Gabby huffed a laugh at that, banging her temple lightly against the headrest. “Is that so?”
“It is,” Ryan said. “And even if it wasn’t, I know you, and I know.”