Top Ten by Katie Cotugno
“Who do you imagine is going to pay those loans back, Gabby?” God, she was so thick sometimes. It killed him. “In case you haven’t noticed, my life is not quite as fucking cushy as yours.”
That stung her, he could tell. Good, Ryan thought. Let her sting. “Don’t tell me what I’ve noticed,” she said coldly, drawing herself up to her full height like a tall, affronted ostrich.
“Somebody needs to,” Ryan said. “Do you have any idea how spoiled you sound right now? I know you grew up in magical Sesame Street Candyland where everybody constantly tells you you can be anything you want to be, but—”
“You are not downtrodden!” Gabby exploded. “Oh my god, you’re a hugely popular white boy hockey player living in the suburbs, Ryan. I’m not going to stand here and listen to you talk about how hard your life is. It’s insulting.”
Ryan felt his face get hot, shame and anger. “That’s not—”
“No,” Gabby interrupted, “it is. Somehow you got it into your head that the only thing you have going for you is hockey, and if you want to believe that, then fine, I can’t stop you. But you’re bigger than this stupid, barbaric sport.”
Ryan laughed in her face. “I’m not, actually. But it’s nice to know what you think of it. And it’s nice to know what you think of me.”
“Can you stop it?” Gabby was shouting now, seeming not to care if anybody else could hear her; in another second she’d probably stamp her foot. “Your dad’s an asshole who doesn’t pay enough attention to you, Ryan, we get it. It’s boring. And just because he doesn’t give you enough credit is no reason not to give it to yourself.”
That was over the line, and they both knew it; when Gabby opened her mouth, Ryan knew she was going to backpedal, but he held up his hands before she could speak. “You know what?” he said. “I’m done with this conversation. My friends are going out.”
“Ryan—” Gabby reached for him then, trying to cross the distance between them; Ryan stepped neatly out of her way.
“Thanks for nothing, I guess.” He almost spat it. “You can go.”
Gabby stared at him for a moment, hands still hovering in midair like she was trying to touch the nighttime. Then she turned around, and she went.
RYAN
Ryan stood frozen on the concrete for a long time after Gabby was gone. His anger was like a layer of foam insulation wrapped around him: something with physical density, like he might be able to reach out and grab a fistful of it. Like it was so thick and suffocating he could barely breathe.
His phone dinged inside his pocket, snapping him out of it enough to realize he was still standing in the middle of the parking lot like a clown. Can’t wait to hear all about your game, Chelsea had texted. Call when you’re done if you get a chance.
He was done, all right. Ryan looked out across the parking lot; he could see his teammates piling into various people’s SUVs, headed for TGI Fridays and then somebody’s basement or backyard or over-the-garage family room, for a night of cheerful drunken celebrating. They’d won, after all. Everything was great.
“McCullough!” Remy shouted, hanging out the passenger-side window of a shiny red Jeep. “You coming or what?”
Ryan shook his raging head, waved them off, and turned toward the front of the building. Jammed his hands into his pockets and started to walk.
It was snowing now, fat flakes slipping down the back of his collar and a sharp wind that bit at the tips of his ears. Ryan kind of liked the sting. His head throbbed, but not nearly as bad as it had the other times he’d hit it. He probably didn’t even have a concussion. She’d probably fucked him into next year for nothing. For a knot on the head.
He kept walking. Colson was peak suburbs, not particularly pedestrian-friendly; Ryan walked mostly on the grassy shoulder, left footprints in the snow in people’s front yards. He wasn’t even sure where he was going until he rounded the corner into Chelsea’s neighborhood, a cluster of small, well-maintained Tudors not far from the middle school. All the streets were named after poets back here, he knew, although none of the names were particularly familiar to him. Dumb jock that he was.
Chelsea’s dad answered the door, a tall, skinny dude with a goatee who had spent the last couple of weeks looking at Ryan with an expression of grim resignation. “Chelsea,” he called, eyes on Ryan like, I know what you’re about, kid, “you have a visitor.”
Chelsea appeared in the front hall a moment later in a pair of soft-looking gray sweatpants and a swim team T-shirt with the collar ripped out, mouth rubbed clean of the red lipstick she usually wore. “Hey,” she said, smiling in a way that looked surprised but—Ryan hoped—pleased. “What are you doing here?”
“Um,” he said, feeling weirdly shy all of a sudden. He didn’t usually get shy around girls, especially girls he was already hooking up with, and it was a new sensation. She was wearing her glasses, which she didn’t always. Ryan liked her glasses a lot. “Hi.”
Chelsea considered him with barely veiled amusement. “Hi,” she said.
“Um, how’re you feeling?” he asked, realizing abruptly what a dope he probably looked like. “I didn’t bring you flowers or anything. I probably should have brought you flowers or soup or something like that.”
“My mom made soup,” Chelsea told him, still hiding a smile and not even very well. “Anyway, I feel a lot better.” She gestured down at herself. “I look like crap, clearly, but.”
“You look beautiful,” Ryan blurted, and this time Chelsea smiled for real.
“Well,” she said. “Thanks.” She leaned against the wall in the foyer then, looking at him a little more closely. “Are you okay?” she asked, dark eyebrows knitting a bit. “How was your game?”
“It was fine.” Ryan shrugged. He didn’t want to talk about hockey, or his head, or Gabby. He especially did not want to talk about Gabby. “Do you want to go for a walk with me?”
That surprised her. “I mean, I don’t think I feel that good,” she pointed out. “It’s actively snowing.”
“Oh, sure.” Ryan nodded, feeling like an idiot. “Right.”
Chelsea smiled again. “What if we drove?” she asked. “Did you drive here?”
Ryan shook his head. “Walked.”
“From school?” Now she looked sort of concerned. “Ryan, are you sure you’re okay?”
Ugh, he was playing this wrong; he didn’t want to worry her. He didn’t want to worry anyone. He mustered his most charming grin. “I’m good. I just missed you once the game was over. And as you might recall, I have no car.”
To his relief, Chelsea smiled again. “I do recall that,” she said, looking placated; she reached out and squeezed his hand. “Let me just make sure it’s okay with my parents. They might give me a hard time about the weather.”
The snow had mostly stopped, actually, so her parents agreed that she could drive Ryan home as long as she didn’t take any detours. “Straight there and back,” her dad said, eyes on Ryan again as he shut the storm door behind them. “Home by usual time.”
“Definitely,” Chelsea promised. “Usual time.”
Chelsea’s car was always full of garbage, which Ryan found sort of improbably charming—like she was so hyper-efficient in the rest of her life that the overflow all ended up here, in the form of empty Starbucks cups and CVS receipts and her second-favorite pair of sneakers. He barely knew her yet, Ryan understood that intellectually. But he felt like he did.
“So,” Chelsea said as she pulled out of the driveway. “You wanna tell me why you’re being such a huge freak right now, or not so much?”
Ryan huffed out a noisy sigh. “I’m not being a huge freak,” he protested. “Whatever, I’m being a regular-sized freak at most.”
“Okay,” Chelsea said calmly, no argument, then proceeded to be absolutely silent until he broke. He told her everything—just like he’d come here to do, if he was being honest with himself; just like he’d known he would deep in his brain stem from the moment he’d set off from school o
When he was done, Chelsea was quiet for another moment, like she was thinking. “Do you think you have a concussion right now?” she asked.
“No,” Ryan said with a bombastic certainty that wasn’t 100 percent genuine. “I don’t.”
Chelsea seemed to take him at his word. “Gabby’s not a sports person,” she pointed out. “I’m not saying that as a knock against her; it’s just true. So there are things she doesn’t get. And from what you’ve said, she has zero tolerance for discomfort of any kind, physical or emotional, so I can see why she would have freaked. Having said that, what she did was super obnoxious and overstepping and doesn’t take into account all the ways that your life is different from hers. And you’re right to be pissed off.”
Ryan wasn’t expecting that. “I am?”
“Yeah,” Chelsea said. “Absolutely. I would be.”
“Oh.” Ryan thought about that for a second. It was strange how having such a smart, rational person repeat his argument back to him—not solve it, just repeat it back—calmed him down almost immediately. Like her giving him permission to be angry meant he didn’t have to clutch the feeling quite so hard. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” Chelsea pulled into his driveway; Ryan looked up at the darkened house. His mom had forgotten to leave the porch light on again—she was out on a date with Phil the Dachshund Guy, who she’d been dating for a year now but who still insisted on calling Ryan buddy in a way that was frankly embarrassing for both of them. It was their anniversary, he remembered suddenly. She’d asked him if he’d mind if she missed his game.
“Well,” Chelsea said finally. “Last stop, huh?”
Ryan gazed at her for a moment in the glow of the dashboard. He liked her so, so much. He liked her smile and how scarily good she was at math and most of all the sturdiness of her, like here was a person who knew exactly who she was in the world and how she fit in there. He more than liked her, potentially. He’d never felt like that about somebody he’d hooked up with before.
“You want to come in?” he asked.
They were kissing by the time they made it up the front steps and through the doorway; Ryan had her shirt off by the time they passed through the living room. He led her fast through the hallway like he always did when anybody new was in his house, not wanting to give her too much time to look around and see how shabby it was. He kicked the door shut tight and went to work on her bra.
“I’m gross,” Chelsea warned him as he fumbled at the clasp of it, his mouth on her collarbone and one knee between her thighs. “I’m still all snotty. I didn’t even shower today.”
“You’re not gross,” Ryan promised her. Even if she had been, he definitely wouldn’t have cared. “Jesus Christ, Chelsea, are you ever not gross.”
That made her smile. Ryan felt the warm, reassuring curve of it against his cheek. Chelsea nudged him backward, walked him over toward the mattress; he sat down on the edge of it, and she climbed right into his lap. His head didn’t hurt anymore. He couldn’t imagine any part of his body ever hurting again in his life.
“You want to?” he asked finally, plucking at the waistband of her sweatpants; they were lying down now, most of his own clothes in a heap on the floor. His room was dark, the only sounds the hiss of the heater and his own ragged breaths.
“Yeah,” Chelsea said, looking at him seriously. “Yeah, I do.”
“Really?” he asked, unable to keep the shock out of his voice. He’d fully expected her to say no. Then, worried for a second she’d misunderstood what he was asking: “I mean. You want to have sex?”
Chelsea laughed at that, loud and cackling. “Yeah, Ryan. I want to have sex.”
“Oh.” Ryan nodded. “Okay. Good. Me too.”
Chelsea laughed again at that and kissed him. Ryan pulled her sweats down her legs. He’d never actually done this before, though he knew he had a reputation at school, and it wasn’t like he’d done anything to dissuade people. He found it was better to let them think what they thought.
Still, and maybe it was his mom’s vestigial Catholicism in him, but he’d always thought it would be sort of special, the first time he did it. Not that this wasn’t special, obviously—not that Chelsea wasn’t special—but if he was being completely honest with himself, he always kind of assumed it would be with—with—
Whatever.
Ryan rubbed his hands up and down Chelsea’s arms, felt the swimming muscles in her shoulders: she’d challenged him to arm wrestling one of the first times they’d hung out. He’d won, but not as quickly as he thought he was going to.
“God,” he said, looking at her in the sliver of light coming in through the window, “you are so pretty.”
“You’re pretty, too,” Chelsea told him. Ryan grinned.
GABBY
“What about this one?” Kristina called the next morning, holding up a lip gloss down at the other end of the aisle.
Gabby squinted. “It’s very purple, certainly.”
“Is that a no?”
“I think it’s nice,” their mom said, tossing an at-home dye kit into their basket. “Go ahead, Stina, throw it in. I’m feeling generous.”
“Big money, big money,” Kristina chanted, like a contestant on Wheel of Fortune. Gabby couldn’t help but smile. They were at the discount beauty supply store on Route 9, trawling the aisles of pressed powder foundation and organic hair masks while a dusting of snow fell outside. A trip to the beauty supply store was a sort of all-purpose emotional marker in the Hart house—not because Gabby’s mom wasn’t a feminist or thought they all needed a vast arsenal of potions to be beautiful, but because she recognized that sometimes if you were feeling happy or sad or like a piece of shit, it helped to buy eleven different nail polishes for ninety-nine cents each and convince yourself, for a little while, that they were the keys to the life that you truly wanted. She’d taken one look at Gabby this morning and demanded they all get in the car.
“Cheer up,” Celia said now, bumping her in the arm as they considered rows of prettily wrapped castile soaps. Celia was home for winter break for exactly eighteen more days, not that Gabby was counting. “It’s not such a huge loss, all things considered.”
Gabby glanced up at her tone, frowning. “What does that mean?”
“I just mean that Ryan’s, like . . .” She waved her hand vaguely. “You know how he is.”
“No, I don’t,” Gabby said flatly. “How is he?”
Celia rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean,” she said, picking up a big purple bottle of body wash and examining the label. “Like, kind of a giant meathead.”
“Fuck you, Celia.” Gabby felt her whole body jump-start. “Just because you’ve taken one women’s studies course at college or whatever doesn’t mean you know anything about him, or about me, or about our friendship. So you can keep your opinions to yourself, thanks.”
“Easy,” Celia said in that voice she got when she thought Gabby was overreacting, looking a little stung. “I’m just trying to make you feel better.”
“You be easy,” Gabby said hotly. She thought of the word of the day app on Ryan’s ancient iPhone. She thought of his head slamming against the ice the night before. She thought of how calmly he’d talked to her when she’d had that panicker the very first time he’d taken her to a party, and suddenly she wasn’t at all confident that she wasn’t about to burst into tears. She felt fiercely defensive of him, even though thirty seconds ago she would have said the same thing Celia had said to anyone who would listen. Worse, probably. “I’m going to wait outside.”
“Gabby—” Celia started, but Gabby was already gone. She didn’t have the car keys, but she was too worked up to go back inside and get them from her mom, so instead she leaned against the trunk and dug her phone out o
Ryan didn’t text back.
NUMBER 4
THE NEW YORK TRIP
SENIOR YEAR, WINTER
GABBY
Ryan put his signal on, glanced over his shoulder, and merged onto the Taconic Parkway South. “Top ten nontouristy things to do in New York City,” he announced.
“I have no idea,” Gabby said from the backseat. Even though they only lived just up the river from Manhattan, her family went down rarely, to see the dinosaurs at the Museum of Natural History or the occasional Broadway matinee. “I only know touristy things.”
“I kind of like touristy things,” Chelsea offered. She and Ryan were doing an overnight in the city to celebrate their one-year anniversary, had plans to go to dinner and see the Rockefeller tree. Gabby wasn’t exactly sure how Ryan had managed to book a hotel room—she had a feeling his dad had probably been involved—but it was her first time visiting Shay down at college, and she was grateful for the ride.
“What are you guys doing tonight, huh?” Ryan asked over his shoulder. “I mean, knowing Shay, she’s probably taking you to hear a jazz trio where all the musicians are subway rats, but—”
Gabby snorted. “You’re a dick,” she said, not without amusement.
“And they’re all wearing little rat turtlenecks—”
“Uh-huh.”
“And little rat berets—”
“All right, now you’re just stealing from The Muppet Show,” Chelsea pointed out, but Gabby was laughing.
“There you go,” Ryan said, glancing at her in the rearview. The car was a new acquisition, a prehistoric beater sedan he’d found on Craigslist and paid for with money from overtime at Walter’s. Ryan loved it like it was his own child. “You’ve been sitting there since you got in looking like you’re about to die.”
“Leave her alone,” Chelsea chided.