Top Ten by Katie Cotugno
“Really?” Chelsea asked. “What did I just say to you, then?”
Crap. Ryan had no idea, truthfully; he’d been trying to work out what Columbia freshmen generally did at eight thirty on a Saturday night, and what Gabby might be doing along with them. “I was listening to the song,” he tried, gesturing up at the zitty dude in a top hat currently singing “Music of the Night” from his perch on top of a shiny red banquette. “This is a cool place.”
Chelsea rolled her eyes. “Are you still freaking out about Gabby?” she asked. “Is that what’s going on?”
“What?” Ryan asked, sounding like he was completely full of it even to his own ears. “No, of course not. And I wasn’t freaking out.”
“Then what is it, huh?” she asked. “It’s me; the whole point of this night is supposed to be that we’ve been together a whole year. You can talk to me. If something is bothering you, then . . .” Chelsea shrugged across the table, her hair frizzing around her face from the cold and the static, her mouth a bright lipstick red. “Just tell me about it.”
“All right.” Even as Ryan was saying it he knew it was a terrible idea, but it just came out, like word vomit. “Let me just shoot her a text, then, see how it’s going.”
“Just shoot—” Chelsea sighed. “Really?”
“You just said I could tell you!” Ryan protested.
“I—” Chelsea pressed her lips together. “You’re right,” she said. “I did; I’m sorry. Go ahead.”
Ryan set his phone on the table and spun it a little. “It’s just, the thing you gotta understand about Gabby is she’s never going to just ask for help or advice, even if she needs it. So you gotta just dig like a freaking archaeologist to find out what’s going on with her, and that’s the only time you find out that, like, she hasn’t eaten for two days because she has to give a class presentation or she’s obsessing about some awkward conversation she had in fifth grade or her whole relationship is in the shitter.” It felt good to talk about her, like lancing a blister or sneezing after you’d been holding it in. “So just because she was acting like a tough guy in the car doesn’t mean she’s not freaking out, is all.”
“Okay,” Chelsea said slowly. “I hear that. But meanwhile here I am sitting across this table from you, and you don’t need to be an archaeologist with me. I’m right here, and I’m telling you I don’t feel like I’m getting your full attention.”
“I know that,” Ryan said, trying not to sound irritated. “I’m paying attention to you. It’s just—I don’t know, it’s hard to explain.”
“What’s hard to ex— Are you in love with her?” Her features twisted unpleasantly; across the restaurant, Phantom of the Opera man was getting to his big finish. “I can’t believe I’m even asking you that. I can’t believe those words just came out of my mouth. I sound like a maniac. But I don’t actually think I am one.”
“Chelsea,” Ryan said. “Stop, no. Come on.”
“You come on,” Chelsea countered. He could tell by the tight, precise way she was modulating her voice that she was trying not to cry. “I have been so, so careful not to be, like, some crazy jealous stereotype of a girlfriend. And there have been lots of times my friends have given me crap about stuff and I’ve said, ‘No way, relax, Ryan loves me.’ But can you tell me honestly that all you feel for her is friendship?” Chelsea held her hands out, palms up and helpless. “Say that to me honestly, and I won’t ask you again.”
“Chels—” Ryan closed his mouth, opened it again. Closed it. He had no idea how to answer the question; every possible response felt like a lie. His feelings for Gabby were like a taped-up box in the back of his closet, ignored and unopened for so long he’d forgotten what was in there. Or, more accurately: he’d made himself forget. “It’s complicated,” he finally said.
Chelsea looked at him for a long moment, inscrutable. “Okay.” She pressed her lips together, like she was sealing a plastic bag. Then she reached for her coat. “I’m going to go,” she said. “We’re not that far from Grand Central. I can get a train back, okay? You can bring my overnight bag to school on Monday.”
“Chelsea—” Ryan started again, but Chelsea shook her head.
“Nope,” she said, holding a hand up. “Don’t even start.” She huffed out a noisy breath. “Because here’s the thing: I’m awesome. I know I’m awesome. And I think you know I’m awesome, honestly. I’m smart and I’m fun and I have a ton of friends and I’m probably going to make the swim team at college and rush a sorority and have a great life. I’m awesome. And I deserve somebody who never doubts for a second that there’s nobody more awesome in the room than me.” She looked at him for another moment. “I have really liked being your girlfriend, Ryan. But I’m not going to be in a relationship with somebody who has weird Facebook-status feelings for somebody else.” She stood up then, looking around the restaurant with pink cheeks and a slightly bewildered expression. “Yeah. Okay.”
Ryan watched her button her coat up and walk out of the restaurant, watched her hail a yellow taxi and climb inside. He knew he should have followed: fixed this, apologized, made some kind of declaration. But he couldn’t think what he could possibly say. Because Chelsea was right: she did deserve better. She deserved somebody who was 100 percent in.
Ryan watched until the taxi blended in with all the others on the avenue. Then he pushed his plate away and raised his hand for the check.
GABBY
Gabby hadn’t realized that spending the weekend with Shay apparently meant spending the weekend with Shay and Adria; the three of them ended up taking the subway downtown to go to Urban Outfitters and wait on a long line at a cupcake place that Adria said was the best, then back up to the dorm for a dinner of pizza and mashed potatoes and cereal in the cacophonous dining hall. After that they went back to Shay’s room to change their clothes before walking fifteen blocks in the freezing cold to Shay’s friend Carla’s off-campus apartment for a party. “I know you usually hate stuff like this,” Shay told her as they climbed a dingy, pee-smelling stairwell, “but I really want you to meet everybody. We won’t stay long. I’ll stick right next to you the whole time.”
Shay did not stick with her the whole time, actually; Gabby knew she meant to, but it wasn’t long before she got carried away by the flow of the party, leaving Gabby clutching a warm, sticky glass of wine and trying not to make a total ass of herself. She was listening to a couple of bro-type film majors talk seriously about Neil LaBute and contemplating mass homicide when Shay finally wandered back over, hooking her chin over Gabby’s shoulder in a gesture so familiar it almost stopped Gabby’s heart. “You ready?” Shay asked, lacing her fingers through Gabby’s and squeezing.
Gabby nodded eagerly, relief flooding her veins like some kind of powerful opiate. “Back to yours?” she asked.
But Shay shook her head. “It’s eleven o’clock! They do a ’90s night at a club near here; it’s the funnest thing ever. I want to take you.”
Gabby didn’t know how to tell her that absolutely nothing about this night had been funnest; six months ago, she wouldn’t have needed to say it at all. She thought longingly of last summer, of all the slow, hot nights they’d spent watching dumb movies on Netflix and cooking complicated dinners at Shay’s house. She’d always thought Shay had liked that stuff, that she’d been having just as much fun as Gabby had. Suddenly she wasn’t so sure. “I don’t have an ID,” she finally tried.
“You don’t need one. Adria!” Shay called. “You ready?”
They stood in line for close to an hour in the bitter cold, Gabby stamping her feet and tucking her gloveless hands in her armpits to warm them. “It’s not usually this long,” Shay said, with the confidence of somebody who came here a lot. Gabby nodded silently, picturing it even though she didn’t want to—the girls Shay probably danced with, how much fun she probably had. She had a whole new life here, Gabby realized for what felt like the millionth time since she’d gotten into the city that afternoon. It hurt exactly the sa
Inside the club was dark and hot and crowded, music so loud Gabby could feel it in her teeth. “Are you okay?” Shay yelled over the insistent thump of a Destiny’s Child remix. Gabby wasn’t, but there was definitely no way to communicate that at this particular moment, so she just nodded, and the grin Shay shot her in return was almost worth the hassle of this whole stupid night. “Come on,” Shay called, taking her by the hand and pulling her through the crowd, expert. “Let’s dance.”
That part was better. Gabby kind of liked dancing, improbably; if she focused on Shay’s body, on the movement of her own hips, she could almost block the rest of the world out. Maybe she could do this, she thought—just give in to the sensory overload of it, the noise and the heat and the strangers. Maybe she wasn’t hopeless after all. She held tight to Shay’s hands, twirling around to what she thought was the Spice Girls; she was just starting to relax when a girl with the most perfect waterfall of blond hair Gabby had ever seen scooted her tall, willowy self right in between them.
“Wait,” Gabby tried to say, but her voice didn’t carry; in what felt like half a second, she’d been pulled away by the current of the crowd. Shay glanced back at her over the blond girl’s shoulder, holding her hands up with an exaggerated grimace, mouthing, Sorry! Gabby was not not not going to cry.
Instead she edged her way through the crowd until she found a low leather stool nobody was sitting on, plopping down and trying to look like she belonged. It was exactly like every party she’d never wanted to go to with Ryan, only a hundred thousand times worse.
Gabby dug her phone out of her jeans pocket, trying to look busy. She checked Instagram—a couple dozen new followers, a few hundred likes on the picture she’d taken of a water tower that afternoon. At least strangers on the internet thought she was okay. She scrolled through her texts until she got to Ryan, thumb hovering above his name but not clicking. He was with Chelsea; the last thing he probably wanted or needed was her texting to complain. It was selfish to even be considering it.
You asleep? she keyed in, hitting send before she could talk herself out of it properly. If he was busy, she reasoned, he could always just not reply.
To her surprise, the thought bubble appeared not ten seconds later. Nope, he said. How’s it going?
Not super, she texted back. Admitting it felt like a dam breaking. Gonna get an early train back, I think. How’s your night?
Ryan texted back a row of skull emojis.
Huh. Bad?
Pretty bad.
What happened?
Long story. Still in town. Can be there in twenty minutes if you wanna bail?
Gabby glanced around the club, the crush of limbs and hair and sparkly outfits. The lights were strobing and swirling in a way that made it hard to focus; the thumping bass blaring from the DJ booth made it impossible to think. And out in the middle of it all was beautiful Shay, her head thrown back laughing, 100,000 percent exactly where she wanted to be.
It felt like Gabby’s heart had vacated her body. It felt like someone had put a stone in its place.
Yeah, she keyed in, come pick me up.
RYAN
Gabby was standing on the corner like the Little fucking Match Girl when Ryan pulled up to the curb twenty minutes later, hands shoved up into her armpits to keep warm. “It’s you,” she said, opening the dinged-up passenger side door of the car.
Ryan grinned ruefully. “It’s me,” he agreed.
“What happened?” she asked, buckling herself in and turning to look at him, her face cast in pinks and yellows from the neon lights outside. “With Chelsea?”
Well, he did not want to talk about that, certainly. He kept waiting for the shock of it to hit him, regret or sadness or anything besides this weird, numb relief. He’d loved Chelsea—at least, he thought he’d loved Chelsea. He didn’t know how to explain why he wasn’t sadder.
Unless, of course, Chelsea had been right.
“Just a fight,” he said finally, glancing over his shoulder and pulling out into traffic. “Not worth getting into, really. Was probably coming for a while.” He squinted into the rearview, switched lanes. “So, what should we do?”
“Do?” Gabby asked.
“Yeah,” he said. From the moment Gabby had texted, he’d felt like there was enough energy in his body to run all the way up Broadway without stopping. “It’s New York, right? We could go eat pie someplace. The Empire State Building might still be open.”
Gabby pulled one knee up, hugged it. “I kind of just want to go to sleep,” she said softly.
Ryan nodded, trying not to feel disappointed. “Fair enough,” he said. “We can do that too.”
The hotel was all the way on the other side of town, and even with the GPS it took Ryan a long time to figure out how to get them over there. It was weird how many cars there were on the road down here even in the middle of the night, FDR Drive and Brooklyn winking at them across the river. It was so different here from home. He glanced at Gabby, her body bent in on itself like a paper clip, her hair down and hiding her face. “You wanna talk about it?” he asked, trying not to sound too eager. Of course he wasn’t happy she’d gotten broken up with, if that was even what had happened. But there was a tiny part of him that wondered if this might be his chance. Both of their relationships ending on the same night, in New York City? That had to mean something, didn’t it?
“Nope,” Gabby said.
She cheered up a little bit once they parked the car in what Ryan hoped was a no-tow zone; he bought her a giant bag of sour-cream-and-onion chips and a Gatorade at a bodega, brought her upstairs to the room. “This is a nice hotel,” Gabby said, sitting on the bed and crunching thoughtfully. “Sorry you’re not going to get to use it for its intended purpose.”
“I’ll live,” Ryan said, sitting down heavily on the duvet beside her. “Did we seriously both get dumped tonight?”
“You got dumped?” Gabby asked him. Then, before Ryan could answer, “Did I get dumped?” And just like that, she started to cry.
Ryan froze. He’d seen Gabby cry exactly once before in their entire relationship, at the end of that Pixar movie about girl emotions, after which she insisted loudly and vehemently that she’d gotten pretzel salt in her eye. Seeing it now broke both his head and his heart.
“All right, sad sack,” he said, taking the bag of chips out of her hand and setting it down on the bedside table, wrapping his arms around her. She smelled like beer and like cold and like Gabby, peppermint soap and organic lotion. “You’re okay.”
“I’m too boring for her,” she said into his shirt collar. “She’s got this whole other life and all these new friends and she wants to go out and do stuff, and I can’t even be mad at her for it! It’s normal! She’s in college! I’m the one who isn’t normal.”
“You’re normal,” Ryan promised, smoothing her damp hair back. “There’s nothing boring about you. You’re the least boring person I know, honestly.”
“That’s a lie,” Gabby said. “Celia is right. I never leave the house. I’m terrible at social situations. I had a panicker as soon as I got out of your car.”
“Okay,” Ryan said. “Easy.” He rubbed her back for a minute, slow circles, the way his mom soothed the nervous dogs she worked with. Gabby was so much narrower than Chelsea, all sharp shoulder blades and bumpy spine, like she might blow away if he wasn’t careful. Like she was someone he wanted to protect. “You’re perfect, okay?”
Gabby sniffled into the crook of his shoulder. “You have to say that,” she said in a wet, muffled voice.
“I really don’t,” Ryan promised. But he let himself hold her a little tighter anyway, the two of them sitting like that for a long, quiet minute. He liked how warm she was through her T-shirt. He liked how she seemed to actually need him right now, the way she hardly ever seemed to.
He liked—oh Jesus Christ—the feeling of her warm mouth brushing against his neck.
Ryan felt himself pop an imme
Gabby shrugged in a way that was somehow combative, burrowing back in closer instead of looking him in his face. She kissed his neck again, more purposefully this time. “A little,” she admitted, and he winced.
Fuck, he wanted to. He wanted to so bad. It was like all the time he’d spent over the last two years convincing himself this wasn’t what he wanted had suddenly evaporated and here it was again, sharp and immediate and his for the taking. But he liked to think he wasn’t fundamentally a fucking piece of shit, so he gently untangled her arms from around his neck. “Hey,” he said into her temple, tasting sweat and shampoo. “Come on. Not like this.”
“Sorry,” she mumbled, shoving him away, not quite gently.
“Gabby,” he said.
“No, you don’t want me, either,” she snapped. “I get it.”
“Hey,” he said. “Cut it out.”
Gabby heaved out a noisy breath. “Sorry,” she muttered again, flopping backward onto the mattress, squeezing her eyes shut and digging the heels of her hands into the sockets. “I’m being an asshole.”
“Kind of,” Ryan agreed. He was irritated suddenly: the knowledge that she was blatantly using him to get back at Shay for something; the idea that he’d do because she was hurt and lonely and here. He was tired; he’d spent three hundred bucks he didn’t really have on this hotel room. Chelsea had dumped him. He wanted to go home.
He looked at Gabby for a moment, still lying on the bed with her eyes covered like a little kid playing hide-and-seek. He could lay it all out there for her, he thought crankily. Blow her fucking mind. You really wanna know why Chelsea dumped me, princess? Listen to this. But it was Gabby, and he loved her, and she looked so fucking sad. He didn’t want to blow her mind. He wanted to make her feel better. And if something was going to happen between them—and Ryan felt pretty sure now that it was—he wanted it to be—well. Kind of . . . perfect.