Top Ten by Katie Cotugno
“Um,” she said quietly, though she wasn’t sure if she’d actually made any noise or not. She was vaguely aware of Michelle and Jacob talking beside her, but all of a sudden it was like she was trying to hear them from the bottom of a well. It was really, really hot in here. Gabby could feel sweat prickling under her arms and in the dips between her fingers; she sucked in a breath of close, stuffy air, but it felt like her nose and throat were stuffed with gauze. Was the AC broken? Jesus Christ, why was nobody else in here about to suffocate?
Gabby put a hand on the seat in front of her to brace herself, dizzy. “It’s hot,” she managed to croak.
“It is?” Michelle looked over at her. Then she frowned. “Are you okay?”
“No,” Gabby said flatly. How was Michelle even breathing right now? The blotches around the edges of her vision were more pronounced than ever; god, she could hardly see. “I gotta get off the train.”
Michelle’s eyes widened. Jacob sat up straight. “What?” Michelle asked. “Wait, why?”
“Michelle,” Gabby said, loudly enough that the people in front of them turned around and peered over the seat in curiosity. “Please. Now.”
“Okay,” Michelle said, grabbing for her backpack and motioning for Jacob to slide out of the seat. “Okay. We’ll get off, okay? We’ll get off.”
Gabby was all but pounding on the doors by the time the train pulled into the next station at Ardsley; she tumbled onto the platform, bending double and bracing her palms on her shaking knees. Her hands and arms were numb up to her elbows. She didn’t think she could stand up straight. This was it, she thought, surprisingly clearly. Her panic was finally going to kill her, and today was the day.
“Gabby,” Michelle was saying. “Gabby, I’m gonna call 911, okay?”
“No,” Gabby said. “No, please don’t do that.” She didn’t want to see a doctor, to be poked and prodded and diagnosed and examined. She didn’t want anyone to look at her ever again. She thought suddenly of the night sophomore year when she’d called 911 on Ryan, how angry he’d been about it. Ryan, who she’d driven away by being insane. “Please, please don’t.”
She made it over to a set of concrete stairs leading to the parking lot, sat down and curled into a ball against the railing. She wanted to make herself as small as she possibly could. She knew intellectually that Michelle was crouched next to her on the sidewalk, whispering calming, quiet nonsense into her ear, but all she could hear was the sound of her own iron panic, her poisoned blood speeding through her veins. How was she ever going to go to college? How was she ever going to have a life? She’d thought she was handling this; she thought she had it under control instead of the other way around. But she’d been wrong. “My brain is broken,” she whispered as Michelle rubbed her back and confused commuters swarmed all around them. “Holy shit, Michelle, I’m so messed up.”
RYAN
Ryan spent the first two weeks of August pulling double shifts at Walter’s and practicing, for the first time in his entire life, a kind of constant performative fineness: acting as if his heart wasn’t broken. Acting as if his head didn’t hurt. He schlepped to Walmart with his mom and let her pick out a comforter for his Minnesota dorm room; he sent in the measurements for his new, university-issued hockey skates. He went on a couple of boring dates with Sophie’s cousin Shannon. He googled “concussion syndrome” and clicked out the window before any results came up.
He’d never made it to the hockey party the night he and Gabby broke up, so he and Remy went for burgers at Applebee’s one hot, stormy Tuesday, the steamy smell of rain on concrete as Ryan crossed the parking lot. DUIs notwithstanding, Remy actually seemed to be doing improbably well at Binghamton: he’d played a year of hockey, then quit so he could pick up a business minor and spend more time with his girlfriend. “I was never going to get any ice time anyway,” he explained, shrugging at Ryan across the shiny, sticky table. “Plus honestly, I’d rather be hooking up with Celeste.”
Ryan nodded. “Can I ask you something?” he said, trying to keep his voice casual. “Those pamphlets they send out with your admission packet about, like, brain injuries and stuff. That’s mostly, like, scare-tactic bullshit, right?”
“Why?” Remy asked, shoveling french fries into his mouth. “Your doctor tell you not to play?”
“What? No,” Ryan said, slightly taken aback. “Nothing like that.”
“Really?” Remy did not look convinced. “With how many times you got cracked at Colson?”
“I didn’t get cracked that many times,” Ryan said, trying not to sound defensive.
Remy shrugged. “If you say so.”
“Why?” Ryan asked in spite of himself. “Do you think I shouldn’t play?”
“Dude,” Remy said, nodding his thanks at the waitress for another soda. “I’m not a doctor. What the fuck do I know?”
“Okay,” Ryan said uneasily. Remy was a lifelong hockey player, just like him. It was weird to hear him hedging like this. “But, like. You know me, and you’ve played at college, so—”
“Dude,” Remy said again, “I have no idea. I can’t make your decisions for you.”
“But—”
“Dude!” Remy laughed a little. “Okay. You want my take so bad? Here’s my take. Hockey is gonna last what, four more years probably? You gotta live with your brain your whole life.” He shrugged again, took a gulp of his soda. “Like I said, I can’t make your decisions for you. But for me?” Remy sighed. “If I was definitely going to the NHL, maybe, like, if I was some Russian superstar who was seven feet tall and ate polar bears for breakfast. Or I guess if I really, really loved it, like if I couldn’t ever imagine myself doing anything else. Then I’d play at the college level with as many knocks on the head as you’ve already had. But neither of those things were true for me.” He took a big bite of his cheeseburger. “I dunno,” he said, like he suddenly realized how much he’d been talking. “Are they true for you?”
On Thursday Ryan was sitting on his bed, in theory getting ready for a party at Remy’s but actually just staring at his hands going through all the girls he’d ever hooked up with to make sure he could remember their first and last names, when his mom knocked on the open door. “You got stuff that needs to go in the laundry?” she asked, the basket in one arm. Then, curiously, “What’s wrong?”
Ryan looked up at her, and then he just said it. “I’m kind of scared about my brain, Mom.”
Ryan’s mom blinked at him. For one terrifying moment it seemed like she might be about to cry, or slap him, or fall apart entirely. Then she took a breath so deep it seemed like it came from her kidneys. “Oh, lovey,” she said, setting the laundry basket down on the carpet and coming to sit beside him on the bed. “Tell me more?”
GABBY
Shay texted for the third time in two weeks wanting to get coffee, so Gabby met her down in Colson Village, wiping her sweaty palms on the backs of her shorts as she crossed the parking lot. In spite of their promise to stay friends, the whole summer had gone and she hadn’t seen Shay at all, and truthfully Gabby had almost let herself forget how pretty she was. She’d cut all her hair off into an asymmetrical bob that made her jaw look even sharper than normal; she was wearing a breezy white tank top, a cluster of jangly bracelets up and down her wrists. Right away, Gabby felt like a bridge troll.
“Are you okay?” Shay asked, once they’d gotten their coffees and found seats at a table by the window, bright sun baking Gabby’s arms and shoulders through the glass. “I feel like you kind of fell off the face of the earth there a little bit.”
“Yeah, no, I’m totally good,” Gabby lied, tearing a paper napkin to pulp on the table. “I’ve just had some stuff going on.”
Shay frowned; she wasn’t buying. “Anxiety stuff?”
“Some,” Gabby allowed. She hadn’t told anyone about her meltdown on the train a few days earlier, swearing Jacob and Michelle to secrecy and promising herself she finally had it under control. She hadn’t had another episo
Mostly.
Still, Shay knew her too well even now for Gabby to pretend that everything was normal. She took a deep breath. “I was kind of dating Ryan for a while,” she began, then wasn’t sure how to continue.
Shay nodded, plucking at the edge of her plastic to-go cup. “Yeah,” she said, “I heard something about that.”
“It’s over now,” Gabby said. “We’re not—yeah, we’re not anything. And there was never anything between us while you and I were—”
“No, I know,” Shay said quietly. “I wouldn’t think—”
“Okay.” Gabby nodded, feeling herself blush. “Anyway, I guess I’ve been taking it sort of hard or whatever.”
“That’s too bad,” Shay told her. “I mean, not that you guys aren’t dating anymore, I’m not going to act like I’m sad about that, but like. If you’re not friends anymore, either. That kind of sucks.”
“Yeah,” Gabby said, swallowing hard. “It kind of does.” She looked at the shredded mess on the table; she thought of all the other messes she’d made. “Was I impossible?” she asked, before she could stop herself. “To be around? Like, is that why you broke up with me? Was I just so exhausting and weird after a while that—”
“Gabby,” Shay said, reaching out and laying a delicate hand on her arm to stop her, squeezing tight. “No.” She sat back then, shrugging a little. “Like, are you always a picnic? No, of course not. But nobody worth being with is. And you are really, really worth being with.”
Gabby shook her head. “You didn’t think so in the end,” she said, trying not to sound bitter about it. Trying not to sound young.
Shay sighed. “I didn’t break up with you because of your anxiety, Gabby-Girl,” she said. “I didn’t even break up with you because of you. I broke up with you because I didn’t want to have a girlfriend for a little while, that’s all.”
“Yeah,” Gabby said, swallowing down the memory. They’d broken up in a parking lot on the last night of Shay’s spring break, snow falling fast and furious even though it was halfway through March. Even after everything that had happened since then, the memory felt like someone squeezing her heart like soft clay. “I know.”
They hugged good-bye outside the coffee shop, Gabby breathing in Shay’s familiar lavender smell and willing herself not to start crying right here on the blacktop. “I’ll see you in the city in a few weeks, okay?” Shay asked, tugging at the end of Gabby’s braid and looking at her worriedly. Gabby didn’t know how to tell her she wasn’t sure how in the world she’d ever get that far.
GABBY
Later that night Gabby was lying on her bed allegedly reading The Tudors but actually staring at the ceiling and reliving in Technicolor an awkward conversation she’d had with Sophie the week before graduation during which she thought Sophie might have thought, mistakenly, that Gabby was coming onto her, when somebody knocked on her door.
“Hey, bug?” her mom said, easing it open. She wasn’t alone: it was both of Gabby’s parents, which was alarming. The last time the two of them had sat her down together had been when Gabby was in eighth grade, when Grandma Grace had died.
“What’s wrong?” Gabby asked, sitting up and tucking her hair behind her ears, alert. If anything really bad had happened they’d be telling all three of them at once, right? Or—oh, shit, did they somehow know about her meltdown on the train the other day? Had Michelle told them? Had somebody else seen? Gabby’s heart hammered, a fist against a wall.
“No no, nothing’s wrong,” her mom said quickly, holding her hands out as she perched on the edge of Gabby’s mattress; her dad sat down in her desk chair, looking too big for the space. “We just wanted to talk to you for a sec. About how you’ve been feeling.”
“I’m fine,” Gabby said immediately. She stared back at them for a moment, her face carefully, purposefully blank. “What, ’cause I broke up with Ryan? I’m fine.”
“It’s not about Ryan,” her dad said gently. “Unless it is about Ryan, and that’s okay too. But Mommy and I have both noticed that you seem pretty unhappy lately. More anxious and wound up than normal. Maybe a little depressed.”
Oh, Gabby did not want to have this conversation. “I’m doing fine,” she insisted. “Like, am I an anxious person? Of course I’m an anxious person; you know that, you’ve met me before. But I’m fine. I’m handling it.”
“You’ve been spending an awful lot of time up here lately,” her dad pointed out.
“What?” Gabby looked at them with bald denial. “No, I’m doing things. I saw Shay for coffee today, even. I’m functioning.”
Gabby’s mom reached out and took her hand then, squeezed it like Gabby had terminal cancer. “It doesn’t really seem like you are, bug,” she said.
“Can you leave me alone?” Gabby said, and it came out a lot more like begging than she meant for it to. “I’m fine.”
Her dad shook his head. “You’re not, sweetheart.”
To her absolute, abject horror, that was when Gabby started to cry. “So what?” she asked, pulling her hand away from her mother’s, sounding snotty and shrill even to herself. “You want me to go play checkers with Dr. Steiner again and talk to him about how broken my brain is? Or like, go on Prozac and be a zombie all the time?”
“Gabby, hey,” her mom said, looking like she was about to cry herself. “Your brain isn’t broken. Don’t say that, sweetheart.”
“Why not?” Gabby demanded. “It’s what you think, clearly. Is this what you guys talk about all the time behind my back, and Celia and Kristina too? How crazy I am? At least Celia also says it to my face.”
“Nobody thinks you’re crazy, Gabby,” her dad chimed in softly. “And it wouldn’t need to be Dr. Steiner. We could find somebody down in the city near school, somebody you liked.”
“I’m not going to like anybody,” Gabby argued. “I can already tell you that.”
“Maybe not,” her dad agreed. “But I bet we could find somebody who could give you some strategies for coping better, even if they weren’t your best friend. There’s no reason for you to feel like this all the time if you don’t have to.”
“Aunt Liz has been on meds for years,” Gabby’s mom told her. “Do you know that, is that something you know? That she gets anxiety too? So did Grandma Grace. It runs in families. I don’t know why we never talked to you about this before.”
Gabby shrugged, staring at her hands in her lap instead of looking at her parents. Because you’re afraid of me, she didn’t say.
“This is our fault,” her dad said, getting up from the desk chair and sitting beside Gabby and her mom on the bedspread. “We should have pushed you about this stuff a long time ago. We should have taken better care of you.”
“I’m not doing it,” Gabby said, shaking her head stubbornly. “I’m not.”
“We can’t force you,” her mom said, scooping Gabby’s tangled, matted hair up off her shoulders; this time, Gabby didn’t flinch away. “It’s not like when you were little, where we could just pick you up and carry you somewhere you didn’t want to go. You’re a grown-up now; you’re going to college. And you have to be responsible for your own self.”
“I don’t want to,” Gabby said, and started crying all over again. She felt like she could cry forever. She felt like she might never, ever stop. “I’m so scared.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” her dad said, and his voice was so quiet. “We know you are.”
RYAN
Ryan met his dad at a diner up in New Paltz, all peeling tabletops and Naugahyde seat cushions clumsily bandaged with duct tape. Ryan ordered a burger and a heaping side of onion rings, choosing not to sa
“Yeah,” Ryan said, though good wasn’t really the adjective he would have chosen to describe it. “Pretty good.”
“Good,” his dad echoed. “Look, I’m sorry again about the graduation thing.”
“Oh, no.” Ryan shook his head. Even though it was just at the beginning of the summer it felt like it had happened to somebody else entirely. He kind of didn’t care anymore. His dad hadn’t shown up when he said he was going to, but his dad hardly ever showed up when he said he was going to. Somewhere along the line, Ryan had realized that no matter what he did—or didn’t do—that was probably never going to change. “It’s cool.”
Ryan took a deep breath. “I have something to talk to you about, and I wanted to do it in person,” he said, looking at his dad across the booth. He was wearing a faded Sunoco T-shirt Ryan remembered from when he was little; there was a day’s worth of graying beard on his chin. “I’m not going to go to Minnesota.”
“Ha!” Ryan’s dad barked a laugh loud enough that the waitress looked over, then slapped the tabletop so hard it rattled the forks. “Jesus Christ, I thought you were going to tell me you were gay.” He shook his head then, like he was only now absorbing what Ryan actually had said to him. “Why the fuck not?”
So Ryan explained as best he could: the headaches, the forgetting. How inexplicably pissed he felt all the time. When he was finished, Ryan’s dad frowned at him over his patty melt.