Top Ten by Katie Cotugno
He’d tried integrating her into his group of friends back when they’d first started hanging out a year and a half ago—inviting her to parties and pizza nights, the occasional pep rally—but she always shook her head and said no thanks, an expression on her face like whatever social activity on offer was only slightly worse than walking barefoot on slimy rocks. It was her society disorder talking, Ryan guessed, or otherwise she thought his friends were all just dumb jocks. Either way, eventually he’d learned to quit asking.
“Oh, PS,” Gabby said now, taking a sip of her soda as they waited for the machine to return her lucky purple ball. “Any idea why Felicity Trainor was giving me the stinkeye in the locker room this morning?”
Ryan shook his head. He and Felicity Trainor had been hanging out the last few weeks; she was his homeroom rep for student council and always wore her hair in a complicated braid crown on top of her head. “You always think people are giving you the stinkeye,” he pointed out.
“I do not!” Gabby defended herself. “Or, okay, I do, but I wasn’t making it up this time. It was actual, not imagined, stinkeye.”
“I don’t know,” Ryan said, not quite looking at her. “Anyway, that’s kind of over, so. I’m probably the wrong person to ask.”
“You and Felicity?” Gabby smirked. “That was quick.”
Ryan shrugged. “It wasn’t a big deal,” he said, busying himself scooping the ball out of the return and handing it over. The truth was, he and Felicity had gotten in a fight about Ryan skipping Felicity’s friend Kyla’s birthday party last weekend to go hang out at Gabby’s, but Ryan didn’t necessarily want to mention that part. It felt too close to admitting . . . something.
Ryan wasn’t sure when he’d first realized he liked Gabby as more than a buddy to play Monopoly and rag on people with. He thought maybe he kind of always had. The tipping point could have been that horrible trip to Albany last fall, he guessed, or maybe the very first night in the yard outside Remy Dolan’s house, but just as likely it had been a slow shuffle over the last year and a half, a dozen different nights on the sofa at her house or drinking Cokes at the pizza place in Colson Village after school on the days when he didn’t have practice. At some point things had just . . . changed.
In any case, Ryan thought as he watched her approach the lane again, it didn’t actually matter when it had happened; Gabby had never shown one speck of interest in him that way, and the last thing he wanted to do was screw up their friendship by making things weird. He’d never had a friend like her before. She was a really good question-asker. She remembered all the weird, random stuff he said. She had an opinion about literally everything: the best way to eat eggs (soft scrambled with heavy cream, like her dad made them on the weekends), pigtails on grown women (inappropriate at best, creepy at worst), and the proper way to organize a locker (books in the order you had classes, or what was even the point?). He wasn’t sure how much of it was the fact that she was a girl and how much of it was just the fact of Gabby herself, but either way, Ryan had never been so interested in another person. He’d never been so curious about what someone might say.
Now he dug a handful of fries out of the red plastic basket on the table, then wiped his greasy hands on the seat of his jeans and got a ball of his own out of the return. “My mom has a boyfriend,” he announced, letting go a little crookedly.
“Really?” Gabby asked, both of them watching the ball swerve down the waxy lane toward the pins; it hit six, which was better than nothing. “Who?”
“This client of hers who brings his three dachshunds in to get groomed all the time,” Ryan told her with a grimace. “She thinks I don’t know.”
“Huh.” Gabby tilted her head to the side, considering. “What’s that like?”
“I don’t know.” Ryan shrugged, bowled again. The ball veered into the gutter almost immediately, and he swore under his breath. “It means my parents aren’t getting back together, which I guess I sort of knew.”
“Did you want them to?”
Ryan hesitated. It was no secret that Gabby wasn’t his dad’s biggest fan. Finally he shrugged again, residual months-old embarrassment prickling up the back of his neck. “I mean, no.”
Gabby wasn’t buying. “It’s okay if you do,” she said, nibbling delicately on the end of a french fry: she liked the extra-crispy ones only, ketchup on the side. He’d made the mistake of putting it on top once and she’d basically called him a serial killer. “They’re your parents.”
“I don’t,” Ryan insisted. “I just think it’s weird for one dude to have three little dogs, is all.”
“More than two of any animal is hoarding behavior,” Gabby agreed, then grinned. “I mean, I say that now. You can ask me again when I’m seventy and living alone in a mansion somewhere with my hundred ferrets.”
“All named after famous photographers, and which you dress up for holidays in little ferret clothes.”
Gabby’s eyes narrowed. “Okay, maybe paint a little less of a picture, how about.”
“I’m kidding,” Ryan said, handing her the ball again. “You’re definitely more cat lady than ferret lady.”
“You know what?” Gabby started, but she was laughing. She had a great laugh, this loud, unselfconscious cackle. Ryan always felt like the funniest guy in the universe when he got it out of her.
“Just bowl,” he told her, sitting back in the molded plastic chair and watching as she considered the pins in front of her. She’d gotten her hair cut earlier that week, so that it only brushed her shoulders. It made her eyes look bigger and, weirdly, more blue. Just for a second, he let himself imagine what it would be like to reach out and tuck it behind her ears.
“What?” Gabby asked, glancing over her shoulder.
Ryan realized abruptly that he’d been staring. “What?”
“You’re looking at me like I have something on my face. Do I have something on my face?”
Ryan felt the beginnings of a blush, distracted himself by picking through the last of the french fries. What the fuck was that? That was absurd. He’d promised himself he was never going to make a move—wasn’t even going to hint at anything—unless she ever gave him a concrete reason to. But he knew it would probably never happen.
He swallowed his mouthful of french fries, shrugged as jovially as he could. “Just a giant pulsing whitehead on the end of your nose,” he said.
Gabby’s eyes widened in horror before she realized he was kidding. “You’re an asshole,” she announced with relish, and bowled another perfect strike.
GABBY
Aunt Liz sent all three of them Sephora gift cards for Easter, so on Saturday Celia drove Gabby and Kristina to the Galleria. Gabby wasn’t really a huge mall person—the place was always so crowded—but it was basically Kristina’s own private holy site. “Can we go to Forever 21?” she asked as they headed across the parking lot. It was the beginning of April, crocuses just starting to break through the mulch in the planters outside the entrance. “Also can we go to Claire’s?”
Celia shook her head. “That stuff is all made in sweatshops, you realize.”
“So is the stuff you wear, I bet,” Kristina pointed out. Then, hopefully: “Can I get my belly button pierced?”
They settled on soft pretzels as a compromise, were standing in line at the kiosk when Celia bumped Gabby hard in the arm. “Incoming,” she said, nodding in the direction of the Sears.
Gabby looked. There was Ryan heading across the atrium in his Colson Cavs jacket with a bunch of his hockey buddies, plus a couple of girls who Gabby always thought of uncharitably as their fan club. He was laughing at something one of them was saying, his arm slung loosely around the shoulders of a brunette named Nina from Gabby’s English class.
“Oh yeah, there he is,” Gabby said, purposely angling her body away from them and toward the pretzel counter. “So do we want cinnamon sugar or Parmesan cheese?”
“Wait a minute,” Celia said. “I mean, cinnamon sugar, but. Aren’t you go
Gabby shrugged. “I wasn’t planning on it, no.”
“Wait, really?” Even Kristina, who normally stayed out of conversations like this, looked incredulous. “Why not?”
“Because,” Gabby said, taking longer to dig her wallet out of her shoulder bag than necessary, her face tilted away from them as she rooted around.
“Because why?” Celia pressed her.
“Did you guys have a fight?” Kristina asked.
“No, nothing like that.” Gabby fished a few wrinkly dollars out of her wallet and handed them to the cashier. “He’s with other people,” she finally said.
“So what?” Celia asked, at the same time that Kristina chimed in, “He was literally at our house last night.”
That was kind of Gabby’s entire point, although she had no idea how to articulate it to her sisters in a way they could possibly understand. It was one thing to hang out with Ryan at her own house basically every Friday for the last year and a half—on her own terms, with her own people, alone. It was quite another to subject herself to all his other friends.
Back at the beginning, her friendship with Ryan had seemed like kind of a joke, the novelty prize at the bottom of a cereal box—amusing for five minutes, maybe, but unlikely to provide any long-term satisfaction. After that first Monopoly night at the start of freshman year, she’d fully expected never to see him again—and sure enough, they’d barely talked all week, just the occasional nod in the hallway, a wave from across the lawn at school. But the following Friday he’d shown up by her locker after the last bell rang.
“So,” he’d said, leaning against the cinder-block wall in his varsity jacket like they were the oldest and dearest of friends, wavy hair sticking out from underneath a Rangers cap. He had a coolly beat-up backpack slung over one shoulder. It looked too way light to have any actual books in it. “Monopoly tonight?”
Gabby gaped. “Are you serious?”
Ryan made a little face at that, like they’d been through this already and he’d expected her to know better by now. “Yeah, Gabby,” he’d told her. “I’m serious. Same time, same place?”
Gabby had no idea what to say to that. “Sure,” she’d managed finally, shaking her head with disbelief and—secretly—the thrill of shocked, unexpected pleasure. “I think my dad’s making guacamole.”
“Sounds great.” Ryan grinned. “I love guacamole.”
And that had been that.
It was the weirdest relationship in her life, certainly. They hardly ever hung out at school, where Ryan was perpetually surrounded by a million different people, whatever girl he was currently hooking up with dangling off his arm like so much jewelry. Gabby spent her free periods by herself editing photos in the computer lab or eating lunch at a table near the back of the cafeteria with Michelle, trying not to attract any unnecessary attention. They had virtually nothing in common. It made no sense.
But he was funny. He was a genuinely good listener. And he had an odd emotional intelligence, was the kind of person who instinctively knew if her mom had had a bad day at work or how to talk Kristina through a fight she’d had with her middle school friends.
And, most surprisingly of all: he kept showing up.
They were like one of those picture books about a tiger cub making friends with a mongoose, Gabby reasoned. She couldn’t explain it. It just was. And it worked—Gabby was quite sure of this part—only because they’d both tacitly agreed to adhere to certain rigid, irrevocable rules about where and when their friendship occurred.
“Are they jerks?” Kristina asked now, motioning across the atrium at Ryan and his cluster of freshly-scrubbed compatriots. She took her glistening, wax paper–wrapped pretzel and looked at Gabby with a worried, earnest expression. “Is that it?”
“No,” Gabby said. Granted, Ryan was usually surrounded by so many people it was impossible for a mere mortal to keep track of their individual personalities, but it wasn’t that she didn’t think they’d be nice to her, exactly. Still, the idea of strolling right up to a group of virtual strangers like that—the thought of their curious glances, the list of dumb things she might possibly say—made her want to dive underneath a pile of J.Crew twinsets and hide until summer. She could feel her pulse getting quicker, the palms of her hands beginning to sweat. It was impossible. There was no way. She was too awkward. She was too afraid.
“Do you guys hang out at school?” Celia was asking now, head tilted to the side like she thought she was a freaking psychologist. “Or do you avoid him there, too?”
“Can you stop interrogating me?” Gabby asked. “I don’t actually see why this is any of your business.”
“I’m sorry,” Celia said. “But from the way you are when he comes over, I just assumed you guys were these great friends, so—”
“We are,” Gabby snapped. God, she did not want to have an anxiety attack standing in front of the Hot Topic in the Yorktown Galleria. “Okay? I’m done having this conversation.”
Celia looked from her and back to Ryan, who was ambling down toward the food court at the other end of the mall. For a second Gabby thought, with raw terror, that Celia might be about to say hi for her, to yell his name or run after him in some kind of misguided attempt at immersion therapy. In the end, though, she only shook her head. “I don’t understand you at all sometimes, Gabby.”
“Lucky for you, you don’t have to,” Gabby retorted, and took a giant bite of her pretzel.
GABBY
She was still stewing on it come Monday, slouched in her seat in the back of the room in the sixth-period study hall she shared with Michelle. “It just kills me how smug Celia is about everything,” Gabby complained, stabbing at the glossy page of her history textbook with a pencil eraser. “Like she’s some kind of authority on human relationships just because she’s popular and has better hair than Kristina and me.”
“Her hair is very good,” Michelle conceded.
Gabby sighed loudly. “Yeah, I know that, thank you. But it doesn’t mean she knows anything about me and Ryan.” She paused to give Michelle a moment to agree with her; when Michelle didn’t, Gabby frowned. “Right?”
“Girls,” Ms. Fernandes called from her desk, where Gabby was pretty sure she was reading an Us Weekly. “That doesn’t sound like studying to me.”
“Sorry, Ms. Fernandes,” Michelle called back. Then, to Gabby: “Right. I mean, absolutely.” She nodded enthusiastically, then turned around and looked back at her notebook.
“Absolutely,” Gabby parroted, sitting back in her chair and knowing full well Michelle wasn’t actually finished. She looked down at her history textbook and read a couple of sentences about the 101st Airborne, waiting.
Sure enough: “You don’t think it’s a little weird, though?” Michelle asked, turning around again a second later. “That you guys hang out all the time, but only ever, like, one-on-one?”
Suddenly Gabby did not like the trajectory of this conversation. “You and I hang out one-on-one all the time,” she pointed out.
Michelle made a face. “That’s not the same, and you know it.”
“Why is it not the same?” Gabby asked, although of course by now she already knew what Michelle was getting at. But she and Ryan hung out by themselves because Gabby liked it that way. It wasn’t as if—as if—
“If I were you,” Michelle said crisply, “I might be worried he was embarrassed of me.”
The words hit Gabby like a stack of textbooks to the stomach—not because they’d never occurred to her before, but because they sort of had. She’d always told herself she was maintaining this particular relationship on her own terms, the way she liked it. But what if that wasn’t what was happening at all?
“I’m sorry,” Michelle said. “I’m not trying to start a fight or make you feel bad or anything.”
“Really? Could have fooled me,” Gabby muttered, just as the bell rang for the end of the period. She shoved her chair out with more force than was really necessary, dump
Michelle scrambled up from her own seat and followed Gabby out of the classroom. “I’m not,” she said again, taking Gabby’s arm and tugging her over to a bank of lockers as the noisy current of bodies rushed around them. “I’m not, seriously. It’s just—can I ask you what the appeal is, exactly? Of being Ryan McCullough’s secret sidekick?”
“Okay,” Gabby said, stepping past her and heading down the crowded hallway. “Enough. I don’t know what your problem is with me today, Michelle, but—”
“Can you listen to me?” Michelle asked, raising her voice over the ruckus. Gabby winced, not wanting anyone else to hear. “I’m just trying to get you to look at this relationship from the outside. You’re like, the one girl he’s ever met that he’s never put a move on—”
Gabby’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know he’s never put a move on me?”
“Oh, please,” Michelle said. “Because he hasn’t.”
“I don’t even want him to put a move on me,” Gabby said. It was true, too. There was a point when she’d wanted it—she’d spent all of freshman year wanting it, basically—and there had been a time, when he first started coming around every week, when she’d thought maybe . . . well. She’d thought maybe. But she was over that now. The truth was that couples like Ryan and her didn’t exist outside of teen movies from the ’80s. Gabby knew this. There was no point in pretending otherwise.
They were friends. Good friends. Real friends, no matter what Michelle seemed to think. But that was all.
“It’s fine to admit you like him,” Michelle continued. “It’s normal to like him! He is, objectively, a physically attractive hockey player. You’re a red-blooded bisexual American woman.”