Top Ten by Katie Cotugno
It was strange, being alone with Ryan’s mom for such an extended period of time. Gabby had worried all morning about it being awkward, but it turned out Luann mostly just wanted someone to listen while she talked. On the ride up she’d put on an ancient mix CD of ’90s lady-rock, so different from the NPR that Gabby’s own mom usually insisted on; she told Gabby all about moving to New York from Ottawa when she was a teenager, that she was one of six siblings and her parents had slept on a pull-out couch in the living room of their apartment in Buffalo until all of them finally moved out. She was funny and charming and scattered, the kind of person who dominated a conversation, but not in a bad way. Gabby guessed that was where Ryan got it.
“Does Ryan have a girlfriend?” Luann asked now as they settled themselves on the metal bleachers; she dug a half-empty bag of M&M’s out of her purse and offered Gabby some. “He’d kill me if he knew I was asking you this, but I’m asking you anyway.”
Gabby hesitated. In fact, Ryan had about one thousand girlfriends, none of whom ever seemed to keep his interest for any significant length of time, but Gabby couldn’t imagine that was the kind of information he’d want her to pass along to his mom. “Nobody important,” she promised.
“Well, except you,” his mom said.
“Oh.” Gabby felt herself blanch. Sure, she’d had a little bit of a crush on Ryan right when they first started hanging out, but that was totally over now. The last thing she wanted was for his mom to be getting ideas. “I mean—we’re not—”
“No, no, of course, I know that,” Luann said, waving her hand. “That’s what’s special about it, right?”
Gabby hesitated. In reality she had no idea what made her friendship with Ryan special—to him, at least. She kept waiting for him to stop showing up every Friday, for the universe to course-correct, for him to find somebody he liked better than her or to wake up one day and realize that Monopoly with the class head case was nobody’s favorite way to spend a Friday night. “Right,” she agreed, gnawing on her thumbnail while they waited for the game to start.
Predictably, Gabby found hockey both boring and violent. She clicked through her phone for most of the first period, pausing on occasion to cheer halfheartedly and once, when Ryan got a goal from what looked to Gabby like halfway across the rink, to cheer for real. It was kind of fun to watch him out there, that much was undeniable. He was fast, and oddly graceful. She thought he might actually be really good.
Still, it was mostly a total snooze-fest, and she was just about to offer to go out and get some popcorn when a tall, rangy guy in jeans and a canvas jacket edged his way into their row of bleachers. “There you are,” he said to Ryan’s mom, nudging his way past the pair of Saint Augustine’s parents sitting at the end. “The hell is wrong with parking at this place, huh? I was driving around in circles for twenty minutes.”
“That’s because you got here late,” Luann said pleasantly. “Come sit. This is Ryan’s friend Gabby. Gabby, this is Ryan’s dad.”
Gabby held her hand out; Ryan’s dad shook it, looking faintly surprised. Underneath his Rangers hat he had that slightly melty-faced quality that middle-aged guys get sometimes when they used to be handsome but then were hard on themselves for twenty or thirty years. His eyes were the same exact amber color as Ryan’s. “Good to meet you, Gabby,” he said, smiling at her. “Thanks for coming out to cheer on our guy here.”
“Yeah,” Gabby said, blushing a little bit without being sure entirely why. “Of course.”
Still, it didn’t take long to become clear that Mr. McCullough was emphatically a Sports Dad: clapping loudly and enthusiastically as long as Colson had control of the puck, hooting with derision at the ref whenever he made a call in favor of the other team. Twice, the Saint Augustine’s couple shot him dirty looks. Gabby had never played a sport in her life other than peewee bowling, but she could not, under any circumstances, imagine her parents caring if she got any strikes or not. Ryan’s dad seemed to care about this hockey game a lot. “His hustle is fucking miserable,” he said to Ryan’s mom at one point, as Ryan skated backward and, Gabby thought, pretty freaking quickly down the rink. “Does his coach talk to him about that? Somebody should be talking to him about that.”
Gabby felt the back of her neck prickle. Not that she was any kind of hockey expert, but Ryan’s hustle looked fine to her. “He got a goal,” she heard herself say. “Before you got here.”
Mr. McCullough raised his eyebrows, like he was just now noticing her. “Are you his girlfriend?” he asked.
Gabby shook her head, irritation barely edging out embarrassment. “We’re just friends,” she said, though Luann had literally just told him that.
“Oh! Right,” Ryan’s dad said. “Sorry.” He nodded at Luann. “My family will be the first to tell you, I’m not always such a great listener.” He grinned again then, self-deprecating. He had Ryan’s smile, wide and easy and a little bit sheepish; just for a moment, Gabby could understand why Ryan wanted his approval so badly.
Colson lost in the end, the other team scoring on their goalie at the last second and a loud buzzer echoing across the rink. Mr. McCullough swore loudly enough that Gabby flinched. Luann put a hand on her back as they edged out of the rink, the crowd suddenly making Gabby a little nervous; they waited for Ryan outside in the Saint Augustine’s lobby, Gabby crossing her arms against the stinging autumn wind every time the front doors opened.
“There he is,” Mr. McCullough said when Ryan finally turned up, putting an arm around his shoulders and squeezing. “What happened to you out there, huh? Your ass was dragging all over the ice.”
He made a freaking goal! Gabby wanted to say again, but thought better of it. Ryan only shrugged.
“Ah, it’s fine,” Mr. McCullough said. “I’m gonna take you to dinner anyway.” He looked at Luann. “You go ahead. I’ll drive him back down tonight, all right?”
“Are you sure?” Luann asked, looking skeptical.
“Jesus, Luann, can I have some time with my son?” Mr. McCullough snapped. “Is that okay with you?”
“You know what, Mike, sure.” Luann held her hands up. “Do what you want.”
“I’ll ride back with you,” Gabby offered, but Ryan shook his head.
“Nah, don’t do that,” he said. “Come to dinner.”
Gabby hesitated. She kind of wanted to go home, honestly: she was tired and peopled-out, and Ryan’s dad’s swings between charm and testiness made her uneasy. She got the distinct impression that the guy didn’t like her, which was unsettling. Parents always liked her.
Still, it was Ryan, and he was asking; Gabby nodded in spite of herself. “Okay,” she said. “Sure.”
RYAN
They ate at a pizza place in a strip mall, fake Tiffany lamps with fruit bowl patterns hanging over all the tables and an ancient Ms. Pac-Man beeping away in the corner. Ryan and Gabby both ordered Cokes, lemon wedges hooked on the sides of the big red plastic cups. Ryan’s dad ordered a beer. “So did Ryan tell you hockey chops run in the family?” he asked Gabby as they slid huge, floppy slices of sausage-and-pepperoni onto their plates.
Gabby nodded. “He did,” she said brightly, in the cheery, artificial voice she used with people she either didn’t know or didn’t like. “Remind me what team you played for?”
“Adirondack Thunder,” Ryan’s dad said, grinning like he always did when his old team came up. “Not exactly the Rangers, I gotta tell you, but we did all right.”
Gabby smiled. She was putting on a good show, but Ryan could tell she was uncomfortable by the way she was shredding her straw paper while she listened, how she was only picking at her food. He couldn’t tell if it was just her usual run-of-the-mill weirdness about being in an unfamiliar place with an unfamiliar person or if it was something else, something more specific to this particular situation. Sometimes when Ryan hung out at Gabby’s house he could forget that he wasn’t one of them, the Harts with their 1,001 Crowd-Pleasing Party Appetizers and Friends of the Co
He would have tried to smooth it out somehow, made a dumb joke or asked Gabby if she wanted to go play Skee-Ball at the back of the restaurant, but just as he was about to his dad turned to Ryan, his focus like a laser beam across the ragged checkered oilcloth. “So what was going on with you out there, kid?” he asked, leaning back on the hind legs of the rickety wooden chair. “Kind of bit it today, huh?”
Ryan felt Gabby stiffen, like his dad had reached across the table and smacked him; he shrugged, kept his voice light so she’d know the ribbing was no big deal. It just meant his dad was interested, in his hockey game and in him by extension. He actually kind of liked it sometimes. “Yeah, it was a bummer,” Ryan said. “Thanks for coming, though.”
“If you want me to come back, buddy, you’re gonna have to start giving me something to see.” Ryan’s dad shook his head, smirking a little. “You guys looked like a bunch of sad sacks out there, the lot of you. Getting taken down by a bunch of soft-handed, coddled private school kids?”
Ryan resisted the urge to remind his dad that two years ago he’d been one of those soft-handed, coddled private school kids himself. He didn’t mind his dad’s needling—after all, the guy just wanted him to get better—but there was something about him doing it in front of Gabby that made it seem less harmless than Ryan knew it actually was. “They outskated us, I guess,” he said with a sheepish smile.
His dad wasn’t willing to let it go quite so easily, though. “What was that mess there at the end of the second period?” he asked. “You looked like a bunch of damn ballerinas.”
Ryan’s smile dropped a bit. “Well, Coach Harkin said—”
“Coach Harkin doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing,” his dad interrupted. “That guy’s a joke. Your grandma could coach a better hockey team than him.”
“Coach Harkin spends a lot more time watching me play hockey than you do, Dad.”
That was the wrong thing to say; his dad’s face darkened, and Ryan knew he’d probably gone too far. “Well, that sounds peachy for you and Coach Harkin,” he said. “Maybe Coach Harkin wants to pay for all your damn gear from now on, too. Hell, maybe Coach Harkin wants to be your damn father.”
Ryan grimaced, eyes cutting over to Gabby. Shit, this was embarrassing. He needed to dial it back. “Dad,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm and even. “Come on, that’s not what—”
“I’ll tell you, kid, I think I’m about done sitting here listening to this shit from you,” Ryan’s dad said, still scowling.
Ryan realized too late that this was about to go from bad to worse; he was tired, he hadn’t thought fast enough to salvage it. “Look, Dad, I’m sorry,” he started. “You’re right.”
“No, forget it,” his dad said, shoving his chair back, the legs screeching against the sticky wooden floor. “Really. I’ll see you around, kid.”
Then he got up and left.
GABBY
Gabby stared at the entrance to the restaurant for a moment, then looked back at Ryan. “Did your dad just dine and dash?” she asked. It was so far outside her understanding of things that parents did that she sort of couldn’t comprehend it. If his dad had turned into a T. rex, ripped the roof of the pizza place clean off, and eaten it, she would not have been more surprised.
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “I think he did.”
“Is he coming back?”
Ryan rubbed a hand over his face. “Probably not,” he said after a moment. “He does stuff like that sometimes, if we piss him off bad enough. He left my mom and me in Princeton once. We wound up taking New Jersey Transit home.”
“He did what?” Gabby said, but Ryan looked so stricken that she immediately moved on. “Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath and trying to sound casual, trying to sound for his sake like this was no big deal. “Want to just call your mom, then? She’s probably not that far; she could come back and get us.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said, wriggling around to dig in his pocket, then swearing. “Phone’s in my hockey bag,” he said. “In my mom’s car.”
“Use mine,” Gabby said, pulling it out of her backpack. The battery was low—she’d worn it down fiddling around on Instagram at the game—but it had enough juice for a phone call.
But Ryan shook his head. “I don’t actually know her number,” he admitted.
“Your mom’s number?” Gabby asked incredulously. “Wasn’t it like, the first thing she had you memorize as a kid? Where you lived and her phone number?”
“It’s a new number,” Ryan explained, looking abashed. “She changed phone companies after my dad left, it’s—” He broke off. “She got a deal.”
“Okay,” Gabby said quickly. “Well. My parents are in North Carolina, but let me try Celia, maybe?” She did, calling Celia’s cell four times in rapid succession and then the house phone twice, and getting nowhere. Hi, said her mom’s voice on their ancient outgoing message. You’ve reached the Harts . . .
Gabby punched End on her cell phone, feeling her anxiety creep as the little red battery indicator got skinnier and skinnier. Her heart sped up, throat getting tighter; the soles of her feet itched inside her sneakers. What the hell were they going to do?
Then she glanced at Ryan, and felt herself calm down.
“Okay,” she said again, taking a deep breath and tucking her hair behind her ear. He was so clearly miserable and useless at the moment that it made Gabby feel weirdly capable, like she had someone to take care of all of a sudden and it was making her brave. She opened the Maps app on her phone, waited for the blue dot to find them, then squinted at the screen. “We’re like six blocks from the Greyhound station,” she reported after a moment.
Ryan looked skeptical. “You want to take a bus?”
“Well, I don’t want to stay here all night,” Gabby said, then felt herself soften. “I think we kind of have to bail ourselves out here, dude.”
Ryan looked like he was going to argue for a moment. After that he just looked sad. “Okay,” he said finally, digging some crumpled bills out of his back pocket and putting them down on the table. “Let’s take a bus.”
RYAN
The Albany bus station was a little like what Ryan imagined the seventh circle of hell would be like, if the seventh circle of hell had a McDonald’s in it. He leaned against a greasy metal pillar with his arms crossed while Gabby went up to the Greyhound window and talked to the bored-looking clerk sitting behind it. He wondered what kind of bad decisions you had to make in your life to wind up manning a bus station window in Albany on a Saturday night in October. He wondered what kind of bad decisions he himself had made to wind up here.
“Okay,” Gabby said, coming over to him with a couple of paper tickets in her hand. “I got us a bus. It doesn’t leave for another hour and a half, and the closest it gets us is Poughkeepsie, but it’s better than nothing.”
Ryan nodded. “Thanks,” he mumbled. He knew he was being a tool, letting her handle the logistics of getting them out of here, but it was like something in his brain and body had shut off as soon as his dad got up from the table at the restaurant, like he’d hit a power button somewhere.
They found a place to sit on a wooden bench in the waiting room, between an old lady knitting a hat on skinny circular needles and a sleepy-looking homeless dude with a cart piled high full of grocery bags. Ryan crossed his arms and stared at the dirty tile floor. He hated his dad for being such an unrelenting asshole. He hated himself for losing the game. He hated Gabby a little, too, for being here and seeing this. For taking care of him like he was a little kid.
“Ryan,” Gabby said finally, in a voice like maybe this wasn’t the first time she’d tried to get his attention. “Come on. The bus is boarding.”
Neither one of them talked as the bus pulled out of the station and toward the highway. Eventually the broken-down cityscape gave way to strip malls, then the blurry outlines of naked autumn trees. The bus was dark except for the glow of streetlamps outside and somebody’s reading light a few rows ahead of them; Ryan thought possibly Gabby was sleeping, when suddenly she spoke.
“I’m going to ask you this one time, and then I’m never going to ask you again,” she said quietly, staring straight ahead at the back of the seat in front of her. “Did your dad ever hit you?”
“What?” Ryan blinked at that, surprised and kind of weirdly offended. His dad could be kind of a jerk sometimes, sure—his dad had been a jerk today—but he wasn’t some kind of Lifetime-movie child abuser. “No.”
“Did he ever hit your mom?”
“No,” Ryan repeated, then added, “Jesus.”
Gabby exhaled, leaned her head back. “Okay.”
“Look, I’m sorry,” Ryan started. Shit, he was so embarrassed. This whole day was a wash, clearly; he wanted to smooth it over as quickly as possible, then forget about it and be done. “This was a clusterfuck, I—”
“Nope,” Gabby said, tucking one denim-covered leg underneath her and turning to face him for the first time, holding her hand up. “Don’t even start. This isn’t your fault. None of this is your fault, okay?”
Ryan shrugged. Intellectually, he knew she was right: odds were, even if they’d won this afternoon his dad would have found something else to give him a hard time about, the other team playing dirty or a bad call the ref had made. He got in these kind of dark, crummy moods sometimes, and there was nothing anybody could really do to talk him out of them. It was just how his dad was. Sometimes it sucked a little, sure. But that didn’t mean Ryan wanted to talk about it. “Yeah,” he said finally, hoping she’d take the hint and drop it, so they could ride home in peace and forget this ever happened. “Okay.”