As of Wednesday morning, Gabe and Zoe have officially gone three days without speaking, making this their longest fight ever. But Gabe is not going to back down, and if Zoe thinks he will, she is sorely mistaken. All he has to do is think about what she said before she stormed out of the coffee shop Sunday — When you decide to stop acting like a dick, you can come find me, and we can talk about this some more, but right now? — and his anger comes back in full force. Acting like a dick? Him? No. He is looking out for her. He is protecting her. Like he always does, because she always does this. Zoe Ballard acts like every stranger in the world is just a friend she hasn’t met yet, and he needs both hands to keep track of the number of times it’s come back to bite her in the ass. She’s too trusting, too selfless, and it’s naive. She has had her homework copied, been tricked out of her lunch money, caught her Homecoming date cheating on her, been teased and made fun of and mocked, all because she insists on giving everyone the benefit of the doubt.
It’s ridiculous — and it’s a pattern she refuses to acknowledge. It’s not that he doesn’t admire how open and friendly she is, in theory, but he hates watching the pattern. She trusts someone too much, they take advantage, and while she may cut them out after that, it in no way changes how she treats the next stranger. And if she refuses to look out for herself, then damn it, he is going to look out for her instead!
He thought that whole shitstorm with Gavin — his hands still curl into fists every time he thinks about the conniving douchebag, and he wishes he’d beat him to a pulp when he had the chance for what he did to Zoe — might at least have taught her some restraint, that that might have been the one good thing to come out of that whole mess. But apparently not, since some other conniving douchebag is clearly on the prowl again. This Alex, this penpal, who she has welcomed into her circle of friends without a second thought. But how manipulative does this bastard have to be to draw Thom out of Zoe? And how many times does someone have to swoop in and try to break her before she recognizes that at some point, she has to start drawing lines?
And she has the nerve, the nerve, to act like he’s overreacting? Like he’s overstepping his boundaries by trying to protect her from scum like that? Like she isn’t being unbelievably naive and childish and foolish—
“Okay, child of mine.” His mother’s voice interrupts his angry thoughts and he looks up from the page in his sketchbook he’s currently mutilating. “You have been storming around this house like a thundercloud for the past three days, and Lindsey Ballard just informed me that you and Zoe haven’t spoken since Sunday, when you came tearing into my costume shop angry as a nest of hornets someone went after with a stick. You wanna tell me what’s going on?”
“Nothing, Ma,” Gabe mumbles to his sketchbook. Gayle Maxwell just crosses her arms.
“Don’t lie to your mother, child. Your mother always knows. What are you and Zoe fighting about?”
Gabe sighs in irritation, knowing there’s no way out of this conversation. He’s held it off for three days, but his mother is a persistent woman. “You know Zoe has a half sister?” he asks, and his mother nods.
“Lindsey mentioned it.”
“Well, consider yourself lucky to be in the know,” Gabe snaps, and his mother lifts one eyebrow.
“Zoe didn’t tell you,” she fills in.
“Not until Sunday, three weeks after she found out.”
“And that’s what’s got you all out of sorts? This is Zoe, Gabe. She’s been like this as long as you’ve known her. She keeps her stress to herself to spare you the worry. What makes this time any different?”
“Because she didn’t keep it to herself!” He doesn’t mean to yell it, but the words just come out that forcefully. He’s so angry with her still, and he’s been holding this in for too long. “She went and told some penpal she’s barely known for three months about it instead of coming to me!”
There’s a long silence into which Gabe breathes heavily. And then his mother says, “And?”
“And what?” he snaps, because what more is there to say? Why isn’t all this enough to get her on his side? But she just raises both eyebrows and gives her the look he hates the most, the You’re not really that foolish, are you? look.
“Oh, there had best be an ‘And what,’ Gabriel,” she says.
“Ma—”
“Zoe Ballard?” she interrupts, in her soft and dangerous voice. “Notorious for trying to handle all her problems herself so she doesn’t bother anyone? Actually reached out and asked for help when confronted with a hugely stressful problem, and instead of being proud of her, you are pissed because she didn’t go to you?”
He just stares at the carpet with his jaw set, fuming. “You don’t get it,” he says after a few seconds of silence, shaking his head.
“Explain it to me, then.”
“She didn’t come to me, Ma,” he says again, emphatically. “Something like this, and she didn’t come to me! She didn’t need me, she has somebody else, somebody she barely knows! About school stress or homework or whatever, fine, but about Thom? About a sister? And she goes to someone else and not me?”
“So Zoe is only allowed to have one friend now, is that what you’re saying?”
“No, but–”
“But you’re the most important friend, so you should be given priority on the most important problems?”
“No! That’s not–”
“Not what you said? That’s exactly what you said, were you listening to yourself?”
“That’s not what I meant!” he insists.
“Then what did you mean?” his mother asks calmly. She’s been calm for this whole exchange, she always is, she never raises her voice, and it’s the worst.
“She didn’t come to me!” he says again, and he’s so worked up he can hardly see straight, and for some reason, he feels like he’s on the verge of tears, which is just infuriating.
“Why not?”
“Because I’ve been too busy for her!”
The silence rings after those words, and Gabe closes his eyes against the admittance. Shit.
“You’re going to go to Zoe’s house and you’re going to apologize to her today,” his mother says softly after a few seconds.
“Ma,” he croaks weakly. “That may be part of it, but she still — how does she know she can even trust him?”
“How do you know she can’t?” his mother demands without pause. “How dare you make assumptions like that about someone you’ve never met? You don’t have the whole picture, Gabriel, because you haven’t even tried to step back and see it. So you are going to go apologize and make things right because if you don’t, you’re not getting on a plane to Germany on Friday, and I will personally call your father and explain why, and he will back me up, because we did not raise you to misdirect your anger onto other people like this, or to make snap judgments founded in nothing but your own insecurities and jealousy. Shame on you.” And with that, she leaves him alone with his thoughts, the very last place he wants to be.
He goes for a walk, hoping to clear his head, but it doesn’t help. He keeps going back to what Zoe said on Sunday before she stormed out, but now he remembers what she said after she called him a dick. You are the one constantly telling me not to put up with people treating me like crap. So this? This is me not putting up with it.
Shit. Shit, shit, shit. He has been a dick. Controlling and entitled and — and using against Zoe one of the things he honestly admires most about her. That she is able to trust so entirely despite so many people in the world being shitty human beings. He sinks down to the curb and rests his head in his hands. He cringes thinking about the things he said that day, painted in a new light now by the tongue lashing his mother gave him, his self-righteous anger that wasn’t anything but a refusal to acknowledge his own failure to be there for Zoe.
Way to go, Gabe, he thinks darkly. Way to royally fuck this all up. With a heavy sigh, he heaves himself to his feet. He’s not at all looking forward to what he knows he has to do.
Fifteen minutes later, he’s on Zoe’s front porch, trying to work up the courage to ring the bell. In the end, Lindsey opens the door before he can.
“Hey, stranger,” she says. “You want to come in, or are you just going to hang out on the porch all day?”
“Well, I’m here to eat crow, so . . .”
She gives him a gentle smile, and yeah, that’s the smile of someone who knows everything, fantastic, but she just says, “Hang tight, okay?” A few moments later, Zoe appears in the doorway, stone faced and unyielding. She just stares him down, too, not saying anything, waiting for him to make the first move. He sighs.
“Can we talk?” he finally asks, and his voice is soft and subdued.
“Are you done being a dick?” she asks, blunt and straightforward. He looks down, shamefaced.
“Yes.”
“Then we can talk.” She turns and comes out onto the porch, sits on the porch swing, and waits.
He sits beside her, and looks slightly at a loss for what to say. He looks up at her a couple times, almost as if hoping she’ll start them off, but for once, she sits silent and stoic, waiting. When he realizes she’s not going to say anything, he sighs.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“For what?” The question is hard and demanding and unlike her.
“Zoe—”
“For what, Gabe?”
He looks down at his hands, his jaw tight for a moment. Then he sighs, heavily, and the tension goes out of him. He looks back up at her.
“I said some awful things to you on Sunday,” he says. “They were petty and beneath me, and I’m sorry.”
“You don’t get to be pissed that I have other friends,” she informs him then in no uncertain terms. “You don’t get to be jealous that I have other people I can go to for help. I should have told you about Lissa sooner. I shouldn’t have made that decision for you, and I’m sorry, too. But you can’t tell me that you don’t want me to shoulder my problems alone, and then in the next second get pissed when you find out that I haven’t, because that means you don’t want me to ask other people for help, you just want me to ask you. And that’s not okay.”
“I know.” His voice is still quiet and subdued.
“And,” Zoe stresses, “You don’t get to decide which of my friendships are valid and which aren’t. It doesn’t matter how long I’ve known him, or whether or not we’ve met in person. You don’t get to make that decision for me. You don’t get to ‘step in’ and put an end to the things in my life that you disagree with. You have always told me that I am a good judge of character. So if you trust me, and I trust him, that should be enough for you. He is a good person and a great friend, and he has been there for me.”
“When I haven’t?” Gabe asks, an edge in his voice that he can’t help, but it’s not directed at her. His mom was right, she always is, and it’s himself he’s really pissed at. She picks up on it, and finally, she softens.
“You’ve both been there for me,” she says, gentler. “That’s the point, Gabe. It’s not a competition, he’s not usurping you. You’re not going to stop being my best friend just because I take one little thing to someone else.”
“But it wasn’t a little thing, Zo,” Gabe says then, trying to stay calm, trying to say the things he should have said on Sunday. “That’s what got me, okay? It wasn’t a little thing, it was Thom. I’m the only one you’ve ever gone to about Thom. Caela doesn’t even know about Thom, and she’s probably your closest female friend. So for you to say, like it’s no big deal, that you’ve let this guy into that part of your life? I . . . reacted badly, I admit that, and I said things I shouldn’t have. But you threw me.”
Zoe seems to consider this for a long moment before she speaks. “I was too dismissive, when I told you about Alex knowing,” she acknowledges. “I knew you would scold me for not telling you about Lissa, and that you’d be right, and I was trying to head you off, but I think I was insensitive, and I’m sorry. Honestly, I told him because . . .” She trails off, searching for the words. “Because he asked,” she finally says. “Not directly, but the only personal question he asked of me at the beginning led right into it, and . . . I was tired of feeling like it was a secret. I never told Caela or Jimmy or anyone because I was thirteen when I learned the whole of it, and I was already drifting away from Caela, and it was too complicated a thing to bring up to anyone who wasn’t you. But with Alex . . . I don’t know. It just didn’t have to feel like a secret.”
That makes . . . a lot of sense, Gabe thinks, when she puts it together like that. He’s never considered it from that angle, but he can definitely see what she means. “He was also so hesitant to trust me,” she continues. “I thought that if I shared something like that, it might get him to open up a little.”
Gabe frowns a bit. “Did it work?” he asks, genuinely curious. Zoe smiles.
“Yeah,” she says. “I mean, I don’t know if it was that specifically or anything, but . . . I’m lucky, Gabe. I’ve had you for forever, this one person in my life who I can tell anything. That’s so important, having someone you always know you can talk to. He doesn’t have that, I don’t think. I’m trying to be for him the kind of person you are for me. But it’s a path that goes both ways.”
It’s there in that speech, the words he needed to hear on Sunday and didn’t. That she values his friendship. That she values it even when he gets too busy and disappears and leaves her on her own to deal with shit. That she values it even when she turns to other people to help with her problems. And like his mom said, he should be glad she has those people to turn to, to be there for her, instead of being jealous of them.
So finally, he takes a deep breath and says, “He’s a good guy?”
Zoe practically grins. “Yes,” she says. “He really is. He’s great to talk to, because he listens really well. I mean, our letters feel like an actual conversation, more than a lot of people I’ve tried to have conversations with in person. And the advice he’s given me on the whole Lissa thing . . . well, honestly, it was like talking to you.”
That sends another pang of jealousy shooting through him, which he tries to hide, but Zoe doesn’t miss it. “What?” she asks, and Gabe sighs. He owes her the truth, after all this. The truth he should have given her on Sunday.
“Okay, I know you don’t mean it like this, but when you say things like that, it doesn’t exactly help–”
“Oh, God,” Zoe interrupts with a grimace of her own, pressing her hand to her forehead. “I’m sorry,” she says immediately, genuinely. “You’re right, that’s — sorry.”
He gives her half a smile. “It’s okay,” he tells her. “It’s just . . . it’s gonna be a bit of an adjustment for me.”
“I just meant that I think you two would actually get along. At least on the protecting Zoe front. I just had to write Alex a letter defending myself against his claim that I put everyone in the world before myself.”
“I’m sorry, isn’t that exactly what you do?” he asks, but he’s teasing. Zoe glares.
“No,” she corrects, actually sounding a little stung. “I don’t put everybody first, and I stand up for myself. You know I do. I don’t let people walk all over me.”
“Yeah,” Gabe says, getting serious. He gestures between the two of them. “Case in point.”
“Exactly. You made a really nice example, actually.”
Gabe grimaces again. “God. He knows?”
“Not specifically what we were fighting about, but yes, he knows the gist. I wrote his letter right after our fight, so I was still pretty irritated. I’d be careful actually; he’s kind of pissed at you right now. He was talking about getting his older brothers and hunting you down to teach you some respect.”
Gabe’s eyes narrow. “Could I take this guy, you think?” he asks, and Zoe laughs.
“Not knowing what he looks like, I have no idea. But I don’t think you could take him and both his brothers, one of whom is a Marine. I’m supposed to inform you of that.”
“Well, then, I suppose I’ll have to rely on you to update him and let him know that we have worked through our differences and are back on good terms?” He looks at her pointedly.
“The very next letter, I promise,” she says.
“Okay,” he says, hitting his open hand on the bench between them in a ‘it is law’ sort of gesture. “Now then, why don’t you actually catch me up with everything sans me turning into a jealous rage monster?”
So she tells him all about Lissa, and what she was so preoccupied with on Sunday, and what her correspondence with Alex has grown into. She reads portions of his last two letters to Gabe, nothing private or intimate, but his advice and his concerns about her looking out for herself. Gabe agrees with Alex a lot, but he does let her know that he thinks Zoe did a good job defending herself with the examples she gave, and he’s glad that Alex was able to acknowledge her points and alter his perception of her.
“He does sound like a good guy,” Gabe acknowledges at the end of it all. Actually, it sounds like a little bit more than that. The last time he saw Zoe this animated over someone — he shakes his head a bit, dismissing the thought. It’s probably groundless. Not noticing the head shake, Zoe smiles.
“He is. Now, we’ve been out here for forever, and my mom is going to accuse me of trying to get out of cleaning the house if we stay much longer.”
“Yeah, and I still have to pack. But um . . .” He hesitates, taking a deep breath. “I am sorry.” He wants her to know he means it. He’s been a major asshole, and he wants to make it up to her. She smiles at the renewed apology.
“Me too,” she says. “You want to hug it out, now?” Gabe laughs, but stands and envelopes her in a big bear hug.
“For what it’s worth,” Gabe says, holding her by the shoulders, “I’m glad you stood your ground on this. I’m glad you didn’t apologize first.”
“Why did you cave?” she asks out of curiosity. Gabe grimaces.
“I want to say it’s because I independently realized the error of my ways, but . . .”
Zoe’s eyes light up. “You got a Mama Gayle talking to, didn’t you?” Gabe grimaces again.
“Yes,” he says heavily. “Yes, I did.” Zoe almost laughs. “You needn’t look quite so gleeful,” he informs her. Zoe grins.
“Hey, I’ve had my own Mama Gayle talking to!”
“Weren’t you, like, eight?”
“Yes, and it scared me into good behavior for nine years.”
Gabe grins and shoves her with his shoulder. “Okay,” he says. “See you on New Year’s?”
“Of course,” she says with a smile. “Have a good time in Germany, and say hi to your dad for me.”
He hugs her again and heads for home. They seem to be fine again, and he thinks they are fine, really, but . . . he knows he’s let her down. And he has to find a way to make up for that. And you probably ought to reach out and apologize to Alex, too, he thinks, though he’s also not looking forward to that very much. But it does need to be done. So he’ll do it. And he’ll do his best to be a better friend from here on out. Because his best friend deserves it.