“Josh—” Greer says, but she’s spoken softly, too softly for this guy’s intentions.
“Even when she was in the hospital I did it.” The iced tea, the burger—all of it turns to lead in my stomach.Greer in the hospital.“We did our best to keep you caught up, huh, Greens?”
Beside me, Greer’s shoulders have dropped. For the first time I notice she’s got her camera in one hand, and now she looks down, idly runs her thumb over the mode dial. “Yeah,” she says.
Josh shrugs. “Anyways, we didn’t quite make it, but we eventually got there. Long road to recovery.”
Greer looks up at him, and there’s anger in her eyes, disappointment. I don’t know what I want more, her to slap his face or me to clasp a hand around his neck and throw him over the side of this deck railing. It’s not like it’s a far drop, but it’d send a clear message: I don’t give a fuck about the size of his dick. I wait, my whole body tense, but eventually Greer drops her eyes again. She looks small, sad, resigned. I set my tea on the deck railing.
“I need to go take some more pictures,” she says. “I’ll see you guys later.”
I watch Josh watch her, see a look of longing there. I’d feel bad for him, maybe, if he hadn’t just tried to stamp aMinesign on Greer’s body by revealing something about her she obviously didn’t want me to know. He opens his mouth to speak to me, but I give him a hard look. My head, my body, everything about me is desperate to go after her, to find out what this guy is talking about, to soothe myself about her health. To hold her body against mine and feel her breath against my neck, to kiss her and touch her until she gives me all her secrets.
Instead I look at Josh and give her the respect she deserves. “Save it. If she wants me to know, she’ll tell me herself.”
I walk away, out into the warm night and noisy party, and feel a pit of dread yawningopen inside me.
* * * *
We don’t talk on the way home.
For the rest of the party, Greer avoided saying much of anything, to me or to anyone else. When the cake finally did come out—a big rectangle with white frosting and icing-piped yellow flowers—I’d taken advantage of everyone’s singing distraction and leaned into Greer to ask her if everything was all right. She’d moved away from me like I’d shocked her, had barely shifted those big blue eyes to mine before looking back to where her mother sat beaming downat her candles.
Greer’s lips had hardly moved when she’d finally answered me. “I’m fine,” she’d said, basically through clenched teeth, and then she’d walked away—again—to retrieve the present she’d brought. It’d been almost rude, the way she’d crossed to her mother, setting the cheerily wrapped package down, the newly blown-out candles on the cake still smoking, and Susan had looked up at her with another one of those inscrutable expressions. Only a couple of minutes later, when Susan was cooing over theCostumes of Old Hollywoodbook Greer had given her, Greer had leaned down and whispered something, giving her mother a quick kiss on the cheek before walking back toward me. “I’m tired,” she’d said sharply. “We’re going to go now.”
I’d barely had time to raise a hand in goodbye to everyone.
When we’d pulled away from the curb, I’d made my first and last attempt to starta conversation.
“Greer. He didn’t—” I’d begun, hoping to tell her that Josh hadn’t said anything, at least not anything that matters. But I’d been almost glad she’d cut me off with a shake of her head, a snapped remark about how she didn’t want to talk until we were back at Kit’s. What I’d been about to say, after all, was a lie: hehadsaid something. Something thatmatters to her.
I’d sat in the seat next to her, felt my fingers twitch with the need to touch her, soothe her like I’d done on the way here. But the way she’d set her jaw, her eyes straight ahead—cocooning herself, it seemed, in a separate place, somewhere icy and hard and impenetrable—told me to keep my hands to myself.
Outside of Kit’s I’m afraid she’ll leave the car running and pull away once I’ve climbed out. Instead she exits the car before me, and I hustle to follow; she walks up the front steps with a sort of grave, focused march. She stands with her hands at her sides, her eyes on the dark street, waiting for me to open the door. Inside, she still says nothing. She walks straight to the dining room, flips the switch that turns on the old chandelier Kit loves so much, sits down in the exact same spot she sat in the first night I’d met her, and clasps her hands on the table. And somehow, I know exactly what shewants me to do.
I sit right across from her, like I did that night. I push the copy of theTimesI have stacked there out of the way. I wait.
“First,” she says, her eyes on her hands, her voice quiet. “I want you to know, I didn’t lie to you about Humphrey. He did havepanic attacks.”
“Okay,” I say, wholly confused at what the fuck this has to do with her brother who seemed nice enough even if he did look a lotat my eyebrows.
“But Patricia was my therapist too. When I was young.”
“Okay,” I repeat, and wonder if this’ll be the only thing I can say for the entirety of this—whatever this is. Everything about Greer’s body right now tells me I’m meant to stay quiet. Stay out of her way until she’s done. That asshole stole something from her tonight, and right now, she’s on a mission to take it back.
“My parents and my teachers at school, they thought—” She breaks off, her hands clasping tighter. “They thought I had a problem with telling the truth. That I was—that I was a hypochondriac, or that I was making some things up about being sick because I was shy. Because I didn’t want to go to school a lot of the time.”
I bend my head, and my own hands feel useless, clumsy. I don’t thinkI’m breathing.
“And Humph, he was a bit like that too. Kind of a nervous kid, and he got pushed around a lot. I think my parents figured it was the same for me. And I didn’t always—I wasn’t always good at telling them how I felt.” I hear her inhale, remind myself to breathe too. “So I went to Patricia, and—well. Iamshy, obviously. As you’ve probably noticed.”
I look up at her, think of how quiet she was sitting in that same seat two years ago. “You don’t seem shy to me. You seem—separate.” She winces slightly, and I rush to say it better, what I mean. “You seem strong, in yourself. Comfortable in the quiet. Watchful.”
She looks back at me for a long moment, her blue eyes soft,contemplative.
“I wasn’t a hypochondriac,” she says, slowly, seriously. Something hot and unpleasant moves through my body, a wave of foreboding that’s all at once entirely similar and entirely different than a rising tide of panic. “I was not well. My—the things I had, headaches and unsteadiness on my feet, and some other things too—they were not in my imagination.”
Myimagination—it’s a dense storm of chaos right now. I’m thinking terrible shit—cancer, a brain tumor, something deadly and invasive, something that must still stalk Greer, no matter that she looks healthy to me now. Every observation I’ve ever made about her takes on new meaning—the way the skin under her eyes purples at night with fatigue. The way she adjusts her body sometimes, like she can’t quite get comfortable. The way she stretches when she rises from the beds we’ve shared together, less luxuriating than—than correcting, I guess.
