“This is fucking dumb,” Jasper announced, unfolding himself from his lounge chair. “I’m gonna go eat a string cheese and jerkoff.”
He disappeared into the house, but Wells and I kept at it, going back and forth half a dozen more times. Red marks bloomed on his lower back and underneath his shoulder blades. He hit me so hard that I coughed. I was just about to bail out—fuck this, it was asinine and I was asinine for agreeing to it, I was every embarrassing stereotype about dudes who went to private school—but thankfully, the orange gave out just then, smashing to a wet, pulpy mess on the patio.
“Shit.” Wells grinned, turning back around to face me. “Guess this round is a draw.”
“Whatever you say, man.” My back was burning; I felt idiotic and disproportionately rattled, like I’d accidentally done something a lot worse than just play a boneheaded game with my buddy’s dipshit brother. Out of nowhere I thought of Greer and the accident, ambulance lights flashing on the winding road that led to Bartley. Pushed it all out of my mind.
“Are you going to clean that up, at least?” Eliza asked as Wells strolled back across the patio toward the house; she’d been ignoring us pointedly for the last several minutes, lying on her stomach with her head bent over her book.
“I’ll tell Birdie,” Wells promised easily, sliding the kitchen door shut behind him.
I did it myself in the end, scooping it up off the concrete and immediately wishing I hadn’t. It felt like picking up roadkill bare-handed, heavy and slippery and somehow deeply wrong. I brought it inside as fast as I could without looking like I was running and tossed it into the kitchen garbage, then came back with a can of grapefruit LaCroix for Eliza.
“Is this so I won’t tell you what a moron you are?” she asked, taking it from my hand with a smile.
“Nah,” I said, sitting down on the chair beside her and crossing my ankles. “I figured you were going to tell me that whether or not I brought you a drink.”
“That fancy private-school education is paying off.” She was still lying on her stomach, propping herself up on one elbow to look at me. “How’s your back?”
“Fine,” I lied. In fact, I felt…well, like I’d been pelted with an orange over and over. Even with Wells gone, I was still a little uneasy, my bones jangling around inside my body like I was one of those full-size plastic skeletons from the Halloween store. “I’m really manly, so. Barely felt it.”
Eliza’s lips twisted. “You realize you’re going to have to explain those bruises over and over every time you get in the pool all week long,” she pointed out. “Citrus injury, et cetera.”
“Probably.” I grimaced at the thought of it. “Maybe I’ll start swimming in a full wetsuit, avoid that problem altogether.”
“Now,thatwould be a waste.” Eliza grinned. “Wells is an asshole,” she continued, moving on to the second thing beforeI could process the first one. “He took it the hardest, you know? Everything that happened with my dad. Which makes zero sense, because it’s not even like he was living at home for any of it. Neither of them were, him or Jasper. I’m the one who had to go into my mom’s bathroom at night and count her Xanax.”
She said it so casually I wasn’t sure if she was kidding or not, crossing her arms in front of her and dropping her head down. Mostly I was just relieved she didn’t seem to be mad at me anymore. “That sucks,” I said finally, sounding like a dumbass even to my own ears.
Eliza shrugged, reaching behind her to unhook the back clasp of her bathing suit. “Don’t peek,” she instructed me firmly.
I cleared my throat, glancing back at the house. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
“I mean,” she said, turning her face to look at me, “you candreamof it, if you want.” She rubbed her nose against the crease of her elbow. “So what’s your story, Michael Linden?”
I shook my head like an instinct. “You know,” I told her, “there’s not much to tell.”
Eliza hummed, skeptical. “Somehow I don’t think that’s true.”
We stayed like that for a while, quiet, the sun making patterns across the water in the pool. I waited for my back to stop throbbing. Eliza turned the pages of her book. At last she got up in one smooth motion and—not bothering to put her top back on, the fabric dangling between two elegant fingers—she got up and headed across the patio. I watched the long line of her backbone as she disappeared into the house.
I sat in the lounge chair for a long time once she was gone,trying dazedly to figure out if she’d been issuing me some kind of silent invitation, and telling myself I was being ridiculous for feeling too edgy and rattled to go find the hell out. I was still gathering my courage when all at once I noticed something moving on the patio. I got up to investigate, then stopped short with a shudder halfway to the back door: There was a giant clump of ants crawling all over the wet, juicy stain the orange had left on the flagstone, hundreds of them scuttling in tandem around what was left of the pulpy mess. I watched them for a long, gross moment, weirdly hypnotized, until Jasper’s voice startled me alert.
“Yo!” he yelled from one of the upstairs windows. “You want to go take the boat out?”
“Uh,” I called back, still watching the ant colony, “sure thing.”
“Cool,” Jasper said. “Be right down.”
I stared at the swarming ants for another minute—transfixed by the sheer number of them, how from a distance they looked like one dark, vibrating mass. Then I left them to their business and went inside.
