6
I woke up to the sound of someone screaming.
I scrambled out of bed so fast I got tangled in the covers, my heart a bloody fist slamming away at the back of my throat. For a second I had no idea where I was. I thought it was my mom, that there was someone in our house I needed to protect her from. I thought it was Greer, and the car was starting to skid.
Then I realized it was Eliza.
I grabbed for my glasses—I was basically blind without them, though I usually put my contacts in first thing—shoving them onto my face and stumbling down the stairs in the muddy-gray dark. My busted ankle gave as I turned the corner into the kitchen, and I landed face-first on the floor.
“Shit,” I hissed. Eliza was still screaming, one high, panicked shriek after another. I boosted myself upright, wincing at the icy-hot pain careening up and down my leg. I burst through the open door and out onto the patio, where I found her standing illuminated by the warm, tasteful glow of the backyard lights, hands clenched into fists at her sides.
Crumpled on the pool steps, slumped like a shipwreck just above the waterline, was a body.
“Oh, fuck.” Wells was right behind me—pushing past his sister and running across the patio, crouching down by the edge of the pool. “Linden!” he barked. “Help me.”
I startled. I’d been standing there staring; for a moment the whole scene seemed enormously, ostentatiously fake to me, like something that was happening on TV or in a movie. Like something I had no realistic frame of reference for at all.
“Linden!”Wells said again, and this time I moved. Together he and I wrestled the body out of the water, my hands sliding slickly over its damp arms and shoulders. Its skin was cold and clammy under my palms. I thought of the orange from the previous afternoon, the overwhelming feeling that I was touching something I shouldn’t be. I thought of the phrasedead weight.
“It’s Greg,” Wells said as we turned him faceup on the concrete. “Fuck,what the fuck is Greg doing here?”
“Is he breathing?” Eliza demanded shrilly.
“I have no idea,” Wells said. “Call 911.”
She shook her head back and forth about a dozen times. “I don’t have my phone.”
“Well, go get it!” he roared. “Shit!”
“What the fuck is going on?” That was Jasper running through the sliding door out onto the patio, Aidy—Aidy?—at his heels and Meredith close behind them. They stopped short when they saw Greg lying motionless on the ground, his arms and legs sprawled in all different directions like a little kid’s action figure left on the playground. Right away, Meredith started screaming too.
“He was in the pool,” Wells explained, sounding completely baffled. “I don’t—why was he in the pool?”
“Is he dead?” That was Meredith, down on her knees at Greg’s side.
“No,” I said, finding my voice for the first time since I’d come out onto the patio. Greg was breathing, but barely, the rise and fall of his chest just visible in the dim predawn light. There was a gash in his head, I saw now, like he’d hit it on something. When I looked down, there was blood on my hands. “He’s alive.”
“They’re on their way,” Eliza reported shakily, coming back out through the kitchen with the phone pressed to her ear. “Yes, I’m still here.”
“Buddy,” Meredith was saying softly, touching Greg’s face and chest and shoulders as tears and snot ran down her face. “Hey, buddy, please wake up.”
Things seemed to happen in flashes after that: the paramedics tromping in through the garden, carrying a bright orange backboard between them. Aidy clutching Jasper’s hand while the dawn came up red and sudden and overripe. Meredith pulling a borrowed fleece over her head and climbing into the back of the ambulance beside Greg, her bangs sticking up at a funny angle; the burst of static from a walkie-talkie as—oh Jesus—two cops from the Edgartown Police Department turned the corner into the yard.
Their names were Reyes and O’Neal, a man and a woman; O’Neal did most of the talking, taking notes in a little book not much bigger than a credit card. “All right,” she said once we’d all introduced ourselves. Birdie had arrived just as the ambulancewas leaving, was pressing hot cups of coffee into everyone’s hands. “Can you all tell us what happened here this morning?”
Wells spoke first. “Greg is a friend of ours,” he began, his voice surprisingly steady. “He came over last night to hang out by the pool, but he went home a little after midnight. I don’t…” His gaze flicked to the rest of us, then back at the police officers. “I don’t think any of us have any idea what he did after that.”
O’Neal nodded. “Was there anyone else at the house we should know about?”
“No,” Eliza said immediately, and I felt myself startle. There’d been at least two dozen people in the pool alone. I didn’t want to get hauled off to jail either, obviously, but still I was surprised by how easily the lie seemed to roll off her tongue. “Just us—and my friend Meredith, Greg’s girlfriend. She’s at the hospital with him now.”
“You all were having a bit of fun, I’m assuming?” That was Reyes, both hands in his pockets as he looked around at the quiet, neatly manicured backyard. We’d done a final sweep for abandoned beer bottles before we went to bed, thank god, though from my vantage point by the patio table I could see the glint of one lonely can hiding under Mrs. Kendrick’s rosebushes.
“You mean, like, drinking?” Eliza asked, her eyes wide and innocent. “No, not at all.”
“I mean, I guess we don’t know what Greg did after he left here,” Wells pointed out. “But none of us are legal yet, so.”
Reyes nodded faintly, his face impassive. I glanced from Eliza to Jasper to Aidy, waiting—and waiting some more—for someone to mention the fight, or the fact that Greg hadn’t so muchcomeover to hang outasshown up drunk and uninvited.And sure, I could have mentioned it myself; I knew that even as I was standing there on the patio like a tree stump. But I couldn’t get my mouth to make the words.
