7
By noon, life at August House had returned almost to normal. Mr. and Mrs. Kendrick got home as we were finishing Birdie’s pancakes; Mr. Kendrick shut himself in the office basically as soon as they walked in the door, his voice muffled as he talked on the phone—to his lawyer, I assumed, trying to gauge the family’s legal exposure. “None of you gave that kid anything to drink, did you?” he asked when he emerged. Greg was in a coma, Meredith had reported from the hospital; the doctors thought he’d probably tripped, drunk or high or some combination of both, and hit his head on the edge of the pool before tumbling over. “You’re sure?”
The Kendrick siblings looked at each other, just for a second. This time it was Jasper who spoke. “No, Dad,” he said. “Come on, you know how that kid is. You think we’re inviting him over and offering him the good Scotch?”
That made Mr. Kendrick smile, just faintly. “You shouldn’t joke,” he said, though his lips were still quirked. “It’s a tragedy. Obviously, he’s a troubled guy.”
“How could he not be, coming from a family like that?” Mrs. Kendrick shook her head. She looked daisy-fresh for a person who’d been awoken before dawn to the news of a comatose teenager floating in her swimming pool, her golden-blond bob pulled into a springy ponytail and her white button-down shirt tucked into a pair of red khaki shorts. Already she’d called the market that Jas and I had been to yesterday and had a tray of sandwiches sent over to the hospital. “Not that it makes this any less awful.”
Now she and Mr. Kendrick were gone again, taking Whimsy for a long walk along the water. Birdie was baking a blueberry crumble to go with dinner, humming along to Blossom Dearie on the stereo. A company had arrived to clean the pool.
I found Jasper sprawled in the yard with his earbuds in, one flip-flop dangling from his toes over the side of the hammock. “Dude,” I said quietly, “should I go home?” My nerves felt brittle and rattly, a bad-seafood kind of queasiness in my stomach. Every time I blinked, I saw Greg slumped like a deflated inner tube on the steps of the pool.
“What?” Jasper pulled out one earbud. “Dude, no. Why? You just got here.”
“No, I know, but—” I broke off. I didn’t know what to say, exactly:Pulling your unconscious neighbor out of the water first thing in the morning kind of takes the fun out of paddling around in the deep end? The casual relationship you and your family suddenly seem to have with the truth makes me a teeny bit uncomfortable? I’m desperate to leave this idyllic seaside playground and spend the last dregs of the summer bagging groceries in the sweltering city heat?
“Greg’s going to be fine,” Jasper promised, all confidence. “Andif he’s not…not to be a dick or anything, but it’s kind of his own fault for getting fucking obliterated and creeping around our yard in the middle of the night like some kind of giant psycho.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, though there was a part of me that couldn’t get over the notion that it wasn’t quite that simple. “No, totally.” All at once I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. “So,” I said instead, raising my eyebrows in his direction, “you and Aidy, huh?”
Jasper grinned. “Me and Aidy, huh.” She’d taken off before his parents got home, though not before the rest of us caught an eyeful of them saying a decidedly prolonged goodbye on the side porch. “Get a room!” Eliza had yelled, banging on the window as she passed by.
“Yo!” That was Wells coming through the back door in his swim trunks, blue-and-white striped towel slung over one tan shoulder. “You ready?” he called across the yard.
“One sec,” Jasper called back. “I’ll meet you down there.”
“Hold up,” I said, even as Wells headed through the gate and down the steps that led to the sand. “You guys are going to the beach?”
I didn’t mean to sound like such a little bitch about it, but I must have, because Jasper looked sheepish. “I mean.” He ruffled his hair with his hand. “I don’t know if we’llswimor anything.”
I laughed at that, but only to avoid some other, more awkward reaction. I didn’t know why the idea seemed so profoundly appalling to me, or what exactly I thought they should be doing instead. After all, whatwasthe socially appropriate itinerary for the day after your sworn enemy almost drowned in your pool? Still, I couldn’t get over the seasick feeling that the rules were somehowdifferent for the Kendricks, and for people like them, than they were for everyone else. I kept thinking of the way the cops had acted this morning, theall in this together, sorry we even have to ask you thisquality of their questions. It was as if Jasper and his family were untouchable, like they had some kind of invisible missile shield of power and privilege around them that nothing—not even something like this—could penetrate.
“Look,” Jas said, boosting himself upright with the practiced ease of a person who’d clearly spent a lot of time getting into and out of hammocks, “I get it. I don’t want you to think that, like, shit like this happens all the time around here and we’re a bunch of sociopaths who are immune to it or something. The whole thing is super fucked up.”
I breathed a sigh of relief at that, hearing him say it out loud. “It is, right?”
“Of course it is!” Jasper laughed a little. “It’s creepy as shit! But also, like…sitting around feeling bad about it all day isn’t going to change anything. And you going back to Boston definitely isn’t.” He shrugged. “Obviously I’m not going to say anything fucking corny likeGreg would want us to go on with our livesor whatever. But if the situation was reversed, and I was the one in the hospital right now? You can bet your ass that kid would be out here drinking a frosty watermelon margarita and working on his tan.”
I had to admit, Jas had a point. I didn’t know Greg at all, but it wasn’t like I needed to scrutinize the results of his Myers-Briggs personality test to figure out that the guy was a total douchebag. And hehadkind of brought the whole thing on himself.
Hadn’t he?
“Go get your suit and meet us down there,” Jas advised now, tucking his earbuds back into their charging pod and slipping them into the pocket of his shorts. “Seriously, bro. What else are you gonna do all day, lie in bed with a finger in your belly button, contemplating the cruel randomness of the universe?”
“Of course not, asshole,” I replied immediately. “You know I only do that on my birthday.”
I could hear Jasper laughing all the way down to the beach.
I was headed back across the patio toward the house—maybe I’d get my suit after all, I thought, and stop being such a delicate flower about the whole thing—when someone called out behind me. I turned and saw it was one of the pool guys, his polo shirt stitched with a logo of three little waves. “This belong to you?” he asked. He was holding something I couldn’t make out in the glare of the midday sunlight. “It was stuck in the filter.”
I held my hand out like an instinct, flinching a little as he dropped it into my palm: a necklace, a rose-gold chain strung with a delicate charm in the shape of a tiny anchor.
I felt my heart do a weird, stuttering thing inside my chest. It didn’t mean anything, I reminded myself immediately: after all, there’d been a million people in the pool last night, and it could easily have fallen off any one of them. But the clasp was broken, the metal bent at a weird, violent angle.
Almost like it had been yanked off someone’s neck.
“I’ll ask around,” I said, tucking the necklace into my pocket. I wondered if anyone had told the pool guys why the Kendricks had called them out here on such short notice. “Thanks.”
