Inside the house was cool and quiet, save for the modest hum of the dishwasher. Birdie’s crumble sat cooling on a rack beside the stove. Eliza was perched at the kitchen island, eating leftover blueberries and scrolling her phone. “Did the boys leave for the beach without me?” she asked, peering past me out the sliding door into the yard. “Those two fuckers.” She paused with her fingers in the ceramic dish, then frowned. “Wait,” she said, “are you not going?”
“No, I will,” I assured her. I curled my hand around the necklace inside my pocket, rubbing my thumb over the charm.Any idea who this belongs to?I thought of asking her. Then I thought again. “I just—you know.”
Eliza tilted her head to the side. “You should come,” she said, pulling one elegant foot up onto the barstool and resting her chin on her knee. She was wearing a pair of white shorts and her bathing suit top, two white triangles connected by a length of nautical rope. “I mean, let’s be real, it’s not like Greg would be sitting vigil if it was one of us who wound up in the pool.”
“That…is pretty much exactly what your brother said.” I smiled, though suddenly there was a tiny part of me that wondered if they’d come up with that line together. “I’ll catch up with you guys, I promise. I think I’m just gonna lie down for a little bit first. I didn’t sleep that much.”
“No kidding.” Eliza smirked at that, her green eyes sparking hot. “Want company?” she asked. Then, before I could answer: “Birdie likes to snuggle.”
I nodded wryly, waiting for the familiar thrill of the tease to hit me. Instead I just felt kind of ill. “Good to know.” I headed for thedoorway, then stopped short just before I got to the dining room. “Hey,” I said, turning to face her again. “Can I ask you something? What were you doing outside so early this morning?”
Eliza looked surprised for a second, then shrugged. “Whimsy had to pee,” she said, popping a blueberry into her mouth. Her tone was totally unbothered, but I thought I saw a flicker of something—annoyance? Suspicion?—cross her sharp, canny face. “Why?”
I shook my head. “No, no reason.” I didn’t actually remember seeing Whimsy in the yard that morning, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. After all, it wasn’t like I’d been paying a ton of attention. I was letting my own uneasiness get the better of me, that was all. “Was just lucky. For Greg, I mean.”
Eliza unfolded herself like a cat and slid off the barstool, padding barefoot across the hardwood floor. “He can thank me when he wakes up,” she said lightly, then slipped out the door onto the patio.
I stood in the doorway for a moment, watching her go. There was a part of me that wanted to follow—to toss her over my shoulder and run us both into the ocean, to bury my feet in the warm sand and let the sun bake this weird, briny guilt right out of me. What was I even feeling guilty about? It wasn’t like I was the one who’d pushed Greg into the pool.
The more I thought about it, though, the more I was starting to wonder if maybe somebody else might have.
I went upstairs to the third floor and lay down on the four-poster bed, the antique frame creaking a bit under my weight. I looked at the ceiling for a while. I stared at the poison plants onthe wall. I kind of wanted my mom, in all honesty, but I knew if she got even the faintest whiff of any of this, she’d have an existential crisis about the kind of murderous Republican element she was exposing me to by sending me to Bartley in the first place. She’d probably drive down the Cape, get on the next ferry out of Woods Hole, and drag me back home herself. Forget bagging groceries; I’d be spending the rest of the summer listening to socialist protest anthems and running errands for the neighborhood mutual aid group.
I was still flat on my back, trying not to feel like the tasteful shiplap walls of August House were creeping ever-so-infinitesimally closer, when my phone buzzed on the nightstand.Hey!Holiday had texted.Still up for coffee today?
“Oh, fuck me,” I muttered. I’d completely forgotten, and honestly, the whole thing sounded even less appealing now than it had two nights earlier. Not only was it basically guaranteed to be excruciatingly awkward, but there was also no way I could make an hour’s worth of inane small talk without Holiday figuring out that something was going on. I knew her—and, more to the point,sheknewme.She’d sniff me out in ten seconds flat.
I stared at the screen for a moment, trying to figure out the best way to bail. The last time I’d messaged her was two full years ago, when she’d texted to ask if I remembered the day we’d found a lost puppy in her backyard in Cambridge. We’d fitted it with a leash and collar and made signs to put up all over the neighborhood before my mom caught us and whisked us both to the pediatrician to get checked for rabies exposure, as our puppy was in fact a surprisingly good-natured baby possum.
Haha,I’d replied two days later.
So, fine, I thought now, cringing a little: It was probably mostly my fault that our friendship hadn’t exactly held steadfast through the ages. On top of which, the more I thought about it, the more I felt like a piece of shit about how I’d basically blown her off at the beach the other night. Still, all at once it occurred to me that maybe she wouldn’t be the worst person in the world to talk to about what had happened at the Kendricks’ this morning.
And as soon as I hadthatthought, I realized there wasn’t actually anyone else I could imagine talking to about it at all.
Coffee sounds great,I typed, then tapped the button to send before I could convince myself not to.Where should I meet you?
“Holy shit,” Holiday said an hour later, her gray eyes wide behind her enormous round glasses. She’d suggested a coffee shop near her parents’ house, a brand-new-but-made-to-look-old-fashioned kind of place with a wide variety of non-dairy milk alternatives and fourteen-dollar avocado toast sprinkled with a million different kinds of seeds. “You think somebody tried to kill him?”
“What? No!” I looked around, afraid somebody would overhear her. The walls were white and bare in here, the ceilings tall and echoey. It seemed like even a whisper would carry clear to the counter, though nobody actually seemed to be paying us any mind: Two women in tennis dresses sipped iced tea and pored over wallpaper swatches. A young couple looked on adoringly as theirtoddler ate a yogurt parfait with his hands. The same local radio station as yesterday piped in over the speakers: Bonnie Raitt this time, “Something to Talk About.” I looked back at her. “That’s not what I’m saying at all. When did I say anything like that?”
“I mean, how is that not the logical conclusion to draw here?” Holiday frowned, her thick eyebrows knitting. “A guy that everyone hates winds up unconscious in the pool at the house of his former-best-friends-turned-worst-enemies?” She looked almost insulted. “If you’re not saying that somebody pushed him, whatareyou saying?”
“I’m not saying anything! I just—” I broke off. When I’d told her about Greg, I think there was a part of me that that been hoping she’d tell me I was being dramatic—that it was a tragedy but that tragedies happen, that secretly I didn’t trust rich people and it was showing. But I’d forgotten that Holiday loved a mystery like nobody else I’d ever met. If there wasn’t one to solve, she would invent it: a weird neighbor who turned out to be a perfectly harmless actuarial assistant; common city vermin as beloved missing pet. In middle school she’d become absolutely convinced that two members of her favorite boy band were secretly dating each other and set out to prove it in a series of escalating gambits that culminated with her talking her way onto their floor at the Mandarin Oriental in Boston by convincing the hotel concierge she was the youngest granddaughter of the Commonwealth’s most prominent political family. She wouldn’t tell anyone what she’d seen there—“It was messed up of me to use my considerable powers of investigation to snoop on people’s private lives like that, and I shouldn’t have done it” was all she’d say—but six months later, they came out as a couple.
Still—Holiday’sconsiderable powers of investigationaside—no way was I about to start accusing my friends of having anything to do with what had happened. That was ridiculous. That was insane. That was—
—the same thing you’ve been secretly wondering all morning, asshole.
“I don’t know what I’m saying,” I hedged finally, scrubbing a hand over my face.
Holiday nodded, stretching her long legs out underneath the table so her ankle bumped, not particularly gently, against mine. A thing I had noticed about her, both the other night and today, was that she didn’t seem to care how much space she took up. It wasn’t just her physical body, although that was definitely part of it—she was almost taller than me, with broad shoulders and wide hips, her stomach soft and round under the boxy short-sleeved dress she was wearing—but it was the way she carried herself. Her overstuffed tote bag. The way she’d asked the barista a thousand questions before she ordered. How tightly she’d hugged me when she saw me on the beach. Sometimes it seemed like the girls at Bartley were all in some kind of silent contest for who could be the most sleek and smooth and optimized, like they’d all been engineered at the Apple headquarters in Cupertino. Holiday was…analog.
“Well, I’m glad you texted, anyway,” she said now, taking a sip from her heavy ceramic mug—after much deliberation she’d ordered a London Fog, a latte made with Earl Grey tea. It smelled like libraries and cloudy days and, actually, kind of like Holiday herself. “Because it kind of seemed like maybe you weren’t that glad to see me at the beach the other night.”
Right away I felt about two inches tall. I should have known there was no way she was going to act like she hadn’t noticed. “No no no,” I said quickly. “It wasn’t that. It’s just…complicated, that’s all.”
Holiday nodded, her full lips quirking. “Sure,” she said, sitting back in her chair.
