“I’m serious,” I insisted. “I know all these people from school, you know? And none of them know, like…” I trailed off.
Holiday ducked her head, low and conspiratorial. “That you’re Superman?” she whispered across the table.
I rolled my eyes. “That I’m broke.”
“Okay.” Holiday straightened up. She didn’t look convinced—in fact, she looked like maybe she thought I was being a dick to her on purpose even more than I had been the other night.
“What,” I said, “you don’t believe me?”
“No, I one hundred percent believe you,” she countered with a shrug. “It’s just that you say it like you expected me to stroll up to this random group of total strangers and immediately lead with the fact that you’re not, like, the heir to a private prison fortune. It’s—what does your mom always call it?Small behavior.”
“Okay, can we not bring mymominto this, please?” I pushed my iced coffee away, feeling my temper flare. “I don’t think it automatically makes me a piece of shit to want to be careful about keeping private things private. Do you have any idea what it’s like to show up to a place like Bartley—or a place like this island, even—knowing you don’t actually fit in?”
Holiday fixed me with a deeply unimpressed look across the table. “No,” she deadpanned. “Please, tell me more about it.”
“I—okay,” I said, feeling myself blush. She was right. Things were fine for her now, maybe, but I remembered plenty of bullshit from back when we were kids—a birthday party nobody had come to, my mom mentioning some crap with some girls at her school. Once I stopped to think about it for even half a second, it was obvious she wouldn’t have ratted me out to Jasper or Eliza or anyone. She was way more loyal than that. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“I’m teasing you, Michael.” Holiday smiled. She had a nice smile, wide and unselfconscious, her teeth white and rich-girl straight. “I can tease you a little, can’t I? I think we’ve known each other long enough for that.”
“Yeah.” I exhaled, rubbing at the back of my neck. Holiday had stayed over at our house a couple of times when we were really young, when her parents—both of them professors at Harvard, her dad in criminology and her mom in Shakespearean lit—were out of town at seminars or conferences. For a second I remembered the two of us running naked through the sprinkler in my small, scrubby backyard, then felt my face get even warmer and abruptly stopped remembering it. “I guess we have.”
“My mom told me about your ankle,” she said, wrapping her hands around her mug. Her nail polish was a deep red, and chipped. “That sucks.”
That surprised me, the baldness of it. “It sucks,” I agreed with a laugh. It was a relief to say it and not have to worry about her reaction.
“Does it hurt?”
I opened my mouth to tell her it was fine, or that it would be,some variation on what I’d been telling everybody since it happened. That I was in better shape now than I’d been before the accident. That I’d be back on the field in a few weeks.
“Yeah,” I admitted quietly. “It hurts a lot.”
Holiday looked at me for a long minute, her expression inscrutable for the first time since she’d sat down at the table. Then she nodded.
“So,” she said, reaching back and scooping her hair into a curly knot on top of her head, securing it without the benefit of an elastic. “Just, like, hypothetically speaking. If what happened to this Greg guy wasn’t a drunk accident. If somebodyhadwanted to hurt him. Do you have any idea who?”
“No,” I said immediately.
Holiday snorted, flopping back in her chair. “Liar.”
I huffed a breath. “These are my friends, Holiday! Not to mention the fact that they’re the people that I’mstayingwith. I’m not just going to start running my mouth accusing them of who thefu—”
“I’m not asking you to accuse anyone of anything!” Holiday interrupted. “I’m just curious, that’s all. From what you’ve said, Greg wasn’t exactly anyone’s best buddy. I’m just wondering if there’s anyone in particular who might have—again,hypothetically—been looking for payback.”
I thought of Eliza lying to the cops about who’d been at the Kendricks’. I thought of Wells’s fist connecting with Greg’s jaw. I thought of how cagey Jasper had been when I brought up Greg outside the bagel place, and I let out a quiet, involuntary groan.“That’s the thing,” I confessed finally. “I think it might be, like…kind of a long list.”
Holiday nodded again, focused as a clockmaker, her gray eyes shades of brown and green and blue. She reached down into her overflowing bag and pulled out a notebook withHoliday Proctorembossed in gold on the cover and the same kind of purple ballpoint pen she’d been writing with since second grade.
“Well then,” she said brightly, opening to a fresh sheet of paper, “I guess we better get started.”
We sat across from each other at the coffee shop for the better part of the afternoon, wandering back up to the counter first for refills of our drinks, then for turkey-and-cheddar sandwiches to soak up some of the caffeine, then for a couple of moon-size oatmeal chocolate-chip cookies because Holiday said she couldn’t possibly be expected to reason deductively without a sugar hit. She made me tell her the story of last night over and over while she scribbled furiously in her notebook: peppering me with questions about Greg and the Kendricks and the police who’d showed up at August House, about what exactly I’d seen when I’d stumbled sleepily out onto the patio that morning. The more I heard myself talk, the more ridiculous and far-fetched the whole thing started to sound—and the sillier I started to feel for dragging Holiday all the way out here to listen to me spout some bonkers conspiracy theory when we’d barely talked at all since the onset of puberty.What happened to Greg had been an accident, obviously. People got drunk and hurt themselves all the time.
“I don’t know,” I said at last, rattling the ice in my compostable coffee cup. It felt like my whole body was full of bees. “I’m probably making too big a deal about this. I mean, the police didn’t seem to think it was suspicious, and they’d be able to recognize a potential crime scene a whole lot better than I would.”
“Probably,” Holiday agreed absently. “Though if I had to guess, the Kendricks are also the kind of people who send fruit baskets lined with cash down to the station on every major holiday to prepare for this exact eventuality. Nobody’s going to want to bad-cop them.” She tugged speculatively at one dark curl, then let it go so it bounced back like a cartoon spring, a habit of hers that I suddenly remembered from when we were kids. “Tell me again how he looked when you got out there?” Then, as if perhaps I’d encountered more than one injured, unconscious bro this fine morning: “Greg, I mean.”
I shook my head. “Holiday, maybe—”
“Michael.” Her gaze was steady. “Just humor me.”
