Jasper smirked. “And that’s Meredith,” he admitted, and I waved. “Come on,” he continued, “I’ll give you the tour.”
I followed him across the patio, past an outdoor kitchen with a built-in grill and through the sliding glass door into the cool, quiet house. “Meredith’s parents used to have a place nearby, but they sold it last year,” he informed me, “which means she’s been at our house, like. All. Fucking. Summer.”
“Uh-oh,” I said with a laugh. His voice suggested either a decades-long blood feud or a vacation hookup gone bad. “Did you guys, like…?”
“Oh,fuckno,” Jasper said, like the very thought of it had his dick shriveling up in horror. “She’s had a boyfriend since the Stone Age. And they’re both idiots.” He shrugged, reaching down to pet the golden retriever snoozing in a monogrammed bed near the mudroom. “This is Whimsy,” he told me. “Come on, this way.”
I’d had it in my head that beach houses were sort of scruffy, full of cast-off furniture and yellowing sci-fi paperbacks, but the Kendricks’ looked freshly renovated, with huge picture windows framing a view of the ocean and an open kitchen that would have made my mom weep with pleasure. Right away I was worried about spilling something, even though I wasn’t holding anything I could possibly spill.
Jas led me through the dining room and into the living room, past an actual library with built-in bookcases lining the three walls that didn’t look out over the garden. And it all just kept going: we passed a study and a sunroom and a den with a projector screen, the sectional so wide and deep I had to physically stop myself from face-planting directly onto it and passing out until school started. August House was the kind of place where any number of people could stay for an indefinite length of time without anyone noticing—not like the apartment I shared with my mom back in East Boston, where my aunt Rosie had come to visit over Christmas and left her bras draped over the shower-curtain rod for days on end, the scent of her perfume hanging thickly in the air.
We traipsed up a flight of steps and down a long hallway, then turned and climbed another staircase that doubled back on itself until finally we got to a bedroom with walls that curved gently on two sides—the turret room, I realized, the one I’d seen from outside.
“Sorry it’s so small,” Jasper said, though it was bigger than both my room at home and the one we’d shared freshman year at Bartley, when we’d first been roommates. “Meredith is hogging the good guest room, since, you know, she lives with us now.”
I shook my head. “Dude, it’s fine.” The bed was an intricately carved four-poster, the duvet cover a cheery blue-and-white stripe. A quartet of framed botanical prints hung on the far wall.
“They’re poisonous,” Jas said when he saw me looking at them.
“Huh?”
“The plants,” he explained, gesturing with his chin. “Foxglove, hogweed, hemlock, stinging nettle. Those drawings are all over the house. My mom bought this whole collection of them from some botanist’s estate sale in Newport, then got them home and some friend of hers was like,Hey, dumbass, you realize the unifying theme of those flowers is that every single one of them is extremely fucking lethal.But by then she’d already paid her decorator to come and hang them.” He shrugged. “Anyway, your bathroom is around the corner. Just be careful because you have to hold the flusher down an extra minute if you take a shit.”
I nodded. “Thanks for the tip.”
“No problem. Meet you down at the pool.” He shut the door behind him, his footsteps thundering down the narrow staircase. “Glad you’re here, dude!”
Once he was gone, I looked at the plants for a moment longer, telling myself there was no reason to feel the tiniest bit creeped out by their graceful leaves and delicate, dangerous flowers. Then I changed into my bathing suit and headed downstairs.
