Mrs. Kendrick made a face. “Dear god, don’t even joke.” She braced one hand on the bookcase, reaching down and adjusting the strap on her shiny metallic sandal with the other. “Listen, Daddy and I are going to go meet the Grahams in town for something to eat. We weren’t sure we’d be back in time when they invited us, but since we’re here…” She trailed off, frowning. “Unless you want us to stay in?”
Eliza shook her head. “We’ll be fine,” she promised lightly, and I couldn’t tell if she was faking it or not. “We always are.”
Jasper’s parents were in good spirits as they headed out to dinner in Vineyard Haven, seemingly placated by whatever conversations they’d had with their lawyers that day: “The gate on the pool is up to code, and the kid was trespassing,” I heard his dad saying to his mom as they headed out the door. “It’s a horrible thing, but according to Barnes, in terms of liability, our asses are covered.” Birdie grilled chicken for the rest of us, slathering it with dill-and-yogurt sauce and putting together a brightly colored salad with fatslices of tomato and peach. We ate outside around the patio table under the party lights once she and Dean were gone for the day, none of us commenting on the fact that what probably looked from the outside like a perfectly curated Instagram post had been full of police officers and paramedics not twelve hours before.
Then again, maybe I was the only one even thinking about it.
“So,” Wells said finally, sitting back in his chair and lifting his chin in an impression of his father that was almost uncanny. He’d reappeared just before dinner, though nobody seemed to know where he’d been. “How was everyone’s day?”
Eliza rolled her eyes, then cut a glance at Meredith, who was picking silently at her dinner. “Don’t be a dick, Wells.”
“Hey now,” Wells chided mildly. I thought he’d seemed more worried than anyone about getting in trouble with Reyes and O’Neal this morning, but he seemed almost jovial now. Though, I realized, catching sight of the ice cubes in his tall, frosty glass, it was possible that actually he was just drunk. “I’m only trying to make conversation with you kids. Highs and lows of the day? Anyone?” Then, when no one answered: “Nobody?” he asked. “Okay then, I’ll start. My high is the truly delectable local feta in this salad right now. And mylow—”
Meredith shoved her chair back and bolted from the table. Eliza shot her brother a look that could have taken the paint right off the little car. “Dammit, Wells!”
Wells sat back in his chair. “What’d I say?”
“Dude,” Jasper said, “you’re an asshole.” Still, I couldn’t help but notice that he was smirking too. Any leftover tension between them from last night seemed to have seeped away. Notfor the first time, I wondered if that was just how it worked when you had siblings—fights that burned out as quickly as they started, a blood bond that was stronger and more important than anything else.
I’d texted Holiday before we sat down to eat, and she came through the gate at the side of the yard just as we were bringing our plates inside. “Hey,” she called, her dark gaze flicking around the group of us on the patio, and I thought I saw a moment of uncertainty cross her expression before she smiled. She’d changed her clothes since this afternoon, was wearing cropped jeans and a boxy T-shirt. Her hair was long and wild down her back. She looked…pretty,and by the way Wells was eyeing her, I could tell he thought so too.
“Guys, this is Holiday,” I announced, swallowing down a weird flash of protectiveness and lifting a hand in greeting. “We’ve known each other since we were zygotes.”
“Hey there,” Wells said, suddenly friendly in a way that immediately raised my hackles even though I knew that was ridiculous. “Pull up a raft.”
No matter what I’d told Holiday about wanting her to come over, I was fully expecting this whole endeavor to be excruciatingly, cringingly awkward, but in fact, I was surprised by how easily she seemed to fit in with the Kendricks: chatting gamely with Jasper, flirting idly with Wells. Eliza had coaxed Meredith back outside at some point, and the two of them and Holiday knew a couple of girls in common—the New England Rich Kid Network strikes again, I thought with a smirk. I tried not to eavesdrop too closely as they talked, but all at once I heard the pitch of Eliza’svoice rise in excitement. “Hold on a second,” she said, gazing at Holiday with open admiration. “You’rethe girl from the Mandarin Oriental?”
Holiday ducked her face, bashful. “It would be unladylike of me to confirm or deny,” she said with a grin.
“Linden,” Eliza announced, looking utterly delighted, “your friend here is an absolute fucking After Hours fandom legend.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, shaking my head in realization and disbelief. After Hours was the cheesy boy band that Holiday had been so obsessed with when we were younger, the one whose two most eligible members were now raising a blind, three-legged rescue dog in cohabitational bliss. “You’re an After Hours fan?”
Eliza shrugged primly. “I contain multitudes,” she informedme.
I snorted. “Clearly.”
“Don’t be misogynist,” she fired back, hopping up in one smooth motion and crossing the patio in my direction. “First of all, I’ll have you know the Beatles were a boy band.”
“After Hours are hardly the Beatles.”
“Spoken like someone who’s not terribly familiar with either,” Holiday put in, and Eliza grinned.
“My dad got us backstage passes to the Past Midnight tour when I was in sixth grade,” she recalled, settling back in a lounge chair and crossing her delicate ankles. “I wroteI love Jamesall over myself with Sharpie and then it wouldn’t come off, so I had to go to school like that until it faded.”
“Rubbing alcohol,” Holiday said absently. “Takes it right off.”
“Oh,nowyou tell me.” Eliza grinned. “Where were you when Iwas playing dodgeball with two full DIYFuture Mrs. James Harpersleeves?”
“Seriously?” I laughed, trying to picture Eliza as an awkward preteen superfan and not quite getting there. She seemed like the kind of person who’d come out of the womb perfectly assured, who’d never had a bad hair day or a breakout or an unfortunate favorite outfit. And sure, of course there was a part of me that knew even then that it wasn’t true, that I was projecting my own hot-girl fantasy onto her, but looking across the patio at her luminous skin and sharp cheekbones—and, okay, the pale shadow of cleavage at the neckline of her shirt—it was hard to make myself stop.
“So you know Linden from when he was a little kid?” Wells asked Holiday now, beer bottle dangling from his fingers as he settled himself at the edge of the deep end of the pool. “Tell us something really fucking embarrassing about him.”
I cringed. There were plenty of stories for her to choose from, if she was inclined to take me down a peg or two—the time I’d peed my pants in the Government Center T station on the way to the circus, the six months I’d spent carrying a Captain America shield to school every day—but Holiday just laughed. “I think he’s unembarrassable,” she said, which was deeply untrue and both of us knew it. “He’s too cool.”
“Holiday’s being very generous to me right now,” I said, shooting her a grateful look across the patio. “What she’s not telling you is that I talk a pretty big game for a guy who lovingly kisses his After Hours poster every night before bed.”
That got a laugh and also redirected the conversation, just like I’d been pretty sure it was going to; never mind that it wasn’t anything real. “I knew it,” Jasper joked, cueing up the band’s latest album on his phone.
