“Apparently, he liked her way before anything happened between her and Greg,” I explained. “Which, not for nothing, but how fucked up is that? I mean, one summer the guy is your best friend for life, and by the next his dad put your dad in jail and he’s hooking up with your crush just to mess with you?”
Holiday shrugged, not quite looking at me. “I mean,” she said quietly, “friendships change.”
I winced at that—I couldn’t help it. “Yeah,” I admitted, knowing all at once that we weren’t talking about Jasper and Greg anymore. “I guess you’re right.” The more I’d thought about it the past few days, the shittier I’d felt about how things had gone between Holiday and me way back when: It wasn’t like I’d ever consciously decided to ditch her, though looking back, I was pretty sure that was how it had seemed from the outside. Even back in middle school, I knew in theory that Holiday’s commitment to being exactly who she was, no matter the context—her habit of singing show tunes on the Red Line, or the time she spent my entire twelfth birthday party speaking in a nonspecific Balkan accent and convincing half the kids in my class she was an exchange student from Montenegro—was admirable, but it was also…a lot. I wasn’t exactly sure when I’d started to notice, or when it had become a thing that bothered me, but either way, by the time we turned thirteen, I’d stopped bringing her around my friends from school.
The last time we really hung out was the summer after eighth grade; my mom had dropped me off in Cambridge to meet Holiday for lunch, one of the first times our parents had agreed to turn us loose in the city without them. I’d been hoping for burgers, but instead we’d gone to a sushi place that Holiday liked, where she’d greeted the waitress in confident Japanese and ordered for the both of us without asking. It wasn’t until the food came out that I realized there were no forks or knives on the table.
I only hesitated for a second, but Holiday was onto me right away. “Do you not know how to use chopsticks?” she asked, pulling her set from their red paper sleeve and breaking them apart. She was wearing a dress that was printed with bright yellow moonsand stars and looked like she’d dug it out of Ms. Frizzle’s closet. Something about it had annoyed me the second I saw her waiting outside the restaurant, though I couldn’t explain exactly what—the nerve of it, maybe, her confidence that either she wasn’t going to get made fun of or that it would be fine if she did.
“No, I do,” I lied. “I’m just like, slow at it.”
Holiday wasn’t buying. “I can show you,” she offered gently. “It’s really not that hard.”
“It’s fine,” I said, yanking the chopsticks apart like a wishbone at Thanksgiving with enough force that they snapped unevenly, one of them significantly longer than the other. “I got it.”
“Michael—”
“What?”I sat back in the booth and dropped them on the table, my whole body suddenly itchy and hot. “I’m not even that hungry.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said reasonably. “I’m paying, anyway. My mom gave me her credit card to take you out.”
And that—that did it. All at once I was sliding out of the booth and stalking out of the restaurant, pretending I couldn’t hear Holiday calling my name. I’d gotten myself a burger and fries at a place around the corner—I could pay for my own lunch, thanks—and eaten them on a bench inside the Harvard Square T stop while a drunk guy yelled obscenities across the platform. Then I got on the train and went home, where my mom, who’d been planning to pick me up at Holiday’s house at five o’clock, looked at me with great suspicion. “Everything okay?” she asked with a frown.
“Yep,” I’d reported shortly, then went into my room and playedMinecraftfor the rest of the afternoon.
Holiday and I patched things up, ostensibly, and we’d seen each other a couple of times before I left for my first year at Bartley in September; still, things were never quite the same between us after that. It was like we’d outgrown each other, or something. It was like everything that had always been different about us was suddenly too big to ignore.
At least, that was what I’d told myself. If there was anything I’d learned in the years since Holiday and I had been inseparable, it was that there were a lot of different versions of the truth.
Now I looked at her across the wobbly fish-shack table, pulling my mind—and hers, I hoped—back to the present. “So if it wasn’t Meredith,” I said, “and it wasn’t Aidy—who, then? We’re back to square one?”
Holiday seemed to consider that for a moment. “Not necessarily,” she countered.
I raised my eyebrows, immediately recognizing her expression as the one she got when there was something on her mind she wasn’t telling me. “Meaning what, exactly?”
She shrugged. “Meaning I’m hungry” was all she said, smiling as Aidy dropped a basket of popcorn shrimp on the table between us. “Let’s eat lunch.”
I got up before dawn the next morning, lacing up my sneakers and taking off down the winding, tree-lined road that snaked away from August House. The birds called out their wary-soundingwarnings in the branches high above my head. Last spring before the accident, I’d been doing seven miles every morning with no problem, all the way into town and back before breakfast and my first class of the day. Now, though, I barely made it a mile before I had to quit, the pain shrieking up my ankle with enough heat to power the entire Massachusetts Steamship Authority. I swore under my breath, useless rage at my own body coursing through me as I looked around frantically for a non-awkward place to sit down before finally giving up and plopping myself at the shoulder like a smashed-up slab of roadkill. I was drenched in sweat, my heart thumping with exertion; my ankle was swollen and squealing and hot. “Fuck,” I muttered, something that felt hideously, dangerously, like tears rising at the back of my throat and sinuses.“Fuck.”
I don’t know how long I’d been sitting there, trying to figure out if I could even make it back to August House at a hobble or if I was going to have to endure the mortifying ordeal of calling Jasper to come get me, when I heard quick footsteps echoing closer down the pavement, the fleet, familiar sound of rubber meeting road. I lifted my head just as Doc slowed to a stop a few feet away.
“Hey, Linden,” he said cautiously, pulling out an earbud. He was wearing running shorts and sunglasses, a hat from Yale Med School turned backward on his head. “You okay?”
I nodded maniacally, jumping to my feet so fast and enthusiastically it was a miracle I didn’t take out my other ankle in the process. “Oh yeah,” I assured him, “I’m totally fine.” The last thing I wanted was for Doc of all people to be catching me like this, weak and pathetic and out of ideas. It was…fucking emasculating, tobe honest, though already I could see Holiday rolling her eyes at the thought. “You can go.”
“Nah, it’s fine. I was about to cool down anyway,” Doc said, pulling out the other earbud and dropping the pair of them into the pocket of his shorts. “I’ll walk back with you.”
Well, shit. What the fuck was I going to do? If I’d had my way, I would have stayed on the side of the road for the rest of the day, waiting for some native Vineyard wildlife to come along and make me into their dinner, but I wasn’t about to let Doc see me being a weenie for a second longer than absolutely necessary. I brushed my palms off on the back of my shorts, ignoring the cacophony of pain singing its way up my shin and hoping I was projecting a robust picture of health and hardiness. “Cool,” I said loudly. “Let’sgo.”
At first neither one of us said much: it was taking the better part of my concentration just to stay upright without groaning, and Doc seemed happy enough to listen to the birds and the far-off crash of the ocean as we walked. Just as August House came into view in the distance, though, the morning sun rising above the roofline, he looked at me sidelong. “So,” he said, “you and Eliza seem to be pretty chill.”
Right away I felt my hackles go up. “I guess,” I said, more roughly than I meant to. “Is that a problem?”
Doc shook his head, laughing a little. “Not at all,” he said easily, holding his hands up. “She’s a friend of mine, that’s all. I like to look out for her.”
I nodded slowly—remembering the shame of slinking off the field once Doc’s team had finished with us in the championshipslast fall, wincing at the hot surge of pain in my ankle every time I gave it any weight. “I don’t know, man,” I said, knowing full well I was being an asshole and not entirely able to help it. “She seems like the kind of girl who can look out for herself.”
“Yup,” Doc agreed. “I’m sure she does.”
