2
Jasper’s parents took us all into town for dinner that night. “Last one into the car is buying lobsters!” Mr. Kendrick called, putting one foot up on a kitchen chair and bending to tie the laces on his boat shoes. I liked the Kendricks: They had a matched-set quality to them that made me think of the lovebirds our downstairs neighbor, Mrs. Le, kept in a cage in her dining room. They even sort of looked alike, tall and thin with the kind of casual tans you get from morning tennis and the occasional afternoon drive with the top down. Both of them looked extremely hale.
We were tromping out to the cars when Mrs. Kendrick put a hand on my arm, pulling me back into the tidy mudroom away from the others. “Linden, honey,” she said, “I just wanted to tell you how glad we are that you could come stay. And to thank you for being such a good friend to Jasper.”
“Oh yeah, of course,” I said quickly. “He’s a good friend to metoo.”
Mrs. Kendrick nodded. “He went through a lot this year,” shecontinued. “I mean, we all did, obviously, but—” She broke off, letting go and waving her hand like she was batting something away. “Anyway. I’m being maudlin. We’re happy you’re here.” She patted my shoulder. “Let’s go eat fried fish.”
“Okay,” I said, a little confused. I knew there’d been some drama at the Kendricks’ last year—Jasper’s dad had gotten sued, I was pretty sure, though I wasn’t sure why or for what and hadn’t wanted to ask too much about it, even though obviously I wondered. But as a general rule, I tried not to ask my friends from Bartley too many questions, in the hope that they would take the hint and return the favor. “Yeah. Thanks for having me.”
Dinner was at a seafood shack called Red’s that Mrs. Kendrick had been going to since she was a little kid—the kind of dive that rich people on vacation can’t get enough of, with colorful Christmas lights hung on the wall behind the bar and the smell of cornmeal batter thick in the air. They didn’t take reservations, so we sat on a bench outside for half an hour while Wells napped with his head back against the faded red shingles and Jasper and Eliza complained about the wait. Meredith was texting furiously, her red hair like a theater curtain around her face. The sight of her thumbs flying over the screen reminded me I’d forgotten to let my mom know I wasn’t dead at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, and I was pulling my own phone out of my pocket when Eliza looked at me suddenly, like she’d just remembered I was there. “So, Linden,” she said, “you’re from Boston?”
I nodded, knowing she’d assume Beacon Hill or Comm Ave, or maybe someplace like Brookline or Arlington that wasn’t actually Boston at all. “Born and raised,” I admitted.
“Are you obsessed with Tom Brady?”
“Fuck Tom Brady,” I said without thinking, then whipped around to look guiltily at Mr. and Mrs. Kendrick. “Um. I mean—”
But Mrs. Kendrick only smiled. “Fuck Tom Brady,” she echoed primly, and everybody burst out laughing; after a moment, I started laughing too.
They were easy to be around, the Kendricks. Don’t get me wrong, my own mom was great—it’s not like I was Harry Potter, living alone under a staircase and waiting for Bartley’s answer to the Weasleys to come rescue me—but I’d always kind of wanted to be part of a big family, especially one as golden and unencumbered as this. It was easy to imagine the five of them rolling matching luggage across the tarmac en route to a family vacation in Mallorca or sitting around the tree drinking fancy champagne on Christmas morning. Gliding sleekly through life like a fleet of tidy sailboats, no drag on any of them at all.
“So what’s the prognosis, Linden?” Mr. Kendrick asked once we’d finally been seated and ordered our dinners. It was loud in here, the dull roar of voices and laughter and clanking beer bottles echoing off the wooden-plank walls and sharply pitched ceiling. The Doobie Brothers crooned over the speakers behind the bar. “Are we going to see you tearing it up out there in the fall?”
“Dad,” Jasper said, shaking his head. “He doesn’t want to talk about—”
“No, it’s okay.” I nodded. Six months ago I’d been hooking up with a senior from Bartley named Greer, who had a crooked incisor tooth and the softest hair I’d ever felt on a human person. One Friday night in March we’d driven into town to see a movieat the second-run theater, and on the way back a deer jumped into the road. Greer swerved and hit a tree instead, and I came to in the passenger seat a couple minutes later with a motherfucker of a concussion and a right ankle smashed to what could politely be called smithereens.
At least, that was what we’d told everyone had happened.
“Prognosis is good,” I said now, smiling gamely: another lie. The prognosis was middling at best, but that wasn’t the kind of thing that people want to hear when they ask you about a sports injury, and it definitely wasn’t something I wanted to announce. I hadn’t talked to anybody about it—not even Jasper knew—but I was at Bartley on a full scholarship, the terms of which dictated that I maintain a 3.5 grade point average and play two-season lacrosse every fall and spring. To put it more bluntly: no lacrosse, no scholarship. Not to mention the glaring fact that if I had any hope of being scouted by colleges, I needed to be back on the field in September, just a few weeks away, not hobbling through my workouts and wincing in agony at every drill. Thinking about it was the kind of thing that had me waking up in the middle of the night, sweating through my sheets, so mostly I tried not to think about it at all.
“Well,” Mr. Kendrick said now, “I’m glad to hear it. God knows we need you if we’re going to finally beat Andover this year.”
“I’m working on it,” I promised cheerfully. Mr. Kendrick grinned.
Our food came just then, a mountain of shrimp and scallops and oysters, whole lobsters with little ramekins of butter fordunking and plastic bibs to wear over your shirt. I went to work on a paper boat of fish and chips while Jasper told a long and convoluted story about a kid we knew from school who’d sunk his entire trust fund into a hydroponic weed operation, and I tried not to notice the same thing I’d noticed about a lot of my friends from school, which was that they could be total douchebags to service staff. Meredith in particular was doing that thing people do when they’ve never had a job waiting tables, asking for one thing at a time so the waitress had to make a million separate trips to get them for her: first tartar sauce, then lemons, then a stack of extra napkins. It reminded me of that picture book my mom used to read to me, about the mouse who gets a cookie and then wants a glass of milk.
“Could I get some more seltzer?” she asked now, rattling the ice in her mostly full cup. Then, once she had it: “Whoops. A slice of lime for it too?”
“Sure,” the waitress said, smiling tightly. She was about our age, with curly blond hair pulled back into a complicated, tricky-looking braid. Her uniform tank top was made to look like a jersey, withRed’sscrawled in looping script across the back. “Anything else?”
Meredith smiled an airy smile. “That’s it for now,” she said, “but I’m sure I’ll think of something.”
“I’m sure you will,” the waitress agreed. “Just shout.”
Once she was gone, Jasper shot Meredith a look across the table. “Was that really necessary?” he asked. He looked personally affronted, though I suspected it had significantly less to do withthe demands themselves than with how cute the waitress was. Jasper had always liked blondes.
“What?” Meredith looked at him blankly, then glanced down at her French fries and frowned, waving her hand to get the waitress’s attention one more time. “Sorry!” she called out, though she sounded the opposite of remorseful; for the first time, it occurred to me that she might be doing this—whatever it was she was doing—on purpose, and not just because she was an oblivious princess. “Ketchup!”
This time, though, the waitress shook her head. “Sorry,” she echoed, somehow managing to mimic Meredith’s tone of voice exactly. “We’re all out.”
Meredith looked at her dubiously. “All out ofketchup?” she asked.
The waitress shrugged. “Wouldn’t you know it,” she said, “somebody else just got the last bottle.”
I blinked at the waitress, quietly impressed. I’d worked in restaurants every summer before this one—you can’t wait tables in a fiberglass boot—and I knew that feeling intimately, the deep and abiding urge to tell another person to go fuck themselves. I’d never actually had the balls to do it, and technically, this girl wasn’t doing it either; still, she was a hell of a lot closer than I’d ever been. There was no way whatever was happening between them wasn’t at least a little bit personal. “Dude,” I muttered to Jasper, “why do I get the feeling this conversation isn’t actually about condiments?”
Jasper rolled his eyes, then turned and smiled crookedly at the waitress. “Don’t ask.”
“Here,” Eliza said once the waitress was gone, then turned tothe table behind ours, touching a stocky retiree gently on his sloping shoulder. “Sorry,” she said sweetly. “Would you mind if we borrowed your ketchup?”
The man looked surprised for a moment, then smiled at her, his jowly face openly appreciative. “Honey,” he said, handing over the bright red squeeze bottle, “you can have whatever you like.”
