Eliza laughed. “In your dreams, maybe,” she said, then slipped off the raft and boosted herself up out of the pool.
“Dude, you should totally stay,” Jasper said when I mentioned it to him out on the porch after dinner later that night. He and Aidy were sitting side by side on the swing while I stretched out cross-legged at the top of the steps with my back against one of the support beams. The night was cool, the hoot of an owl audible from high up in the trees; I hadn’t gotten a single mosquito bite since I’d been here, like possibly there was some kind of invisible rich-person net that kept them all away.
“I’m thinking about it,” I admitted. Something about thisplace reminded me of the poppy field inThe Wizard of Oz,like if I wasn’t careful, I might look up one day and realize that years had passed and I’d forgotten to do something extremely important. Still, I could feel the urge to stay tugging languidly at my limbs. “You think it’ll be cool with your mom and dad?”
“I can assure you, they absolutely will not care,” Jasper said with confidence. “Meredith has been here all summer, remember? And they like having a lot of people in the house. It helps them forget that they don’t actually like each other that much.”
I looked at him with curious surprise, not entirely sure what to say to that. Mr. and Mrs. Kendrick had seemed pretty solid to me, but what the hell did I know? They weren’t my parents. The truth was, I barely knew them. Sometimes it felt like Jasper’s entire family kept shape-shifting in front of my eyes, like I couldn’t tell what was real and what was fake.
Only one way to find out,reminded a voice in my head that sounded suspiciously like Holiday’s; I ignored it as studiously as possible, reminding myself to get a grip. So whatever, it had been fun to randomly run around with an old friend for a couple of days on vacation. But it wasn’t like we were suddenly going to go back to having sleepovers and eating tuna fish sandwiches on her front steps. We’d grown up. We’d moved on. We had better things to do.
“Okay then,” I said. “I’ll stay.”
“There you go,” Aidy said, lacing her fingers through Jasper’s like she was worried he was going to escape. The two of them had spent the last few days joined at the hip every second she wasn’t working at Red’s, gazing adoringly at each other and sharing thesame piece of chewing gum and generally nauseating the rest of us with their unceasing PDA. “Bro, I’m in love,” Jasper had announced to me that morning, watching Aidy make her way up the beach in a vintage-looking bathing suit and a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses. And yeah, I’d heard him say it before, about his SAT tutor and the bagel shop barista and the girls’ swim coach back at Bartley; still, something about the way he was looking at Aidy now made me wonder if maybe this time he was telling the truth.
Eliza came out through the front door just then, Whimsy at her heels. “Linden’s staying for the hurricane party,” Jasper announced with a grin.
Eliza hopped delicately up onto the deck rail, perching herself there like a rare island bird. “Of course he is,” she said lightly, like as far as she was concerned, we’d settled the matter hours ago. Come to think of it, we probably had.
The four of us sat on the porch for a long time—chatting idly as we listened to the wind rustle, breathing the end-of-summer air. One thing I liked about August House—a thing I liked about the Kendricks—was that nobody ever seemed to be worried about wasting time. Back at Bartley there was always something I was supposed to be doing: lacrosse practice or time in the weight room or my job at the library; homework to keep my grades up so I wouldn’t put my scholarship in danger. And all summer I’d been hustling to bank as much money as I possibly could. But here it was like nobody expected me to do anything. There was nothingtodo except…be.
I leaned my head back, only half listening as the conversationswirled around me: an article that Eliza had seen in theVineyard Gazetteabout a family of possums drunk on Cheez-Its caught having a bacchanal in someone’s pantry; Jasper’s thoughtful musings on which members of our class at Bartley were most likely to have experimented with bestiality. A story that Aidy knew about the Crying Swamp, a patch of woods turned cranberry bog in West Tisbury where people used to swear they could hear someone wailing all night long, their heartbroken cries echoing endlessly out into the darkness.
“Someone?” Eliza asked, lips quirking. “Like what, a ghost?”
“Or something,” Aidy said with an ominous shrug.
“Seriously?” Jasper looked over at her with some interest. “You don’t actually believe in that, do you?”
“Of course not,” Aidy said, a whisper of defensiveness audible in her voice. “But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.” She shrugged almost violently. “I’ve lived on this island my entire life, and I can tell you that more than enough extremely fucked-up stuff happens here without dragging the supernatural into it.”
Something about the way she said it caught my attention, like possibly she was talking in specifics and not generalities, but before I could figure out a low-key way to ask what she meant, Eliza and Jasper had already moved on, launching into yet another arcane Kendrick family parlor game. Tonight’s was called Pervy Congressman, the object of which, so far as I understood it, was to come up with mean campaign slogans for people Jasper and Eliza didn’t like, including their father’s attorney, members of several prominent Vineyard families, and Wells. “You realize you both sound completely stoned,” I told them, laughing in spite of myself.
“IwishI was stoned,” Aidy said longingly. Pervy Congressman hadn’t seemed to hold her attention, and I thought again of how uncomfortable she’d looked at Doc’s party. I wondered if she sometimes felt like an outsider with the Kendricks the same way I did, always half a beat behind, or if possibly she was still thinking about the Crying Swamp and whatever—or whoever—might be grieving deep inside it.
“I wish I was stoned too, actually,” Eliza admitted, then poked Jasper with one bare foot. “Go get your Black Box, will you?” I knew from our years of living together that the Black Box was where Jasper kept his weed, an old Utz Cheese Balls canister he’d named after the box where Winston Churchill kept his official correspondence during World War II. It always seemed to me like the first place anyone would look if the administration at Bartley ever went through with the room checks they were always threatening whenever somebody got caught with drugs in the dorms, but Jasper felt confident his Fourth Amendment rights would hold if it ever came to that, and I suspected he was probably correct.
But now he shook his head. “Cupboard is bare,” he reported sadly. “We went through the last of it the other night.”
“So?” Eliza asked with a shrug. “Go get more.”
Jasper snorted. “Oh, I’m sorry. Have I not been paying enough attention to your personal pharmacological needs while the cops are strolling around our backyard and your houseguest’s boyfriend is comatose in the hospital from partying too much?”
I glanced over at him, surprised—it was the first time he’d said anything to suggest what had happened with Greg was still on hismind—but Eliza looked patently unimpressed. “Oh, please,” she said, “the cops know exactly what happened, which is that Greg was a dirtbag who shouldn’t have been creeping around our house in the first place. They could give a shit about mypersonal pharmacological needs.”
I couldn’t help but wince at the callousness in her voice, even though I knew she was right: in fact, Eliza probably could have gotten stoned on whippets, crashed the big car into the Flying Horses Carousel, and still made it back to August House by dinner. I thought again of how the Kendricks seemed to play by an entirely different set of rules than the rest of us, swallowing down a sudden storm swell of resentment.
“One thing I’ll say about Holliman,” Jasper continued, seeming to concede his sister’s point, “is that if he was here, he could definitely hook us up.”
“There’shiscampaign slogan,” Eliza joked. “Excellent weed in every bowl.”
“And oxy,” Jasper pointed out. “And coke, actually. A man of many talents.”
“What about you, Aidy?” Eliza suggested, crossing her delicate ankles, and it took me a second to realize she was still on the hunt for something to take the edge off. “You must know somebody who could help us out.”
“Why, because I’m a townie?” Aidy’s lips twisted. “Classist.”
“Oh, right, because whoever Greg was working with was definitely the president of the Greenwich chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution.” Eliza shook her head, though I thoughtI saw her cheeks pink up a bit at the callout. “Aren’t you the one who said he was dealing for some total sketchballs from Southie?”
