3
“You guys up for ice cream?” Mrs. Kendrick asked as we headed out into the muggy parking lot of the restaurant. I felt myself perk up like a little kid at the offer—the shop was only a few doors down, and I could smell the cold vanilla sugar from here—but Jasper shook his head.
“We’re going to go meet up with some people on the beach,” he replied, which was news to me. “We’ll see you guys at home.”
We stopped back at August House to drop the car, then trouped out through the yard and down the sand about half a mile or so to where a group was already gathered around the orange glow of a bonfire. It was a pretty night, the setting sun streaking the sky in purple and pink and navy. The brackish smell of the ocean mixed with the sharp, woodsy scent of the smoke.
“There they are!” Doc called when he saw us. He’d swapped his neon bathing suit out for a hoodie, though it was still pretty warm even at nine o’clock. “Was wondering if you all were going to show up or what.”
“Obviously,” Eliza said, popping up on her toes to give hima hug. I rubbed idly at the back of my neck, swallowing down a sudden flicker of jealousy. “We like to make an entrance, is all.”
“He’s just hoping we brought more booze,” Jasper said, dropping a scratchy-looking wool blanket onto the sand.
“I mean,” Doc said with a lopsided grin, “that too.”
We settled in. Wells unzipped the nylon cooler he’d carried down from the house, passing out beers like a tall, skinny Santa Claus. Jasper introduced me to a bunch of his Vineyard friends. The whole thing was a little too sprawling and relaxed to qualify as an actual party: people coming and going, groups spreading out and breaking up before wandering back together again. We ran into a couple of underclassmen from Bartley whose parents had a place in Chilmark; a girl Meredith and Eliza knew from their yoga studio stopped by with a bottle of fancy tequila. The fire spat and crackled, glowing sparks flying up into the air.
“You’re quiet,” Eliza observed, strolling up beside me with a beer bottle dangling from her fingertips, clinking the neck of it softly against mine.
I shook my head. “Just taking it all in.”
“You are, aren’t you?” She raised her eyebrows. “Better watch what I say.”
“Why,” I asked with a grin, “were you planning on confessing to something?”
“Maybe.” Eliza winked.
Maybe.She was a beautiful girl, Eliza. I was just trying to work up the stones to ask if she wanted to go for a walk when I heard a familiar voice behind me: “Michael?” it called, and I whirled right the fuck around. Nobody but my mom called me by myfirst name—nobody, that is, except one person, and there she was, coming out of the darkness like an apparition from an entirely different world.
“Holiday,” I said, feeling deeply and immediately like I’d been caught doing something I wasn’t supposed to be doing. My mom had worked for Holiday’s parents since we were both little kids, cooking their meals and cleaning their bathrooms and accepting their deliveries at their enormous Victorian house in Cambridge. My first memory was of Holiday accidentally slamming my fingers in the door of their linen closet, both of us screaming bloody murder. The ring finger of my right hand was still kind of weird and crooked at the tip. “Um, hey.”
“Hey yourself.” She wrapped me in a tight, unselfconscious hug that smelled like farmer’s market bar soap and a little bit like weed. “What are you doing here?” she asked, letting me go and smiling over my shoulder at the group.
“Just, uh, staying with some friends from school,” I said, motioning vaguely behind me at Eliza and Jasper and Meredith, who were looking at us curiously. Holiday barely had time to offer them a friendly little wave before I ushered her down the beach, lest she expect me to do anything insane like introduce her. “You?”
“My folks have a place here,” she explained. The breeze was blowing her dark, curly hair all around, and she gathered it up in one hand for a moment, like she was trying to see me better, before letting it go again. “I’m surprised your mom didn’t mention it, actually.”
My momhadmentioned it, I remembered suddenly: “Youshould text Holiday,” she’d said when I told her I was coming to stay with the Kendricks; then, when I hadn’t answered: “Michael? Are you listening to me?” I’d grunted a noise of acknowledgment and then immediately forgotten, the way you don’t bother to store information that has no bearing on your actual life.
“Yeah,” I said now. “I’m surprised she didn’t too.”
Holiday nodded. She looked older, which I guessed made sense since I hadn’t seen her at all in the three years since I’d started at Bartley. She was also a full click prettier than I remembered, but it made me feel weird and honestly kind of perverted to notice that, like trying to get a secret look at your cousin in her underwear at your grandparents’ house over Thanksgiving break. Not that Holiday was walking along the beach in her underwear. She wasn’t even wearing a bathing suit. She was dressed in a loose-fitting black overalls–type situation made out of linen or something—the kind of getup our art teacher, Ms. Singh, would have worn to teach us about Dadaism in an overly enthusiastic tone of voice. Her lipstick was very, very red.
Neither one of us said anything for another moment, a pause that went on just slightly too long not to be weird. I racked my brain for a non-douchey way to bail out. It wasn’t that I wasn’t glad to see her, exactly—she’d been my best friend, until puberty—but I’d spent the last three years at Bartley doing everything humanly possible to separate my home life from my school life, and a thing I remembered very clearly about Holiday was that back when we were kids, she’d been the kind of person you could always rely on to say the quiet part out loud. I could just imagine it now:Hi, I’mHoliday Proctor! Michael’s mom washes my unmentionables for a living.I’d worked too hard to fit in with these people. I’d worked too hard, period, to risk her messing it up.
“Well, it was cool to run into you.” I reached out to touch her arm in a friendly way, only I kind of accidentally punched her instead, like we were on the same high school football team in 1950. Fuck, I needed to get out of this conversation. “I guess I’ll see you around,” I said at the same time that Holiday said, “We should get coffee and catch up for real.”
“Oh!” I froze. “Um, yeah, totally.”
“I mean, only if you want to,” she said, looking at me a little strangely. “No pressure, et cetera.”
“No, no, that sounds great,” I lied. In fact, it did not sound great—it sounded awkward and boring and like a waste of an hour I could otherwise be spending at the beach or in the pool or taking a particularly luxurious bathroom break—but then I thought about what my mom would say if she found out I’d blown Holiday off after all this time, and found myself nodding like a dashboard bobblehead doll on a particularly bumpy stretch of road. “Day after tomorrow, maybe?” I hoped the whole thing might slip her mind by then, though it seemed unlikely. Holiday had always been like an elephant that way: she never forgot.
“Sure thing.” She smiled, toothy and sincere. “Let’s do it.”
“Who was that?” Jasper asked when I rejoined the group. They were sprawled in various states of repose on the blanket, passing around a flask that Wells had pulled out of his hoodie pocket.
I shook my head. “Just somebody I know from home.”
