15
I woke up early the next morning—or, more accurately, I didn’t actually sleep at all, tossing and turning and sweating through my sheets for most of the night. I thought about Eliza. I thought about Greg. I thought about Greer, who I’d more or less made myself forget for the better part of the last six months. We hadn’t talked all summer—or, more accurately, we hadn’t talked since that night in the library a few days after the accident last spring. I winced at the memory: the precarious, off-balance sensation of hobbling around Bartley’s still-snowy campus with a cast and crutches, the makeup-covered cuts just visible on Greer’s sharp cheekbone. “Can I trust you?” she’d asked, and her eyes were so serious. It wasn’t until later that I realized what she’d meant.
A little after three a.m. I reached over and picked my phone up off the dresser, opening Instagram and typing in the first few letters of her handle. She didn’t post much—Greer was too cool for that, or at the very least I knew she wanted people to think she was—but there was a shot from the Fourth of July of her standingon a wide, green swath of lawn, drawing a long line of light behind her with a sparkler.Glow up, as the kids say,the caption read.
I flopped back against the pillows, trying to tell myself I didn’t feel anything for her anymore and knowing that was mostly bullshit. We’d gotten together back in the fall of my junior year: At Bartley I had a job shelving books at the library three nights a week after dinner, which wasn’tquiteas overtly embarrassing as washing dishes in the dining hall after meals, but still I kept my head down while I was there, slinking through the stacks while I ran my fingers along the spines of novels and biographies, making sure everything was in order. I’d seen Greer around campus sometimes—getting coffee at the kiosk with the other seniors in her cohort, lying on a quilt out on the green—but I didn’t think I’d ever registered for her one way or the other until one night a few days before Halloween when I looked up from the transcendentalist poets and there she was, leaning against the shelves with her arms and ankles crossed.
“Tell me this, Linden,” she said, gazing at me from behind a pair of round tortoiseshell glasses; she was wearing flannel pants and Bean boots, her soft-looking hair catching the overhead light. “How long is it going to take for you to pull your head out of your ass and ask me to hang out?”
We were inseparable after that.
Until we weren’t.
Now I dropped my phone back onto the dresser with more force than I meant to, a clatter that had me wincing and listening for movement in the house. Thinking about Greer made me feelsick and overserved in a way that I usually associated with drinking too much or eating an entire bag of Doritos in one sitting. I wanted to get up and run—and I would have, if not for the pain in my busted ankle. Instead I threw back the covers and padded downstairs as quietly as I could. Birdie had made a plum cake with dinner, and I was headed for the kitchen to see if there was any left when a quiet, knowing voice shattered the silence: “Couldn’t sleep?”
I sucked in a breath, my gaze skittering toward the darkened dining room. It was a polished, formal space, and the Kendricks hardly ever used it—they ate out on the patio, or otherwise clustered around the island in the kitchen, everyone talking at once—but Mrs. Kendrick was sitting in her bathrobe at the far end of the long oak table, a half-full wineglass in front of her and the nearly empty bottle at her side. I was startled, though I probably shouldn’t have been: A thing I was starting to realize was that even in the middle of the night, August House was never entirely still. There was always someone awake, someone restless. Someone watching or listening in.
“Um, yeah,” I said—slightly befuddled, not wanting to let her know she’d rattled me. I stepped closer to where she was sitting, “Or—no, rather. Couldn’t sleep.”
“Me neither.” She held up her wineglass in a girlish little toast. “Did you kids have fun tonight?”
“We did,” I said, aiming for politeness but also not particularly wanting to settle in for an impromptu heart-to-heart. There was something slightly creepy about finding her here by herself in the dark like this, without so much as an up-in-arms Facebook groupor a book of Sudoku puzzles to keep her occupied. It felt almost like she’d been waiting for me, though I knew that was impossible. “Thank you again for having me.”
“Oh, Linden, don’t be ridiculous.” She waved a hand to bat away the gratitude, lifting one thin eyebrow. “You and my daughter seem to be getting along.”
I almost choked on my own tongue. “I…yeah,” I said; then, realizing that didn’t sound particularly gentlemanly: “I mean, I like her very much. I think you’d have to ask her if she feels the same.”
Mrs. Kendrick liked that: “Oh, that’s clever,” she replied softly, lips quirking. There was a detached, almost floaty quality to her voice, like she was here in the room with me but also not all the way. She was a little drunk—more than a little—but I didn’t think that was it, entirely. I remembered what Eliza had said when I’d first gotten here, about needing to count her mom’s Xanax; it hadn’t fit with the image I had in my head of tennis-playing, gala-attending Mrs. Kendrick, and I’d dismissed it as hyperbole. But now suddenly I wasn’t so sure. “How would you say she’s doing?”
“Eliza?” I asked—surprised by the question, wondering why she wanted to know. I thought uneasily of the story Eliza had told me earlier, about Wells and the staircase to the widow’s walk, then pushed it resolutely out of my mind. “She’s great.”
Mrs. Kendrick smiled to herself. “She is, isn’t she.” She took a sip of wine, the glass wobbling dangerously as she set it back down.
“Whoops,” I said, reaching out and steadying it with one hand just before it tipped.
Mrs. Kendrick eyed me across the table. “You don’t miss a trick, do you, Linden?” she asked, lifting it to her lips one more time.
“I…guess not?” I said uncertainly, watching as she drained its ruby-colored contents. “Quick reflexes, I guess.”
“No, I don’t just mean that. You’re observant.” She lifted her chin. “I see you when you’re with my children. They’re chatterboxes, all three of them. It drove me up a wall, when they were young: all thattalking.All thosequestions.But not you. You’re quiet. You”—she gestured with the empty glass—“take it all in.”
“…Maybe,” I agreed slowly, not sure what she was driving at. “I think I’m mostly just trying not to say anything dumb.”
Mrs. Kendrick didn’t laugh. “I used to be the same way,” she said, reaching for the wine bottle and pouring herself a refill. “Noticing everything. But it’s not always such a good trait, in a person. As you get older, you’ll find sometimes it’s better not to notice some things at all.”
My pulse sped up at that, a feeling like someone had reached inside my chest and started pumping my heart like a stress ball. Was that a warning? Did she know somehow that Holiday and I were trying to figure out what had happened the night of the party?
More to the point: Didsheknow how Greg had wound up in the pool?
All at once I was struck by the urge to get out of this room—and this conversation—as quickly as possible. “That’s…good advice,” I said, trying to put some distance between us in a way that wasn’t too painfully obvious. “I should probably try to get some rest. Have a good night, Mrs. Kendrick.”
Birdie’s plum cake forgotten, I headed back up to the third floor at a pace that could only be called a scamper, shutting the door firmly behind me and flicking the tiny antique lock. I spent the dregs of the night sitting upright in bed and staring darkly at the botanical prints on the wall, the outlines of the plants just barely visible in the moonlight seeping in through the window, and the moment the sun finally dripped up over the horizon, I was out of bed and pulling a pair of shorts out of the creaking chest of drawers. I crept back down the stairs as quietly as I could, not wanting Mr. Kendrick to conscript me for an early-morning polar plunge, then hopped on one of the bikes that was leaning against the porch and pedaled furiously down the drive. It was warmer than I had bargained for, and I was covered in sweat by the time I got to Holiday’s house, wiping my forehead with the back of my arm as I climbed the steps to the porch.
“Um,” she said, eyes widening when she answered the door.“Hi.”She was still wearing her pajamas, a pair of ratty sweatpants and a Greenleaf T-shirt. It occurred to me, though I was trying very hard not to notice, that she wasn’t wearing a bra. “You’re up early.”
I’d told myself I was just stopping by to say hi, maybe ask if she wanted to go get an iced coffee, but before I knew it, I was blurting out everything that had happened since the last time we’d talked in one long, punctuationless sentence: Greg and the drugs andsome total sketchballs from Southie,Mrs. Kendrick at the dining room table, and somebody going through my stuff. “I fucked up,” I admitted when I was finished, my chest heaving a little with exertion. “I was wrong.”
Holiday gazed at me for a long moment with an expression I didn’t entirely recognize. Then she sighed. “Okay,” she said, holding one hand up. “I need a minute.”
