“Topher might have followed Greg back to August House after the party,” I hypothesized. “Jasper said something about catching Greg and Meredith in the outdoor shower one night a few weeks ago; he was making a big stink about having to burn the whole thing down and have Dean rebuild it. It’s possible Greg headed back over there for a hookup—”
“And got a lot more than a hand job for his trouble?”
I snorted, reaching for my iced coffee and stretching out in the rickety patio chair. “Not to put too fine a point on it, but yes.” I frowned. “What do we think about Mrs. Kendrick?”
Holiday shrugged. “I mean, we should definitely keep it in mind, but honestly, it sounds like standard late-night wine-mom talk. You said Jasper mentioned his parents were unhappy, right?” She grinned wickedly. “The way things are going with those people, you should probably be thankful she didn’t ask you to wait a minute while she slipped into something a little more comfortable.”
“Oh my god, fuck you,” I said, but I was laughing. It felt good to be in her company again—coming up with theories, joking around. I’d enjoyed myself the last couple of days, tooling around with Jasper and Eliza. But the truth was I’d missed Holiday too. “So what’s our play here?” I asked, tipping the chair back on two legs.
“Listen to you, Bold Assumptions!” Holiday cocked an eyebrow. “What exactly do you think I’ve been doing for the last three days, just sitting around coming up with variousinvestigative plans on the off chance you happened to pull your head out of your own ass before you left town?”
“I mean,” I said sheepishly, “yes, kind of.”
Holiday’s eyes narrowed. “You’re very annoying, do you know that? But you’re also notentirelywrong.” She sighed. “I think we should stake out the hospital,” she told me. “See if Topher Leal—or anybody else—shows up.”
“At thehospital?” I shook my head. “What’s he going to be doing, waiting to see if Greg jumps out of bed like Lazarus and does the Wobble out the front door? It’s not like he can just stroll on in there and introduce himself, camp out by the vending machines next to Meredith.”
“Aw, I think they’d have a lot in common if they just got to know each other a little,” Holiday deadpanned, then grew serious. “Chances are, Topher can’t show his face back in Boston until he gets the money. If I were him, I’d be sitting on that hospital like a mother duck waiting for her eggs to hatch.”
We made a plan to meet up later that night. Eliza had taken the tiny, janky-looking ferry out to Chappaquiddick to see her friend, so I spent the day at the beach with Jasper and Doc, the three of us wave jumping and playing can jam and goofing around on paddleboards. Birdie brought lunch down in a giant basket, tomato-and-mozzarella sandwiches slathered with pesto made from basil she’d grown in a garden at the side of the house. “I made one for your brother,” she said to Jasper, then—I thought—flicking her gaze ever so quickly to me. “Is he not here with you all?”
Doc shook his head. Wells seemed to be keeping his distance the last few days, drifting in and out of the house at odd hours:“He’s probably got some secret girlfriend he doesn’t want any of us to know about,” Jasper hypothesized, and I shoved a fistful of chips into my mouth.
Holiday picked me up just as the sun was setting. “I brought snacks,” she announced, nodding at a tote bag on the crowded floor of the passenger side, “but no drinks because I didn’t want us to have to pee in a coffee cup halfway through.”
“Very forward-thinking of you,” I said.
“Not my first stakeout,” she said with a shrug.
The hospital was on the other side of the island, twenty minutes from August House. I was accustomed to Boston hospitals, sprawling medical campuses crammed with tall, interconnected buildings that towered against the skyline, but this was a smallish, squat structure that looked like it belonged in a suburban office park. “I think they mostly treat like, tourists with heatstroke,” Holiday explained as we pulled into the parking lot. Life-threatening injuries were usually helicoptered back to the mainland.
“So Greg’s condition can’t be too bad, then,” I pointed out hopefully.
“Maybe,” Holiday agreed, pulling into a spot at the far end of the lot and killing the engine. “Or they don’t think more sophisticated treatment would help enough to be worth it.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything,unbuckling my seat belt and settling in. The two of us were quiet for a while, watching the emergency room doors whoosh open and shut and keeping track of the cars coming and going in the mostly empty lot. It reminded me of when we were little kids, the two of us lying on our stomachs side by side on the fancy rug in her parents’ living room, working on opposite pages of a coloring book. We chatted on and off now, idle: a music festival she’d been to earlier in the summer, a comedian both of us liked. Holiday’s school, which started up again in two weeks. “What about next year?” I asked. We were both about to be seniors, though we hadn’t talked much about it. “What happens then?”
Holiday sighed. “That’s a great question.” She leaned back against the driver’s side window, pulling one leg up onto the seat and resting her chin on her knee. She was wearing leggings and a hoodie from some performing arts camp up in Maine, her hair in a giant knot on top of her head. “I don’t know. College, conceivably. Grad school. But there’s also a part of me that wants to say fuck it and move out to Lenox to live in a commune with a bunch of other ladies and knit socks in Fair Isle patterns all day.”
I grinned—not because I couldn’t picture it but because I kind of could, right down to the loaves of sourdough bread cooling on their butcher-block counters and the low drone of NPR on the radio. “Can I ask you something personal?” I blurted. “Are you…” I trailed off, immediately rethinking the sagacity of this line of questioning and filled with searing regret, but Holiday burst out laughing.
“A lesbian?” she prodded, lifting one thick eyebrow. “No,Michael. Despite my admittedly impressive ability to quote Mary Oliver and love of an ethically made garment, I regret to inform you I am not a lesbian.”
My entire body prickled hot and red, though it’s not like that wasn’t what I’d been trying to ask her. “It would be fine if you were, obviously!” I backpedaled.
Holiday snorted. “Thank you for your blessing.”
“No no,” I said quickly, “I didn’t mean it like that, I just—”
Holiday held up a hand to save me from myself, though to my relief, she looked more amused than offended. “What about you?” she asked.
“Oh, I’m not a lesbian either.”
She pressed her lips together, but I saw her smile anyway. “What are you going to do about next year, smartass?” she amended. “Actually, forget next year. What are you going to do about Bartley?”
I shrugged, leaning my head back against the seat. I didn’t particularly want to talk about it, though I supposed that at this particular moment I didn’t really have a leg to stand on when it came to invasive questions. “I have no idea,” I confessed. “Show up at practice and hope nobody notices I suck, I guess. Go back to Boston if I lose my scholarship.”
“You really think they’ll pull it if you’re injured?”
