We should have floored it. To this day, I don’t know why we didn’t except that, apparently, deep in our hearts the two of us were a couple of spineless order-followers, unbuckling our seat belts and climbing out onto the asphalt as obediently as a pair of well-trained dogs. Topher looked back and forth between us, wild-eyed.
“Who the fuck do you work for?” he demanded.
I opened my mouth, then shut it again, racking my brain for the answer that was least likely to wind up with Holiday and me splattered all over the pavement. All at once the utter recklessness of this entire outing crashed into me like a riptide: going on astakeout? Tailing adrugdealer? What the fuck had we thought wewere doing? If Topher really was the person who’d hurt Greg, there was no reason to assume he wouldn’t be just as willing to hurt us.
There was also no reason to assume, I realized as my heart turned to vapor inside my chest, that he didn’t have a gun.
“We’re nobody,” Holiday assured him quickly. “We were just—” She gestured back and forth between us, wiggling her eyebrows in what I assumed was some pathetic attempt to indicatefooling around in the car.“You know how it is.”
But Topher wasn’t buying. “Don’t fuck around with me,” he said. Up close his mannerisms were twitchy and erratic, his hands fluttering at his sides like restless birds. “I saw you back at the hospital.”
Shit. “The hospital?” I repeated, stalling. “Dude, we weren’t—”
“No, you’re right,” Holiday interrupted, elbowing me hard in the rib cage. “We were just there, visiting our friend Greg up in the ICU. He had an accident a few days ago.”
“And then you just happened to wind up parked outside my motel?” Topher shook his head. “How fucking dumb do you think I am?”
He had a point—as far as logical explanations went, it was pretty damn thin—but all at once I saw Holiday’s spine straighten the way it always did when she was preparing for a performance. “Dude,” she said to Topher, lowering her voice like she was leveling with him. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a place to be alone on this island?” She jerked her head in my direction. “He’s staying with friends who might as well be running a boardinghouse, I live with myextremelyoverprotective parents, and every single parking lot on the Vineyard is—your tax dollars atwork—lit up like Times freaking Square. And I mean sure, you’re less likely to be carjacked outside the Stop and Shop, but at what cost? We were just looking for a little privacy.” Then, as if perhaps she was worried he wouldn’t take her point: “You know, to—”
“Jesus Christ,enough.” Topher held a hand up to stop her, blowing a breath out through his nose as he weighed the plausibility of her story—or, possibly, just trying to figure out the fastest way to get her to shut up. “Of course you’re friends with Holliman,” he muttered finally, rolling his eyes like he should have guessed as much. “All of you Vineyard kids have the same look.”
It was ridiculous—okay, it was borderlinepathological—but the truth is that even in the moment there was a tiny part of me that felt pride at that, the idea that at some point in the last few years I’d managed to disguise myself well enough that this kid couldn’t smell the Eastie on me. That as far as he was concerned, I fit in.
Topher looked around, like he was making sure there was no one else with us. Then he waved us off. “Get the fuck out of here,” he ordered, rubbing hard at the back of his long, skinny neck. “I don’t know what the fuck you think you’re after, but if I see either one of you again, I’m going to fucking kill you.”
And—yeah. It definitely didn’t sound like he meant it in the metaphorical sense. Holiday and I scrambled back into the car, neither one of us saying anything as Holiday wrenched the key in the ignition and peeled off down the road.
“Is he following us?” she asked, glancing in the rearview; she was doing at least twice the speed limit, the engine working hard behind my knees. “Is that insane to ask?”
It wasn’t. I craned my neck, squinting out the back window, but all I could see was darkness. “I think we’re okay?” I reported uncertainly.
Holiday didn’t answer. Her hands were steady on the wheel, but the rest of her definitely wasn’t, her whole body shaking in the driver’s seat beside me. “It’s fine,” she managed through clenched teeth when she noticed me watching. “It’s an adrenaline rush, that’s all.” I wasn’t sure which one of us she was trying to reassure.
Still, she kept her foot on the gas as we whipped down the road in the direction of August House; we might have made it all theway home like that if not for the raccoon that darted out into the road as we passed through town, its silvery back gleaming inthe headlights. Holiday swore, swerving hard, and I gasped.
“Sorry,” she said once we’d cleared it, her eyes glued to the road. A car whooshed past us in the opposite direction, its horn blaring in protest. “Sorry.”
I thought of the night of the accident: the flashing lights, my shattered ankle. This wasn’t that, I reminded myself, fighting off a shiver of my own. Itwasn’t.But still: “Pull over,” I said finally, reaching out and putting my hand on hers. “Holiday. You gotta pull over.”
“Okay.” Holiday took a deep breath. “Yeah.” She slowed to a stop in the empty parking lot of a grocery store. She’d been right, I thought vaguely: it was bright as a carnival, the neon lights winking cheerful yellows and reds across the blacktop. Neither one of us said anything for a moment. Holiday kept her hands on the wheel. It felt like the middle of the night, but in reality there were still plenty of people out and about on this part of the island,finishing up late dinners and spilling out of the bars. There was a group of kids about our age horsing around outside an arcade across the street, and I suddenly remembered that when Greer and I had finally gotten back to campus the night of the accident, there had been a bunch of underclassmen playing midnight Ultimate on the green outside the dining hall.How is it possible that your lives are just proceeding as normal?I’d wondered.How is it possible the world is proceeding at all?
I waited a moment for my heart to stop pounding, eventually realized that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, then turned to face her. “We need to stop,” I decided. “For real this time. You didn’t sign up for this. Shit, Holiday,Ididn’t sign up for this. At the very least, we need to go to the cops.”
“What? No way!” Holiday exclaimed. “Fuck that.” She’d been nakedly terrified a moment ago, but now she looked energized—exhilarated, even. Her cheeks and mouth were both bright red. “What would we even tell them?”
I gaped at her. “That a drug dealer just threatened to kill us?” I posited. “Just, like, as a jumping-off point.”
But Holiday shook her head. “If we send the police after Topher now, all he’s going to do is disappear,” she reasoned. “We still don’t have anything concrete to give them.”
I hesitated. Holiday made sense, but I knew her well enough to know what she wasn’t saying: She didn’t want to give up the investigation yet, to step back or hand it over or admit we might be in over our heads here. Not after everything we’d been through.
And if I was being honest, neither did I.
As if she could sense she almost had me, she pressed her lipstogether, shook her head. “We’re on the right track, Michael. I can feel it. Can’t you feel it?”
I looked at her then, hair wild and eyes shining. I glanced down at her full, bright mouth. “Yeah,” I said softly. “I can feel it.”
We stared at each other, neither one of us saying anything; both of us were still breathing hard. I could see her chest rising and falling inside her hoodie. Just for a second, I imagined leaning across the gearshift and—
