“Michael,” Holiday said, and the sound of her voice pulled me back to myself.
“Yeah,” I said, way too loudly. My whole body was hot and unpleasantly prickly; I was sure she could see what I’d been thinking scrawled all over my face. “It’s late,” I blurted, nodding at the clock on the dashboard to avoid meeting her gaze. “I should get back. We can figure this out in the morning.”
Holiday nodded back, clearing her throat. “Absolutely,” she said. “We don’t have to decide anything right this minute.”
We didn’t talk all the way home.
I stood in the driveway for a long time after Holiday dropped me off, gazing up at the splendid, glowing facade of August House. This place had seemed so deeply glamorous to me just a few days ago, an avatar for everything I thought I wanted, and while it was still incredible—all gable and balcony and turret, shadows looming in the deep purple night—now it looked like a haunted houseout of a little kids’ storybook: beautiful but sinister, swollen with secrets. For a second I couldn’t get over the urge to run. The ferry ran until late, I remembered suddenly. Theoretically I could be back in Boston by morning—safe at my mom’s scratched, scarred kitchen table, far away from whatever twisted picture was starting to come into focus here on the Vineyard.
The screen door creaked open just then, a noise like something out of a horror movie; I jumped about three feet in the air, but it was only Jasper poking his head out, frowning at me in the glow of the porch light. “Yo, is that you?” he called across the lawn. “What the fuck are you doing out here?”
I looked from him back up to the house again, watching as a figure passed by the window in one of the upstairs bedrooms. “Being a creep,” I told him, then shoved my hands into my pockets and trotted across the damp, dewy grass to follow him backinside.
