17
By the time I got back to the Kendricks’, the energy at August House had taken on a buzzing, frenetic quality. Birdie was in the kitchen fixing a dinner that could be eaten at room temperature in case the power went out, while Dean screwed the galvanized hurricane shutters closed with an electric drill. Mrs. Kendrick had gone into town for last-minute supplies: “By which I mean, more wine,” Jasper said with a grin as he haphazardly let the air out of the pool floats so they wouldn’t fly away in the storm. Only Wells seemed completely undisturbed by the low-grade chaos: he swung slowly in the hammock, his face inscrutable behind his sunglasses.
“Meredith still at the hospital?” I asked Jasper. The two of us were dragging the lounge chairs into the shed at the back of the pool house, the shrill screech of metal on stone grating against my nerves.
Jasper nodded. “Hopefully she’ll stay there,” he said, tossing me an outdoor pillow to add to the pile. “Could be the apocalypse, right? Gotta hoard those resources.”
“Uh-huh,” I said with a smirk. His apparent concern for the end of the world hadn’t stopped him from inviting Aidy or Doc, not to mention the half-dozen people that Wells had told to come by if they wanted. I tried to imagine my mom opening our house to a bunch of strangers on the night of a hurricane a week after a teenager had wound up floating unconscious in our pool, then immediately decided that there were so many completely impossible clauses in that sentence that it was a useless mental exercise. Better, I reminded myself, to go with the August House flow.
Eliza got back a couple of hours after I did, strolling into the house with the unhurried confidence of a girl who expected bad weather to wait for her go-ahead. “Hey,” I said, a slow, involuntary grin spreading over my face at the sight of her. We’d texted a little bit—okay, we’d texted alot—but it was different to see her in person, her sharp collarbones and graceful wrists and perpetual expression of faint amusement. I’dmissedher, I realized; even as I had the thought, it occurred to me that I didn’t want to say goodbye to her at the end of this weekend. Shit, I didn’t want to say goodbye to her at all. “You’re back.”
“I’m back,” Eliza agreed. She tilted her face up, expectant; when I kissed her, I could feel the curve of her own lazy smile against my mouth. “Were you worried about me?”
“Nah,” I said, straightening up again. “Just didn’t want to wind up marooned alone in a storm with the rest of these degenerates, that’s all. Could be a realLord of the Fliessituation.”
“I mean”—Eliza handed me her overnight bag—“when is itnot?”
The rain had already started by the time Birdie and Dean tookoff in the late afternoon, the drum of it audible even through the thick metal shutters. I felt a pang of guilt as I watched them go, remembering that they still had their own house to secure down the road. It occurred to me to run after them, to see if they needed a hand, but before I could decide either way, Jasper was calling my name from across the kitchen. “Should we make party punch?” he wanted to know, his sandy head buried in the glowing depths of the fridge. “Like, some play on a dark and stormy? Or is that too fucking corny?”
“It’s corny as shit!” Eliza called from the other room, to which Jasper flipped her a bird she couldn’t see.
“I didn’t ask you!”
A noisy roll of thunder rumbled just then, the growl of it palpable right through the soles of my sneakers; Whimsy whimpered from her post near the pantry, and I flinched. I thought of the long line of cars I’d seen at the ferry port earlier, all of them lined up to get the hell off the island. “Look,” I said to Jasper, dropping my voice so that Eliza wouldn’t hear me, “I’m fully aware that this is going to make me sound like a giant pussy, but like…this is safe, right? Us all being here?”
Jasper laughed. “Yeah, dude,” he said, “it’s safe.” Then he shrugged. “I mean, I think so, anyway. What the fuck do I know?” He handed me a bottle of tequila from the freezer, then—apparently having decided on his own that party punch was indeed in order—fished out some pineapple juice to go with it. “And if it’s not, it’s a pretty metal way to go, right? Blown to kingdom come during a hurricane?”
I laughed, though nothing about it seemed particularly funnyto me. I’d ignored half a dozen texts from my own mom urging me to try to get a standby ticket for the ferry back to the mainland this morning; now that it was too late to bail out, I found myself unable to ignore the distinct possibility I’d made a serious mistake. I felt weird and unsettled, my nerves jangly and on edge in the same way they’d been that day at the pool when Wells and I had played Orange. I was relieved in spite of myself when Holiday showed up a few minutes later, the tightness in my chest easing a bit at the sight of her round, familiar face.
“It’smiserableout there,” she announced, pulling two bags of Pirate’s Booty out of her tote bag and handing them to Jasper. “Here,” she said, “I brought supplies.”
Jasper grinned. “I knew you were the kind of girl to have around in an emergency.” He took the snacks and headed for the kitchen, but I grabbed Holiday’s arm before she could follow.
“Your parents were seriously cool with you coming over here?” I asked.
Holiday looked at me a little strangely. “…Yes?” she said. “Why wouldn’t they be?”
“I mean,” I pointed out, feeling more than a little foolish, “it’s ahurricane.”
That made her smile. “No, I know it is,” she promised. “But that’s just what happens out here in the summer. Staying on-island and like, making a casual bad-weather cheese plate while listening to Miles Davis is what separates us from the tourists. It’s fine.”
“Right.” I frowned. “Wouldn’t want anyone to confuse you for a tourist.”
Holiday made a face. “Don’t be like that,” she chided gently. “You know what I mean.”
“No, I do,” I said, and Idid;still, I couldn’t help brushing up against the unpleasant reminder that at Holiday’s core she had a lot more in common with the Kendricks than she did with me—her indomitable rich-girl nonchalance, the certainty deep in her bones that nothing truly bad was ever going to happen. It was the same bulletproof confidence that had her strolling into the Mandarin Oriental to spy on her favorite boy band. It was the same hardheaded recklessness that had her dragging me after Topher Leal.
We made camp in the den, sprawling out on the enormous sectional and sitting cross-legged in nests of pillows on the thick, fluffy rug. Aidy helped Jasper set out the snacks that Birdie had made before she left, a giant pitcher of something bright and boozy appearing on the table beside them. Wells connected a playlist to the speakers. Eliza and Doc laid out a hand of Spit. The storm grew in intensity outside the window, the rain a deluge and the wind screaming like some tortured creature out of a folktale; the overhead lights flickered as thunder shook the house. Eliza was right; itwascozy, in an old-fashioned, New England, boarding-school common room sort of way.
So why couldn’t I shake this deep, ceaseless dread?
I wasn’t the only one in a weird mood tonight. It was barely noticeable—as far as any of the Kendricks were concerned, she was the same as she ever was—but there was definitely something going on with Holiday. It was strange to think that she and I were somehow back in a place where I knew her well enough to knowwhen she was hiding something; it was stranger still that maybe I’d known her that well all along, even when we weren’t really talking to each other, like there was some invisible tether connecting us. I wasn’t sure it was something I actually liked.
“Hey,” I said finally, pulling her into the library and shutting the glass-paneled door behind us. “What’s going on with you tonight?”
“What?” Right away Holiday shook her head, all innocence. “Nothing.” She made a show of looking around at the bookshelves and the artwork, the grand piano with its framed family photos on top. “This place is really very tasteful,” she observed.
“Okay,” I said, making a face. “Do you want to do a song and dance, or do you want to talk to me?”
