“Long-lost love?” He waggled his eyebrows.
“Fuck you,” I replied. I wasn’t sure which one of us he was making fun of, Holiday or me, or if he wasn’t making fun of either one of us and I was just being touchy. I glanced uneasily over my shoulder, but Holiday had rejoined her friends down at the far end of the beach. She was probably just as glad to be rid of me as I was of her, I reassured myself: after all, nobody in their right mind wanted the son of the household help crashing their tony beach vacation. And granted, Holiday had never once treated me that way in all the time we’d spent together, but what did I know? I hadn’t talked to Holiday in years. “Our moms know each other.”
Jasper nodded distractedly. I was worried he’d press me, but he didn’t seem to care, handing me the flask and taking a hit from the joint that Wells was holding out. “Sit down,” he instructed. “We’re playing Lies.”
“Okay,” I said with a laugh, the liquor burning in my throat and chest. “What are the rules, just lie your fucking face off?”
“Exactly,” Eliza confirmed. “We used to do Two Truths to go along with it, but that got boring, so we trimmed the fat.”
“Very market-focused of you,” I said.
Eliza smiled. “Thank you.”
“The trick is to make them believable,” Jasper explained, a halo of smoke around his face. “So, for instance, if I were to say,I saw Wells jerking off to a picture of a prominent Republican senator in women’s underwear,you would say,Yeah, that seems legit,and—”
“Fuck you,” Wells said, but he was laughing. “I’ll have you know he was wearing a suit, like a gentleman.”
“Best lie wins,” Jasper said cheerfully. “Doc, you start.”
Doc nodded. “Let’s see,” he said, leaning back on his palmsand crossing his ankles, his canny gaze flicking around the circle before finally lighting on me. “When he’s not getting his ass fully trounced at lacrosse, Linden lives a double life back in Boston as a part-time hot dog vendor at Fenway and an extra in Masshole movies directed by Ben Affleck.”
I burst out laughing along with the rest of the group, trying to ignore the embarrassment and annoyance flaming in my face. Doc was kidding around, obviously—that was how the game worked—but hadn’t Jasper just said the whole point was to make your lies believable? Also, fuck that guy! He’d beaten me at lacrosseone time.Still, “I actually work the drive-through at a Dunkin’ Donuts in Dorchester,” I corrected as good-naturedly as I could manage, reaching for the flask and wondering for the hundred thousandth time if that was how I seemed to these people, like some sweatsuit-wearing stereotype. If it was how I seemed to Eliza. “Have some respect.” I turned to Jasper. “So what, it’s my turn now?”
We played a few rounds, Eliza accusing Jasper of sending dick pics to the perpetually sweat-stained woman who airbrushed souvenir T-shirts at a kiosk in town and Wells suggesting Doc sat down to pee. When it was Jasper’s turn, though, he didn’t hesitate. “Meredith,” he said grandly, turning to where she was perched on a hollowed-out log, scrolling her phone industriously; I wasn’t sure if I was imagining that something in his voice suggested he’d been waiting for this opportunity, had perhaps even orchestrated the entire game with it in mind. “Meredithspends her days desperately trying to avoid getting chlamydia from her cocksmack boyfriend because, apparently, she’s too stupid to cop onto what everybody else with two brain cells already knows, which is that the onlyperson he’s ever given a steaming shit about is himself.” He paused, then frowned theatrically. “Whoops,” he said, “sorry. For a second I forgot that was supposed to be a lie.”
Meredith didn’t laugh. Neither, to our small credit, did anyone else, all of us staring slack-jawed across the circle at the way the air had suddenly changed; I had never, in all the time I’d known him, heard Jasper say anything like that to anyone. “Fuck you, Jasper,” Meredith said, her green eyes flashing; she got to her feet, jamming her phone into her shorts pocket and stalking off across the sand.
“Fuckyou,Meredith,” Jasper called after her. “You have a good night, now!”
Eliza scrambled upright. “Why do you have to be like this?” she asked Jasper, her whole body coiled with temper. “For fuck’s sake, she’s not even the one whodidanything.”
“She fucks around with that guy, and then she comes back to our house—toDad’shouse—and eats our cereal,” Jasper shot back immediately. “Personally, that’s enough for me.”
Eliza shook her head. “You’re an asshole,” she announced, then turned and headed off across the beach after Meredith, kicking up sand as she went.
Once she was gone, I looked around the circle for an explanation, but none seemed to be forthcoming. Jasper was reaching for the flask, looking a little bit sheepish; Wells was whistling the chorus to “We Are Family” under his breath. “Okay,” I muttered to Doc finally, “what the fuck just happened?”
“Dude,” he said quietly, “you don’t want to know.”
The shine kind of came off the game after that, but we stayed where we were anyway—getting progressively drunker, talkingcheerful trash. I figured Eliza had followed Meredith back up to the house, but at some point I glanced down the beach and spotted her a few hundred yards away, sitting in the dunes, looking out at the dark, endless water. I got up and headed over; she’d sifted through the sand until she found a flat, round seashell, was turning it over and over her knuckles like she was practicing a coin trick. “What happened to your friend?” I asked as I approached.
Eliza shrugged. “She left.”
“To…go see the cocksmack?” I asked.
That made her smile, but only faintly. “We used to all be so close,” she told me softly, pushing her sea-swept hair out of her face. “Us, and Meredith’s family, and the Hollimans—Greg Holliman, that’s the cocksmack in question. Our parents grew up together, you know? We used to spend all day together every single summer and then go sleep at each other’s houses at night. And I thought it would always be like that—like eventually we’d all grow up and bring our own kids out here and they’d all grow up and marry each other and bringtheirkids, just like our parents had.” She shook her head, like she couldn’t believe her own stupidity. “So incestuous, right?”
It was, but it wasn’t unusual. A thing I’d learned at Bartley was that the same complicated, sprawling rich-person ecosystems that got undeserving people into the Ivy League and elected to the presidency also operated in a thousand smaller, more pedantic ways. Even the ones who didn’t know each other from decades of idyllic summers on the Vineyard might as well have: They docked their boats at the same marinas and boarded their horses at the same stables, played tennis and golf at the same exclusive countryclubs. They spoke the same dialect. I spoke it too now, sort of, though I was still working to train the accent—Fuck Tom Brady,I thought with a grimace—out of my voice. “Maybe a little incestuous,” I agreed.
“Incestuous and delusional, it turns out.” She glanced at me sidelong. “Greg’s dad is the one who flipped, in case that wasn’t abundantly clear.”
I hesitated, not wanting to let on that I wasn’t totally sure what she was talking about.
“In the…court case?” I finally guessed.
Eliza nodded. “He and my dad had the same financial advisor,” she explained. “Greg’s dad was the one who hooked our dad up with him in the first place. And then when everything happened, Greg’s dad made a deal with the DA. He got probation and community service, on the condition that he testified.” She shoved the shell back down into the sand, like the blade of a knife. “Our dad got ten months in jail.”
Holy shit. I did everything I could to keep my face neutral just then, but my brain was ricocheting wildly around inside my head. Suddenly a million tiny, seemingly insignificant moments fell neatly into place: Mr. Kendrick’s conspicuous absence from family weekend last semester. The way Mrs. Kendrick had thanked me earlier tonight. The random, midweek trip home Jasper had taken right around the time of my accident, even though it was only a couple of weeks until reading period.
