“Hold on a second,” he said in the same cool, detached, impossible-to-argue-with tone he’d used to invite me to play Orange what felt like an entire lifetime ago. “I want to hear this.”
Meredith stayed where she was.
“Somebodydefinitely scratched you when they pulled that necklace off,” Holiday asserted, “but it wasn’t Aidy. Which means the story you told us about the two of you guys getting in an argument at the party was bullshit, which means that her corroborating it wasalsobullshit, which means that for some reason you guys are covering for each oth—”
“It was an accident,” Aidy blurted suddenly. It was the first time she’d spoken since she’d followed Jasper out here; her blue surfer-girl eyes were wide and terrified. “We never meant to—”
Meredith whirled on her. “Oh, donot,” she snapped with an animal ferocity. Then, to the rest us: “I have no idea what she’s talking about.”
Aidy looked terrible, now that I was gazing at her more closely, with dark rings under her eyes and a hastily covered breakout visible along her jaw. Her normally tan face was pale and gaunt. “I’mnot like you,” she said to Meredith softly. “I can’t do this anymore. Not after everything that happened. Not when he’s—”
“I said shut up!”
“You shut up, Meredith!” Aidy’s voice rose. “You’ve been making my life a living hell in one way or another for the whole entire summer, and I’m fucking sick of it. All I was trying to do was helpyou.”
“How did any of this help me?” Meredith fired back. “All you did was make everything a million times worse.”
“Should I have just let him hit you, then?” Aidy demanded. “Or who knows what else?”
“Whoa whoa whoa,” Eliza said, holding her hands up, “Greg was going tohityou?”
“Of course not!” Meredith insisted, then, more quietly: “I don’t know. I was handling it.”
“You werenothandling it!” Aidy insisted, then looked at the rest of us. “The night of the party—” she started, but Meredith cut her off.
“Stop,” she said, her voice urgent. “I swear to god, Aidy, I will make you regret—”
“I don’t care anymore.” Aidy sank down onto the floor of the porch, pulling her knees up and burying her face in her hands. “I don’tcare.” I thought she might be crying, but when she lifted her head a moment later, her expression was resigned. “I’m so tired. I just want it to be done.”
None of us said anything for a moment. When Holiday spoke, her voice was soft. “Aidy,” she said, squatting down on the floor beside her, “what happened?”
Aidy sighed. “The night of the party,” she said again, shooting a look at Jasper, “after you fell asleep, I was heading out—not because I like,regrettedanything, I just didn’t want it to be weird in the morning—when I heard Greg and Meredith arguing out on the patio. I guess he’d showed up at the party earlier to have it out with her, but then when you guys”—she gestured at Jasper and Wells—“whatever. He knew she’d taken the cash he had squirrelled away, and he couldn’t pay what he owed that Topher guy, and he was pissed. And whatever, none of that was my problem—no matter what Meredith likes to tell people, I didn’t actually give half a crap about Greg—but then he shoved her.”
“None of this happened,” Meredith informed us shrilly. She’d toggled back to bald-faced denial, yanking at her hair as she paced across the porch. “I have no idea what she’s talking about.Shehas no idea what she’s talking about.”
“I just…reacted,” Aidy said. “I have a sister who had a bad boyfriend situation a couple of years back, and I just…yeah. I ran at him and pushed him as hard as I could. And he was so fucked up.” She raised her chin then, looking searchingly at the rest of us. “That’s the thing you have to understand about Greg—like, he’s this big guy, there was no way I could ever hurt him even if I was trying to, but he just…crumpled. He hit his head on the edge of the pool—you know how the lip of it kind of goes up at the edge? And then he was just…in.”
She rubbed her face again, like she was trying to scrub away the memory. “I panicked,” she recalled. “I jumped in and tried to fish him out, but I could only get him as far as the staircase. I was soaking wet, and Meredith was hissing at me to get the fuck out ofthe water before someone saw us; we were trying to be as quiet as we could. We didn’t know if he was dead or alive.”
“Why didn’t you call for help?” I couldn’t help but ask.
“And say what, exactly?” Aidy’s voice was sharp. “That I’d accidentally brain-damaged the rich vacationer who’d tossed me over to go back to his private-school girlfriend? I know the cops around here love to just bend over backward for summer folks, but please believe me when I tell you they’re not like that with everyone. I already have an arrest on my record from last summer—for being drunk and disorderly,” she clarified, “not that it’s anyone’s business. And I would like to get off this fucking island and have a future at some point.”
“And Meredith knew that if the police got involved, eventually they’d figure out that she’d taken the money.” Holiday straightened up. “You planted the necklace,” she said to Meredith, sounding almost admiring. “And you scratched your own neck to make it look like you’d gotten into a fight with Aidy.”
“You’re cracked,” Meredith insisted, but Aidy nodded.
“She knew that someone would find it the next morning,” Aidy explained. “We were obvious suspects anyway, because of how we’d both been romantic with him. But if we made it even more obvious, and then we were each other’s alibis, then…”
“Then nobody would look at either one of you twice,” Holiday finished.Tidy,she’d said earlier, and it had been. Except for one variable.
“What was your plan if Greg woke up?” I asked.
Meredith and Aidy looked at each other, then quickly away, asif the eye contact was blinding. Neither one of them answered, but the implication was clear.
They’d been hoping he wouldn’t.
And—at least until Holiday and I came along—they’d luckedout.
We were silent then, all of us trying to figure out what on earth we were going to do now. A lone seagull screamed overhead. “Meredith,” Eliza said finally, her voice barely above a whisper, “probably you should cancel that ride.”
