Jas looked at me a little bit oddly. “Your friend from the beach,” he said. “The one who was dressed like Ms. Singh.”
“Oh.” I shook my head, feeling the back of my neck get alittle warm. “Nah, that’s cool. I don’t really think she’s the partying type.” That wasn’t actually fair: In fact, I had the vague impression that Holiday was pretty popular at Greenleaf, her arty Cambridge day school where they were always putting on all-female productions of Shakespearean tragedies and nobody shaved their armpits. But somehow I couldn’t picture her drinking caipirinhas with Eliza and Meredith, or even Aidy the waitress from Red’s. Holiday was, and always had been, in a category all by herself.
Jasper shrugged again. “Whatever you want, man. The more the merrier, is all.”
“In bed,” I replied reflexively. Then, the word sending some synapse firing off deep inside my brain, the memory sparked: “Hey. You didn’t go back down to the beach after we all came upstairs last night, did you?”
“Are you kidding?” Jasper snorted. “I was so messed up it was a miracle I found my bed the first time.” He glanced at me curiously as he slammed the trunk. “Why?”
“No reason,” I lied, pushing whatever drunken, still-concussed head trip I might or might not have had to the back of my mind and climbing into the passenger seat of the Land Rover. “I wastoo.”
The fog and the clouds burned off by the time we got back to August House, and suddenly it was another perfect beach day: the sun round and bright and yellow, the rays almost visible like a little kid would draw. Birdie made BLTs and potato salad for lunch. Mr.and Mrs. Kendrick left for the ferry once we were finished, the two of them headed for a black-tie wedding in Truro.
“Be good,” Mrs. Kendrick said, taking a lap around the patio table and dropping kisses on everyone’s foreheads, including Meredith’s and mine.
Jasper smiled. “We always are.”
Once they were gone, Meredith biked over to Greg’s house and the rest of us drifted out to the pool, Eliza reading a Joan Didion novel on one of the lounge chairs and Jasper scrolling his phone. Wells lay faceup on the hot concrete beside the pool, eyes hidden behind a pair of mirrored sunglasses. He was a tricky guy, Wells: I hadn’t spent that much time with him back when he was at Bartley, but I remembered him being a pretty mellow dude. I didn’t know if it was everything that had happened with his dad or just being around all the blowhards at Harvard, but there was something about him that seemed suddenly brittle to me, just this side of mean. He’d been the drunkest of all of us when we gamboled up to the house last night, and it seemed like he was probably headed in that direction again now, a can of hard seltzer sweating on the patio beside him. “Mom’s going to be pissed if you drink all her special juice,” Jasper had warned the last time he disappeared into the pool house for another, to which Wells had lifted one middle finger in reply.
“Yo, Linden,” he called now, still lying supine on the pool deck. “You ever play Orange?”
Eliza sighed loudly. “Wells,” she said, marking her place in her book with her index finger, “come on.”
“Don’t start with that shit,” Jasper put in.
“Why?” I asked, sitting up on my own lounge chair. I’d purposely left an empty seat between Eliza and me, not wanting to look like I cared one way or the other about…anything. “What’s Orange?”
“It’s a stupid game,” Eliza informed me, “for stupid people.”
“Aw, sis,” Wells told her, “you say the sweetest things.” He lifted his chin, half peering back at me. “Come on, Linden. You in, or what?”
“I—yeah, okay,” I said slowly, swinging my feet over the side of the lounge chair and standing up. I was curious now, if a little bit nervous. “Sure.”
Wells smiled. He got up from the patio in one smooth movement, padding barefoot into the house before returning a minute later holding an orange the size of a softball—there was a bowl of them sitting on the kitchen island, along with fuzzy local peaches and bananas that never seemed to brown. He held it out to me and I took it like an instinct, feeling the weight of it in my hand as he walked around to the other side of the pool.
“Okay,” he announced, turning around so that his back was facing me. I could see the sharp ridges of his spine through his skin. “Now hit me with it.”
I laughed out loud, then realized he wasn’t kidding. “Wait,” I said. “Seriously? Dude, what the fuck.”
“That’s the whole game,” Eliza informed me, peering at us over the tops of her sunglasses. “And then you’re going to turn around and he’s going to hityouas hard ashecan, and you’re going togo back and forth like that until one of you cries uncle or the orange explodes, whichever comes first.” She gazed balefully at her brother. “Am I forgetting anything?”
Wells smirked. “Nope,” he admitted. “That about covers it.” He looked at me over his shoulder. “What do you say, Linden? Still want to play?” His tone was friendly, but after three years at Bartley I knew exactly what kind of bargain was on offer here: Wells wasn’t going to give me a hard time if I told him I wasn’t interested. But he wasn’t going to forget about it either.
So. I said okay.
I turned the orange in my hand for a moment, rubbing my thumb over the bumpy skin, then wound up and tossed it—hard enough so it cleared the width of the pool, but not hard enough to do any real damage. It connected with a dull thud against Wells’s back before dropping to the patio and rolling for a second, coming to rest a few feet away. Wells, for his part, barely winced.
“He’s going easy on you,” Jasper informed his brother. “He knows you’re delicate.”
Wells didn’t like that. “Were you?” he asked me, bending to retrieve the orange. “Don’t.”
I shrugged, turning around and facing the garden. Already I was regretting this, some kind of weirdFight Clubpissing contest. I should have just told him to go screw. “Just warming up, I guess.”
“Okay,” he said, then lobbed the orange back across the pool, hitting me in the back hard enough that I flinched. “Better hurry up and get warm.”
I felt anger flare in my chest, a muscle in my jaw twitching.The next time, I threw it as hard as I could. It left a mark right away, a bright red splotch just to the right of Wells’s backbone.
“That’s more like it,” Wells said, sounding satisfied. Eliza sighed again and went back to her book.
