“You’re an angel,” I told her. I think I did, anyway; like I said, I was pretty drunk. “I love you.” Then I blanched. “I mean—you know what I mean. Don’t freak out. I don’t want you to freak out.”
Greer shook her head, scooting over to make room for me on the mattress. “Go to sleep, dork,” she said fondly. Her laughter was the last thing I heard before I fell asleep.
5
Sunday, 10/27/24
I woke up feeling like someone was boring directly into my skull with a hammer drill, a taste in my mouth like the bottom of the Fort Point Channel. My stomach was roiling. My anxiety was cranked to ten.
“Morning, sunshine,” Greer said with a smile. She was sitting pretzel-legged at the end of my bed, looking fresh as the bright yellow tulips that line the Public Garden in springtime. “Your roommates were going to wait for you for breakfast, but I told them it was probably going to be a while.”
“I drank a goldfish,” I told her sadly.
Greer nodded. “I know,” she said, holding her phone up as evidence, waggling the video in my face. “I saw.”
I winced, rolling over and burying my face in my too-warm pillow. “Oh, god.”
“You’re kind of viral,” she informed me, in a voice that wasn’t quite admiring. “Ten thousand views this morning already. You should see if you can leverage this somehow, maybe pick up acorporate sponsorship. I don’t know with who, though.” I could hear the smirk in her voice. “Like, definitely not Chewy dot-com.”
I groaned into the mattress. “Am I a goldfish killer?”
“I mean, objectively, yes,” she said, crawling back across the covers and tucking herself in beside me. She smelled like coffee and detergent and the fancy bespoke shampoo she bought off Instagram, which she used to carry to the bathroom at Bartley in a sleek little caddy. “But let’s be real, if you didn’t drink it, somebody else would have had to. That poor fucking goldfish never stood a chance.”
“That’s not really comforting to me, Greer.”
“It wasn’t meant to be,” she said pleasantly, patting me on the back before sitting up one more time. “Now go take a shower. You smell like the floor of a bar.”
We’d missed brunch in the dining hall entirely, so we walked up to a café near Porter Square for breakfast sandwiches. It was even chillier than the night before, and rainy, the leaves slick on the sidewalk and a wind that sliced cleanly through my jacket. Still, the cold air was bracing, and between that and the greasy bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit I inhaled in two enormous bites, I was feeling a full click steadier by the time we headed back to campus. “Good news,” I reported, rattling the ice in my coffee cup. “I might live after all.”
“That’s a relief,” Greer said, raising her elegant eyebrows. “And, you know. More than we can say for the fish.”
I made a face. “Did you get your stuff finished last night?” I asked as she swiped her card outside of Hemlock House. I pulled the heavy wooden door open, nodding for her to go ahead. “Or do you have more to do today?”
“I literally always have more to do,” Greer reported grimly, “but you can come up and keep me company while I do it, if you want. Or do some of your own, even.”
I considered the dull throb of the hangover still echoing at the back of my skull. “That…might be ambitious.” We crossed the black-and-white tile of the lobby, past the staircase that led down to the laundry room and a bulletin board bearing notices for STD testing at the health center and an a cappella concert of ’90s boy band hits. “Did you do your Zoom with your dad?”
Greer shook her head. “His assistant sent me a calendar invite for Tuesday,” she reported, “though I guess it’s always possible I’ll get listeria and die before then.”
“Gotta manifest your dreams,” I agreed as we climbed the spiral stairs to the fourth floor. “So, that’s going super, huh? You and your parents, I mean.” Greer’s relationship with her family hadn’t been great, back when we were at Bartley. Her mom and dad were what my old roommate Jasper had calledhardos,meaning they were the kind of rich parents who cared a lot about grades and also never did cocaine, even on vacation.
“Oh yeah,” Greer said with exaggerated carelessness. “It’s amazing.” She was quiet for a moment. “I mean, it’s not that my parents don’t love me. Like, they definitely love me? It’s just that they don’t always seem tolikeme that much.”
“Really?” I frowned. “What’s not to like?”
Greer smiled at that. “Why, thank you, Linden,” she said, bumping her arm against mine. “I agree that I’m very charming.”
“No,” I said, stopping and taking her elbow, turning her gently so that she met my gaze. “I’m serious. You’re literally at Harvard.You’re doing the thing. What else could they possibly want or expect?”
Greer shrugged, like it should have been obvious. “Greatness,” she said simply.
I thought about my own mom, back across the river in Eastie. She’d always had high expectations, in her way: from the time I could walk she’d demanded I bus my own plate, clean up my own messes, save my own soul. Once, she signed me up for an entire weekend of community service because she saw me walk past an unhoused woman on the Common and not slip anything into her battered cup. Still, my mom had never, at any time, given me any indication whatsoever that she gave one single solitary shit either way about whether I played sports or where I went to college. I honestly don’t think it had ever even occurred to her to wonder if I was great or not. The only thing she really cared about was that I wasgood.
And if sometimes it felt like that might have been a higher bar to clear, well, I suspected she probably knew that too.
Greer looked at me for a second, the two of us standing there in the stale dimness of the stairwell. In her glasses and her sweatpants, she looked very, very young. “Linden—” she started, then seemed to think better of it, turning and starting to climb one more time. “I mean,” she said over her shoulder, her voice light and playful, “I think they also always kind of hoped I’d play the oboe.”
Back in the suite, Keiko, Margot, Dagny, and Celine were all parked in the common room, the TV murmuring quietly and a small platoon of Starbucks cups scattered across the coffee table. Margot had her headphones on and was moving her lips silently,either practicing the conjugation of irregular verbs in Latin or listening to Taylor Swift on Spotify. Celine was eating Cinnamon Toast Crunch out of the box.
