Celine shrugged. “We take care of each other, right?” she asked, carefully wrapping a perfume bottle in a back issue of theCrimson.Then her chin wobbled. “At least, we fuckin’ try.”
“I…brought ice cream,” I offered a little awkwardly, holding up the bag from the convenience store not far from Hemlock. “Is that weird?”
Keiko tilted her head. “I mean, kind of,” she said, peering over and peeking inside the bag to see what flavors I’d picked. “But also, some might say, gentlemanly.”
“Very gentlemanly,” Greer echoed, shooting me a smile across the room. She grabbed a handful of stolen dining-hall spoons from the common-room kitchenette and we passed the pints around while we worked, emptying Bri’s bureau and rolling up her little area rug, wrapping the cord of the desk lamp around its bendy gooseneck. “Thanks for coming,” Greer murmured as I tucked Bri’s schoolbooks into a banker’s box, reaching over and laying one small hand on my back. “I’m really glad you’re here.”
“Yeah, of course,” I said, goofily pleased in spite of everything, happy she was letting me help her in an actual, concrete way. I hadn’t been able to figure out exactly how to be there for Greer the last few days. She’d slept in my room the last two nights, showing up late and crawling under my covers, though when I asked hershe’d been adamant that she didn’t want to talk. Once I’d woken up and she was crying. Once I’d woken up and she was gone. The university had offered her a bunch of different accommodations—time off, extended deadlines—and I was expecting her to jump at them, especially with how stressed she’d been about schoolwork. But she’d turned down every single one. “I just want everyone to treat me normally,” she’d told me this morning over breakfast. “And that includes you.”
It didn’t take long for us to pack up the rest of Bri’s things, her entire life at Harvard fitting neatly into a university-issued laundry cart. I thought about my mom, who’d lived in our apartment since before I was born and was woven inextricably into its every nook and crevice. I thought about how neatly I’d disappeared from Bartley after graduation, never to be heard from again.
I bent down to check under Bri’s bed as we were finishing up, nudging a lacy thong out of the way with my sneaker as discreetly as possible before pulling out a broken hanger and a crumpled piece of college-ruled loose-leaf. I was about to toss the lot of it into the big black trash bag at the center of the room when I noticed a scrawl of red ink on the paper. I opened it as casually as I could, my eyes widening as I read the words:
Remember: you owe me.
Holy shit. I blinked, the words blurring and sharpening in front of my eyes like a Magic Eye.You owe me.Who the hell had written it? And what could Bri possibly owe? I thought again of the crushed-up pills on the desk the other morning. I thought again of the knocked-over lamp. I’d figured Bri had jostled it overherself as she fumbled clumsily toward Greer’s mattress. But what if that wasn’t what had happened at all?
“You okay?” Greer asked, glancing at me as she shut the door to the wardrobe.
I looked over at her half a beat too quickly, a familiar anxious restlessness growing in my body. It was the feeling of trying to work a blackberry seed out of a molar. It was the feeling of having a puzzle to solve. “Absolutely,” I lied, then shoved the note in my pocket. “What’s next?”
Holiday took a ballet class on Wednesday evenings, but when I texted and told her it was an emergency she said I could pick her up when it was finished and we’d go get food at South Street Diner. I was waiting for her on Boylston Street when she came through the door with a scrum of other dancers at a little past nine, sweatpants pulled on over her leotard and her overflowing bag slung over one shoulder. “Hey!” she said, her face breaking open when she saw me.
“Hey,”agreed the tall, skinny guy in dance leggings walking beside her, raising his dark eyebrows suggestively. He turned to Holiday, his full mouth twisting. “Who’s your boyfriend, Proctor?”
Holiday laughed. “Why,” she asked, “is he handsome?” She shoved the guy playfully, then blew him and the rest of them a showy, exaggerated kiss. “He’s not my boyfriend. I’ll see you guys later, okay?”
“Handsome, huh?” I asked once we were alone on the sidewalk. “Is that what you’d call me?”
“Not to your face,” Holiday shot back. “Come on.” She nodded toward the corner. “I’m starving.”
We turned onto Tremont and then again onto Stuart, walking south until we got to a grubby diner near the bus station. It had been a favorite of ours over the summer, in no small part because it stayed open all night long, and I breathed a weird, suprising sigh of relief as we slid into our usual booth at the back.
“So what’s the big emergency?” she asked once we’d ordered, then ducked her head conspiratorially. “Are you pregnant? Because I’ll take you to the clinic, Michael. I literally have Planned Parenthood saved in my phone for reproductive rights emergencies.”
“Funny.” I took a deep breath, my heart starting to beat a little bit harder; some part of me felt like I’d already wasted too much time. “You know that thing that happened on Martha’s Vineyard a couple of summers ago?”
Holiday raised her eyebrows across the melamine table, her expression canny.Thatthing that happened on Martha’s Vineyardwas a body in a swimming pool;thatthing that happened on Martha’s Vineyardwas a car chase.Thatthing that happened on Martha’s Vineyardwas the two of us screaming at each other in a pitch-black kitchen while a hurricane raged out the window and a murderer lurked on the other side of the door.
“Um, yeah” was all Holiday said, her thick eyebrows just barely twitching. “I think I remember it.”
“What if I told you I think it might have happened again?”
I filled her in as quickly as possible on the events of the othermorning, the pills and the EMTs and the cool gray pallor of Bri’s skin against Greer’s bright flowered sheets. “Holy shit,” Holiday said when I was finished, her eyes wide and expressive behind her glasses. “Michael, that’sawful.I heard a girl had OD’d over there, but I had no idea you were the one who found her. I’m so sorry. How’s Greer doing? How areyou?”
“I mean, I’m fine,” I said, shrugging as manfully as possible. “And Greer is—you know. About how you’d expect her to be, considering her roommate just overdosed. Or at least, Ithoughtshe had overdosed? That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I was helping them all clear Bri’s stuff out of the suite earlier this afternoon, and I found this under her bed.”
I pulled the note out of my pocket and passed it across the table, watching as Holiday read its terse, all-caps contents. “That’s…weird,” she said finally, her warm fingers brushing mine as she handed it back.
“It is, right?” I nodded, gratified by her agreement. “It’s totally weird.”
“Could have been written by whoever she was buying from, conceivably.”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” I said, pleased we were already on the same page. “And like, if she couldn’t pay, maybe he killed her to send a message to his other clients.”
Holiday frowned. “Whoa whoa whoa,” she said, holding both hands up. “Hang on a second. I thought you said she overdosed.”
“Well, yeah, that’s what the EMTs seemed to think,” I admitted. “But—”
