For her part, Greer only shrugged: “They’re right,” she said. “I probably just took it off somewhere and don’t remember, that’sall.”
I nodded slowly. Personally, I couldn’t imagine taking a vintage Rolex off somewhere and not remembering where I’d left it, but I didn’t say that out loud. After all, it wasn’t actually impossible that she’d lost it. I was used to stuff like this, the stark and sudden reminders between how people here had grown up and how I had. My roommate back at Bartley had once bet twenty-five hundred dollars on whether another kid on our hall could eat seven saltines in a minute; when it turned out he couldn’t, Jasper only shrugged and dug the cash out of a box on his bookshelf, joking about how he hoped his weed dealer took cards.
Now I sat on the bed, watching as Greer looked half-heartedly around the room for a while longer before finally giving up and scooping a simple black dress off the back of the desk chair, tugging it over her head. “I don’t know,” she conceded, climbing onto the mattress and putting her head in my lap. “It’s gone. Add it to the long list of reasons for my parents to be disappointed in me, I guess.”
“Will do,” I promised, smoothing her hair back off her forehead. “Is there like an Excel document somewhere?”
“They keep it in Google Sheets,” she replied, rolling over to look up at me. “That way it’s easily sharable.”
“Sounds efficient.”
“They are that.”
We were quiet for a moment, both of us thinking. “Can I ask you something?” I ventured, unable to help myself. “What did Margot mean out there? About all your jilted ex-lovers?”
Greer snorted in disbelief at that, reaching up and pressing the heels of her hands into her eye sockets. “Oh, Linden,” she said, “please don’t.”
“I’m not,” I said quickly, holding my hands up. “I’m not.”
“It’s literally the day of my best friend’s memorial service.”
“No, I know.” I winced. “I’m sorry. That was douchey.”
Greer sighed, dropping her hands from her face. She looked exhausted. “It’s fine,” she said, shaking her head a little, like she was too worn out to argue. “I basically asked you the same thing the other day, didn’t I? About all the girls you hooked up with?”
It felt like a million years ago already, the cold, sunny afternoon we’d gone to Castle Island. Still: “Yeah,” I admitted. “I guess you kind of did.”
We gazed at each other for a moment. I could see the flecks of gold in her eyes. It wasn’t the right time, probably; I could easily see a universe where it was never the right time, where we hovered in this in-between until graduation, so I took a deep breath, then bent down and pressed my mouth gently against hers. “I’ve wanted to do that since I got to campus,” I confessed quietly.
“I know.” Greer grinned.
I wrinkled my nose. “That obvious?”
“A little obvious,” she said, boosting herself upright. “But that’s fine. I wanted it too.”
“You did?”
“I did,” Greer said, and lifted her face to mine.
“Hey, Greer, honey?” Margot asked, knocking on the door at the same time as she opened it, Greer and I pulling quickly apart. “We gotta get going.”
Greer nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “We’ll be right out.”
“Okay,” Margot agreed. She looked back and forth between us for a moment, a small smile playing over her catlike features. “For the record,” she said, turning and calling over her shoulder, “Bri would have liked that too.”
Bri’s service was at MemChurch, the Memorial Church of Harvard University, a tall, airy space full of glossy wooden pews and polished marble columns. Sunlight streamed through the arched leaded windows. The crimson carpet up the aisle seemed to glow.
Greer was almost finished with her reading, a poem by Ada Limòn, when my phone buzzed with a text. I ignored it, but a second later it buzzed again, then started humming with the insistent swarm that meant someone was calling. I pulled the thing out of my pocket, snuck a look at the screen: Holiday.
Not a good time,I texted as furtively as I could.
She texted back barely a second later:It’s important.
I sighed and edged toward the aisle, earning dirty looks from both Dagny and Margot for my trouble, then made my way to the back and out the heavy door of the chapel. “Dude,” I said when she answered, ducking into the stairwell that led to the choir loft, “I’m literally in the middle of Bri’s memorial service.”
“Seriously?” Holiday sounded incredulous. “What the hell are you doing calling me?”
“You said it was important!”
