I exhaled, my shoulders dropping back down to where they belonged. It was useless to pretend I didn’t still think about her. It was useless to pretend I didn’t still care. “Hi, Greer.”
In the weeks since then we’d hung out a few times, meeting for coffee at the hipster place in the Smith Center and going to a free concert on the Esplanade. Every single time, I shoved a piece of gum in my mouth just in case, but so far we seemed to be stuck decisively in neutral. Which was fine, obviously—it wasn’t like I thought Greer owed me a hookup for nostalgia’s sake or whatever. I just…still liked her, that was all. I was pretty sure that neither one of us could quite decide if she still liked me back.
Now Bri ignored our visible discomfort, plucking a half-empty bottle from the makeshift bar and waggling it in Greer’s direction. “Want me to make you one of these?” she asked.
Greer tilted her head, her expression equal parts curious and fond. “Just to clarify: byone of these,you mean a generous glug of Fireball in a red plastic cup?”
“Exactly.” Bri’s smile was dazzling. “Craft cocktail, baby.” She poured for a three count, splashing some cinnamon-flavored whiskey onto the counter and wiping it up with her bare hand before heading for the living room. Then, on second thought, she doubled back and took the bottle, too. “You guys be good.”
“We always are,” Greer promised. She waited until Bri was gone, then shook her head at me. “Sorry. That girl is my best friend at college, but she is a hot mess.”
“Is it an act?” I asked, taking a chance and boosting myself up onto the counter next to her, the sides of our pinkies just brushing. “Like, a fun party girl thing?”
“I mean, yes and no?” Greer shrugged. “Don’t get me wrong, she’s a literal genius, all her professors love her, but she also is very much getting obliterated five nights out of the week.”
“That’s a lot of nights.”
“It is, in fact, five-sevenths of the nights,” Greer agreed. “She’s also now putting her Adderall up her nose instead of just like, taking it the normal way like everybody else, which feels sort of alarming to me? But she’s on the dean’s list and I’m barely clinging to my sanity, so what the fuck do I know. I should probably just try it her way.”
I smiled, bumping her arm lightly with mine. “You know some things,” I said.
That made her laugh. “Thank you,” she said, dropping herhead briefly onto my shoulder. “I do. I know like, one or two things.”
“Three things at least,” I continued.
“Well, don’t overdo it,” Greer said, holding a hand up. “You’re going to make me blush.”
“Itiswild here, though,” I admitted quietly. “At this school, I mean.” The truth was, I still couldn’t quite believe I’d gotten in: the accident had left my ankle smashed to powder, with any chance at a lacrosse scholarship—not to mention my entire future—hanging precariously in the balance. It wasn’t lost on me how lucky I was to be at this party right now and not bagging groceries at Market Basket half a mile away. “I know that like, the first rule of being at Harvard is to act like being at Harvard is no big deal and that you always knew you were smart and accomplished enough to deserve it and the work doesn’t make you want to lie down in a ditch? But I’ll tell you, Greer: sometimes the work makes me want to lie down in a ditch.”
“Same, obviously.” She took a sip of her beer. “Do you wish you were somewhere else?”
I shook my head. “I do not.”
“Me either.” Greer smiled. “I know it’s so dorky, but you know what my family is like. Every single one of them went here. They literally put me in a Harvard onesie to bring me home from the hospital after I was born.” She ran her thumb over the mouth of the bottle. “Can I tell you something so fucking corny?”
“Cornier than the Harvard onesie?” I teased.
“Impressively, yes.” Greer wrinkled her nose. “It was so niceand fallish outside this afternoon that I put that old Cranberries song on my headphones and just, like, walked back and forth across campus a couple of times pretending I was in a movie.”
I burst out laughing, I couldn’t help it. “Oh yeah, that is really fucking corny.”
“Fuck you!” Greer punched me in the arm. “You like it.”
“I do,” I admitted, ducking my head a little closer. “I…yeah. I mean. You know I do.”
I was just about to ask her if she wanted to get out of here and head back to her suite when the kitchen door swung abruptly open and Hunter Hayes strolled through in a hoodie and a backward Whalers cap: “There you are,” he said when he spotted me. “I’ve been looking.”
“Well.” I winced. “Here I am.” Hunter was a senior forward, cocaptain of the lax team. Every time I looked at him I saw his entire future laid out before me like the battered game of Chutes and Ladders that lived in our entertainment unit when I was a kid: business school at Wharton, followed by a stint at an investment bank in Boston and a successful congressional run in the small Maine district where his dad was a wealthy real estate attorney. Two years after that, a scandal involving the nanny, his blond wife smiling tightly beside him as he stood at a podium and recommitted himself to family values.
“So I see,” he agreed now, baring his teeth at me. “Need you to go on a beer run.”
“Wait.” I frowned: if there was anything we had more than enough of at this party, it was alcohol. I could see at least half adozen twelve-packs of cans from where I was sitting, not to mention the scrum of bottles on the counter. “Seriously?”
“Seriously,” Hunter said cheerfully. “Always be prepared, am I right?” His gaze cut to Greer, his gaze sharpening just the slightest bit. “Unless, of course, you’re otherwise engaged.”
Greer made a face. I didn’t, but only because I didn’t want to take a cuff directly to the side of my head. I was used to this: it was the same for all the first-year lax players, the knowledge that you could be called upon at any moment to drop everything you were doing to run some inane, vaguely humiliating errand for an upperclassman—dropping off laundry, picking up foot cream at CVS. George Patel, another first-year, had spent the entirety of last weekend picking all the yellow Skittles out of an enormous bag from Costco because one of the senior defensemen swore they made his pee smell weird. It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, really. I’d been playing private-school sports since I was fourteen; I could take a little bit of hazing. In fact, there was a part of me that even welcomed the chance to show the rest of the team that I wasn’t about to crack under pressure.Look how stoically this guy scrubs toilets,I imagined them saying.Linden’s no whiny little flea, no sir.
Still, I couldn’t help but feel like something about it was different with Hunter—that he’d singled me out for a special kind of torture, like there was something about me specifically that had rubbed him the wrong way from the moment I’d stepped onto campus. He’d pissed in my cleats once, back in September. The previous Saturday he’d made me eat six Tasty Burgers in a row while he watched.
