Greer’s expression was supremely unimpressed. “He…does not have a rich inner life,” she continued, as if I hadn’t spoken. “And he, like, did not take it great, so you’ll have to forgive me if it’s not the story I like to lead with when I’m talking to”—she waved a hand in my general direction—“potential suitors.”
That stopped me, the skin on my lower back prickling as I thought about Oliver’s busted tooth. All at once, I forgot I was pissed. “What do you mean, he didn’t take it great?”
Greer shrugged inside her sweatshirt, tugging the scarf more tightly around her. “You’ve met him,” she said, like that should have been enough of an explanation. “It wasn’t a big deal. He just said a bunch of nasty stuff, that’s all. Left a couple of choice comments on my Instagram. Real charmer.” Greer sighed then, holding her hands out like,What do you want from me?“In case it wasn’t abundantly clear, Linden, I’m already not having the best week of my entire life. And I have to study if I don’t want to wind up commuting to Western Connecticut State University for spring semester, so.” Her eyes filled with tears behind her glasses. “Fuck off, okay?”
Right away, I felt like the biggest asshole who’d ever lived. “I’m sorry,” I said, reaching for her—pulling her out of her chair and wrapping my arms around her, ignoring the exaggerated sigh of Irritated Laptop Girl one carrel over. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m being a weirdo.”
“Youreallyare,” Greer agreed, but she let me hold her—her body deflating a little as she wrapped her arms around my neck and hung there for a moment, letting me take her weight. “It sucked, okay?” she mumbled into my chest, her voice muffled against my hoodie. “The whole thing with Hunter.”
“I hear you,” I said quietly. “We don’t have to—I mean, your business is your business. I didn’t mean to, like, pry.”
“Thank you,” she said—or that was what it sounded like, anyway; I was momentarily distracted by Laptop Girl slamming her computer shut and huffing off into the dimly lit stacks. “I appreciate that.”
“I gotta say, though,” I ventured, smoothing my palms over thewarm cotton of Greer’s sweatshirt, breathing in her cherry ChapStick smell, “I don’t really think I qualify as apotentialsuitor at this point.”
Greer snorted. “Oh no?” she asked, pulling back and tilting her face up to look at me. “Then what are you, exactly?”
I shrugged inside her arms. “You tell me.”
Greer seemed to consider that. For a second it seemed like she might be about to soften; for a second it even seemed like she might be about to kiss me, but in the end she just smiled and ducked neatly out of my grip. “I don’t think I will,” she said sweetly, then turned to collect her textbooks, sliding her stuff back into her bag. “Come on,” she said, slinging it over her shoulder and lacing her fingers through mine, tugging me toward the staircase. “Let’s go get something to eat.”
9
Thursday, 11/7/24
“It’s not that I’mjealous,” I insisted on Thursday, slurping dejectedly at an iced coffee even though the temperature was close to freezing. “I mean, Hunter can barely walk upright. He thinks Audre Lorde is a flavor of Muscle Milk. I’m notintimidatedby him. I just don’t get why Greer wouldn’t have mentioned it, you know? Like, if it’s really over, if it really wasn’t a big deal, then why wouldn’t she have just said— Are you listening?”
“Nope!” Holiday said brightly. It had taken almost the whole week to find a time we could meet, and we’d finally caught up at a coffee shop in Central, a hipster place with mismatched mugs and the kind of ratty, sagging couches that always made me worry I was going to pick up bedbugs. Holiday had no such qualms, apparently, dropping herself down onto the cushions with such abandon that her cup overflowed, its weedy-smelling contents sloshing down onto her arm and into the sleeve of her sweater. It looked hand-knit, gray with a bunch of tiny white pom-poms on it. “Although I can’t help but observe that for a person who was soanxious to get to crime-solvin’ he wanted me to give up my very expensive theater tickets last weekend, you seem to be having an awfully hard time focusing.”
“Fair enough,” I admitted, stuffing a bite of scone into my mouth. “Let’s get started.”
Holiday nodded briskly. “Let’s.” She bent down and pulled her notebook out of her bag, a thick, wide-ruled tome with her name embossed in gold on the cover. She’d had some variation on that notebook as long as I’d known her; she’d probably been the only elementary schooler in Cambridge with a monogrammed assignment pad from FranklinCovey. She always wrote in bright purple pen. “What do we know about Bri?”
“Not a ton,” I confessed, parroting back the stuff she’d told me in the living room of the lax house the night of the party, the slivers of knowledge I’d gleaned from Greer. I thought back to the last time Holiday and I had done this, sitting across from each other in a coffee shop on Martha’s Vineyard. Our suspect list then had been enormous—our victim had gone through life as if he was trying specifically to piss people off whenever possible. But Bri hadn’t been like that. Judging from the remembrances of her in theCrimson—to hear Greer and Dagny talk about it, you’d have thought it was a total hit job, but actually most of it was quite nice and sincere—most people had liked her a lot. “I think we should probably start by trying to find her dealer,” I concluded finally. “Somebody in the suite will know who it was, I’m pretty sure. All six of them were like, super close.”
“Are you sure?” Holiday asked. “How much time have you spent in that suite?”
“A good amount,” I defended myself. “And it isn’t some, like,Mean Girlsthing. They’re all best friends.”
“I’m not saying they’re mean girls,” Holiday countered, in a voice like she was making fun of me a little but hoping I wouldn’t notice. “But everyone has enemies.”
“Even you?”
“Well, no, notme,” Holiday admitted, batting her eyelashes across the coffee table. “Everybody likes me. But I’m a special case.”
“You’re something,” I muttered. “I will give you that much.”
Holiday had me pull up Bri’s social media accounts, which had already turned into morbid digital memorials, and we scrolled back as far as we could before working our way forward again: Bri in high school with her softball team, Bri experimenting with blond highlights at the prom. Most of the pictures from the last year or so were of her with the girls from the suite: Bri and Dagny apple picking, Bri and Keiko and Celine dressed up for freshman formal. All six of them mugging in front of Hemlock House on move-in day this past August.
“They look like sisters,” Holiday observed, peering over my shoulder. She’d settled herself onto the couch beside me so we could look at the phone together, a lock of her hair brushing the side of my cheek. “Bri and Greer, I mean.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “They kind of do.” I hadn’t paid that much attention to it before, but all at once I couldn’t unsee it: the hair and eyes, sure, but also the way they held themselves. Even their bone structure was kind of similar.
“Hang on,” Holiday said, batting my hand out of the way to look at the picture more closely, then straightening up and turningto face me. “You said Bri was in Greer’s bed when you found her, right?”
“Yeah.” I frowned. “Why?”
“And she was wearing Greer’s clothes.” She took the phone from my hand and scrolled back to the last photo in Bri’s feed—maybe the last photo of her, period. “That green tank top, right? You said it was Greer’s?”
