“Hey!” he said; then, doing an actual, physical double take: “Holiday!” He shook his head, blushing a little. “Hey, Holiday.”
“Hey yourself,” Holiday said with a grin. “Duncan.”
“What’s up?” he asked. His smile was megawatt.
“Not much,” she replied. “Just heading to the T.”
“Me too!” he said immediately. “Well, not to the T, exactly, but—” He shook his head, looking momentarily confused by his own destination. “Can I walk with you?”
“Sure,” she said, already taking a step back toward the sidewalk. “That’d be great.” She lifted an eyebrow in my direction, almost imperceptible. “Bye, Michael.”
“Bye.” I managed not to roll my eyes, but barely. It wasn’t likeI didn’t understand why he was interested: Holiday was like that, the kind of girl people wanted to be around. Having her full attention felt like standing next to a space heater, warm and occasionally a little bit itchy. “I’ll let you know about a party!” I called pointedly, though I wasn’t sure either one of them would hear me.
“You do that!” Holiday yelled, without looking back.
11
Saturday, 11/23/24
“It’s cold as balls,” Holiday announced when I pushed the heavy door open and found her standing on the brick pathway outside my building two nights later, the wind blowing her hair around her face and her olive cheeks rosy in the glow of the sodium lights. “You ready to go?”
“Hey, Holiday!” Duncan piped up, stopping short right behind me. He’d trailed me downstairs like an Irish wolfhound when Holiday had texted to say she was here—he was ostensibly on his way to pick up food at Tasty Burger, though it was clear from the hopeful, hangdog expression on his face that that was in no way his actual intention. “You look great.”
I rolled my eyes as I jogged down the wide granite steps to join her, though I couldn’t help but notice that it wasn’t like Duncan waswrong.Holiday’s personal style usually skewed toward “forty-five-year-old mom from Huron Village”: big sweaters and clogs with enormous wooden soles and dresses that could most accurately be described as frocks, plus the occasional potato-sackjumpsuit. But she’d dressed the lax-house part tonight, in jeans and boots and a lacy top that was just this side of sheer; she’d done some girl business with her makeup that made her eyes look very dark. “Come on,” I said, clearing my throat and jerking my head toward the sidewalk. “We’re going this way.”
Holiday nodded. “Have a good night, Duncan!” she called, flashing her warmest smile over one perfumed shoulder. “Maybe we’ll see you later.”
“We will not,” I muttered, steering her in the opposite direction. Holiday ignored me.
It took fifteen minutes to walk to the lax house, the bustle of the Square fading behind us as the streets got quieter and more residential, the only sound the bare branches of the oak trees rubbing themselves together overhead. Holiday seemed quiet tonight too, none of her usual running patter about the latest woman playwright in residence at the Huntington or the Intro to Ceramics class she was considering signing up for at the CCAE. It was noticeable enough that finally I glanced over at her in the darkness: “Hey,” I said as we crossed an empty side street, “you okay?”
Holiday looked surprised. “Yeah,” she said quickly. “Yeah, totally.” Then, half a block later: “Can I ask you a question, though? Did something happen last night?”
I glanced at her blankly. “No, why?” Last night had been Friday; I’d gotten dinner with Greer at a ramen place near Central, then gone back to her suite and scrolled football scores on my phone for an hour while she and the other girls did Richard Gere pregame, some sad 2000s rom-com about a middle-aged couple doing ballroom dancing. The rest of them had gone to a partywhen it was over, but Greer had brought me back to her empty bedroom, locked the door, and let me take her bra off, which—while itwasthe first time that had happened since we’d started hanging out again—was probably not the kind of information Holiday was fishing for. “What would have happened?”
I—” Holiday broke off, then shook her head, turning to sidestep a giant root that had buckled the cobblestone sidewalk. “No, nothing. I just meant, like, Bri-wise.”
“Like, with Hunter, you mean?” I racked my brain, scrubbing for anything I might have missed. “No, I don’t think so. He’ll be here tonight, though, obviously.”
Holiday nodded. “Okay,” she said. “Well. Good.”
Somethingwas up, clearly, and I would have pressed her, but we were already turning onto the long front walk of the lax house. “Duncan was right, PS,” I muttered, leaning close to her ear as we climbed the slightly saggy steps to the porch. “You look nice.”
Holiday turned to look at me, her red slips slightly parted. Then she shook her head. “Don’t sound so surprised,” she said with a smirk. “Come on, let’s do this thing.”
The party was already cranking by the time I opened the front door, the bass from a Lizzo song rattling in my teeth before we even got all the way into the foyer. The lax house was an old Cambridge colonial, with a grand front hall and a formal dining room to one side, Christmas lights crisscrossing the coffered ceilings of the living room.
“There he is!” called Cam, who was sitting on the arm of the sagging leather couch with a Sam Winter in one hand and a joint in the other. “Where you been, Linden?”
Holiday squeezed my arm, already taking a step backward down the hallway that led to the kitchen. “Divide and conquer?” she asked quietly.
“Um, sure,” I agreed, a little surprised she was so eager to be left to her own devices in a house full of strangers, though probably I shouldn’t have been. No matter how long Holiday and I had known each other, it was always funny to me to watch her at parties—the way she eased equally effortlessly into conversations with sports bros and the daughters of Eastern European oligarchs, making fast friends with party girls and wallflowers alike. There was something utterly unselfconscious about her that people seemed instinctively drawn to—like out of everyone I knew, she was the only one who’d looked at the poster in kindergarten of the tabby cat in sunglasses that saidBe Yourselfand actually taken the advice to heart. Holiday was Holiday, no matter her circumstances. Wherever she went, there she was. It made me a little jealous sometimes, honestly; it felt like there was probably less to remember that way. It freed up the space for her to be so smart about everything else.
I grabbed a beer from an open box on the dining room table and lost her in the crowd for a little while, getting waylaid by a men’s rights conspiracy theorist from my International Women Writers class and then distracted by two sophomores improvising a game of pickleball out in the backyard. I was just headed back toward the dining room when Hunter appeared from the direction of the grimy downstairs bathroom and slung a slightly too-rough arm around my shoulders. “Hey, pally,” he said. He nodded across the room to where Holiday was perched on the edge of a radiatorcover, holding forth with one of our midfielders, a student from Germany who, as far as I could tell, had never said a single word to anyone else. “Who’s your friend?”
“That’s Holiday,” I reported, feeling my entire body coil. “She doesn’t go here.”
“No kidding,” Hunter said with a grin. “I would have noticed.”
