I scowled. “She has a boyfriend,” I lied, then immediately regretted it. It was weird behavior on my part; Holiday would have handed me my ass if she’d overheard, and she would have been right to do so. But seriously, what was the deal with everyone sniffing around her tonight? It was like nobody had ever seen a girl before. “So. You’re out of luck, probably.”
Hunter shrugged likeWhat can you do?before trotting off a moment later, presumably to direct his romantic attention elsewhere or burp into someone’s unsuspecting face, one or the other. With Hunter, there was really no way to tell.
I weaved my way through the crowd until I caught Holiday’s eye. “Enjoying yourself?” I asked, tugging her into the old telephone nook under the stairs.
“I am, actually.” She smiled at me. “The parties have a different vibe at my school.”
I glanced down the hallway, wondering what she made of this place. The lax house wasn’t grungy, exactly—somebody’s dad paid for a cleaning service that came in every week—but it was still unequivocally a place where a bunch of dudes ate and farted and jerked off all day, all of them under one roof. I tried to imagine Holiday’s art school parties at people’s Beacon Hill apartments decorated like the sets for a Wes Anderson movie, all velvet sofasand clever wallpaper, everyone eating cheese cubes and drinking wine from stemless glasses. All of them talking about Marcel Duchamp. “More Sartre?”
“I mean, no, but it’s nice to know that’s how you imagine us.” She tilted her head toward the kitchen. “Come on,” she said. “I scoped out a back staircase off the kitchen.”
We made it to the second floor unnoticed; I followed Holiday down the long, dim hallway, the hardwood creaking a little ominously under our feet. The walls were hung with faded photos of the lax teams from back in the ’80s and ’90s: dozens of mostly indistinguishable white guys with Tom Cruise hair and short shorts and a palpable air of self-satisfaction I tried not to recognize too closely. Was this how people would see me in thirty years? I couldn’t help but wonder. Shit, was this how people saw menow?
“Which one is Hunter’s?” Holiday asked, snapping me back into the present. She motioned to the half-dozen doors that lined the hallway, but I shook my head.
“I have no idea, actually.”
“Seriously?” She turned to look at me. “How can you not know?”
“I’ve never been up here,” I admitted. “Only upperclassmen are technically allowed upstairs.”
“For the sex parties?”
“Nah, we usually do those in the basement.”
“For ease of cleanup,” Holiday agreed without missing a trick. “Silly me.”
I stood back as she knocked lightly on one door after another, easing them open and nosing around inside until she found ampleevidence of their occupants. “What are you going to say if somebody is actually in one of these?” I asked her, glancing nervously over my shoulder in the direction of the stairs.
“That my tampon failed and I’m having a period emergency and I was looking for somewhere private to scrub out my underwear,” Holiday said pleasantly. “What areyougoing to say?”
I considered that for a moment. “I mean, same, probably.”
Holiday rolled her eyes. “Here we go,” she said finally, slipping catlike through a door at the end of the hallway, a corner room with windows on two walls and a gray Ikea rug spread across the scuffed wood floors. Hunter’s practice jersey was slung—unwashed, from the smell of it—over the footboard of the bed. “Now we’re talking.”
I checked the staircase one more time, then stepped in behind her and looked around: a navy-blue quilt and a surprising amount of hair product, a sleek desktop Mac with two monitors sitting on the desk. “Do people still like Vampire Weekend?” I wondered, peering at the posters on the wall with sincere curiosity. “Like, is that a thing?”
“I’m truly the wrong person to ask,” Holiday said, making a beeline for the desk. “My most listened-to artist on Spotify last year was Natalie Merchant.” She slid the drawers open one by one, poking gingerly through their contents and muttering to herself.
I stood there and watched her for a moment, her lips pursed and her brow furrowed, before catching myself staring and turning abruptly away. I opened the closet door, taking in Hunter’s truly impressive collection of Patagonia quarter-zip fleeces, the New Balance sneakers in every color and style. It looked—well, itlooked kind of like the inside of my closet, actually, and I glanced over at Holiday, hoping she hadn’t noticed.
“Anything useful in there?” she asked, looking at me perfunctorily over one shoulder. “Beyond the fact that you guys evidently have the same personal shopper, I mean.”
“Fuck off,” I muttered. It wasn’t like I cared what Holiday thought of my clothes, exactly. Still, I couldn’t help but think of what she’d said that day on the bank of the river, about only hanging out with people who were just like me. “You find anything?”
Holiday shook her head, flicking through a little wire basket next to the computer. “Birthday greeting from Grandma,” she reported. “T pass. Gift card to Buffalo Wild Wings.” She frowned. “Where is there a Buffalo Wild Wings around here?”
I rolled my eyes. “Holiday—”
“I’m just saying, could be a clue.”
“It’s not a clue,” I said. “Can you just—”
Holiday tutted. “I gotta tell you, Michael,” she observed, turning her attention to the nightstand, “I don’t feel like you’re finding me as charming tonight as you could be.”
“I find you, as always, extremely charming,” I assured her, glancing nervously in the direction of the closed door. I wasn’t sure how long we’d been up here, but it felt like we had to be pushing our luck. “I just don’t want to get caught.”
“We’re not going to—Hang on,” Holiday said, still crouched over the nightstand drawer. “Oh, shit.”
