“Look,” I said as soon as we were close enough. “About—”
“I was tired,” Holiday interrupted with a wave of her hand, “and I listened toDear Evan Hansenright before I came to the party. You were totally fine.”
“Are you sure?” I asked uncertainly. “Because it definitely felt like—”
“Michael,”she said; I couldn’t tell if I was imagining the edge in her voice or not. “You’re good. Seriously. I would have done the same thing if you hadn’t gotten there first.”
“You would?” I asked, half a beat too quickly. “I mean, you would have—” I broke off.
Holiday looked suspicious all of a sudden, like possibly she thought I was setting some kind of trap for her. “Anyway,” she said instead of answering, “there’s something else I want to talk to you about. I was thinking when I got home last night: Why was that girl Noelle—”
“Linden!” Greer called. When I looked up she was ambling toward us along with the rest of her suitemates, all of them looking like something out of a promotional brochure from the Office of Undergraduate Admissions in their jeans and Harvard sweatshirts. “Hi!”
I introduced Holiday around as we met up with a couple of the guys from the lax team and a few other people from Hemlock, all of us climbing the tall stadium steps to our seats. “I’ve heard a lot about you,” Holiday told Greer, and though her tone was perfectly friendly, her smile wide, something about the way she said it had my gaze flicking nervously in her direction.
“You have?” Greer asked, glancing back at me sidelong. “How do you guys know each other?”
“We grew up together” was all Holiday said, then shaded her eyes with one hand as she peered down at the concession stand. “Anybody want lemonade?”
It was fun, the Harvard-Yale game, everybody in a celebratory, almost-Thanksgiving kind of mood; we cheered and swore and drank the party punch Margot had snuck into the stadium in a water bladder, Greer’s arm looped casually around my waist. We headed down the bleachers for popcorn at halftime, her phonepinging with a text as we waited in line: “Be right back,” she promised, though she hadn’t returned by the time I finished paying, and eventually I found her near the entrance gates, talking urgently to a girl in ripped black jeans and a flannel.
“Hey!” she said as I approached, taking the popcorn with a grateful smile. “You remember my cousin Emily, right?”
I didn’t, actually—I didn’t think we’d ever met, back at Bartley—though she did look weirdly familiar to me, with blond hair and a spray of freckles across her fair, angular face. “How’s it going?” I asked, holding my hand out. “You don’t go here, do you? Are you at Yale?”
“She’s at BU,” Greer reported.
“I am,” Emily agreed, eyes still on Greer, “although honestly we hardly ever see each other, since my cousin here can only be bothered to return like one out of every three texts.”
“Not true!” Greer protested, her mouth dropping open. “We see each other.”
Emily raised an eyebrow. “Do we, though?” she asked sweetly.
“We definitely do,” Greer said. Then, not quite under her breath: “We see each other plenty.”
I wasn’t sure whatthatmeant, exactly, though if Emily was anything like the rest of Greer’s family I could probably guess. “What are you studying?” I asked Emily, trying to change the subject. “At BU, I mean.”
Emily lifted her chin like a challenge. “As it happens, I’m undeclared.”
“Me too,” I admitted. “Although I like to think of it more as keeping my options open.”
We chatted a little while longer, about the game and about their family Thanksgiving, which their grandma was hosting back in Connecticut; I was just about to ask if they were driving down together when Holiday came up behind me and put a hand on my shoulder. “Hey,” she said over the roar of the crowd. “Can I borrow you for a sec?”
“Oh!” I said, surprised. Honestly, I’d almost forgotten Holiday was here: I wasn’t sure whether or not it had anything to do with what had happened the night before, but she’d kept her distance for most of the first half of the game, chatting with Dagny and Celine and Margot; I’d briefly clocked her talking to Li-Wen, a sophomore who lived in the same suite in Hemlock as Noelle and a couple of other girls from the crew team, then lost track of her again. “Sure.”
I promised Greer and Emily I’d catch up with them soon and followed Holiday through the crowd and down underneath the bleachers, blinking as my eyes adjusted to the dimness. The game was muffled down here, the air a full ten degrees colder. “Who was that girl you were talking to?” she asked. “The blond?”
For one utterly unhinged second I thought she was asking because she was jealous. “Greer’s cousin Emily,” I reported. “Why?”
“She looks familiar to me from someplace,” Holiday mused, tugging thoughtfully on the end of one dark curl, “but I don’t know where I would have seen her.”
“To me too, actually,” I admitted. “But yeah, I don’t know from where. She goes to BU, if that helps. Is that what you wanted to talk to me about?”
“No, actually.” Holiday shook her head. “Hunter’s not ourguy.”
“What the fuck?” I blinked, snagged by the suddenness of it. “Wait, how do you know that? How can you possibly know that?”
Holiday sighed. “So that’s what I was trying to tell you before the game started,” she said. “All last night, I was wondering what that girl Noelle was doing barging into Hunter’s room without knocking. You know, when she walked in on—” She waved a hand back and forth between us, blushing a little.
