Right after Greer’s room had been trashed.
13
Monday 11/25/24–Friday 11/29/24
I barely slept that night, or the one that came after it. I kept replaying my conversation with Greer in my head, wondering how I could have handled it differently. I kept replaying the other night in Hunter’s room.
I dozed off in International Women Writers on Tuesday morning, I couldn’t help it; I woke up just as the lecture was wrapping, startling to alertness as my classmates packed their things all around me. I swallowed down the stale, sticky taste in my mouth, slinging my backpack over my shoulder and trying to sneak out of the hall as unobtrusively as possible.
No such luck: “Michael,” Professor McMorrow called just as I was heading through the door, “hang on a minute, will you?”
I bit my tongue, barely suppressing a visible wince. This was the last conversation I was ready to have, especially now; all I wanted to do was shuffle back to Eastie, stuff myself full of turkey and sleep for four full days. “I know,” I said once the classroom was empty, more sharply than I meant to. “I owe you a meeting.”
McMorrow nodded. “You do, although actually I just wanted to pull you aside to ask you, going forward, to find another venue to catch up on your Zs.”
“Uh, yeah.” I winced. “Sorry about that.”
“I understand you’ve had a lot going on,” she continued. “I’m not sure if you got my email about your friend Bri, but—”
“I did,” I said, remembering with a sudden surge of irritation the way everyone on campus had tried to pump me for information after she died. “It just wasn’t really something I wanted to talk about.”
McMorrow nodded. “Fair enough,” she said. “But all first-years do need to meet with their advisor before the end of the semester, and in terms of registering for your classes for the spring, it would be good for us to sit down and—”
“Let’s just have it now,” I interrupted. “The meeting, I mean. I have no idea what classes I want to take next semester. I have no idea what I want my major to be. I have no idea about a lot of things, honestly, including what I’m doing here most days, so I don’t know that it makes a ton of sense for us to schedule something just to sit and waste each other’s time.”
“Well.” McMorrow’s eyebrows twitched. “I’m sorry to hear that you’re struggling. That’s all the more reason for—”
“I’m notstruggling,” I said, weirdly offended by the suggestion. “I just—” I broke off. I justwhat,exactly? I just completely alienated my girlfriend by spending the last three weeks on a murder investigation that probably isn’t even legitimate? I just kissed my best friend in a panicky attempt at an undercover operation and now she won’t look me in the eye? All at once it occurred to methat I was flailing. All at once it occurred to me that I was way out of line. “I’m sorry,” I said, holding my hands up. “That wasn’t— I shouldn’t have—”
“Michael,” McMorrow said, and her voice was surprisingly gentle. “Are you sure you don’t want to talk?”
“I’ll email you,” I promised—hands still up, taking two giant steps back toward the doorway. “We’ll set something up.”
I bailed out of the lecture hall before she could reply.
The dorms closed for Thanksgiving break at noon on Wednesday, my classmates grumbling good-naturedly about traffic or the crowds at airport on the busiest travel days of the year. For my part I packed up a duffel and took the T back home to Eastie, trying not to feel sorry for myself. Normally, Thanksgiving was my favorite holiday; in fact, it had always been kind of a special thing for my mom and me, the two of us making a gross-but-delicious green bean casserole and watching the dog show on TV, then driving down to Revere Beach to watch the sunset and eat pie in the car while listening to Christmas carols on Lite FM. We did all those things this year too, but none of it felt especially festive. I couldn’t stop thinking about Greer, the accusing look in her eyes under the bleachers at the football game.
Also, I couldn’t stop thinking about Holiday.
I’d texted to tell her what I suspected about Emily, and she’d agreed it was worth looking into, though it wasn’t totally clearhow to do that when Greer wasn’t speaking to me and we didn’t know Emily’s last name. We found one promising profile among Greer’s Instagram followers, EmilyBoo42, but the account was set to private and the avatar pic was a screenshot of Miss Piggy in an evening gown.
Neither one of us had mentioned the kiss again.
“So, obviously I recognize that you’d rather fling yourself directly into the Mystic River than talk to me about girl stuff,” my mom said finally, tucking one leg underneath her in the driver’s seat and taking a bite of her pie, “but you know I’m here to listen if you want.” She held her hand out. “Switch.”
“You’re right,” I said, passing her my big plastic clamshell. My mom was a good baker, but she hated to do it, so we always got two different pies from Market Basket and ate them whole without bothering to slice them; I’d picked pumpkin every single year since I was seven, but for her part she liked to mix it up. This year she’d gotten banana cream. “I’d rather die.” I licked the back of my fork—the bananas were a little gloopy, but not necessarily in a bad way. “Also, what makes you think I’m having girl trouble?”
My mother eyed me across the gear shift. “Aren’t you?”
I spent that night and the better part of the following morning on the ancient Bernie & Phyl’s sofa in our living room, watching a Lord of the Rings marathon on cable even though I’ve never entirely been able to follow the plot of Lord of the Rings. “That’s because Lord of the Rings is excruciatingly boring,” my mom explained when I mentioned it to her, padding through the living room with a basket of laundry on one hip. “Inevitably, you fallasleep and miss something, but you don’t realize that’s what happened because every scene looks exactly the same.”
I was opening my mouth to agree when the doorbell rang downstairs. “It’s me,” Holiday said, when I hit the button on the staticky old intercom. When I opened the door a moment later she was standing on the other side of it in leggings and a pair of filthy Ugg boots she’d had since eighth grade. “Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” I said cautiously. Her expression was perfectly normal, but I didn’t know if that was because she wasfeelingperfectly normal or because she was still mad at me for kissing her and trying to act like she wasn’t. “How was Thanksgiving?”
“My mom doesn’t believe in Thanksgiving,” Holiday reminded me, skirting past me into the living room. “We do a land acknowledgment and then she goes to the outlet mall in Wrentham.” She shrugged, holding up a paper bag from Spinelli’s. “I brought lunch.”
“You always have been a girl after my own heart,” my mom said, coming into our tiny foyer and dropping a kiss on Holiday’s cheek. “Hi, honey. Michael, take her coat, will you?”
