“I can get my own coat,” Holiday told me.
“I know,” I said, and took it anyway.
“So what’s up?” I asked, once we’d eaten our sandwiches and Holiday had gamely answered my mom’s ten thousand questions about college. I led her down the narrow hallway to my room and shut the door behind me, then thought twice and opened it again. “Did you come up with something?”
Holiday looked at me a little weirdly. “What do you mean?”
“Did you—” I broke off. “I mean, about Emily.”
“No,” she said. Her eyes narrowed. “Why?”
“No, no reason,” I said too quickly. “I mean, I just figured you came over to tell me something. About…Emily.”
“No,” Holiday said again, crossing her arms warily. She was wearing a purple hoodie withEmerson College Football: Undefeated Since 1880printed across the front. “I just came over to…come over.”
“Okay,” I said, wincing at the awkwardness of it. Fuck, why was this so hard all of a sudden? All summer it had been totally normal, but now—“Well, good. I’m glad you did.”
“Okay.”
We were silent for a moment. Holiday glanced around my room. That summer we’d spent most of our time out in the city or over at her house, and I didn’t think she’d been in here in six or seven years at least. “Animorphs,” she observed, gazing at the pictures taped to the wall behind my computer. “Very nice.”
“Fuck off,” I said with a grin. Once I’d moved into the dorms at Bartley I’d more or less curated my entire identity like some kind of monthly subscription box, surrounding myself with items that matched the tastes of the person I was trying to be: arty, minimalist movie posters I’d ordered off the internet and fancy soap from the obnoxious general store in Great Barrington. Here I hadn’t bothered with any of that, so the whole aesthetic was frozen in middle-school purgatory. “Anyway, that’s nothing. Wait until we revisit my extensive collection of manga.”
In the end we wound up sitting on the floor and playing Catan for a full hour while 96.9 played Boston’s Best Throwbacks on the Mickey Mouse clock radio I’d had since I learned to tell time.It was weirdly fun, both of us expanding our road networks and shit-talking each other’s resource production. It reminded me of when we were little kids and my mom would set us up with some kind of project, mixing up a batch of morning glory muffins from a crunchy kids’ cookbook she’d gotten in the used books basement at Harvard Book Store or bringing her all the things we could find in Holiday’s backyard that started with the letterL.It reminded me of how I’d felt at the end of the day back at Bartley, when I could finally take off my coat and tie.
The afternoon passed, gray winter light filtering in through the window. My mom made us a bowl of popcorn sprinkled with nutritional yeast. My aunt Rose called from Cincinnati to wish us a happy Thanksgiving, which she’d forgotten to do the day before because she’d been the on-call nurse in the emergency room, and my mom’s laughter echoed down the hall as they talked.
“Did you hear from your dad?” Holiday asked quietly, rolling the dice on the matted carpet. “Yesterday, I mean?”
I snorted. “No.” My dad hadn’t called in ages. Last I knew, he was living outside Denver with a girlfriend who usually tucked some cash into my birthday cards before signing them on his behalf, but it was possible they’d broken up because I hadn’t gotten one of those in a couple of years. It didn’t really bother me that much, except when it did.
“Well, that sucks,” Holiday said, setting a development card down on the carpet. “I’m sorry. And I’m sorry about Greer too.”
“No you’re not.”
“Excuse you.” Right away, her head snapped up. “What’sthatsupposed to mean?”
“Relax,” I said quickly, holding both hands out. “I just mean—I know you didn’t think she was, like. Expanding my personal horizons, or whatever.”
“Youdon’t expandmypersonal horizons, and I like you fine.”
“Fuck you!” I said with a laugh. “I’m at fuckin’ Harvard. I’m a genius, as far as you’re concerned.”
“Fuck you,” she echoed fondly. “I’m kidding. I think you are a genius, actually. Or you could be, if you wanted it bad enough.”
“And you don’t think I want it bad enough?”
Holiday looked at me for a long moment. “No,” she said finally, and her voice was so quiet. “I don’t think you do.” She cleared her throat. “Why did you guys break up? The first time, I mean.”
I glanced at her a little sharply; we’d never talked about it, and I hesitated, wondering exactly how much I wanted to tell her. “Things got kind of weird after the accident. She was, uh. The one driving the car, so.”
“Oh.”Holiday’s eyes widened, though I could tell she was trying not to react. “I…didn’t know that.”
“I don’t talk about it that much.” I hardly ever talked about it at all, actually, to Holiday or to anyone else—one, because every time I thought about it I wound up pissed-off and cranky, and two, because Greer and I had lied to everyone at Bartley about what we were doing when it happened, and in my experience the best way to keep a lie straight was not to talk about it in the first place. Still, Holiday sat silently, ankles crossed on the carpet; both of us knew she was waiting me out, and both of us knew it would eventually work.
“The rules about cars at Bartley are weird,” I explained finally.“Seniors are allowed to have them, but it’s this complicated thing where you’re not really like, supposed to take them very far unless you’re driving home for a break? Like, they’re called town privileges, but that’s it.” I shrugged. “Anyway, the night of the accident we told everyone we went to see a movie at the second-run theater.”
“But you didn’t.”
