“Oh yeah,” Greer said with a laugh, “you’re embarking on a regular hero’s journey out there.”
“I am.” I stepped cautiously between her knees, dropping my hands lightly onto her denim-covered thighs and hoping my touch was more welcome to her than Hunter’s had been. “Who knows what could happen to me?”
“Who knows,” Greer echoed, her full mouth twisting in amusement. She always wore cherry ChapStick, Greer; she kept tubes of it everywhere, in her coat pockets and desk drawers and in the zippered compartment of the vintage neon Jansport she’d carried back at Bartley. After we broke up I found one in the pocket of my favorite jeans, though not before I’d put them through the dryer and melted bright pink wax onto almost every article of clothing I owned.
“Linden,” she said now, peeling my hands off her legs, lacing her fingers through mine.
“Greer.”
Just for a second, she leaned forward; I closed my eyes like an instinct, but in the end she just used me for leverage, sliding neatly off the counter and slipping past me in the direction of the living room. “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”
“Yeah,” I promised, swallowing down a warm-beer gulp of disappointment. It had been like this since we’d first started hanging out again, a tacit push-pull I wasn’t quite sure how to read. It wasn’t that Greer didn’t seem interested, exactly. It was more like she was holding me off just to see if I’d wait. “See you tomorrow.”
Outside, it was purple-dark and chilly, the wind rustling the branches of the oak trees overhead. Six blocks away, there was a corner deli that sold beer and reliably didn’t look too hard at IDs, which was important, since mine said I was a twenty-six-year-old organ donor from Raynham named Danylo Rukaj. I headed in that direction, then stopped and glanced back at the lax house for a moment, squinting at the yellow light glowing behind the curtains and listening to the party going on without me. Then I pulled up my collar and set off.
2
Friday, 10/18/24
The sun was just stretching its arms over the tops of the academic buildings when my alarm went off the following morning. I had a real first-year kind of schedule, with eight a.m. classes every single morning of the week; on Fridays it was International Women Writers with Professor McMorrow, who was youngish and palpably brilliant, with a strict no-bullshit policy and a nose like a blade. The second week of class, some finance major with a two-hundred-dollar haircut had jumped in with a question that wasreally more of a commentabout what he described asthe wokening of the Ivy League,and I’d watched her take him out so cleanly she might as well have been a resistance sharpshooter in 1942 Paris. Something about her reminded me of my mom, actually, if my mom had gone to graduate school at Yale and Oxford instead of meeting my dad smoking a cigarette outside the Cantab in the spring of 2003.
“Nice work today, Michael,” the professor said as I headed out the door of the lecture hall. “But don’t forget to message me to set up a meeting, okay?”
I nodded. McMorrow was also my academic advisor, which meant that, per the email that had gone out to all first-year students at the beginning of the semester, I was supposed to have already scheduled a time to go to her office for a heart-to-heart about picking a major and fitting into the Harvard community and, presumably, what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wasn’t sure why I kept putting it off, except for the fact that I didn’t have answers to any of those questions, and one thing about theHarvard communitywas that everyone else decidedly did. “I will,” I promised. “I’ll do it tonight.”
I had another class in a different building immediately after that one, and by the time it was done I was starving, so I grabbed a Snickers bar from one of the vending machines and ate it in two big bites, dry leaves crunching under my sneakers as I crossed campus toward Hemlock House. Greer’s dorm was vintage Harvard, a big old brick building with a slate roof and a dozen chimneys, all narrow hallways and windows that didn’t open properly and a geriatric elevator of questionable repute. I’d seen three different mice—at least, Ithoughtthey were three different mice; I suppose it could have been one particularly industrious mouse on three different occasions—in the handful of times I’d been inside.
My key card didn’t give me access to any dorm other than my own, but a girl in jeans and a cable knit sweater held the front door open for me as she was leaving—an unsmiling blond who looked vaguely familiar, though I wasn’t sure from where. I’d met a lot of people during orientation back at the beginning of the semester, when every social interaction felt like it began with someone in a brightly colored T-shirt announcing a game of Two Truthsand a Lie (I’m originally from East Boston, I’m allergic to apples, two summers ago I helped solve a murder; no, I’m not allergic to apples). Since then I’d mostly hung out with the guys I knew from the lax team—and, more recently, with Greer.
She lived on the fourth floor of Hemlock, in a six-person suite made up of three doubles surrounding a small common space with a bathroom and a kitchenette. The girls usually kept the main door propped open with a book or a shower shoe wedged underneath it, and I knocked twice before I let myself inside. “Hey!” I called, breathing in the same burned-popcorn smell that all the suites had, cut by a faint whiff of hair product and a cupcake-scented plug-in. The common room was empty, somebody’s crusty bowl of mac and cheese sitting forlornly on the coffee table. “Are you here?”
“Um, hi!” Greer called from the direction of her bedroom, her voice pitched a little higher than normal. “Yeah.”
“Hey,” I said again, heading down the dimly lit hallway. Greer’s room—her side of it, at least—reminded me a lot of the one she’d lived in back at Bartley: thoughtfully considered and immaculately tidy, the bed made up with an antique quilt from Etsy and a Mark Rothko poster tacked neatly to the wall above the desk. Toni Morrison andThe Tempestlined the bookshelf alongside a couple of the frothy, brightly covered romances Greer didn’t like to admit she read, a vintage Polaroid camera serving as a bookend. The photos themselves were tucked into a ribbon board beside the bed, Greer with her parents in front of the big Christmas tree in New York City and a close-up of Bri at last year’s spring formal, her red lips puckered like Marilyn Monroe’s. Sweaters hung neatly in thecloset. Jewelry hung neatly on hooks.A place for everything,I could almost hear Greer’s mother telling her.Everything in its place.
Well. That was how it usually looked.
“Whoa,” I said now, stopping short in the doorway. The whole room was a mess, the floor strewn with books and burrito wrappers and party clothes, like a panicky ghost had ransacked the wardrobe before dashing outside stark naked for a night of haunting. The drawers were all hanging open. The trash can had been overturned. “What happened?”
Greer shook her head. “I have no idea,” she said, looking around at the damage. She was standing in the center of the room, holding a T-shirt she must have randomly scooped off the floor, her expression bewildered. “I just got back from class and it was like this.” She rolled her eyes. “Probably Bri looking for her last party pill she thought she dropped somewhere, let’s be honest with ourselves.”
“Really?” I asked, unconvinced. The room did notseemto me like it had been tossed by Bri looking for her last party pill she thought she dropped somewhere, but it didn’t seem immediately wise to say that out loud. “Is anything, like, missing?”
“I mean—” Greer looked around a little uncertainly, seeming to falter for a moment. “I don’t think so?”
“Do you want me to get the RA?”
“What?No.” She shook her head, coming back to herself, though the color was still high in her cheeks. “What for, to tell her that Bri is a slob? It’s fine. I’ll make her buy me brunch this weekend, that’s all.”
“Okay,” I said, gingerly setting my backpack down on the floor in the hallway, feeling pretty sure that there was more going on here than Greer was saying but not exactly sure what it might be. Girls could be kind of animals sometimes, I knew that about them. One time back at Bartley I’d seen a pair of roommates send each other to the ER. “Well, I can help you pick it up, at least.”
“Are you sure?” Greer asked, frowning a little. “You definitely don’t have to.”
“No, of course,” I said quickly. “Are you kidding? I’m about to spend my entire weekend scouring the grout at the lax house with a Magic Eraser. This is nothing.”
That made her smile. “Okay,” she agreed. “If you’re sure.”
“Greer,” I said softly. “I’m sure.”
