“Were you?”
“No,” she admitted, leaning her head back against the wall. “He was. But I could have been.”
“Did he give you a reason?”
“Does it matter?”
“I—” I broke off, trying to think how to answer that. “Yes,” I said eventually, which was the truth even if I didn’t totally understand why.
Holiday looked at me for a long moment. Then she sighed. “He said I wasn’t in it,” she reported flatly.
“Meaning…”
“We got in this stupid fight,” she said, leaning her head back against the wall. “He was going to backpack through Europe for all of June and July, and he wanted me to go with him.”
I blinked. “Wow.” Holiday and I had spent the entire summer together, eating ice cream from Christina’s and watching the entirety of a sleepy PBS show she liked about a British veterinarian. She’d never mentioned she could have been sipping champagne at a café overlooking the Eiffel Tower and looking at artifacts stolen from colonized nations, or whatever people did on vacation abroad. “And you didn’t want to?”
“First of all,” Holiday said, “do I look to you for one second like a person who would enjoy backpacking anywhere? I don’t even like backpacking toschool.” She shook her head. “But also, it was my last summer before college, you know? I just…wanted to spend it here.” She shrugged. “Anyway, then it turned into this whole big thing about how he loved me more than I loved him and how I’d had one foot out the door ever since we started dating, like I was just biding my time waiting for—” She broke off. “Whatever. Something better to come along.”
“Were you?” I asked, the words coming out a little more quickly than I’d meant for them to.
Holiday shrugged one more time. “Maybe. I don’t know.” She crossed her arms. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore, Michael.”
“Why n—”
Holiday grabbed my elbow before I could get the question out, lifting her chin in the direction of the suite: Margot was headed down the hall toward the elevator, dressed in a puffy coat and a beanie, purse slung crosswise over her shoulder.
“Shit,” Holiday hissed. “There she goes.”
We scrambled to our feet, hustling down the stairs and bursting into the lobby just in time to see Margot disappear out the front door of Hemlock House. “This way,” Holiday said quietly, nodding at the side entrance.
We followed her at a distance through the Square and down into the T station, then inbound to Park Street, where she transferred to the Green Line toward Allston. “Are we going to BU?” Holiday asked as the train shrieked out of the tunnel and onto the aboveground trolley tracks, craning her neck to try to keep eyes on Margot in the next car down. “I wonder if she’s going to meet Emily. Is there a universe in whichEmilyis Boy Genius?” She frowned. “We should have brought disguises.”
“Sox hats and fake mustaches,” I agreed distractedly, peering over a businessman’s shoulder.
“Large Dunkin’ iced coffees.”
“I would love a large Dunkin’ iced coffee right now, actually.”
“You know you might as well be paying four dollars for a plastic cup of water with a little dust sprinkled in.”
“Also, cream and sugar—She’s getting off,” I interrupted myself, nodding as Margot stepped off the train and onto the platform. Holiday and I nearly took out a couple of old ladies in our hurry to follow, watching as Margot broke into a grin and wavedat someone across the street. She darted through the traffic on Comm Ave, flinging herself with wild abandon directly into the arms of—
“Oh, fuck me,” I said, stopping so short that Holiday crashed directly into my back.
“Who is that?” she hissed, peering over my shoulder. “The guy she’s kissing?”
“That’s James,” I said. “Margot’s cousin.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Holiday said, smacking me in the arm like I was joking, which I was emphatically not. Across the street Margot had popped up onto her tiptoes, her body pressed against James’s right there in the middle of the sidewalk. “Are you sure they’re real cousins? Maybe it’s like one of those things where they’re family friends but they call each other—”
“They’re real cousins,” I said grimly. “They were talking about their mean grandma when we were in Maine.”
“Well, then maybe it’s a WASP thing I just don’t know about?” she asked hopefully.
“Tongue kissing your blood relative by way of greeting?”
“Whatever,” Holiday said, a little defensive. “I don’t know your fucking Wonder Bread customs. The point is—”
