“Nobody’s forcing you to do any of this, Holiday.” My face felt like it was on fire. “Excuse me for thinking we were friends, I guess.”
“Friends?”Holiday echoed, barking out a sharp little laugh. “You think we’re friends.”
I frowned. “What are you— Of course we’re friends.”
Holiday planted her feet. “Who’s my roommate, Michael?”
“What?”
“My roommate. At college. What’s her name?”
I opened my mouth, then closed it again, racking my memory for some identifying detail. She must have mentioned it at some point. Chiara? Liz?
Holiday watched me wriggle for a moment before she finally shook her head. “I can see you’re trying to remember,” she said. “But it’s not in your brain. I’ve never told you, because you’ve never asked. You’ve never asked about my roommate, or what classes I’m taking, or if I even like my program. For all you know I’ve dropped out of theater school entirely to study business at Northeastern, hoping to get a job selling mortgages when I graduate.”
“I mean,” I said. “At the very least, I’m pretty sure that’s not true.”
Holiday blew out a noisy breath. “The point is, if we were actually friends, all that stuff would have come up naturally in conversation. But it hasn’t, because we’re not. We’renot !” It came out almost like a wail. “I’m just…a person who helps you solve shit. I’m like an extremely useful piece of office equipment to you. I’m an iPhone, but with breasts and an encyclopedic knowledge of the work of Stephen Sondheim.”
“I ask you questions,” I protested. “I asked you about why you and Evan broke up literally like two hours ago.”
“Oh, well, in that case,” Holiday scoffed. “One question about my failed relationship six months after the fact makes up for all the rest of it, I guess.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that, exactly. It felt like wadinginto a swamp filled with alligators. “We’ve been distracted,” I said finally. “The start of freshman year, not to mention everything else that’s been going on—”
But Holiday wasn’t buying. “I would have shown up for you,” she says. “Ialwaysshow up for you. And I can’t keep doing it, telling myself it’s fine, that we have fun together, that it’s enough. Like, just hanging around some college I don’t even go to, waiting for you to suddenly—” She broke off, her expression stricken.
“Waiting for me to what?” My voice was very quiet.
“Forget it.”
“Waiting for me towhat,Holiday?” It felt like I was at the top of a tall building with no guardrails, looking over the edge a hundred stories down.
Holiday shook her head. “To wake up one day and suddenly be the kind of friend that I deserve.”
“Bullshit,” I told her flatly. “That’s not what you were going to say. And it’s the second time today you’ve started a sentence like that and then refused to finish it, so I don’t think you’re really in a position to be telling me what kind of interest I take or don’t take in your—”
“See, this is why I didn’t want to talk to you about this.” Holiday cut me off, eyes flashing. “Because your ego is so fragile that like, any kind of feedback—”
“Feedback?”I echoed. “Is that what you call what’s happening right now?”
“I’m not even saying anything mean, Michael! On top of which, I’m not even saying anythingnew.Our whole lives, our entire friendship has been on your terms.”
“Onmyterms? You are unequivocally the boss of me, Holiday.”
“If you think that, you’re even stupider than you look.”
Oh, I didn’t like that. “Maybe we shouldn’t be hanging out so much, then. You said it yourself, right? This is a city full of new people. Maybe both of us could stand to go meet some.”
Holiday pressed her full lips together. I hadn’t seen her cry in almost a decade, and for a second it almost looked like she was about to, but in the end she only lifted her chin like a queen. “Maybe we could,” she agreed. “I’ll see you around, Michael.”
“Great,” I agreed. “See you around.”
18
Thursday, 12/5/24–Friday, 12/6/24
The problem with having a knock-down, drag-out, friendship-ending fight with someone at the BU East stop on the Green Line when you live downtown and in Harvard Square, respectively: it makes storming off kind of a nonstarter. Holiday and I waited at opposite ends of the platform for the train to come, but when it finally chugged into sight it was only a single trolley car long, and enormously crowded. The front door was the only one to open.
