I sighed noisily and shuffled into line behind her, getting a whiff of her hair for my trouble as I tapped my card and smushed myself into the three square inches of available standing room. Holiday didn’t say anything, so I didn’t either; both of us seethed in silence for ten excruciating stops until finally we got to Park Street and I shoved my way off. When I looked back through the window, I couldn’t find her in the crush of commuters.
A bunch of guys from the lax team had gotten tickets to the Celtics game that evening, but I wasn’t in the mood to hang outwith anyone. Instead, I spent the rest of the night in my room, pretending to study and trying not to think about Duncan and Holiday sitting in the plush darkness of a theater across the river, whispering about what a philistine I was. Around nine I shuffled down to the convenience store, cobbling dinner together out of a microwave pizza, a bag of Pepperidge Farm Brussels cookies, and a waxy Red Delicious apple, for health.
“Dude,” Dave said when I got back upstairs, eyeing me over his laptop. “You good?”
“I’m fine,” I snapped, then winced at the sound of it. “Sorry.” I scrubbed a hand over my face. “Just, like, a lot on my mind.”
Dave nodded. “They’re doing an overnight Indiana Jones marathon in the common room,” he offered. “I’m going to go by when I’m done with this paper, if you want to come along.”
I shook my head. “I think I might just crash,” I said, partly because I wanted to see what time Duncan got home and partly because I had, by this point, eaten thirteen of the fifteen cookies in the foil-lined Pepperidge Farm bag and was feeling more than a little bit ill. “But thanks.”
Dave shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said, shutting his computer and heaving himself up off the bed. “You change your mind about whatever you’re sulking over, you know where to find me.”
“I’m notsulking,” I said peevishly. And I wasn’t.
Not exactly.
Okay, I was sulking a little.
Holiday was just wrong, that was all. She had no idea what she was talking about. It wasn’t true; I did so ask her questions. And if I didn’t, it was only because she was always talking so much thatI could barely get a word in edgewise. Still, when I tried to make a list of things I knew about her life right now, it was disturbingly short.
Ugh, I really did not want to be the bad guy here.
Fight with Holiday or not, the end of the semester was speeding in my direction like a car down the turnpike, assignments stacking up one on top of another. I was painstakingly formatting the bibliography for an expos paper I was writing on women historians of the IRA the following afternoon when my phone buzzed on the table beside me.How’s the work going?Greer wanted to know.
Miserable,I reported.What’s up?
Look out your window.
I leaned back in my chair and peered down at the outside of Hemlock House, where Greer was standing in her bright red peacoat and a hat with a pompom on it, her hair glossy and dark. I watched as she waved, then bent her head to type something else into her phone:Study break?she asked.
I grinned, slamming my laptop closed and pushing my chair back.Sure.
I grabbed my coat, thundering down the stairs and out into the courtyard, which was bustling with all the frenetic activity of a Friday afternoon. “I know you,” I said, wrapping my arms around Greer in the chilly afternoon light. We hadn’t seen a ton of each other since we’d gotten back from Maine; I’d been distracted by my goose chase after Margot, and she’d been gearing up for the final push of the semester. “I figured you were in the library.”
“I was,” she said, “but my brain is soup.” She wrinkled her nose. “You wanna go have an adventure?”
We took the train across the river and got off the Green Line at the Prudential Center, the high-end mall already decked out for the holidays in reds and golds. “Are we going to Eataly?” I asked hopefully.
Greer laughed. “Maybe later,” she promised, pulling me through the crowd of shoppers and out onto Huntington Ave. “If you’re good.”
Outside the mall it was freezing; I’d forgotten this about Boston in winter, how the wind comes in off the water and slices through the buildings, burning your face and the inside of your ears. The Berkshires were cold, sure, but not like this. “I’m transferring,” I decided. “Effective immediately. And I’m only applying to schools in Florida.”
Greer ignored me, pulling me through the afternoon crowds on the sidewalk before finally coming to a stop in front of an empty reflecting pool, which stretched out in front of us for the better part of a block. A few skateboarders in skullcaps practiced their moves, wheels rumbling over the concrete. “Here we are,” she announced. “I’ve always wanted to come to this place.”
“Oh yeah?” I teased. “Hoping to get some tips on your ollies?”
“You’re hilarious.” She shook her head. “Not the pool,” she said, then motioned at the hulking building at the other side of the reflecting pool. “The Mapparium.”
I shook my head. “The what, now?”
“Come on,” Greer said, then took my hand and pulled me toward the entrance.
The Mapparium was an enormous, inside-out stained-glass globe lit up with a million tiny light bulbs. “Whoa,” I said as westepped onto the long glass walkway that cut down the middle—startling at how loud and booming my voice sounded, gazing around at the world with no small amount of wonder. There was something strange happening with the perspective from this angle, the sizes of the continents all different from what I was used to seeing: Africa way bigger than it looked on the globe in my bedroom back at my mom’s house; Europe and North America huddled as if for warmth right up against the North Pole. “This is wild.”
“It’s cool, right?” Greer asked, turning a slow circle on the catwalk with her hands tucked into her pockets. Her tone was nonchalant, careless even, but I could see in the eager lift of her eyebrows that she was hoping I’d say yes.
“It’s really cool,” I agreed softly. Cooler still was the idea that she’d brought me here hoping I’d like it, that she’d picked it out for a field trip with me in mind. All at once I felt a wave of fondness for her that was so strong it almost took me out at the knees. How had I spent almost two years apart from her? How had I forgotten the way she made me feel? “I can’t believe I didn’t know it was here.”
