I frowned. “Worry about me?”
Greer shrugged, sitting back down on the bench and wrapping her hands around her coffee cup. “I’ve seen what this school does to people who aren’t ready for it,” she said. “It makes you weird. It makes you a little impulsive. Before you know it you’re fixating on shit that doesn’t matter, just to feel like there’s some part of your life that you can control.” She lifted an eyebrow behind her glasses. “Believe me, I know. At this rate, you’re going to wind up on academic probation, freaking out before every little quiz because you’re terrified this is going to be the one that gets you booted, fooling around with your high school boyfriend.”
I snorted, the tension draining out of my body as I reached for her, pulling her up again and into my arms. “There are worse things than fooling around with your high school boyfriend,” I reminded her quietly.
Greer sighed. “Yes,” she agreed with theatrical resignation, looping her arms around my neck. “I suppose there are.”
We stood there for a long moment and held on to each other, cold wind buffeting us from all sides. “Get a room!” a skateboarder called from the other side of the plaza. I huffed a laugh into Greer’s hair.
“Okay,” I decided finally. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I’m goingto stop. I am stopping; I have officially stopped. I’m done playing Sherlock Holmes. I just want to get through my finals and finish the rest of the semester and be with you.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Greer agreed, her voice muffled into my jacket. She pulled back to look at me then, her eyes searching my face behind her glasses like she wanted to make sure I wasn’t full of shit. “I want this to work, Linden. I, like—really,reallywant this to work.”
I thought of the first time I’d ever seen her, in the library back at Bartley. I thought of how it felt to run into her that day in the Coop. “Me too,” I promised. “And I’m sorry.”
Greer nodded. “Buy me dinner to make it up to me, how about?”
I grinned. “You got a deal.”
19
Friday, 12/6/24–Saturday, 12/7/24
We went to dinner at a place Greer liked in Chinatown, tucking ourselves into a tiny table by the fogged-up window and ordering a mess of steamed buns and udon noodles. “What are you doing for the break?” Greer asked over the clank of dishes from the kitchen.
Trying to find odd jobs and avoiding Holiday, probably, but I didn’t say that out loud. “Still considering my options,” I told her instead, hooking an ankle around hers underneath the wobbly table. “Why, are you traveling?”
Greer nodded. “I think Vail, maybe?” She heaped a pile of noodles onto her plate. “We’ll see what happens when grades come back, though. It’s possible my dad will make me stay in Connecticut practicing Latin conjugation to atone for my unextraordinary mind.”
“I think you’re pretty extraordinary,” I told her, no hesitation. Greer flicked a piece of green onion at my head.
We got an Uber back to campus. It was freezing, the winddamp and that bite in the air that tempts snow; Greer slipped her hand into mine as we crossed the courtyard toward Hemlock House, tugging me close like we could keep each other warm that way. “You could come with me,” she murmured. “Over break, I mean.”
I looked down at her as we made our way through the lobby, interested. “To Vail, you mean?”
Greer grinned. “Or to Connecticut,” she said with a shrug. “I might need some help with my irregular verbs.”
We swung by the suite to pick up a bottle of wine Greer had squirreled away in her closet, then climbed the stairs to my empty room. Both of us had work to do, so Greer put on a jazzy, Starbucks-y playlist she said would help us focus, the two of us sitting side by side in my bed clacking away at our computers. Duncan and Dave got back from the library around midnight, bearing fries and shakes from Tasty Burger. All of us were asleep by one a.m.
I woke up the following morning to a knock on the door. The light was gray and blurry out the window when I cracked one eye open; I was confused for a second, thinking I was back at home in Eastie and my mom was knocking to tell me that school had been canceled for snow. Then I blinked and remembered.
“What the fuck,” Dave mumbled, rooting around for his glasses as whoever it was knocked again, louder and more insistently this time. “What time is it?”
“Early.” I climbed over Greer, who was only just stirring, and padded barefoot across the carpet to swing the door open. “Yeah?”
“Michael Linden?”
I blinked. Standing silhouetted against the harsh light of thehallway were the same two campus security guards Holiday had shaken down to let us look at the entry log for Hemlock House. “Um,” I said, a second of keen white fear slicing through me that something terrible had happened to my mom while I was across the river drinking goldfish and reading Derrida like an asshole. “Yes? That’s me.”
“We’ve had a report of stolen property in this room,” said the taller one—DiNapoli, I remembered. I wasn’t sure if I was imagining the look of gleeful satisfaction on his face. “We’d like to conduct a search.”
I didn’t answer for a moment, my brain sluggish with sleep and confusion. “A search?” I repeated slowly, trying to figure out what the fuck I should do here. I knew Holiday would tell them to come back with a warrant—but did campus security even need a warrant to search a dorm? I didn’t know, on top of which I was in my heart, and had always been, a rule follower. Also: I had nothing to hide. “Yeah, okay.” I looked at Duncan and Dave, who were both sitting up dazedly in their bunk beds. “I mean, if it’s okay with you guys?”
They nodded in unison.
“Um, what’s this about?” Greer asked, swinging her legs over the side of the bed and reaching for her tortoiseshell glasses, her brow furrowed as she slipped them onto her face. “I mean, what are you looking for, exactly?” She turned to me. “Do you know what they’re looking for?”
“I have no idea,” I promised quickly, swallowing down the reflexive kind of guilt you feel when people are accusing you of something, even when you know objectively you haven’t doneanything wrong. I watched as the two of them opened my drawers and pawed through my closet—with, frankly, a lot less elegance and finesse than Holiday and I had when we’d been going through Hunter’s stuff back at the lax house. “Who was the report from?”
