“It wasn’t like that,” Greer said quietly. “That’s not what it was like.”
Just for one second, none of us breathed. “Greer,” I murmured, and I swore I could feel my heart breaking deep inside my chest. “Oh, Greer.”
“Itwasn’t,” she insisted, shaking her head a little. “Bri was my best friend. I loved her. The same way I love all of you.” She slid down the wall into a crouch, wrapping her arms around her knees like she wanted to make herself as small as humanly possible. “But she was just sooutraged,you know? It was like she didn’t even know me, like she was just going on and on about fairness and integrity, like she had any kind of leg to stand on. That wholeI’m just the humble daughter of a car salesmanthing that she liked to do? Her dad literally plays golf with the dean of admissions on Nantucket every summer. It’s not like she got here through brains and grit. But she just looked so disappointed in me, you know? Itmade me feel insane. And she was going on and on and she was just sonoisy.” She turned to the girls. “You guys know how she was. A voice like a fucking foghorn. Even on a Saturday with nobody around, somebody was going to hear. I didn’t mean to hurt her. I just needed her to stop yelling before someone heard.
“You guys don’t know what it was like,” she continued. “Not coming here was never an option. My grades weren’t great. I’m not a violin prodigy or a field hockey star. I’m just…average. I always have been. And there is absolutely nothing my parents hate more than that.”
It was Margot, in the end, who found her voice first. “Greer, sweetheart,” she said. She sounded so kind. “We have to tell someone.”
Greer looked at her for a moment. “I know,” she said quietly, and started to cry.
Margot hugged her then. The other three joined them, the five of them holding each other, connected in their grief and their love for each other. They looked like a Renaissance painting, like something you’d see hanging in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum across town. It felt like we were intruding.
“Come on,” Holiday said, putting a gentle hand on my arm and nodding toward the exit.
“What?” I murmured, surprised. I was waiting on the grand finale; I figured she’d have somehow texted a buddy on the Cambridge Police Department on the way over here, or sent out a distress signal via the 311 app. “Don’t we need to make sure—?”
“No,” Holiday said, “we don’t.” She shook her head. “They can handle it from here.”
23
Afterward
Holiday was right about that too, in the end. The girls from the suite went with Greer to the dean of students; from there, they went with her to turn herself in to the police. The story made the front page of every paper in town, from theGlobeto theCrimson;I turned my face away from the headlines as I trudged across campus to hand in my final paper for International Women Writers. Technically, I could have just uploaded it to the portal—I was probably going to have to upload it to the portal anyhow, actually—but I’d never managed to make it to my mandatory advisor meeting and figured this was probably my last chance.
“Michael,” Professor McMorrow said, lifting one eyebrow when I knocked on the open door to her office. It was winter gray outside the window, a glass-shaded lamp casting a warm glow across the desk. “Nice to see you back.”
“Nice to be back,” I said, handing over the paper. “Was a little touch and go there for a minute.”
The professor nodded likeNo kidding.“How was your first semester?”
“Eventful.”
She leaned back in her leather chair. “I can imagine.”
I tucked my hands into my coat pockets, clearing my throat a bit. Her office was cozy, the walls lined with novels and collections of poetry, classical music piping from a little Bose radio on the shelf. On the desk was a framed photograph of the professor on the beach with a woman I assumed was her wife, each of them holding a squirmy-looking toddler. “I owe you an apology,” I told her. “I was…amped, the last time we talked.”
McMorrow raised an eyebrow. “That’s one word for it, certainly.”
“I was an inappropriate jerk,” I clarified, “and I’m sorry.”
She waved her hand. “I’ve seen worse. And knowing what we know now, I imagine you were going through quite a bit in your personal life.”
“You could say that,” I agreed. “I’m hoping the rest of my time here isn’t quite so high-stakes. Or like, that itishigh-stakes, but maybe not in quite the same way as this was?” I was rambling, the wildness of the last days and weeks catching up with me all at once. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’m trying to get from my time here, is I guess what I’m saying.”
“And?” She lifted her chin.
“A friend of mine told me I should be sure not to waste it.”
“Sounds like good advice.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “She’s…smart like that. Anyway, I think I’m ready to declare a major.”
That seemed to surprise her. “You’ve got time, you know,” she reminded me. “I don’t know if I was quite obvious the last time we spoke. There’s no requirement to declare until November of your sophomore year.”
“No, I know,” I assured her, “but I want to. It feels really obvious to me now, what I want to study here. It feels really clear to me what I want to do.”
McMorrow nodded one more time, then reached over to turn down the music before gesturing to the empty chair on the other side of her desk. “Well, in that case,” she said, “have a seat, why don’t you? You can tell me a little bit more about what you have in mind.”
