“I’m sure you are,” she said seriously. Then her face split open into a grin. She hopped up out of the chair and threw her arms around me, hugging me so tight she nearly knocked me over. “Hi,” she said.
“Hi.” I closed my eyes for a second before I quite knew I was going to do it, breathing in the familiar smell of tea and incense and weed. She was wearing high-waisted jeans and a sweater that was oversized even on her tall, broad frame, her riot of dark, curly hair loose and wild around her face.
I probably would have held on a minute longer—we’d barely seen each other since school started, and I was surprised to realize just how much I’d missed her—but all at once I realized Duncan and Dave were sitting on their respective bunk beds, trying with various degrees of subtlety to act like they weren’t paying attention. “How’d you even get into the building?” I asked Holiday, stepping back and tucking my hands into my hoodie pocket. I’d seen her talk her way into a lot of places in the decade and a half we’d known each other, though our dorm had a desk attendant downstairs who was in theory supposed to prevent randos from just strolling on in without a key card.
“I’ve got a couple of friends from Greenleaf who live here,” Holiday explained, naming the artsy private high school where she’d graduated the previous spring. Holiday was getting her BFA in musical theater across the river at Emerson, where I liked to imagine everyone walked around reciting Shakespeare and singing selections fromWicked,the click-clack of a million manual typewriters echoing through the corridors at all hours of the day and night. “I took advantage of their hospitality, since yours was—”
“Nonexistent?” I grimaced.
“You’re fine.” Her voice was high with the slightest lilt of mocking, but her smile was sincere, the warmth of it like a fire cracklingin the lobby of a house you’d walked all day to get to. “Your roommates and I are old friends at this point. I think Duncan and I are going to go on vacation together.”
“Turks and Caicos,” Duncan agreed, his round cheeks gone nearly as red as his rusty mop of hair. He was a math major, with a slightly panicky smile and a bright green Yeti water bottle he carried everywhere like a security blanket; he’d been trying to grow a beard since our first week on campus, with a limited amount of success. “Maybe Mallorca.”
“Mallorca sounds nice,” Holiday agreed. “Dave, what do you think about Mallorca?” She turned back to me as Dave shot her an enthusiastic thumbs-up, eyes still trained on his laptop. “Michael’s not invited, obviously.”
“Probably for the best,” I reminded her. “You know I burn easy.”
“You’re delicate,” Holiday concurred.
We said our goodbyes to the guys and stopped by the fancy doughnut shop in the student center, where all the doughnuts cost four dollars each and had flavors like lychee and fresh-cut grass, then wandered down to the river to eat. It was warm that day, and the trees lining either side of the river all exploding in brilliant yellows and golds. Holiday slipped her shoes off, wriggling her painted toes in the coarse city grass as she flopped onto her back and closed her eyes. “I know this weather is because of global warming,” she said. “But also, this weather is the absolute shit.”
“It doesn’t suck,” I agreed, my phone buzzing in my pocket asI sat beside her. When I glanced down I had a text from Duncan:Hey Linden,he’d written, which was how he began all his texts to me,does Holiday have a boyfriend?
I frowned as a bright flicker of annoyance zipped through my body, a weird current of irritation I didn’t want to examine too closely. It wasn’t like I cared who Holiday hooked up with, though she did have notoriously miserable taste in guys: when I’d gotten back to Boston for winter break last year, she’d been dating some guy from Buckingham, Browne & Nichols who looked like he was about to star in a prestige television drama as the art school son of a billionaire who got a solo show at a fancy gallery by dunking his penis in paint and slapping it on a canvas a bunch of times. Suffice it to say I wasn’t that bummed out about it when they broke up right before graduation. She and I had actually wound up spending most of the summer together in the aftermath: I had a job shelving library books at the Eastie branch of the BPL, while she taught acting and stage combat to a bunch of little kids at the performing arts camp she’d attended all through elementary school. It had been a good time, Holiday picking me up most afternoons in her filthy Honda and the two of us dicking around Boston, going to all-ages shows at the Paradise and doing an exhaustive raspberry-lime rickey taste test and watching the sunset on the Esplanade. It had never been anything but platonic—Holiday and I had been friends since we were in preschool, and that was all—but still, I didn’t like the idea of Duncan sniffing around.
Don’t be gross,I typed now, then shoved my phone back inside my pocket and plunked myself down on the grass.
“What?” Holiday asked, propping herself up on both elbows and turning to look at me.
“Nothing.”
“You’re scowling.”
“Am I?”
“You are.”
“Pretty sure that’s just how my face is.”
“Pretty sure it’s not,” she fired back, but she let it go, dropping down onto her back one more time. “Also: you smell.”
“Yousmell,” I countered immediately. “I was running.”
“Uh-huh.” She grinned. “What are you up to tonight?” she asked, stretching her arms above her head, her sweater riding up a little bit so I caught a glance of her pale, soft stomach. “Is there a Halloween thing?”
I nodded, looking away. “Lacrosse party.”
“Ah,” she said. “Right.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” she said. “It just seems like maybe you’re doing a lot of that here, that’s all.”
“I mean, to be fair, I’ve also occasionally been attending my first semester of classes at Harvard University.”
“Ever heard of it?” she teased.
“I’m serious!” I protested. “I’m here on a lacrosse scholarship, Holiday. I kind of have to hang out with the team.”
