“No, I know you do,” she agreed. “I just forgot for a second howget crunked with my broswas right there in the list of the requirements next to showing up for practice and maintaining a three point five GPA.”
“First of all, it’s three point six,” I said. “Second of all, it’s part of being on the—it’s a whole—” I broke off. “You know that.”
“I do,” Holiday said. “I know that.”
I sighed. It was like this sometimes, with Holiday—she and I had been best friends for basically our entire childhoods, but we didn’t talk for most of high school, and it wasn’t until we ran into each other on Martha’s Vineyard a couple of years ago that we got close again. It was complicated, sort of. On occasion, it had been known to get weird. “Okay,” I said finally. “Then why are you looking at me like I shat on your carpet?”
Holiday’s eyes narrowed behind the big round frames of her glasses. “Maybe that’s just how my face is.”
“I think I know your face better than most people,” I pointed out, taking a sip of my iced coffee.
Holiday shrugged into the grass. “Maybe,” she admitted. There was something I didn’t understand in her expression, just for a second; then she blinked and it was gone. “What are you even taking?” she asked instead, sitting up again and tucking one leg underneath her, pulling her doughnut out of its bag and plucking a sprinkle off the top. “Like, classwise, I mean.”
I filled her in on Economic Justice and Race, Gender, and Performance, the advisor meeting I’d been putting off with Professor McMorrow. “I don’t know,” I said, watching as a thirtysomething couple in matching Chacos pushed an expensive-looking stroller along the walking path. “I told myself I’d get over my impostor-type bullshit once I got here, and I guess I mostly have? But it does kind of feel like everybody else has known exactly what they were going to do when they grew up since basically the day they were born.”
Right away, Holiday shook her head. “Not everybody.”
“You,” I pointed out.
“I mean, sure, but who knows if I’m actually going to get to do it,” she countered. “Be on Broadwayis not exactly what one might call a rock-solid career aspiration. Let’s be real, I’m probably going to wind up teaching theater games at a residential school for kids with violent behavioral problems.”
“Doubtful,” I said. I knew she didn’t really think that, and she knew I knew she didn’t; if there was one thing Holiday had never lacked, it was a clear-eyed confidence about exactly how much she was capable of. Still, I appreciated her saying it. “You’ll go full EGOT.”
“Well. That’s very loving.” Holiday pulled off a piece of her doughnut and popped it into her mouth. “Anyway,” she said once she’d swallowed, “the point is, nobody knows exactly what they’re going to wind up doing, and you shouldn’t let anyone bully you into picking a major just to pick it. You’re actually exactly the kind of person who should take some time before they declare.”
I felt myself frown. “Meaning what, exactly? Why are you like, negging me today?”
“I’m not!” Holiday insisted, not especially convincingly; it occurred to me to wonder if maybe she wasn’t quite as chill about me forgetting our plans as she’d pretended to be. “I’m just saying it would be good to look around and figure out what you actually like before you settle on some random thing just to have it decided.”
“Good for me more than other people?”
“Good for all people equally,” she promised, but then, a moment later, and more quietly: “I guess I just don’t want you to waste your time here, that’s all.”
“Here, where?” That surprised me. “Like at college? Waste it how?”
“Well, think about it,” she instructed. “Two summers ago on the Vineyard your ankle was still hamburger. You couldn’t play. You didn’t even know if you were going to be able to finish out high school at Bartley, let alone get a scholarship to college. And now—look at you, Michael. Like you just said, you’re literally at Harvard. Even adjusting for privilege and general douchebaggery, you’re surrounded by some of the most brilliant and interesting minds of our whole entire generation.” She shrugged. “I just don’t want you to spend the next four years hanging out with the exact same guys you hung out with for the last four, that’s all.”
“And whoshouldI be hanging out with, exactly?” I asked, trying to keep my voice light, to ignore the uncomfortable prickle of recognition I felt at what she was saying. That was the problem with Holiday, forever and always: she saw everyone, me especially, a little too clearly for comfort. “Actors?”
Holiday grinned. “I mean,” she said with a theatrical preen, “you could do worse.”
I smiled back, though something about the conversation irked me—Holiday slipping so easily into the role of my slightly snotty big sister, maybe, even though we were exactly the same age. My mom had worked for the Proctors at their big house near Porter Square basically since I was in diapers, cooking their meals anddusting their bookshelves and driving Holiday to her various fencing matches and modern dance rehearsals and auditions for community theater productions ofFunny Girl.We weren’t siblings, but we might as well have been.
Possibly, Holiday could sense that I was feeling prickly, because she deftly changed the subject to an improv performance some friends of hers were doing in the park the following afternoon, and the conversation wandered from there, our fingers sticky with doughnut glaze as we watched the last rowers of the season make their way down the Charles. We covered dining hall food and the religious zealot who liked to hand out pamphlets on Brookline Avenue and how all the good stores in Harvard Square had turned into banks now, and it wasn’t until I mentioned a Netflix show Greer had told me to watch that Holiday frowned. “Oh!” she said, digging busily around in the doughnut bag and handing me a napkin. “I didn’t realize that was a thing that was happening again. You and Greer, I mean.”
“Kind of.” I lifted an eyebrow, feeling briefly like I’d gotten caught doing something illicit. “Why, is that a problem?”
“No,” Holiday said immediately, balling up the wax-paper bag. “Of course not. I just—no.” She shook her head, then pulled her phone out of her enormous, perpetually overstuffed tote and wrinkled her nose at the time. “It’s late,” she announced suddenly, though in fact it was the middle of the afternoon and broad daylight. “I gotta get back.”
In the end I decided it was better not to press her, holding a hand out to pull her to her feet. The Square was crowded with tourists as I walked her back toward the T station, theGhostbusterstheme song blaring from the open windows of an Uber passing by. “What areyoudoing tonight?” I asked. “Like, a reading ofMacbethin a graveyard by candlelight?”
“Some of the people in my cohort are putting on an Edgar Allan Poe thing, if you must know,” Holiday reported tartly. “ThenRocky Horrorat Coolidge Corner at midnight.”
“Obviously.” Holiday had always loved a midnight movie; over the summer she’d dragged me to half a dozen of them,Jurassic ParkandAliensand something calledA Gnome Named Gnormfrom which I still had not entirely recovered. We spent most of that one drinking thermoses of rum punch out of her purse, only then I spilled mine into her lap and when she jammed a kernel of popcorn in my ear in retaliation, part of it got stuck in there. She’d needed to use tweezers and the flashlight on her phone to get it out.
“You could blow off your party and come, you know,” she told me now, raising her voice as she walked backward toward the entrance to the train station. “Meet some different kinds of people, even. Really immerse yourself in the theater sce—”
“Goodbye, Holiday!”
