Chapter 11

11

Saturday, 11/23/24

"It's cold as balls," Holiday announced when I pushed the heavy door open and found her standing on the brick pathway outside my building two nights later, the wind blowing her hair around her face and her olive cheeks rosy in the glow of the sodium lights. "You ready to go?"

"Hey, Holiday!" Duncan piped up, stopping short right behind me. He'd trailed me downstairs like an Irish wolfhound when Holiday had texted to say she was here—he was ostensibly on his way to pick up food at Tasty Burger, though it was clear from the hopeful, hangdog expression on his face that that was in no way his actual intention. "You look great."

I rolled my eyes as I jogged down the wide granite steps to join her, though I couldn't help but notice that it wasn't like Duncan was wrong. Holiday's personal style usually skewed toward "forty-five-year-old mom from Huron Village": big sweaters and clogs with enormous wooden soles and dresses that could most accurately be described as frocks, plus the occasional potato-sack jumpsuit. But she'd dressed the lax-house part tonight, in jeans and boots and a lacy top that was just this side of sheer; she'd done some girl business with her makeup that made her eyes look very dark. "Come on," I said, clearing my throat and jerking my head toward the sidewalk. "We're going this way."

Holiday nodded. "Have a good night, Duncan!" she called, flashing her warmest smile over one perfumed shoulder. "Maybe we'll see you later."

"We will not," I muttered, steering her in the opposite direction. Holiday ignored me.

It took fifteen minutes to walk to the lax house, the bustle of the Square fading behind us as the streets got quieter and more residential, the only sound the bare branches of the oak trees rubbing themselves together overhead. Holiday seemed quiet tonight too, none of her usual running patter about the latest woman playwright in residence at the Huntington or the Intro to Ceramics class she was considering signing up for at the CCAE. It was noticeable enough that finally I glanced over at her in the darkness: "Hey," I said as we crossed an empty side street, "you okay?"

Holiday looked surprised. "Yeah," she said quickly. "Yeah, totally." Then, half a block later: "Can I ask you a question, though? Did something happen last night?"

I glanced at her blankly. "No, why?" Last night had been Friday; I'd gotten dinner with Greer at a ramen place near Central, then gone back to her suite and scrolled football scores on my phone for an hour while she and the other girls did Richard Gere pregame, some sad 2000s rom-com about a middle-aged couple doing ballroom dancing. The rest of them had gone to a party when it was over, but Greer had brought me back to her empty bedroom, locked the door, and let me take her bra off, which—while it was the first time that had happened since we'd started hanging out again—was probably not the kind of information Holiday was fishing for. "What would have happened?"

I—" Holiday broke off, then shook her head, turning to sidestep a giant root that had buckled the cobblestone sidewalk. "No, nothing. I just meant, like, Bri-wise."

"Like, with Hunter, you mean?" I racked my brain, scrubbing for anything I might have missed. "No, I don't think so. He'll be here tonight, though, obviously."

Holiday nodded. "Okay," she said. "Well. Good."

Something was up, clearly, and I would have pressed her, but we were already turning onto the long front walk of the lax house. "Duncan was right, PS," I muttered, leaning close to her ear as we climbed the slightly saggy steps to the porch. "You look nice."

Holiday turned to look at me, her red slips slightly parted. Then she shook her head. "Don't sound so surprised," she said with a smirk. "Come on, let's do this thing."

The party was already cranking by the time I opened the front door, the bass from a Lizzo song rattling in my teeth before we even got all the way into the foyer. The lax house was an old Cambridge colonial, with a grand front hall and a formal dining room to one side, Christmas lights crisscrossing the coffered ceilings of the living room.

"There he is!" called Cam, who was sitting on the arm of the sagging leather couch with a Sam Winter in one hand and a joint in the other. "Where you been, Linden?"

Holiday squeezed my arm, already taking a step backward down the hallway that led to the kitchen. "Divide and conquer?" she asked quietly.

"Um, sure," I agreed, a little surprised she was so eager to be left to her own devices in a house full of strangers, though probably I shouldn't have been. No matter how long Holiday and I had known each other, it was always funny to me to watch her at parties—the way she eased equally effortlessly into conversations with sports bros and the daughters of Eastern European oligarchs, making fast friends with party girls and wallflowers alike. There was something utterly unselfconscious about her that people seemed instinctively drawn to—like out of everyone I knew, she was the only one who'd looked at the poster in kindergarten of the tabby cat in sunglasses that said Be Yourself and actually taken the advice to heart. Holiday was Holiday, no matter her circumstances. Wherever she went, there she was. It made me a little jealous sometimes, honestly; it felt like there was probably less to remember that way. It freed up the space for her to be so smart about everything else.

I grabbed a beer from an open box on the dining room table and lost her in the crowd for a little while, getting waylaid by a men's rights conspiracy theorist from my International Women Writers class and then distracted by two sophomores improvising a game of pickleball out in the backyard. I was just headed back toward the dining room when Hunter appeared from the direction of the grimy downstairs bathroom and slung a slightly too-rough arm around my shoulders. "Hey, pally," he said. He nodded across the room to where Holiday was perched on the edge of a radiator cover, holding forth with one of our midfielders, a student from Germany who, as far as I could tell, had never said a single word to anyone else. "Who's your friend?"

"That's Holiday," I reported, feeling my entire body coil. "She doesn't go here."

"No kidding," Hunter said with a grin. "I would have noticed."

I scowled. "She has a boyfriend," I lied, then immediately regretted it. It was weird behavior on my part; Holiday would have handed me my ass if she'd overheard, and she would have been right to do so. But seriously, what was the deal with everyone sniffing around her tonight? It was like nobody had ever seen a girl before. "So. You're out of luck, probably."

Hunter shrugged like What can you do? before trotting off a moment later, presumably to direct his romantic attention elsewhere or burp into someone's unsuspecting face, one or the other. With Hunter, there was really no way to tell.

I weaved my way through the crowd until I caught Holiday's eye. "Enjoying yourself?" I asked, tugging her into the old telephone nook under the stairs.

"I am, actually." She smiled at me. "The parties have a different vibe at my school."

I glanced down the hallway, wondering what she made of this place. The lax house wasn't grungy, exactly—somebody's dad paid for a cleaning service that came in every week—but it was still unequivocally a place where a bunch of dudes ate and farted and jerked off all day, all of them under one roof. I tried to imagine Holiday's art school parties at people's Beacon Hill apartments decorated like the sets for a Wes Anderson movie, all velvet sofas and clever wallpaper, everyone eating cheese cubes and drinking wine from stemless glasses. All of them talking about Marcel Duchamp. "More Sartre?"

"I mean, no, but it's nice to know that's how you imagine us." She tilted her head toward the kitchen. "Come on," she said. "I scoped out a back staircase off the kitchen."

We made it to the second floor unnoticed; I followed Holiday down the long, dim hallway, the hardwood creaking a little ominously under our feet. The walls were hung with faded photos of the lax teams from back in the '80s and '90s: dozens of mostly indistinguishable white guys with Tom Cruise hair and short shorts and a palpable air of self-satisfaction I tried not to recognize too closely. Was this how people would see me in thirty years? I couldn't help but wonder. Shit, was this how people saw me now ?

"Which one is Hunter's?" Holiday asked, snapping me back into the present. She motioned to the half-dozen doors that lined the hallway, but I shook my head.

"I have no idea, actually."

"Seriously?" She turned to look at me. "How can you not know?"

"I've never been up here," I admitted. "Only upperclassmen are technically allowed upstairs."

"For the sex parties?"

"Nah, we usually do those in the basement."

"For ease of cleanup," Holiday agreed without missing a trick. "Silly me."

I stood back as she knocked lightly on one door after another, easing them open and nosing around inside until she found ample evidence of their occupants. "What are you going to say if somebody is actually in one of these?" I asked her, glancing nervously over my shoulder in the direction of the stairs.

"That my tampon failed and I'm having a period emergency and I was looking for somewhere private to scrub out my underwear," Holiday said pleasantly. "What are you going to say?"

I considered that for a moment. "I mean, same, probably."

Holiday rolled her eyes. "Here we go," she said finally, slipping catlike through a door at the end of the hallway, a corner room with windows on two walls and a gray Ikea rug spread across the scuffed wood floors. Hunter's practice jersey was slung—unwashed, from the smell of it—over the footboard of the bed. "Now we're talking."

I checked the staircase one more time, then stepped in behind her and looked around: a navy-blue quilt and a surprising amount of hair product, a sleek desktop Mac with two monitors sitting on the desk. "Do people still like Vampire Weekend?" I wondered, peering at the posters on the wall with sincere curiosity. "Like, is that a thing?"

"I'm truly the wrong person to ask," Holiday said, making a beeline for the desk. "My most listened-to artist on Spotify last year was Natalie Merchant." She slid the drawers open one by one, poking gingerly through their contents and muttering to herself.

I stood there and watched her for a moment, her lips pursed and her brow furrowed, before catching myself staring and turning abruptly away. I opened the closet door, taking in Hunter's truly impressive collection of Patagonia quarter-zip fleeces, the New Balance sneakers in every color and style. It looked—well, it looked kind of like the inside of my closet, actually, and I glanced over at Holiday, hoping she hadn't noticed.

"Anything useful in there?" she asked, looking at me perfunctorily over one shoulder. "Beyond the fact that you guys evidently have the same personal shopper, I mean."

"Fuck off," I muttered. It wasn't like I cared what Holiday thought of my clothes, exactly. Still, I couldn't help but think of what she'd said that day on the bank of the river, about only hanging out with people who were just like me. "You find anything?"

Holiday shook her head, flicking through a little wire basket next to the computer. "Birthday greeting from Grandma," she reported. "T pass. Gift card to Buffalo Wild Wings." She frowned. "Where is there a Buffalo Wild Wings around here?"

I rolled my eyes. "Holiday—"

"I'm just saying, could be a clue."

"It's not a clue," I said. "Can you just—"

Holiday tutted. "I gotta tell you, Michael," she observed, turning her attention to the nightstand, "I don't feel like you're finding me as charming tonight as you could be."

"I find you, as always, extremely charming," I assured her, glancing nervously in the direction of the closed door. I wasn't sure how long we'd been up here, but it felt like we had to be pushing our luck. "I just don't want to get caught."

"We're not going to—Hang on," Holiday said, still crouched over the nightstand drawer. "Oh, shit."

"What?" I was across the room in two big steps. "What?"

"Don't overreact," Holiday said, getting to her feet and stepping back so I could peer over her shoulder at the contents of the drawer. "And don't touch anything."

"I'm not going to—" I broke off. "Oh, fuck me." In the nightstand drawer, in between a dinged-up tin of lip balm and a tangle of charging cords, was a stack of Polaroids.

Of Greer.

In her underwear.

In bed.

"Woof," Holiday said, nudging around in the rest of the drawer with one manicured finger like she was afraid of catching avian flu. "What a creep." She glanced over at me. "Down, boy."

"I'm not up, " I insisted peevishly, then felt myself blush through my deep irritation. I felt a muscle ticcing in my jaw. Hunter was a dick, yeah, but he also came from generations of money; his dad was a partner at a hedge fund on Wall Street. His family had a ski house in Vail. I hated to think of him seeing Greer like that at all, let alone whenever he wanted to. I hated the idea of him still having this kind of access. "I mean, I'm not— Whatever. I'm cool."

"Oh yeah, you look real mellow." Holiday nudged me out of the way, pulling her phone out of her pocket. "Her hair is different, right? So they must be from last year?"

"I didn't think they were from this— Whatever," I repeated as she opened up her camera app and snapped a dozen photos of the Polaroids and where we'd found them, stepping back and taking a shot of the nightstand itself for reference. "I mean, this proves it, right? Hunter's still obsessed with Greer. He tried to get back together with her, she turned him down—shit, maybe they even argued about me at some point. He went to her room that night because he knew she wasn't at the party, and thought she might be alo—" I broke off as Holiday slid the nightstand drawer shut. "What are you doing?" My eyes widened. "You're going to leave them here?"

Holiday looked at me like I'd lost my mind. "I mean," she said carefully, "I'm not going to steal evidence, no."

"That evidence is creepy pictures of my girlfriend that he's probably using to jerk—" I snapped my jaws shut at the unmistakable sound of footsteps coming closer down the hallway.

Holiday's eyes widened. "Fuck," she whispered, her gaze darting wildly around the room. "Is that—?"

"Yeah," I said. "We need to—"

"Hide," she agreed, but the doorknob was already turning.

Just for a second, I froze in a blind, useless panic.

Then I grabbed Holiday around the waist, tossed her down onto Hunter's rumpled bed, and slammed my mouth against hers.

It wasn't elegant. It was spit and teeth and a quiet "oh" from Holiday, our noses bashing together in the second before we course-corrected and her hands came up to cup my face. She opened her mouth, or I did; I could feel how warm her body was, straight through the lacy fabric of her shirt. She was a good kisser, I thought vaguely. I don't know why that surprised me, but it did.

"Hey, are you in h— Whoops!" said a female voice, high and tinkling and openly amused. Holiday and I broke apart—quickly, though probably not as quickly as we could have. I turned around and realized with some horror I was looking back at Noelle, a sophomore who lived a couple of floors above Greer over in Hemlock. She was wearing a stretchy crop top and big white sneakers and the twisty grin of a person who thinks she's seen something salacious she wasn't supposed to see. "Sorry."

"Shit," I said, pulling back a little dizzily. I didn't need to fake acting stupefied and out of breath. "Uh, no, we're sorry."

"You don't look sorry," Noelle said, still grinning. "As you were." She twirled her hand in a funny little fairy-tale wave before turning and shutting the door neatly behind her.

Once she was gone Holiday cleared her throat, scrambling up off the bed so fast she almost lost her balance and wound up sprawled across it one more time. "Okay," she said, arms pinwheeling a little as she righted herself. "We need to get out of here."

"Uh," I said, getting unsteadily to my feet. I felt like I'd been hit with a two-by-four. I felt like I'd fallen down a well. I'd been working on the beginning of a boner, and I shifted my weight a little awkwardly, hoping Holiday wouldn't notice but knowing that realistically she already had. "Yup."

"Okay," she said again. She was touching her face, her hair, her shirt, her hands migrating up and down her body like a pair of nervous birds searching unsuccessfully for a comfortable place to land. "Well. Let's…do that."

She turned on her heel and headed for the door, wrenching it open and marching down the dim, narrow hallway. I stumbled down the staircase after her, tripping a little on the worn carpet runner. Neither of us bothered with our coats. Outside, the porch was littered with empty beer boxes, a couple of empty liquor bottles peeking out of a giant black trash bag. "How are they not worried about this?" Holiday asked, looking around at the detritus. Her voice was just the tiniest bit shrill. "Like, hasn't it occurred to them that somebody could just be strolling by and see it and call over to the dean like, ‘Hey, it's me, Joe Neighbor! Just so you know, there are fifty underage scholar athletes getting utterly shit-faced in campus housing and one of them is probably going to get alcohol poisoning or commit a date rape before the evening concludes, okay, have a great night'?"

"This isn't campus housing, technically," I explained, a little taken aback by the hard conversational swerve and also not really loving the air quotes she'd put around "scholar athletes." "And beyond, that, no, I don't think they care that much."

Holiday shook her head. "No," she replied softly. "I guess they wouldn't."

Neither one of us said anything for a moment. A couple of chattering girls got into an Uber a few houses over, their heels clicking on the chilly sidewalk. The wind rustled the branches of the enormous old trees that lined the street. "So what's our next step?" I asked finally, not looking directly at her. Every nerve ending in my body felt open and raw. "We need to bring those photos you took to the cops, right?"

"What?" Holiday asked. Her lips were bright and smudgy in the white glow of the porch light, her hair twice its normal volume, an enormous dark corona around her face. "I—no, I don't think so. Not yet, anyway."

That surprised me. "Wait," I said, " no ? Why not?"

"I'm not saying never," she amended. "I just want to—"

"Like, what other evidence could we possibly need at this point?" I asked. Then, when she didn't answer: "Hello? Are you even listening to me right now?"

"Am I—yes!" Holiday snapped. "I'm flustered, Michael, will you give me a second?"

I frowned. "Why are you—why, because we—?" I pointed back and forth between us, weirdly unable to say it.

"No!" Holiday exclaimed. Then, seeming to realize that it wasn't an answer that would hold up to even the most casual scrutiny: "I mean, yes, of course because we—" She broke off.

"Okay…," I said uncertainly, feeling an unpleasant heat creeping up out of my collar. "I mean, I'm sorry. I thought it was pretty obvious we needed a cover."

Holiday blew out a breath. "Of course we did, I just—"

"So then why are you mad at me?"

"I'm not mad at you," she insisted, in the voice of a person who was definitely, unequivocally mad at me. "I just—"

"You just what, exactly?"

"Nothing!" Holiday huffed a noisy breath, raking her tangle of hair back. "Whatever. It's fine. Like you said, we needed a cover."

"I know," I agreed, aware that my own voice was kind of obnoxious but not particularly caring. I felt guilty and defensive without quite knowing why—it was like she was accusing me of something, but only vaguely, leaving me half a set of clues. "I mean, I just hope it doesn't get back to Greer."

Holiday made a face at that, leaning back against the porch railing. "Well," she promised, "she won't hear it from me, I can promise you that much." She jammed her hands into the pockets of her giant sweater—or she tried to, anyway, except she wasn't wearing a giant sweater with pockets, she was wearing a shirt with fiddly little fabric-covered buttons and a neckline I'd been trying not to look at all night long. "Okay," she said, wiping her palms on the seat of her jeans instead. "Anyway."

"Anyway," I agreed, only to snap my jaws shut one more time as the front door of the lax house creaked open, a couple of guys from the team looking at us a little oddly as they ambled out. Probably this wasn't the ideal venue for a private conversation about whether or not our star forward was also possibly a cold-blooded killer. "Anyway," I repeated once they were gone, more quietly this time. "Tell me again why you don't think we should go to the police?"

"Honestly?" Holiday shrugged. "I'm not convinced Hunter's our guy."

"What?" I whirled on her, a wave of disbelief and annoyance crashing over me like the ocean slamming into the rocks at Spectacle Island in winter. "You're shitting me."

"I'm not," she said. "And we've made the mistake of going off half-cocked in the past, so this time I want to be sure—"

"You mean I've gone off half-cocked." I cringed at the memory of how I'd acted back on Martha's Vineyard, immediately irritated at her for even bringing it up. "This isn't like that."

"Are you sure?" Holiday pressed, then continued before I could answer. "Can I ask you something? Do you like Hunter as a suspect so much because you actually think he killed Bri, or do you like him as a suspect so much because you let him bully you into drinking a goldfish and he slept with Greer while you guys were broken up?"

Oh, that pissed me off. "First of all, he didn't bully me into anything," I informed her, heading toward her across the sagging porch. "I drank that goldfish because I wanted to. And second of all, I like him as a suspect so much because he was verifiably at the crime scene the night of the murder and he's got pictures of my girlfriend in her underwear in his desk like a fucking freak!"

"If it was even a crime scene," Holiday shot back.

That stopped me. "What?"

"I'm just saying." Holiday folded her arms and stepped neatly past me, pacing back and forth across the porch. She was shivering; it was freezing out here, though I'd been too distracted to register the cold until right now. "We need to think for a minute, okay? We need to be rational and strategic about this. We can't just go careening all over the place, following your every random impulse wherever it takes us." She was talking fast, cheeks flushed and eyes bright when she turned to face me. "I don't even know what's real and what's not, here."

All at once I felt myself get very, very still. "Holiday," I said. "What are we actually talking about right now?"

"What?" Holiday blanched, a look of sheer unadulterated panic crossing her face in the half second before she blinked it away. "Nothing. I mean, we're talking about the case, obviously." She shook her head like she was trying to clear it, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes. "I'm not thinking clearly," she admitted. "Maybe I drank too much."

I frowned. "Did you drink anything? I didn't drink anything."

"That's not the point, Michael!" Holiday threw her hands up. "Look," she said finally, "we got what we came for, right? We've got the photos. And there's no harm in taking a day or two to figure out whether or not that's enough to get us…wherever it is we're trying to go." She sighed. "In the meantime, I'm going to take off. I'll see you at the game tomorrow, okay?"

"Right," I said. The annual Harvard-Yale game was the following morning, this year's matchup in a football rivalry dating back to 1875. It was an all-day affair, the tailgating starting pretty much as soon as the sun came up, the Square filled with wealthy alumni from both universities eager to relive their glory days. On the way over here we'd passed a middle-aged guy in loafers and pleated khakis getting kicked out of a bar on Mass Ave while singing the Yale fight song at the top of his lungs. "Look, Holiday—"

"Yeah?" This was quick.

"I—" I broke off. I wanted to apologize to her, but I couldn't decide what for, exactly. Kissing her, I guess, but I wasn't actually sorry for that. I'd meant what I said—we'd needed a cover—but there was also a part of me that had always wondered what it might be like, that had looked over at her a million times in the car and in the library and on the Charles River Esplanade and thought: What if? Now I knew—I didn't think I'd ever be able to unknow it, honestly—but still in some strange way it felt like the wondering itself was the thing I ought to be sorry for. "Are we okay?" I finally asked.

Holiday's shoulders dropped. "We're fine, Michael." She sounded so much more unsure than I ever thought of her as being. "I'm cold. I'm tired. I just want to go, okay?"

"Let me at least get you a ride back to your dorm."

Holiday shook her head. "We're like three blocks from my house," she reminded me. "I'm just going to crash there tonight."

"I—oh." She was right, I realized suddenly. I had never thought of it like that; the illusion of an independent adult life on campus was so all-consuming that most of the time it felt like I was a whole world away from the places where I'd grown up, but of course she was right—we were, at most, a seven-minute walk from her parents' massive Cambridge Victorian. Holiday could probably do it in five. I could picture the house so clearly: the dark paint crisp and fresh against the row of perfectly trimmed evergreen bushes lining the wraparound porch, the trio of Adirondack chairs festooned with seasonally appropriate outdoor pillows. The front door was always flanked by clusters of fat orange and white pumpkins at this time of year, dozens of them spilling down the wide front steps: my mom had probably arranged them, same as she did every autumn, picking them up at Pemberton Farms and lugging them out of her trunk one by one.

It didn't feel like we were three blocks from Holiday's parents' house, though. All of a sudden it felt like we were very far from home.

"Well," I said at last, rocking back on my heels a little. "Okay. Text me when you get there, anyway."

Holiday smiled at that, just faintly. "I will text you when I get there," she promised.

I walked her as far as the sidewalk in silence, watching as her tall, broad figure receded into the darkness and reminding myself there was no reason to feel like I was never going to see her again.

Then: "Oh, shit," I realized suddenly. "Holiday!" I called. "Wait!"

Even as she turned to look at me I dashed back into the house and darted through the crowd in the kitchen, finally finding her coat near the bottom of the pile in the old butler's pantry. I grabbed mine too; I'd go with her, I decided with wild conviction, imagining the two of us sitting side by side on the couch in her parents' book-lined den and watching some stupid movie on their extravagant cable package until things between us felt safe and normal again.

I careened back out into the chilly night, catching up with her half a block away, where she was standing underneath a streetlamp, the cold light bouncing off her glossy hair. "Here," I said breathlessly, holding the coat out in her direction.

Her eyes widened in recognition. "Thank you," she said, shrugging it on and immediately tucking her hands into the pockets.

"You're welcome," I said. Then, summoning courage from somewhere deep behind my ribcage: "Look," I said, "what if I just—"

"Yo, Linden!"

I turned around: back at the lax house, Cam was leaning against the porch rail, his posture loose and drunk, his face friendly. "You coming back inside?" he asked, the clang and clatter of the party rending the quiet night. "We're gonna play beer pong."

I considered that for a moment, looking from him to Holiday and back again, down at my own jacket still clutched in my hand. I could feel the courage leaching out of me like runoff from one of those old Fall River glove factories. "Um," I said finally, my voice as casual as I could manage. "Yeah. I'll be there in a sec."

Cam nodded. "Suit yourself," he said, the door slamming behind him as he went back inside.

Holiday was already stepping away by the time I turned around again, ducking out of the glow from the streetlight and into the darkness so I couldn't see her face. "Night, Michael," she said softly.

"Night, Holiday."

I stood there on the sidewalk for a long time once she was gone, knowing I'd missed something important. Knowing I'd let a chance slip away. I didn't actually want to go back inside and play beer pong, and finally I got tired of lurking around under a streetlight like a total boner, so in the end I shrugged my jacket on and headed back in the direction of my dorm. I took the long way, passing graveyards from the 1700s and big old houses with warm yellow light glowing through their front windows, breathing in the smell of a fire in someone's far-off fireplace and telling myself I felt nothing at all.