Chapter 16

16

Sunday, 12/1/24

When I woke up it was December, and someone was pissing enthusiastically into the toilet beside me. "Don't mind me," James said, his voice cheerful as I blinked rapidly, hideously alert. "Didn't mean to startle you."

"Dude," I managed, scrubbing a hand over my swollen, throbbing face, "there are like, twelve bathrooms in this house."

"Emergency," he said pleasantly. His pajama pants were printed with tiny red lobsters. "Couldn't wait. Honestly, all things considered, you're lucky all I had to do was pee."

I winced, waiting until he was finished washing his hands before I pushed myself cautiously upright. I was still wearing my clothes from the night before, the smell of wood and bonfire smoke wafting off me every time I moved. My joints ached. My mouth felt cottony. And I was filled with the kind of sticky black dread that oozes into every cranny and crevice, a sick certainty that some grave disaster was coming and I was its unlucky author. I could only remember bits and pieces of anything that had happened once Leo had taken off into the woods—the weirdness with Greer, the breathing trees, and— woof —the message I'd left for Holiday. What had I even said ? The whole thing was hazy, but judging by the creeping, moldy feeling in my chest, it couldn't have been—

I keep thinking about kissing you.

Oh, fuck me.

"Bro," James said, glancing at me over his shoulder as he headed into the hallway, "you gonna boot?"

"No," I said, gripping the edge of the bathtub and waiting for him to go away. "I'm good."

Once I was finally alone I dug my phone out of my pocket with shaking hands, hoping maybe I'd hallucinated the whole thing, but there it was: outgoing call, 4 minutes, 11:17 p.m. I had no idea if she'd gotten it already; she hadn't called me back, or even texted. I swiped over to our message thread, my thumb flying: So, hey. Lots to fill you in on. Back tonight, but in the meantime, if you've got a long voice mail from me you haven't listened to yet…maybe don't?

I followed up a second later: I realize that me saying that is probably just going to make you want to listen immediately, but. Really. Better to delete. Then, most pathetic of all, I tried one more time: lol.

I waited for a minute to see if she'd text back, which she didn't, then shoved my phone into my pocket with a grumble and shuffled downstairs to the kitchen, where I found Greer sitting at the long farmhouse table with Margot and Celine and Dagny, all of them eating sticky buns as big as their heads.

"There you are," Greer said, pulling off one long, gooey piece and popping it into her mouth. "I was going to come poke you in a minute to make sure you were alive." She looked at me, presumably taking in my pale, sweaty face. "There's coffee."

"Thank you." I poured a cup from the fancy machine, willing myself to steady out. The dull panic coursing through my body felt worse than just normal morning-after anxiety, a kind of foreboding I couldn't shake. I didn't know if it was the aftereffects of whatever had been in the edibles or just the catastrophe of my own bad judgment. "I passed out on the bathroom floor."

"I know," she said, not unkindly. "I tried to move you when we got back into the house. You told me to go away and that you were communing with the tile."

"I mean, it is very lovely tile," Dagny agreed, barely holding in her laughter as she patted the bench beside her. "Come have a sticky bun."

It was already close to noon, and Margot needed to get back to campus to work on a group project, so once I'd finished my coffee we all headed upstairs to pack. "What are you doing?" Margot asked when she saw me hauling an armload of bedding down the back stairs.

I froze. "Bringing the sheets down?" I explained, feeling a little bit sheepish. "I was gonna throw them into the machine."

Margot's lips quirked. "You definitely don't need to do that."

"I don't mind," I said. I looked around at the kitchen, taking in the mess on the counters, the muddy boot prints by the door. The trash was piled high in the stainless steel can. "We should probably clean up a little before we go, right?"

Margot shook her head. "It's fine," she promised. "The housekeeper will be here this afternoon. She'll take care of it."

The housekeeper. I glanced out the window at the fine wash of sleet coming down on the driveway, thought of my mom spending a snowy Sunday schlepping the vacuum up the grand front steps. "Okay," I said uneasily. "Well, as long as I'm down here, I might as well toss them in."

Margot shrugged. "Sure," she said, "suit yourself."

So I ran a load of laundry, carried Greer's bag down to the Jeep. "Oh, shit," I said as we were hauling the last of our stuff into the trunk, "I think I left my hoodie upstairs." I doubled back into the house and tidied up the kitchen as fast as I could, starting the dishwasher and tying up the trash bags before digging all the cash I had out of my wallet and leaving it on the kitchen table on top of a paper towel, scrawling housekeeping across it with a pen I found in a drawer. "Where's the hoodie?" Greer asked when I climbed into the Jeep a few minutes later, breathing a little hard.

"I realized I already packed it," I said. "I'm a dumbass."

"Only sometimes," she replied, scooting over in the back seat to make room.

It felt like the ride back to Boston took forever, the stop-and-start of the Thanksgiving weekend traffic making me queasy. Since the accident I could be a little weird about driving in bad weather, especially with people I didn't know that well. "You okay?" Greer murmured as Margot flipped off a minivan behind her on 95 South. "You look like you're about to pass out."

"Just hungover," I said, which was partly true. "Which reminds me: What happened with the, ah, turkey?"

Both of them burst out laughing at that.

When we got back to campus I basically tucked and rolled out of the car, saying a hurried goodbye to the girls outside of Hemlock and dialing Holiday's number as I darted up the stairs of my dorm. "So, I'm guessing you got my other message," I said when she sent me to voice mail one more time. "Like I said in my text this morning, definitely feel free to just ignore that, but—"

I broke off as I opened the door to my room—and found Holiday cross-legged on my mattress eating a paper cup of ice cream from J.P. Licks. Duncan was sitting in his desk chair opposite, his feet propped up on the bed. I blinked, looking from Holiday to Duncan and back to Holiday again. "Are you waiting for me?" I asked her.

"Always," Holiday deadpanned, then rolled her eyes. "No, Michael." She nodded at Duncan—who, I saw now, had his own cup of ice cream. They'd been hanging out here, I realized belatedly. In my room. Together.

On purpose.

"Dave's connecting flight is delayed in Chicago," Duncan reported cheerfully, his ruddy hair flopping down over his forehead. "How was your break?"

"It was good," I said absently, still trying to tease out exactly how this scene before me had come into existence. Who ate ice cream in December, anyway? It was unnatural.

Holiday scraped the bottom of her cup with her plastic spoon. "I should get going," she announced, tossing them into the trash can underneath my desk. "Duncan, I'll text you about the—"

"The reading at Trident," he finished for her. "Yeah, definitely."

"It's a date."

A date ? My head banged. Fuck, at this rate I was going to be hungover until New Year's. "I can walk you down," I managed. I was still wearing my coat, suddenly sweating in the overwarm residence hall.

Holiday shook her head. "I'm good," she said, but I followed her anyway, trailing her down the hallway and onto the staircase.

"Hey," I said. "So, about that message—"

"Don't worry about it," she said airily, holding a hand up in an attempt, presumably, to save me from myself. "I could only understand, like, half of what you were saying anyway. Who's Boy Genius?"

"I have no idea," I said. "But I think it's worth looking into, right? If Greer somehow found out something incriminating about him and Margot—"

"Trying to shut her up could be enough of a motive for them to come after her," Holiday admitted. "It probably makes sense to put eyes on Margot for a couple of days, see if she leads us anywhere interesting."

I nodded. "And Emily? It seems weird that Greer didn't mention her being on campus the day her room got trashed, right?"

"Yeah." Holiday sighed. "Can you please do me a favor and try to figure out what Greer's mom's maiden name is?" she asked. "I mean, I'm a pretty good internet detective, but there are thirty-two thousand students at BU and like four thousand of them are named Emily."

"Yeah, of course," I promised. It occurred to me that she didn't sound particularly enthusiastic about the idea; I wondered if the novelty of this particular investigation was starting to wear off for her, though it could have just been that my head was still pounding and all my joints kind of hurt. "I'm happy to help." Then, because I couldn't quite stop myself: "So you and Duncan, huh?"

Holiday made a face and shoved her hands into her coat pockets at the same time she shrugged, a Thanksgiving cornucopia of nervous body language. "It's not a big deal," she said. "We've been talking a little bit, that's all."

I raised an eyebrow. "So I see."

"He couldn't afford to fly home just for the weekend," she continued as she got to the bottom of the stairs and opened the door to the bustling lobby. "He's on scholarship, just like you."

I blinked. "He is?" I hadn't known that; I'd never thought to ask about his plans. It made me feel like a dick in a way I didn't want to examine too closely.

"He is," she reported. "Imagine that." She pushed open the door of the building, an icy blast of wind blowing through. "I'll talk to you tomorrow, Michael," she told me. "Meanwhile, drink some water, will you? You look like you're about to keel over and die."

"Thanks for that."

"Anytime."

Once she was gone I headed back upstairs to my room, where Duncan had finished his ice cream and was stretched out in bed with a chemistry book. "Hey, dude," I said, reaching out and running a hand over my bedspread, smoothing out the place where Holiday had been. "I think I owe you an apology."