Chapter 18

18

Thursday, 12/5/24–Friday, 12/6/24

The problem with having a knock-down, drag-out, friendship-ending fight with someone at the BU East stop on the Green Line when you live downtown and in Harvard Square, respectively: it makes storming off kind of a nonstarter. Holiday and I waited at opposite ends of the platform for the train to come, but when it finally chugged into sight it was only a single trolley car long, and enormously crowded. The front door was the only one to open.

I sighed noisily and shuffled into line behind her, getting a whiff of her hair for my trouble as I tapped my card and smushed myself into the three square inches of available standing room. Holiday didn't say anything, so I didn't either; both of us seethed in silence for ten excruciating stops until finally we got to Park Street and I shoved my way off. When I looked back through the window, I couldn't find her in the crush of commuters.

A bunch of guys from the lax team had gotten tickets to the Celtics game that evening, but I wasn't in the mood to hang out with anyone. Instead, I spent the rest of the night in my room, pretending to study and trying not to think about Duncan and Holiday sitting in the plush darkness of a theater across the river, whispering about what a philistine I was. Around nine I shuffled down to the convenience store, cobbling dinner together out of a microwave pizza, a bag of Pepperidge Farm Brussels cookies, and a waxy Red Delicious apple, for health.

"Dude," Dave said when I got back upstairs, eyeing me over his laptop. "You good?"

"I'm fine," I snapped, then winced at the sound of it. "Sorry." I scrubbed a hand over my face. "Just, like, a lot on my mind."

Dave nodded. "They're doing an overnight Indiana Jones marathon in the common room," he offered. "I'm going to go by when I'm done with this paper, if you want to come along."

I shook my head. "I think I might just crash," I said, partly because I wanted to see what time Duncan got home and partly because I had, by this point, eaten thirteen of the fifteen cookies in the foil-lined Pepperidge Farm bag and was feeling more than a little bit ill. "But thanks."

Dave shrugged. "Suit yourself," he said, shutting his computer and heaving himself up off the bed. "You change your mind about whatever you're sulking over, you know where to find me."

"I'm not sulking, " I said peevishly. And I wasn't.

Not exactly.

Okay, I was sulking a little.

Holiday was just wrong, that was all. She had no idea what she was talking about. It wasn't true; I did so ask her questions. And if I didn't, it was only because she was always talking so much that I could barely get a word in edgewise. Still, when I tried to make a list of things I knew about her life right now, it was disturbingly short.

Ugh, I really did not want to be the bad guy here.

Fight with Holiday or not, the end of the semester was speeding in my direction like a car down the turnpike, assignments stacking up one on top of another. I was painstakingly formatting the bibliography for an expos paper I was writing on women historians of the IRA the following afternoon when my phone buzzed on the table beside me. How's the work going? Greer wanted to know.

Miserable, I reported. What's up?

Look out your window.

I leaned back in my chair and peered down at the outside of Hemlock House, where Greer was standing in her bright red peacoat and a hat with a pompom on it, her hair glossy and dark. I watched as she waved, then bent her head to type something else into her phone: Study break? she asked.

I grinned, slamming my laptop closed and pushing my chair back. Sure.

I grabbed my coat, thundering down the stairs and out into the courtyard, which was bustling with all the frenetic activity of a Friday afternoon. "I know you," I said, wrapping my arms around Greer in the chilly afternoon light. We hadn't seen a ton of each other since we'd gotten back from Maine; I'd been distracted by my goose chase after Margot, and she'd been gearing up for the final push of the semester. "I figured you were in the library."

"I was," she said, "but my brain is soup." She wrinkled her nose. "You wanna go have an adventure?"

We took the train across the river and got off the Green Line at the Prudential Center, the high-end mall already decked out for the holidays in reds and golds. "Are we going to Eataly?" I asked hopefully.

Greer laughed. "Maybe later," she promised, pulling me through the crowd of shoppers and out onto Huntington Ave. "If you're good."

Outside the mall it was freezing; I'd forgotten this about Boston in winter, how the wind comes in off the water and slices through the buildings, burning your face and the inside of your ears. The Berkshires were cold, sure, but not like this. "I'm transferring," I decided. "Effective immediately. And I'm only applying to schools in Florida."

Greer ignored me, pulling me through the afternoon crowds on the sidewalk before finally coming to a stop in front of an empty reflecting pool, which stretched out in front of us for the better part of a block. A few skateboarders in skullcaps practiced their moves, wheels rumbling over the concrete. "Here we are," she announced. "I've always wanted to come to this place."

"Oh yeah?" I teased. "Hoping to get some tips on your ollies?"

"You're hilarious." She shook her head. "Not the pool," she said, then motioned at the hulking building at the other side of the reflecting pool. "The Mapparium."

I shook my head. "The what, now?"

"Come on," Greer said, then took my hand and pulled me toward the entrance.

The Mapparium was an enormous, inside-out stained-glass globe lit up with a million tiny light bulbs. "Whoa," I said as we stepped onto the long glass walkway that cut down the middle—startling at how loud and booming my voice sounded, gazing around at the world with no small amount of wonder. There was something strange happening with the perspective from this angle, the sizes of the continents all different from what I was used to seeing: Africa way bigger than it looked on the globe in my bedroom back at my mom's house; Europe and North America huddled as if for warmth right up against the North Pole. "This is wild."

"It's cool, right?" Greer asked, turning a slow circle on the catwalk with her hands tucked into her pockets. Her tone was nonchalant, careless even, but I could see in the eager lift of her eyebrows that she was hoping I'd say yes.

"It's really cool," I agreed softly. Cooler still was the idea that she'd brought me here hoping I'd like it, that she'd picked it out for a field trip with me in mind. All at once I felt a wave of fondness for her that was so strong it almost took me out at the knees. How had I spent almost two years apart from her? How had I forgotten the way she made me feel? "I can't believe I didn't know it was here."

Greer's eyes were shining. "It gets cooler," she told me, motioning along the walkway back the way we'd come. "Here, go stand at that end."

I did as she told me, watching as she made her way to the opposite side of the globe. "Hi," she whispered—or at least, I could tell by the way her mouth was moving that it was a whisper. The acoustics of the Mapparium made it so I could hear her as loudly and clearly as if she'd been speaking right into my ear.

"It's a whispering gallery," she told me, her smile radiant on the other side of the world. "It's for telling secrets."

"Oh yeah?" I felt the back of my neck get warm. "Tell me one, then, how about."

Greer tapped a finger to her lips, like she was thinking. "I'm really glad you came to Harvard," she confessed after a moment. "I think maybe I've been letting you feel like I didn't care so much one way or the other. I think maybe I wanted you to believe that, even. But I'm really happy you're here."

"I'm really happy I am too." I grinned at her, the warmth in my chest enough to power the entire planet. I could feel the weirdness from my fight with Holiday—the heaviness I'd been carrying ever since Bri died—melting away. I looked at Greer standing there across the walkway, hands still tucked neatly into the pockets of her bright red coat. I loved her, I realized. And I was tired of sneaking around, keeping secrets and telling half-truths like the scared, insecure kid I'd been when we were together back at Bartley. I wanted to be honest with her. I wanted to be the kind of grown-ass man she deserved. "I have to tell you something," I said.

Greer laughed. "I mean," she replied, in her normal voice this time, "that's kind of the idea."

But I shook my head. "I'm serious."

Her smile slipped, just a little. "Okay," she agreed slowly, taking a cautious step toward me and tilting her head back toward the door. "Should we go?"

We grabbed lattes at a nearby Starbucks and sat on a bench outside the Mapparium, both of us shivering a little bit in the gray New England afternoon. "Are you breaking up with me?" Greer asked, running her thumb in circles around the plastic lid of her coffee cup. "Because I gotta say, Linden, if you chased me around all semester just to dump me two weeks before finals—"

"I'm not," I promised quickly. "I'm definitely not."

"Okay," she said. "Then what?"

"First of all," I began, then cleared my throat and started over. "First of all, please believe me when I say I know this is going to sound completely bonkers. And also, I know you're probably going to be pissed."

"Oh, boy." Greer looked at me sidelong. "Gotta love a conversation that starts that way."

"Yeah." I took a deep breath. "So, um, here's the thing. I know Margot and James are hooking up. And I know that you know too, but I think the thing you might not know is that they know you know, and that's why they tried to hurt you, but wound up accidentally getting Bri instead."

For a moment Greer just gaped at me, the only sounds the cars on Huntington Avenue and the frigid wind screaming across the plaza. It felt like the first moment after a gunshot. "To begin with," she said finally, her voice small in the sudden hugeness of the city all around us, "um, no. I definitely did not know that."

"Oh. Well." I felt myself blush, like possibly I was the pervert here. "Margot and James are hooking up."

"Margot and James are first cousins."

"I know," I said.

"And they're—"

"Yeah." I winced. "I saw it. I wish I could unsee it, actually."

Greer didn't laugh. "Where?" she asked. "Like, when did you—how do you even know that?"

"It doesn't matter."

"Were you spying on them?" She stood up so fast her coffee burbled up like a geyser, flooding the lid of her cup. "Have you been spying on me ?"

"Of course not," I said, scrambling to my feet to match her. "Why would I spy on you?" I shook my head. "I just—it started because when we were at Margot's at Thanksgiving I saw this text on her phone—"

"You were going through her phone ?"

"She handed it to me!" I protested. "The text popped up while I was taking that video of you guys doing the dance from High School Musical or whatever."

"First of all, it was A Goofy Movie, " Greer corrected me. "And second of all, you realize how sketchy you sound right now."

"I do, yes." I sighed, setting my coffee cup down on the bench. "Anyway, the point is—"

"The point is," Greer interrupted, "this is ridiculous. Even if it is true about Margot and James—and I will tell you right now, I think that is a big if—Margot was with me in the library the night Bri died, Linden. She felt bad for me about missing the lax party, so she came and brought me snacks and was generally a really good fucking friend to me, right up until the moment that we left Widener together and she dropped me off outside your dorm. There's no way she went up to the suite and killed Bri, thinking it was me: she knew I wasn't in there. On top of which, she's my friend, and she wouldn't try to hurt me. And if she did try to hurt me for some wild, enormously unlikely reason, she wouldn't have accidentally hurt Bri instead." Greer shook her head before I could say anything. "Look, Linden. I care about you. I love you, even—or I could, if you'd relax and give me a chance. But you have got to stop this. It's too much for me. It's freaking me out. It's making me worry about you."

I frowned. "Worry about me?"

Greer shrugged, sitting back down on the bench and wrapping her hands around her coffee cup. "I've seen what this school does to people who aren't ready for it," she said. "It makes you weird. It makes you a little impulsive. Before you know it you're fixating on shit that doesn't matter, just to feel like there's some part of your life that you can control." She lifted an eyebrow behind her glasses. "Believe me, I know. At this rate, you're going to wind up on academic probation, freaking out before every little quiz because you're terrified this is going to be the one that gets you booted, fooling around with your high school boyfriend."

I snorted, the tension draining out of my body as I reached for her, pulling her up again and into my arms. "There are worse things than fooling around with your high school boyfriend," I reminded her quietly.

Greer sighed. "Yes," she agreed with theatrical resignation, looping her arms around my neck. "I suppose there are."

We stood there for a long moment and held on to each other, cold wind buffeting us from all sides. "Get a room!" a skateboarder called from the other side of the plaza. I huffed a laugh into Greer's hair.

"Okay," I decided finally. "You're right. I'm sorry. I'm going to stop. I am stopping; I have officially stopped. I'm done playing Sherlock Holmes. I just want to get through my finals and finish the rest of the semester and be with you."

"Sounds like a plan," Greer agreed, her voice muffled into my jacket. She pulled back to look at me then, her eyes searching my face behind her glasses like she wanted to make sure I wasn't full of shit. "I want this to work, Linden. I, like—really, really want this to work."

I thought of the first time I'd ever seen her, in the library back at Bartley. I thought of how it felt to run into her that day in the Coop. "Me too," I promised. "And I'm sorry."

Greer nodded. "Buy me dinner to make it up to me, how about?"

I grinned. "You got a deal."