Chapter 3

3

Saturday, 10/26/24

I went for a long run most Saturday mornings that fall, looping my way through the quiet streets of Cambridge or over the BU bridge and down into the crowded pedestrian bustle of Back Bay. It was the weekend before Halloween, and Harvard Square was full and festive, cotton cobwebs hanging in the store windows and little kids wandering around dressed as superheroes and spies. There were hundreds of jack-o'-lanterns stacked on risers on Cambridge Common, ready to be lit as part of a festival that night.

My stomach growled as I turned off Mass Ave and back onto campus—I usually ate with my roommates on the weekends, the three of us jostling each other in line for the waffle maker in the dining hall downstairs. I liked Dave and Duncan a lot, generally, though I knew they were both angling for an invitation to the lax house one of these nights and were starting to wonder why I hadn't delivered. It wasn't that I was embarrassed by them, though back at Bartley I probably would have been: the earnestness of them, their jokey T-shirts and Axe body spray and utter lack of guile. None of that felt like it mattered nearly as much here as it had in high school, in general, but still every time I opened my mouth to ask them to tag along I imagined Hunter catching sight of them across the room like a poacher snagging a pair of baby elephants in the crosshairs of his rifle, and figured I was doing them both a favor by acting like I didn't know they wanted to come.

"Hey," I said now, pushing the door of our room open. "Do you guys want to—"

I broke off, stopping short: Holiday Proctor was sitting in my desk chair, her feet up on my desk like the villain in a James Bond movie.

"Shit," I said, my shoulders dropping.

"You forgot," she accused.

"I didn't forget," I protested.

"Uh-huh." Holiday wasn't buying. "You know, I literally thought, Just this once, I'm not going to send Michael a reminder that we made plans to hang out, and he is fully going to blank it. "

"Does it get exhausting, being right all the time?"

"You'd think so," she said sweetly, "but actually I find it quite invigorating."

"I forgot a little," I admitted, guilt prickling warmly at the back of my neck. "But I'm really happy you're here."

"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 from Wicked, 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 crackling in 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 as I 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 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 Broadway is 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 who should I 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 and dusting their bookshelves and driving Holiday to her various fencing matches and modern dance rehearsals and auditions for community theater productions of Funny 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, the Ghostbusters theme song blaring from the open windows of an Uber passing by. "What are you doing tonight?" I asked. "Like, a reading of Macbeth in 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. "Then Rocky Horror at 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 Park and Aliens and something called A Gnome Named Gnorm from 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!"

Holiday grinned at me, her smile luminous in the late-season sunlight. "See you around, Michael."