Chapter 6

6

Tuesday, 10/29/24–Wednesday, 10/30/24

Time passed strangely in the wake of Bri's death, stretching out like taffy before snapping tautly back again as the university machine whirred into gear. There were grief counselors available at the mental health center. A memorial service was planned for the end of the week. A campuswide call went out for remembrances of Bri to be published in an upcoming edition of the Crimson. "Great," Margot said when I mentioned it over dinner in the Hemlock dining hall on Tuesday, "so there's going to be a full-page spread of total strangers talking about how fun she was to party with."

"She was a straight-A student, for the record," Keiko piped up from across the table.

"She got into fucking Harvard!" Dagny shoved a dinner roll into her mouth.

It's not like I didn't understand why they were feeling protective. What happened to Bri had been the subject of all kinds of wild speculation on campus, rumors jumping like bedbugs from house to house: That she'd had a needle in her arm when Greer found her. That she'd sometimes traded blow jobs for coke. Even Cam, a person who could generally be relied upon to mind his business, had pulled me aside as we ran laps at the track early that morning to ask if it was true that Bri had gotten caught up in a hazing for a final club dabbling in dark rituals. "Of course not," I snapped, doubling my pace and pulling ahead of him. "This isn't the fucking Wizarding World of Who Gives a Fuck. Don't be a dumbass."

I was half expecting him to pop me in the face—and there was a part of me that almost wanted him to—but instead, he just stopped running, his expression wounded. "Aw, don't get mad, dude!" he called after me. "I was just double-checking!"

Even the faculty seemed to be after all the dirty details of Bri's death. When I checked my phone on the way back from dinner there was an email from Professor McMorrow reminding me I still hadn't scheduled my first-semester check-in. Additionally, she'd written, a colleague mentioned you may have been friendly with the student who tragically passed away earlier this week. I wanted to let you know I'm here if you want to talk, either about that or about your semester more broadly. When might be a good time for us to meet?

I scowled, shoving my phone back into my pocket as the lampposts blinked on all around me. "Nope," I muttered, though there was nobody around on the path to hear. "No, thank you. I'm good."

Bri's parents were scheduled to come pick up her stuff on Friday morning after the memorial service, so on Wednesday afternoon I went over to the suite to help pack it all up. Greer and the rest of the girls were already at it when I arrived, pulling the tacks out of Bri's Klimt poster and folding up her impressive collection of party clothes. "You guys are amazing," I said, watching as the five of them buzzed around the room with crisp, practiced efficiency.

Celine shrugged. "We take care of each other, right?" she asked, carefully wrapping a perfume bottle in a back issue of the Crimson. Then her chin wobbled. "At least, we fuckin' try."

"I…brought ice cream," I offered a little awkwardly, holding up the bag from the convenience store not far from Hemlock. "Is that weird?"

Keiko tilted her head. "I mean, kind of," she said, peering over and peeking inside the bag to see what flavors I'd picked. "But also, some might say, gentlemanly."

"Very gentlemanly," Greer echoed, shooting me a smile across the room. She grabbed a handful of stolen dining-hall spoons from the common-room kitchenette and we passed the pints around while we worked, emptying Bri's bureau and rolling up her little area rug, wrapping the cord of the desk lamp around its bendy gooseneck. "Thanks for coming," Greer murmured as I tucked Bri's schoolbooks into a banker's box, reaching over and laying one small hand on my back. "I'm really glad you're here."

"Yeah, of course," I said, goofily pleased in spite of everything, happy she was letting me help her in an actual, concrete way. I hadn't been able to figure out exactly how to be there for Greer the last few days. She'd slept in my room the last two nights, showing up late and crawling under my covers, though when I asked her she'd been adamant that she didn't want to talk. Once I'd woken up and she was crying. Once I'd woken up and she was gone. The university had offered her a bunch of different accommodations—time off, extended deadlines—and I was expecting her to jump at them, especially with how stressed she'd been about schoolwork. But she'd turned down every single one. "I just want everyone to treat me normally," she'd told me this morning over breakfast. "And that includes you."

It didn't take long for us to pack up the rest of Bri's things, her entire life at Harvard fitting neatly into a university-issued laundry cart. I thought about my mom, who'd lived in our apartment since before I was born and was woven inextricably into its every nook and crevice. I thought about how neatly I'd disappeared from Bartley after graduation, never to be heard from again.

I bent down to check under Bri's bed as we were finishing up, nudging a lacy thong out of the way with my sneaker as discreetly as possible before pulling out a broken hanger and a crumpled piece of college-ruled loose-leaf. I was about to toss the lot of it into the big black trash bag at the center of the room when I noticed a scrawl of red ink on the paper. I opened it as casually as I could, my eyes widening as I read the words:

Remember: you owe me.

Holy shit. I blinked, the words blurring and sharpening in front of my eyes like a Magic Eye. You owe me. Who the hell had written it? And what could Bri possibly owe? I thought again of the crushed-up pills on the desk the other morning. I thought again of the knocked-over lamp. I'd figured Bri had jostled it over herself as she fumbled clumsily toward Greer's mattress. But what if that wasn't what had happened at all?

"You okay?" Greer asked, glancing at me as she shut the door to the wardrobe.

I looked over at her half a beat too quickly, a familiar anxious restlessness growing in my body. It was the feeling of trying to work a blackberry seed out of a molar. It was the feeling of having a puzzle to solve. "Absolutely," I lied, then shoved the note in my pocket. "What's next?"

Holiday took a ballet class on Wednesday evenings, but when I texted and told her it was an emergency she said I could pick her up when it was finished and we'd go get food at South Street Diner. I was waiting for her on Boylston Street when she came through the door with a scrum of other dancers at a little past nine, sweatpants pulled on over her leotard and her overflowing bag slung over one shoulder. "Hey!" she said, her face breaking open when she saw me.

"Hey," agreed the tall, skinny guy in dance leggings walking beside her, raising his dark eyebrows suggestively. He turned to Holiday, his full mouth twisting. "Who's your boyfriend, Proctor?"

Holiday laughed. "Why," she asked, "is he handsome?" She shoved the guy playfully, then blew him and the rest of them a showy, exaggerated kiss. "He's not my boyfriend. I'll see you guys later, okay?"

"Handsome, huh?" I asked once we were alone on the sidewalk. "Is that what you'd call me?"

"Not to your face," Holiday shot back. "Come on." She nodded toward the corner. "I'm starving."

We turned onto Tremont and then again onto Stuart, walking south until we got to a grubby diner near the bus station. It had been a favorite of ours over the summer, in no small part because it stayed open all night long, and I breathed a weird, suprising sigh of relief as we slid into our usual booth at the back.

"So what's the big emergency?" she asked once we'd ordered, then ducked her head conspiratorially. "Are you pregnant? Because I'll take you to the clinic, Michael. I literally have Planned Parenthood saved in my phone for reproductive rights emergencies."

"Funny." I took a deep breath, my heart starting to beat a little bit harder; some part of me felt like I'd already wasted too much time. "You know that thing that happened on Martha's Vineyard a couple of summers ago?"

Holiday raised her eyebrows across the melamine table, her expression canny. That thing that happened on Martha's Vineyard was a body in a swimming pool; that thing that happened on Martha's Vineyard was a car chase. That thing that happened on Martha's Vineyard was the two of us screaming at each other in a pitch-black kitchen while a hurricane raged out the window and a murderer lurked on the other side of the door.

"Um, yeah" was all Holiday said, her thick eyebrows just barely twitching. "I think I remember it."

"What if I told you I think it might have happened again?"

I filled her in as quickly as possible on the events of the other morning, the pills and the EMTs and the cool gray pallor of Bri's skin against Greer's bright flowered sheets. "Holy shit," Holiday said when I was finished, her eyes wide and expressive behind her glasses. "Michael, that's awful. I heard a girl had OD'd over there, but I had no idea you were the one who found her. I'm so sorry. How's Greer doing? How are you ?"

"I mean, I'm fine," I said, shrugging as manfully as possible. "And Greer is—you know. About how you'd expect her to be, considering her roommate just overdosed. Or at least, I thought she had overdosed? That's what I wanted to talk to you about. I was helping them all clear Bri's stuff out of the suite earlier this afternoon, and I found this under her bed."

I pulled the note out of my pocket and passed it across the table, watching as Holiday read its terse, all-caps contents. "That's…weird," she said finally, her warm fingers brushing mine as she handed it back.

"It is, right?" I nodded, gratified by her agreement. "It's totally weird."

"Could have been written by whoever she was buying from, conceivably."

"That's exactly what I was thinking," I said, pleased we were already on the same page. "And like, if she couldn't pay, maybe he killed her to send a message to his other clients."

Holiday frowned. "Whoa whoa whoa," she said, holding both hands up. "Hang on a second. I thought you said she overdosed."

"Well, yeah, that's what the EMTs seemed to think," I admitted. "But—"

"They would be the ones to know, right? And didn't you say she was like, a huge partier?"

"No, she definitely was," I allowed. "But there was also this lamp that got knocked over—"

"A lamp?"

"On the desk."

"Couldn't Bri have knocked it over herself before she passed out?"

"I mean, sure, I guess," I admitted, the slightest of edges creeping into my voice, "but—"

"Did they do an autopsy?"

"I have no idea," I said. "Maybe? I haven't like, heard anything about it. There was a bunch of crushed-up oxy on her desk, so I think they probably just assumed that's what she took."

"Were the police acting like they thought anything was suspicious?"

"I mean, they interviewed us."

"Harvard police?" she asked. "Or real police?"

"The Harvard police are real police."

"That's what it says on their website, yes," Holiday agreed with a wry smile. "What did they ask, stuff about Bri using?"

"About what happened that night," I recalled, "and when we found her. And yeah, about her being on drugs."

"Have they been back?"

"Well, no," I conceded, "but that doesn't mean anything, right?"

Holiday tilted her head like, Not quite. "Bri was a white girl in the Ivy League," she pointed out. "If there was even a whiff of something sketchy going on, they'd be all over it. Or forget the police, even—the Herald would be all over it. Or like, Fox 25."

I shrugged a little belligerently at that, sitting back against the ripped fake leather of the booth. It was a fucked-up assessment, but I couldn't act like it wasn't true. "I guess."

Both of us were quiet for a moment. Holiday took a long sip of her coffee. "Look," she said finally, her voice gentle, "I know first year is a mindfuck. Even if you think you're settling in fine, it's a lot to get used to. There's one girl on my floor who hasn't eaten anything but cereal since she got here. There's another one who makes her roommate leave the room every night between six and six-thirty so she can walk around naked for half an hour and air out all her various crevices."

I lifted an eyebrow. "Is it you?"

"Fuck off," Holiday said sweetly. "The point is, we're all still figuring out what we're doing here, even if we don't want to admit it. And what happened on the Vineyard last year was a thrill—I mean, a massively messed-up thrill, but still a thrill. It felt, like, purposeful. And concrete. I can get why you'd be looking for something like that now. But sometimes…an accident really is just an accident, you know? One weird note from a maybe-dealer does not a murder mystery make."

"Hold on a sec," I said, blinking at her across the table as I took in her meaning, my whole body flushed with humiliation and shame. "You think I'm manufacturing a violent crime because I'm having trouble adjusting to college ?"

Right away, Holiday shook her head. "That's not what I'm—"

"Really?" I interrupted. "Because it kind of sounds like that's exactly what—"

"It's not," Holiday insisted. "Michael, come on. I just— Remember what I was saying the other day, about spending all your time with the lacrosse team? What if you joined a club, or something?"

"A club ?" Oh, I was livid. I was so fucking pissed. "Screw you, Holiday. I bring something like this to you and you turn around and tell me I should join the literary magazine?"

Holiday blew a breath out. "Michael—" she started, then broke off as the waitress arrived and set our plates down, the smell of fried potatoes and bacon filling the air between us. We ate in silence for a moment, passing the ketchup sullenly back and forth. "Did you show it to Greer?" she asked me finally. "The note, I mean."

I shook my head, remembering the way Greer's body had crumpled to the floor the other night in the hallway. Remembering how she'd shaken in my arms. "She's like, super upset."

"I mean, understandably," Holiday pointed out. "I'm sure everyone is. It's an upsetting thing." She sighed. "I don't want to fight with you, okay? I felt like we were kind of fighting the other day by the river too. But you're my best friend. I'm so happy we're living in the same place again. And I'm really sorry this whole thing happened. Also," she said, bumping my ankle with hers underneath the table, "just saying, if you want to hang out with me so bad, you don't need to bring me a murder investigation to work on. All you need to do is say so."

I rolled my eyes. "Fuck off," I said, but I was smiling, I couldn't help it. I reached over and snagged a fry off her plate.

We ate our greasy food and drank our coffee and shot the shit for the better part of an hour, the knot in my chest loosening up just the slightest bit as Hall she had a bloodhound's nose for a mystery, and loved one more than anyone else I knew. She'd been the one to push us forward on the Vineyard, not to mention the one who'd ultimately cracked the whole thing wide open, and if she said there was nothing here to see, I knew it wasn't because she wasn't interested. It was because there was nothing here to see.

So why couldn't I shake the feeling that something wasn't right?

It was almost midnight by the time I walked her back to her dorm, the night air damp on the back of my neck as a rat darted furtively under a car across the street. "You realize you don't have to do this," Holiday told me as we sidestepped a mountain range of black garbage bags oozing slime all over the curb. "I'm fine to get back on my own."

I waved her off. "You and I both know my mom would cut my nuts off if she found out I let you walk home by yourself this late," I reminded her. It was factually correct, maybe, but it was also the truth that I didn't want to say goodnight to her just yet. We'd spent all summer breathing each other's air, eating butter and jam bagels from Forge and playing Scrabble on her parents' back patio; I forgot sometimes, when I didn't see her for a while, how much better things were when I did.

"So here's a question," Holiday said as we rounded the corner, the marquee of the Colonial winking cheerfully down the block. "Are you around the Friday before Thanksgiving? I'm in a showcase here, a musical theater thing down in the cabaret in my building. I'm singing a song from Bridges of Madison County. "

"Isn't that a movie?" I asked.

"It's a musical too," she explained. "It only ran for a few months on Broadway; the music is beautiful but not terribly commercial, and in the current theater climate— Anyway." She shook her head. "I'm the only first year they picked, so."

"Seriously?" I raised my eyebrows. "That's awesome, Holiday."

"It's not a big deal," Holiday said with a shrug. "But if you're around, you should come. Assuming of course that you can take some time away from your jam-packed schedule of goldfish eating."

I winced. "You heard about that too, huh?"

"I may have."

"Well," I said, rubbing at my neck as we slowed to a stop at the entrance to her building. "I'm busy, but I'm not that busy. I'll definitely be there."

"Okay," she said with a smile. "It's a date."

I said my goodnights, then looked both ways before crossing the street in the direction of the T stop. I'd almost reached the entrance when she called out. "Hey, Michael!" she hollered, her voice loud in the late-night quiet. "Murder or not: I'm glad you texted."

I grinned at her in the green glow of the traffic light, then turned and headed down into the dark mouth of the tunnel. Murder or not, I was glad I had too.