Chapter 7

7

Thursday, 10/31/24–Friday, 11/1/24

Greer invited me over to the suite to pregame Bri's memorial service.

"To what, now?" I asked, laughing a little nervously. We were walking across campus, the sun setting above the science buildings; I'd picked her up from her last class of the day. It was Halloween, though neither of us was feeling particularly festive. The air smelled like woodsmoke and leaves.

"You heard me." She shrugged, lips twisting. For the first time since Bri died, there was a little spark of mischief in her expression. "We decided it's what she would have liked."

It was undeniably on-brand, as far as tributes went; still: "You sure you want me there?" I asked. "I get if you guys want to have, like, girl time."

Greer nodded. "You showed up for me in a big way this week, Linden. For the whole suite, really, but especially for me." She reached over and took my hand, lacing our fingers together. "Like it or not, you're in it now. You're one of us."

"Richard Gere pregame for life," I joked.

"Exactly."

We followed the winding path back toward Hemlock, passing a group of girls made up like the Kardashians and a cluster of grad students dressed as DNA. The Grim Reaper scuttled silently up behind us, scythe held like a flag in the air, and I shuddered before I could quell the impulse. I'd been expecting to feel less rattled after my conversation with Holiday—if she said I was reaching, then I was reaching, end of story—but instead, I'd spent the whole day turning that note over in my head, reading it again and again until the paper had gone soft and damp in my hands. I couldn't shake the notion that something wasn't right, that there was something about Bri's death that I wasn't seeing clearly.

I was obsessing, that was all. I needed to let it go.

The service was scheduled for noon on Friday. I went over to the suite around eleven and found the five of them clustered on the couch in the common room, passing a bottle of Fireball back and forth. "We started without you," Margot informed me, holding her shot glass up in a salute.

I nodded seriously. "I see that."

I watched as Dagny poured a shot of cinnamon whiskey into a coffee mug, then handed it over to me before raising the bottle. "To Bri," she said, waving it with a little flourish. "We miss you, you wild bird."

"You bright light," Greer added.

"You crazy bitch," Margot put in.

I smiled as all five of them busted up laughing. "To Bri," we all echoed, and drank. I winced at the familiar burn of the Fireball, then nodded at this morning's issue of the Crimson, which was lying wrinkled on the coffee table.

"Is the stuff about Bri as bad as you thought it was going to be?" I asked Dagny.

"Worse," Greer answered instead, flopping backward onto the sofa and plopping her feet into Celine's lap. "I am actually completely beside myself over the way everyone is talking about her."

"I know," Celine agreed, squeezing Greer's toes through her bright, fuzzy socks. "It sucks."

"How are people talking about her?" I asked.

"Don't act like you haven't heard them," Greer said, eyeing me from her still-prone position.

"I haven't," I said, which was a lie—of course I had, but I wanted to hear her say it. "I'm not the kind of guy people gossipto."

"Oh, please." Margot rolled her eyes.

"No, he's right, actually," Greer said with a small smile. "He's not. It's because his face is so punchable. It makes him hard to trust." Then, before I could dig into whatever the hell that meant, she continued: "You know how people are. Like, Oh, it's so sad what happened, but also, like, this fucked-up undertone of how she probably deserved it because she was a partier who liked to wear dresses that showed her underbutt. Which, she wasn't even that much of a partier, compared to a lot of the people in this school!"

I wasn't sure that was true—after all, Greer herself had complained about Bri's partying more than once, including the morning we found her. Still, it wasn't like I didn't take her point. There was a definite cautionary quality to the way people were talking about what had happened to Bri, an isn't it awful but that's what you get kind of smugness that made me a little uncomfortable. It was always surprising to me, the stories people told themselves about why someone else deserved whatever tragedies befell them. The stories of all the reasons they themselves would be safe.

"Nobody's actually saying anything mean about her, are they?" I asked, trying to sound casual. "Like, she didn't have any actual enemies. "

"Enemies?" Celine looked at me a little strangely, her expression reflected almost exactly in the other girls' faces. "No, of course not."

"Everybody loved Bri," Dagny said, "just like we did."

"No, totally," I said. "I guess I just meant—I don't know." I cringed a little. I was miserable at this kind of investigative work, interviewing people while trying to act like I wasn't. Not that I was interviewing anyone. Not that I was investigating. "Just like, nasty ex-boyfriends or whatever. People who might be spreading rumors on purpose."

"If anybody in this suite has a long list of jilted ex-lovers, it's Greer," Margot put in.

Greer huffed a laugh, her mouth dropping open. "Fuck off, Margot."

"Love you!" Margot sang in reply.

Greer rolled her eyes. "All right," she said, hauling herself up off the sofa. "Let's get ready for this shit show, shall we?"

"Greer," Dagny said, snorting, "Jesus."

"What?" Greer shot back. "You know as well as I do she would have hated this! Like, some nondenominational prayer service and all of us holding candles or whatever. It's a joke." She shook her head. "Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go dress in my mourning attire."

She stomped off down the hall, swaying a little from the Fireball. I stood there for a moment, unsure whether or not I was meant to follow.

"She's taking it really hard," Margot said after a moment, breaking the moody silence. "I mean, we all are, obviously, but it's worst for her."

"Yeah," I agreed quietly. "I can see that." I jammed my hands into my pockets. "I'll, uh. Let you guys get ready."

I headed down the hallway, knocking lightly on Greer's door before easing it open. She was prowling around the room in a bra and black tights, opening drawers and closing them again. I thought it was just nerves, or that she couldn't decide what to wear, but all at once she straightened up and turned to face me. "My watch is missing," she announced.

I frowned. "Your watch?"

"Well, my grandpa's watch. My grandma gave it to me when I got my acceptance letter here. It's a vintage Rolex, it's a whole—" She waved her hand. "Whatever, it's just going to make me sound douchey. Anyway, it was in my jewelry box, and now it's…" She opened the box one more time, then closed it again. "Not."

I glanced over my shoulder at the door. "Do you think whoever messed up your room took it?" In the chaos of everything that happened I'd never asked her whether it was actually Bri who'd been responsible that day, though judging by the look on her face now, I was pretty sure it hadn't been.

Sure enough, Greer shook her head. "I—maybe?" she admitted quietly. "I don't know. Hey, guys?" she called down the hallway toward the living room. "None of you have seen my watch lying around, have you?"

A chorus of "Nope" and "When was the last time you wore it" and "Did you check your nightstand, you know how you like to take off your jewelry when you drink" drifted down the hallway; something about their distraction, their lack of curiosity, made me wonder if possibly Greer hadn't told them her room had been trashed.

For her part, Greer only shrugged: "They're right," she said. "I probably just took it off somewhere and don't remember, that'sall."

I nodded slowly. Personally, I couldn't imagine taking a vintage Rolex off somewhere and not remembering where I'd left it, but I didn't say that out loud. After all, it wasn't actually impossible that she'd lost it. I was used to stuff like this, the stark and sudden reminders between how people here had grown up and how I had. My roommate back at Bartley had once bet twenty-five hundred dollars on whether another kid on our hall could eat seven saltines in a minute; when it turned out he couldn't, Jasper only shrugged and dug the cash out of a box on his bookshelf, joking about how he hoped his weed dealer took cards.

Now I sat on the bed, watching as Greer looked half-heartedly around the room for a while longer before finally giving up and scooping a simple black dress off the back of the desk chair, tugging it over her head. "I don't know," she conceded, climbing onto the mattress and putting her head in my lap. "It's gone. Add it to the long list of reasons for my parents to be disappointed in me, I guess."

"Will do," I promised, smoothing her hair back off her forehead. "Is there like an Excel document somewhere?"

"They keep it in Google Sheets," she replied, rolling over to look up at me. "That way it's easily sharable."

"Sounds efficient."

"They are that."

We were quiet for a moment, both of us thinking. "Can I ask you something?" I ventured, unable to help myself. "What did Margot mean out there? About all your jilted ex-lovers?"

Greer snorted in disbelief at that, reaching up and pressing the heels of her hands into her eye sockets. "Oh, Linden," she said, "please don't."

"I'm not," I said quickly, holding my hands up. "I'm not."

"It's literally the day of my best friend's memorial service."

"No, I know." I winced. "I'm sorry. That was douchey."

Greer sighed, dropping her hands from her face. She looked exhausted. "It's fine," she said, shaking her head a little, like she was too worn out to argue. "I basically asked you the same thing the other day, didn't I? About all the girls you hooked up with?"

It felt like a million years ago already, the cold, sunny afternoon we'd gone to Castle Island. Still: "Yeah," I admitted. "I guess you kind of did."

We gazed at each other for a moment. I could see the flecks of gold in her eyes. It wasn't the right time, probably; I could easily see a universe where it was never the right time, where we hovered in this in-between until graduation, so I took a deep breath, then bent down and pressed my mouth gently against hers. "I've wanted to do that since I got to campus," I confessed quietly.

"I know." Greer grinned.

I wrinkled my nose. "That obvious?"

"A little obvious," she said, boosting herself upright. "But that's fine. I wanted it too."

"You did?"

"I did," Greer said, and lifted her face to mine.

"Hey, Greer, honey?" Margot asked, knocking on the door at the same time as she opened it, Greer and I pulling quickly apart. "We gotta get going."

Greer nodded. "Yeah," she said. "We'll be right out."

"Okay," Margot agreed. She looked back and forth between us for a moment, a small smile playing over her catlike features. "For the record," she said, turning and calling over her shoulder, "Bri would have liked that too."

Bri's service was at MemChurch, the Memorial Church of Harvard University, a tall, airy space full of glossy wooden pews and polished marble columns. Sunlight streamed through the arched leaded windows. The crimson carpet up the aisle seemed to glow.

Greer was almost finished with her reading, a poem by Ada Limòn, when my phone buzzed with a text. I ignored it, but a second later it buzzed again, then started humming with the insistent swarm that meant someone was calling. I pulled the thing out of my pocket, snuck a look at the screen: Holiday.

Not a good time, I texted as furtively as I could.

She texted back barely a second later: It's important.

I sighed and edged toward the aisle, earning dirty looks from both Dagny and Margot for my trouble, then made my way to the back and out the heavy door of the chapel. "Dude," I said when she answered, ducking into the stairwell that led to the choir loft, "I'm literally in the middle of Bri's memorial service."

"Seriously?" Holiday sounded incredulous. "What the hell are you doing calling me?"

"You said it was important!"

"I mean, it could have waited until—whatever," Holiday said impatiently. "Okay. Well. While I have you. You said there was a bunch of crushed-up oxy on the desk when you found Bri, right?"

"Yeah," I recalled slowly. "Why?"

"I felt kind of bad about blowing you off at the diner the other night," she explained. "So I called a friend at the medical examiner's office—"

"Hang on," I interrupted. "You have a friend at the medical examiner's office?"

Holiday sighed, like she had suspected she'd need to explain this part but had hoped I'd know enough to just accept and move on. "We met in After Hours fandom," she informed me, naming the boy band she'd been obsessed with since middle school. "She writes, like, the raunchiest fan fiction you've ever read in your life."

"And she's the medical examiner?"

"Did I say she was the medical examiner?" Holiday countered. "She just works there. She does IT or something. Don't be ridiculous."

"Oh, I'm the one being ridiculous."

"The point is," Holiday pressed on, "she told me that it's regular procedure for them to do an autopsy on all drug overdose cases, even if the deaths aren't being investigated as suspicious. And according to the records she pulled up for me, Bri's official cause of death is an overdose—but all they found in her system besides alcohol was Adderall and Molly."

I frowned. "Not oxy?'

"Not oxy."

"But if there was no oxy in her system—"

"Then what was the oxy doing on the desk?" she asked. "Yeah, I don't know."

I sat down hard on the landing, weirdly vindicated and a little afraid. "So the cops must be investigating, then."

"I don't actually think so," Holiday admitted, her voice low and urgent. "She said it doesn't look like the Cambridge PD has requested the autopsy report." Then, before I could respond: "There's one more thing. I did a little bit of research, and like, obviously I'm also not the medical examiner, but from what I read, if they're just running a basic toxicology panel to confirm there were drugs in her system, it's possible they weren't necessarily looking for another cause of death."

I frowned. "Meaning—"

"Meaning it's possible—probable, even—that Bri drank a lot, took a bunch of drugs, knocked over a lamp, passed out in Greer's bed, and never woke up," Holiday reminded me, "and that's a tragedy. But it's also possible she drank a lot and took a bunch of drugs—"

"And then somebody smothered her with a pillow and left different drugs on the desk to point the cops in the wrong direction and nobody caught it?"

"Well," Holiday pointed out, "not nobody. "

Downstairs in the chapel the service was wrapping up, a hundred voices rising and falling together as the pianist played a plinky rendition of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." Sunlight trickled through a window at the top of the staircase, a million motes of dust hovering in the air. "No," I agreed slowly, rubbed a hand over my forehead as I stood on wobbly legs to face whatever was about to happen. "Not nobody."