Page 23

23

Afterward

Holiday was right about that too, in the end. The girls from the suite went with Greer to the dean of students; from there, they went with her to turn herself in to the police. The story made the front page of every paper in town, from the Globe to the Crimson; I turned my face away from the headlines as I trudged across campus to hand in my final paper for International Women Writers. Technically, I could have just uploaded it to the portal—I was probably going to have to upload it to the portal anyhow, actually—but I’d never managed to make it to my mandatory advisor meeting and figured this was probably my last chance.

“Michael,” Professor McMorrow said, lifting one eyebrow when I knocked on the open door to her office. It was winter gray outside the window, a glass-shaded lamp casting a warm glow across the desk. “Nice to see you back.”

“Nice to be back,” I said, handing over the paper. “Was a little touch and go there for a minute.”

The professor nodded like No kidding. “How was your first semester?”

“Eventful.”

She leaned back in her leather chair. “I can imagine.”

I tucked my hands into my coat pockets, clearing my throat a bit. Her office was cozy, the walls lined with novels and collections of poetry, classical music piping from a little Bose radio on the shelf. On the desk was a framed photograph of the professor on the beach with a woman I assumed was her wife, each of them holding a squirmy-looking toddler. “I owe you an apology,” I told her. “I was…amped, the last time we talked.”

McMorrow raised an eyebrow. “That’s one word for it, certainly.”

“I was an inappropriate jerk,” I clarified, “and I’m sorry.”

She waved her hand. “I’ve seen worse. And knowing what we know now, I imagine you were going through quite a bit in your personal life.”

“You could say that,” I agreed. “I’m hoping the rest of my time here isn’t quite so high-stakes. Or like, that it is high-stakes, but maybe not in quite the same way as this was?” I was rambling, the wildness of the last days and weeks catching up with me all at once. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’m trying to get from my time here, is I guess what I’m saying.”

“And?” She lifted her chin.

“A friend of mine told me I should be sure not to waste it.”

“Sounds like good advice.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “She’s…smart like that. Anyway, I think I’m ready to declare a major.”

That seemed to surprise her. “You’ve got time, you know,” she reminded me. “I don’t know if I was quite obvious the last time we spoke. There’s no requirement to declare until November of your sophomore year.”

“No, I know,” I assured her, “but I want to. It feels really obvious to me now, what I want to study here. It feels really clear to me what I want to do.”

McMorrow nodded one more time, then reached over to turn down the music before gesturing to the empty chair on the other side of her desk. “Well, in that case,” she said, “have a seat, why don’t you? You can tell me a little bit more about what you have in mind.”

I told Holiday a few nights later as we walked through Cambridge Common, steam from her cup of hot chocolate curling up around her face. “Psychology,” she repeated, her smile glowing. “Of course. I love it. I think it’s perfect.”

“I mean, I don’t know about perfect, ” I said, feeling the back of my neck prickle under the collar of my jacket. They’d lit the big tree a few weeks before, the bulbs glowing cheerily in the twilight. “But I keep coming back to it, how what happened with Greer didn’t come out of nowhere. And how what happened on the Vineyard didn’t either.” I shrugged, a little embarrassed. “Anyway, it’s interesting to me, how brains work. Why people do the things that they do.”

“Not to mention the fact that it’s a pretty useful field of study for a person who wants to pursue investigative work.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Not to mention that, no.”

“You know,” Holiday said, perching on the edge of a park bench and crossing her ankles, “if we’re going to keep doing this, we’re going to need to have business cards printed up or something.”

“Get a website,” I agreed wryly. Bri’s murder had made national news, the keyboard warriors on Reddit calling Greer the Ivy League Killer. There was a part of me that couldn’t help but wonder if her parents might finally be a tiny bit impressed: after all, it had taken brains to do what she’d done. It had taken planning. It wasn’t the work of—what had she said to me that night in Chinatown? An unextraordinary mind. “Punch up our SEO.”

“Exactly.” Holiday’s tone was light, but a moment later she nudged me in the shoulder. “Are you okay? It’s gotta be kind of a lot to process.”

“I mean, yeah,” I said with a shrug. “Not for nothing, but my romantic track record is…not so great the last couple of years. Forget a psychology major. I need to start with like, Remedial Human Relationships.”

“Introduction to Heterosexual Mating Rituals, with a concentration in knowing whether the girl you’re hooking up with has committed any felonies lately?”

“Maybe there’s an online section,” I mused. “Something I could take during J-term.”

Holiday smiled. “Mine’s not super either, for what it’s worth,” she said consolingly. “My track record, I mean. To be clear, it’s definitely not as bad as yours, but still.”

That interested me. “Oh no?” I asked, trying not to sound too eager. “What happened with Duncan?”

“I don’t know,” Holiday said with a shrug. “I think in the end I was kind of a lot of woman for him.”

I nodded. “Well,” I said slowly, “in that case. Can I ask you something?”

Holiday lifted an eyebrow. “Always.”

“You wanna do something New Year’s Eve?”

Holiday looked at me for a moment in the glow of the streetlights, a slow, knowing grin spreading across her face. “Maybe,” she allowed. “We’ll see.” She tapped her cup against mine in a goofy little toast before standing up and disappearing into the crowd toward the Christmas tree, snow dusting her hair and the shoulders of her coat. I took a deep breath, then followed.