We’re playing Ping-Pong in my basement on Saturday evening, me and Nadia versus Mason and Ellie. Ellie’s taking a break from flute practice, and the rest of us are killing time, because while I don’t know for sure what time a party at Charlotte Holbrook’s house should start—since she didn’t bother to tell me—I’m pretty sure it’s not eight o’clock.
“That son of a bitch got what he deserved,” I repeat.
Ellie sends the ball back to Nadia’s side, and I lunge for it because Nadia is staring at me, openmouthed. I miss, and the ball goes flying off the table. Uncle Nick is sitting a few feet away, sifting through my parents’ old record collection because he too is going to a party, and it has an eighties vinyl theme. He leans to one side, scoops the ball out of a corner, and tosses it to me.
“Are you sure he was talking about Will?” Uncle Nick asks.
“I don’t know who else he could have been talking about,” I say, handing the ball to Mason so he can serve.
Mason takes it but makes no move to start playing again. “Maybe he was confused. You said he didn’t recognize you, right?”
“Right,” I say. “He didn’t seem to know Tripp at first either. But then he did, and he seemed fine after that. Until he…said what he said.”
“That’s horrible,” Nadia says. “Poor Mr. Larkin. First the portrait, and now this. This whole week has been such an affront to his memory.”
Ellie taps her Ping-Pong paddle against her palm, thoughtful. “Do you think it’s possible that you guys didn’t know Mr. Larkin as well as you think you did? Maybe he wasn’t totally nice all the time.”
I give her a hard look. Ellie’s the only person in the room besides Uncle Nick who knows about my internship, and she’s the only one who knows about Ramon d’Arturo’s The man was a void comment. She’s hitting a little too close to stuff I’m not ready to share. “I knew him plenty well,” I say. “And everybody at Saint Ambrose loved him. Including Mr. Solomon.” Uncle Nick leans back on his heels, a Blondie album in one hand. “Don’t put Will too far up on a pedestal, Brynn,” he says. “The guy was
only human, like the rest of us. He could get into it with people.” “Get into it?” I repeat. “What does that mean?”
“You know.” Uncle Nick keeps digging through the pile until he extracts a Simple Minds album. “Yessss. Score,” he says happily. “Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t you forget about me.”
“Nerd,” Ellie says.
I clear my throat. “Actually, I don’t know,” I say. Uncle Nick just blinks at me, clearly having lost the thread of our previous conversation, so I add, “What you meant when you said that Mr. Larkin could get into it with people.”
“Argue. Lose his temper,” Uncle Nick says. “Not with you guys,” he adds when my eyebrows rise. “But with parents. I’d hear him every once in a while, when I was doing after-school homework help. Sometimes it turned into an actual shouting match.”
“Shouting match?” Nadia asks. “With who?”
“Most of the time I couldn’t tell,” Uncle Nick says. “I was trying to mind my own business. But I saw Laura Delgado storm out of there more
than once.”
“Shane’s mom?” I ask. I don’t know Ms. Delgado well, but every time I’ve seen her, she’s been smooth and unruffled. “I never took her for a shouter.”
“She wasn’t one of the shouters,” Uncle Nick says. “But she was upset, which is my point. Will had a way of pressing buttons. Maybe all this media attention is opening old wounds.” Then he seems to realize what he just said—all this media attention, including the potential Motive story that nobody else except Ellie knows about—and hastily adds, “Or maybe you just caught Mr. Solomon on a bad day. Getting old sucks, or so I’ve heard.” He gets to his feet, wincing a little as something cracks, and Ellie smirks.
“Hurt your back, Grandpa Nick?” she asks.
“Go play some Mozart,” he retorts. “All right, I’m heading out. How about you?”
I glance at the clock on the wall; it’s barely eight-thirty. “I think it’s still too early.”
“You’ve got a designated driver, right?” he asks, in that semi-stern tone he thinks makes him sound like Dad.
Nadia plucks the ball from Mason’s hand and bounces it neatly on her paddle. “That’s me,” she says. “Always.”
Mason looks like he can’t wait to leave my basement. “You say that like we go to parties every weekend,” he says. “This is the first party we’ve been to all year.”
“It’s January eighth,” she reminds him.
“I was including New Year’s Eve in that equation.”
“Well, don’t,” Nadia says. “New year, new social slate.”
—
It’s possible that, in our efforts to look too busy and important to show up early, we ended up being a couple of hours late.
“Well, this is quite the rager,” Mason says as Charlotte’s enormous, contemporary-style house comes into view at the end of her mile-long
driveway. The front of the house is almost entirely windows, and every room is packed full of people talking, drinking, and dancing.
“You’re not going to be allowed inside if you use that term,” Nadia says.
“I’m guessing her parents aren’t home,” I say, which is another detail Charlotte failed to mention.
“I don’t think I should go any farther,” Nadia says, slowing the car to a stop. “It looks like people are blocking one another in, and I don’t want to get stuck. I’m going to pull onto the grass.” Cars are parallel parked on either side of Charlotte’s driveway, and Nadia adds her Subaru station wagon to the end of the line.
I lean forward from the back seat to thump both of them on the shoulders. “All right. Let’s see what an elite party is all about.”
“Only if you stop calling it that,” Nadia says.
Mason pouts as he gets out of the car. “Stop policing our vocabulary.”
We make our way down the rest of the driveway, weaving through cars that are parked much too closely together. When we reach the house, we all pause, eyes roving across its front. Nadia is the first to say it: “Where’s the door?”
It’s a fair question, because everything looks like a giant window. Then a boy rushes from inside toward one of the panes and pushes it outward. He barely makes it past us before he falls to his knees and vomits into a shrub. Music pulses from the open door as Mason catches hold of the slim silver rod that passes for a doorknob and says, “Thanks for the assist.”
“Should we help him?” Nadia asks, looking over her shoulder. I wrinkle my nose. “With what?”
The boy gets up then, still clutching a Solo cup in one hand, which he waves at us as he staggers back through the door. “This,” he slurs, “was one too many.”
“Auspicious start,” Mason says. “Let’s go.”
The first thing I notice as we’re absorbed into a crush of people is that we’re underdressed. Well, Nadia and I are. The boys are in casual clothes, but most of the girls are wearing cute cocktail-style dresses. Some of them
are in heels, but more are barefoot, like they kicked off their shoes a while ago.
“Abby,” Nadia calls, and I turn to see Abby Liu leaning against the wall in a short red dress, fanning herself. “You look so pretty. Is this supposed to be semiformal?”
A different type of person than Abby might smirk about how we’re obviously second-tier guests, but she smiles kindly. “Oh, no, it’s just something a few of us did for fun. How often do we get to dress up, right?” She fans herself again. “I was about to grab a drink. You guys want something?”
“Yes,” Mason says, nodding eagerly. “I would like that very much.” “They’re in the kitchen,” Abby says. “Follow me.”
I tap Nadia’s arm. “You guys go ahead,” I tell her. “I’m going to find a bathroom.” My friends leave with Abby, and I wander through the crush of people until I see a long line of girls in the hallway that can only mean one thing. I join them with a sigh, thinking how much easier life must be when you can just saunter outside and find a tree. By the time I finish my turn and make my way into the kitchen, my friends are nowhere in sight.
Charlotte is, though. She’s wearing a shimmering bronze dress, her hair pulled back on one side with a jeweled barrette. She’s using a ladle to scoop red liquid from a crystal bowl into cups, and when she catches sight of me, she waves and holds one up. “Punch?” she asks.
“Thanks,” I say, taking it. “Your house is amazing.”
“Oh.” Charlotte blinks around her kitchen—which is twice the size of mine and has top-of-the-line everything—like she’s never really thought about it before. “It’s okay, I guess.” I can’t help but let out a snort, and her lips curve into a small smile. “That came out wrong. I just wish it were closer to school, sometimes. I’m jealous of the kids who can pop home for lunch.”
I’ve never popped home for lunch in my life. But she’s been nice to me all week, so I tell her, “Well, if you get desperate, you can always come to my house.”
“Your house?” Charlotte looks baffled at the concept, like it hadn’t occurred to her until just now that I continue to exist when I’m out of her sight. Then her hostess mask slips back into place and she says, “You’re the sweetest.”
Aaand, we’re done. “Is Tripp around?” I ask.
“He is,” Charlotte says, scooping more punch. “But I wouldn’t go looking for him if I were you. He’s having a bad night.”
“A bad night? What do you mean?”
Charlotte squints critically at the neat line of cups in front of her. They all appear to be holding the exact same amount of liquid, but she tops two of them off. Then she frowns and dumps the contents of one of them back into the crystal bowl. “It’s not easy, you know,” she says.
“What isn’t?” I ask, my patience thinning at her vague-talk.
Charlotte seems to realize it, and finally meets my eyes full-on. “Seeing what we saw,” she says. “Back then. It doesn’t leave you.”
“Oh,” I say, surprised at her honesty and a little ashamed that I forced it. Sometimes I get so deep into reporter mode that I forget I’m dealing with actual people. I take a long sip of punch, which isn’t quite sweet enough to mask how strong it is. “Yeah, of course.”
“Everybody has their own way of dealing,” Charlotte says. “Tripp’s is that sometimes he drinks a little too much when something sets him off.” Her face hardens. “Like a demented old groundskeeper turning positively feral.”
“He told you about Mr. Solomon, huh?” I ask.
“He did,” Charlotte said. “And I told him, I think being on that committee is a terrible idea.” She gives me a pointed look, as though I’m the one who recruited him. “Scholarship or no scholarship.”
“What scholarship?” I ask.
“I don’t know what it’s called,” Charlotte says. Of course; she doesn’t need to know anything about scholarships when she lives in a house like this. “But there’s a big community service requirement, so—” She breaks off as a group of girls descends upon the orderly line of punch cups. “One at a time, please,” she chides, and I take the opportunity to slip away.
I check my phone and see a text from Mason that reads GORFF IS HERE I LURV HEM, so I can only assume that (1) Mason, a notorious lightweight, has been hitting the punch hard, and (2) he’s found his crush, Geoff. I catch sight of Nadia’s pink sweater in a knot of girls and decide that my friends are doing fine on their own for now.
I make my way through the house. A room with a huge arched ceiling and a massive television on the wall seems to be where people are drinking the hardest, but if Tripp’s having a bad night, he’s not going to be in a crowd. I don’t know the current version of Tripp all that well, but I know where my old friend would be. So I go outside, shivering without the coat I dropped in a pile somewhere, and gaze around at the much smaller groups of people standing in Charlotte’s spacious backyard.
There’s a covered pool, a fountain, and an immaculate-looking shed that’s practically a small house. The property is ringed by a wrought-iron fence broken up with evenly spaced stone pillars, all the same size and shape except for the one farthest away. When I get closer, the irregularity morphs into the outline of a person. Tripp is sitting on top of the narrow platform, his legs dangling and his left hand clutching a nearly empty bottle of whiskey.
I stop at the base of the pillar and call up to him, “How’d you get up there?”
Tripp blinks slowly at me, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t see me coming. “Climbed,” he says. He’s coatless and his blue button-down shirt is half-untucked, the sleeves rolled up. His tousled blond hair looks silver in the moonlight; his shadowed features are as fine and chiseled as a statue’s. He’s beautiful, I think, before shoving the thought away and replacing it with a more appropriate descriptor. And very, very drunk.
“Charlotte says you’re having a bad night,” I say.
“Charlotte is mistaken,” Tripp says, taking a long swig from the bottle. When he finishes, there’s barely an inch of liquid left. “I’m having a great night.”
“Have you thought about how you’re going to get down?” He shrugs, unconcerned. “Jump.”
“You’re at least eight feet off the ground.”
“And I’m six feet tall, so…” Tripp shrugs again. “I only have to jump two feet.”
“That’s not how it works,” I say.
Tripp finishes his bottle and points it at me. “You’re fun at parties, Gallagher. Always knew you would be.”
“I’m just trying to—” Then I gasp, my heart jumping into my throat as Tripp suddenly launches himself off the pillar. For a second I can’t breathe, waiting for the horrific splat that’s sure to come, but he lands on his feet with barely a quiver, the bottle still in one hand. He sets it on the ground before bowing deeply, and the fact that he still doesn’t lose his balance makes my temper spike. “Asshole!” I say, socking his shoulder. Which probably hurts me more than it hurt him, because he is solid. I shake my hand and back away, glaring. “You scared me.”
Tripp brushes his hair out of his eyes. “Why?”
“You could’ve broken a leg! Or worse. And then—”
“No,” Tripp says, advancing toward me until he’s close enough to touch. He’s almost a foot taller than I am, and I have to crane my neck to see his face. “I mean, why do you care?” I don’t answer right away—words have deserted me, for some reason—and he adds, “You can’t stand me.”
“That’s not true,” I say automatically, because that’s what you say to a drunk person exhibiting self-destructive tendencies. It takes a few beats for me to realize I mean it.
“It should be,” Tripp says.
I study his face. He looks tired and sad; there’s none of the raw anger I saw when he nearly punched Colin Jeffries. That’s not who he is, I think, and then I push the thought away, because how do I know, really? Were we ever truly friends, if he could’ve dropped me so easily? But Charlotte’s offhand remark about the scholarship keeps circling through my brain, reminding me how precarious Tripp’s home life always was, and probably still is, no matter how together he seems on the surface.
I don’t understand, suddenly, why I’m here. Well, I understand it— reconnaissance for Carly—but it doesn’t feel right anymore. There’s no way
I can tell her about this conversation; I can’t offer up Tripp’s pain like it’s just another sound bite. But there’s still something I’d like to know, for my own sake.
“Why did you apologize to me?” I ask. His forehead knits. “Huh?”
“Today, at Mr. Solomon’s. You said you were sorry.” “Right. Yes. I am.”
“For what?”
Tripp’s voice is steady, and if I hadn’t seen copious evidence to the contrary, I’d almost believe he was sober. “For what I said in eighth grade. In gym class. It was a lie. Which you already know, obviously.” He huffs out a humorless laugh. “I’m a bad liar.”
“Then why did you say it?”
“Because.” His Adam’s apple bobs once, then twice, as he looks at the ground. “I needed you to hate me.”
“Why?” I ask. “Because you’d suddenly decided to hate me back then?”
Tripp looks up then, his eyes capturing mine. “No, Brynn. I didn’t hate you back then. And I don’t hate you now.” He enunciates each word slowly and carefully, like he needs to make sure I don’t misunderstand him. “Not even a little bit.”
“T!” The booming voice behind us makes me jump. I turn to see Shane heading our way, wearing a big grin and a determined expression. “Time to come inside, don’t you think, bud?” I step back, self-conscious about how close together Tripp and I were standing, and Shane gives me a curt nod. “Hey, Brynn, how’s it going? I’ll take it from here.”
“Take what?” I ask.
“Tripp’s having a bad night,” Shane says, sounding like Charlotte’s echo as he lifts Tripp’s empty bottle from the ground with two fingers. His free hand curls around Tripp’s bicep. “You can’t take anything he says right now too seriously.”
“We were just talking,” I say, feeling weirdly defensive. I try to catch Tripp’s eye, but he’s looking at the ground again.
“No, totally, I get it,” Shane says. “But talking’s over, okay?” He doesn’t wait for me to answer before steering Tripp away.
