“Yeah, well. You didn’t know them. I’m just explaining so you don’t have to wonder what we’re talking about.”
My sympathy drains away. He’s so defensive and bitter all the time. “Fine.”
“I didn’t think about it,” says Meer. “But I should have.”
“S’okay. I didn’t have to come with,” says Tatum, softening. “That’s on me.”
“I’m sorry.”
Tatum socks Meer in the arm, gently. “Don’t take it hard. Just—lemme be on my own for a bit. ’Kay?”
“ ’Kay.”
And Tatum is gone.
Meer and I look at the ruin in silence. “I imagined the ashes would glow,” he says, finally. “Or the grand house would reveal its secrets, or something. I guess I thought it would be like stepping into one of our father’s paintings. I could see what he sees in his imagination all the time, and understand it. All those burning buildings, the castles, the underworld, the girl with her feet covered in ash. Why are things always up in flames?”
“Did he see a fire?” I ask. “When he was younger? Is he painting something he knows?”
“If he did, he never talks about it.”
“Does he talk about being a kid?”
“Never,” says Meer. “Well, he’ll say something like, he only liked chocolate ice cream when he was a boy. Or he used to have a toy airplane. Or he saw ghosts, even. But he never talks about his family, or stuff they did together. All his true stories are from when he was already a grown-up.” Meer shrugs. “It’s how it’s always been. I figured coming here would be kind of like a journeyto the inside of Kingsley’s head. And I thought you’d want to see it, too. But it didn’t turn out like I wanted.”
We follow the wooden walkway that Tatum and Brock took, going out of the yard. “I have something to confess,” Meer says.
“What?”
“I did know one of the kids who died. Who lived here. I mean, I knew her on social media.”
“I thought you weren’t on it.”
“Two mornings a week,” he says. “When we get the computers out. I knew Mirren that way. I knew her grandma Tipper, too, back when she was alive. Tipper was on the Vineyard a lot. She knew our dad. Anyway, Mirren and I texted. We said we should meet up when she was here this summer, only we never got around to it. First I didn’t see her message, and then when I wrote back, she didn’t have service on Beechwood, and so…We didn’t ever.”
“Did you like her, like as a girlfriend?”
“No, no,” says Meer. “I had a boyfriend last year. A summer person.”
“Oh.”
“I just—I do have some online friends, but no one who actually lives here. Because of the homeschooling and all. I mean, I have Brock now,” Meer goes on. “But he has zero interest in meeting people because he’s in recovery and living like a monk.”
“What about Tatum?”
“He has friends,” says Meer. “From school and his job and stuff. But now they don’t…Anyway. They’re all leaving in the fall and I don’t even like them. But Mirren, she was just across the water, so we could have hung out. She used to post these travel collages, not of places she’d been—because I think she was mostly here on the island in the summers—but like, places she wanted to go. Whenshe was in college or out of school, or someday. She wanted to see wildlife, like big animals and apes and birds. Rainforests in the Congo and stuff like that.” The words are spilling out of him.
I am beginning to understand that Meer is a curious mix of qualities. He seems utterly relaxed and generous with his time and energy while also being slightly unsocialized. He’s got that sweet baby face and seems confident in his body—but he clearly didn’t have enough game to meet up with Mirren Sheffield, even as a friend, though he has access to a motorboat and she was on this island all summer. He’s come here now that she’s dead, which is a little ghoulish, and yet he seems innocent about how it might come off.
“I don’t have a lot of friends, either,” I say. “Or really, any.”
“You don’t?” Meer stops walking and turns to me. “You seem like, well, like anyone would want to be around you. Like you’d be popular.”
“Well, what you’re seeing on my social media isn’t most of my actual life.”
“You told people when your mom moved away.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t say I was eating lunch alone in the cafeteria. And that everyone at school wrote me off as a strange, angry nerd-girl.”
