The Herd(31)

When, during sophomore year, Ted mentioned he was meeting Cameron in town for a party, we persuaded Eleanor it was a good idea for us to go with him. Mainly I just wanted to see Cameron in the flesh, this mythical older man, Eleanor’s capital-F first. We’d trekked to Allston-Brighton in our cutest outfits, prepared to dazzle, but Cameron had been there with his then-girlfriend, almost theatrically ignoring us.

But the party itself was epic: slick tables set up for beer pong and flip cup and something called chandelier, an ice luge, different music in different rooms, shots we swallowed with teenage abandon. That night, Mikki had gone home with a hot musician who, she later told us, played her a violin concerto at five in the morning. (It was beautiful but so loud, she recounted.) I’d fallen asleep on a sofa at the tail end of the house party, and Ted and Eleanor had decided to leave me behind. I’d woken to Cameron gently shaking my shoulder, and I can still remember the sheepishness, the sharp hangover, the little moon of spit where the pillow met the corner of my lips. I’d left with a quiet crush on Cameron, one I never mentioned to the gang.

In the ensuing years at Harvard, we almost never saw Cameron after that; Ted sometimes mentioned him, how he had his own apartment in Salem now, how he was doing fine. Then, senior year, we’d all returned from our exciting summers—internships in New York and Los Angeles, Mikki’s eight-week design intensive in Milan—and Eleanor had announced that she and Cameron were dating again. They’d reconnected while she was living at home, she said. There was still a lot of passion there. That was probably when Cameron peaked, before the cascade of bad turns that landed him in rehab.

And Ted—well, Ted had turned and triumphantly marched off to the beat of his own drum. He’d filled out, now with thick, hairy arms and a thick, hairy beard, and discovered he had a knack for making, anything from a custom liquor cabinet to a custom video game to twenty-four tiny custom mechanisms that stretched to simulate breathing—a local artist had hired him to insert them in dolls that looked like sleeping babies, dolls the man placed around Boston to get a rise out of unsuspecting people. It sounded very avant-garde to me at the time.

But still, there was also something about Ted I didn’t like. Or didn’t get, maybe. He was doing pretty well now, kicking around NYC. Far and away the more successful of the two brothers.

I should call Ted. Had the cops contacted him already? Or maybe they weren’t concerned at all. Maybe they figured Eleanor was a newlywed entrepreneur with a failing marriage and an Atlas-esque sphere of pressure pushing down on her, and she’d be back in a few days once she’d sorted things out. Is that what I’d assume, if the AWOL woman were a stranger and not my best friend?

With a sigh, I pushed Cosmo away and rolled off the side of the couch. I grabbed my phone and triaged the texts, emails, and missed calls from journalists and friends. Their excitement shot out of the screen, like the little bubbles that hit your nose from a full glass of Champagne. These people had no idea that everything was wrong, bad, scary, nonsensical. Several articles used the same photo of Eleanor, Mikki, and me from the last Herd announcement. It was a favorite of Eleanor’s—we all looked good. Sometimes it struck me, though, how convenient it was for Eleanor to have a non-white face in her inner circle. A deep prickle of insecurity, a question of whether on some level, perhaps subconsciously, Eleanor had been strategic in befriending me, practiced as she was at curating her appearance….

Then Mikki’s name appeared. I took a deep breath and answered it.

“How are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m freaking out. Aren’t you?”

“Obviously.” I sighed. “The stuff about her wanting to see other people—it’s weird she didn’t mention it.” Sure, she’d stopped discussing her sex life in lurid detail once she and Daniel got serious, but this was…big.

“Yeah. Guess she’s good at keeping secrets.”

“I guess.” Aren’t we all, Mikki?

“Do they think it has to do with the vandalism?” she said. “That was practically a threat.”

“I don’t know. I mentioned it to the detectives on the way out.” The stolen phone too. Eleanor hadn’t wanted anyone to know about it—not even Mikki.

“Right. They seemed so eager to help.” She sighed. “What do you think, Hana? What happened?”

“I have no idea. I just know she had big plans for this week, this month—next year, clearly. She and I have a postmortem scheduled for first thing tomorrow morning, for God’s sake.” Postmortem: I’d always called it that, a chance to dissect and learn from the previous day’s event or campaign launch. This was the first time it sounded morbid.

“I know.” We were both quiet for a moment. “Have you tried to reach Stephanie?”

God, Eleanor’s number two had left Saturday to do yoga on a beach in India—she hadn’t even crossed my mind. “Not yet. She said she’d only have Wi-Fi a few hours a day. She’ll probably see the articles and think Eleanor really did have a family emergency.”

“Right, okay,” Mikki said. “And has Titan reached out to you?”

“Yeah, they’re in my inbox somewhere. I’m going to keep them in the dark, obviously. Buy some time.” I figured we had a decent shot at keeping Eleanor’s AWOL status under wraps if she showed up in the next few hours. Which she had to. She had to.