We Fell Apart: A We Were Liars Novel(24)

“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 journey to 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. When she 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.”

Meer puts his arm around me and we start walking again. “I like strange, angry nerd-girls,” he says. “If that’s what you are. I’d totally eat with you in the cafeteria.”

“Oh good,” I say. “I’d eat with you, too.” We reach a place where the pathway stretches around the perimeter of the island, and I follow Meer as we walk along a cliff’s edge. “Are you going to college?” I ask. “I mean, I get that you don’t like institutions. But are you doing something like that, anyway?”

“College isn’t for me.”

“I meant something like that.”

“What would I do?”

“Like, apprentice to a tattoo artist or a cheesemaker or something. Or do an outdoor education course where you trek across mountains.” Kingsley clearly has so much money, Meer could go anywhere, learn anything. Does he just want to be idle?

“Whatever,” he says. “I don’t want to be a cheesemaker.”

“Travel to Japan? Become a high-level ukulele player? I don’t know. What are you into?”

He doesn’t answer for a beat. “What are you gonna do?” he finally asks.

“Study game design at UC Irvine.”

“Like what, like board games?”

“Video. Invent them, code them, design how they look, that kind of thing.”

“I’m so game deprived,” says Meer. “I feel like I’m into them, but I don’t even know where to start. I tried Temple Run, but it made me sweat.”

I laugh.

“What’s the best game you’ve played? Tell me.”

I’m not sure what he’ll like, but I describe Killer Odyssey. And then Arkham City. Meer keeps asking, “What happens next?,” so I tell him the plot twists like stories as we make our way through the dark.