Bad Habits Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  December 29, 2021, 8:15 p.m.

  Mac

  1

  December 29, 2021, 8:30 p.m.

  Gwen

  2

  December 29, 2021, 8:45 p.m.

  The Program

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  December 30, 2021, 1:27 a.m.

  Oh, Fools

  8

  9

  December 30, 2021, 2:01 a.m.

  Bad Habits

  10

  December 30, 2021, 2:17 a.m.

  11

  12

  December 30, 2021, 2:40 a.m.

  13

  Claire

  14

  December 30, 2021, 2:59 a.m.

  15

  December 30, 2021, 3:07 a.m.

  16

  December 29, 2021, 3:45 a.m.

  Acknowledgments

  Read More from Amy Gentry

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2021 by Amy Gentry

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Gentry, Amy, author.

  Title: Bad habits / Amy Gentry.

  Description: Boston : Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020034157 (print) | LCCN 2020034158 (ebook) | ISBN 9780358408574 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780358126546 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780358439974 | ISBN 9780358440871 | ISBN 9780358125051 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Psychological fiction. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3607.E567 B33 2021 (print) | LCC PS3607.E567 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020034157

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020034158

  Cover design by Christopher Moisan

  Cover photographs: Shutterstock and © Ildiko Neer/Trevillion Images

  Author photograph © Matt Valentine

  v1.0121

  for ln & smy & ncb

  December 29, 2021, 8:15 p.m.

  SkyLoft Hotel, Los Angeles

  Gwen’s perfect laugh reaches me from across the hotel lobby just as I step into the elevator. Through some acoustical trick of polished floors and curved walls, the unmistakable peals echo inside the elevator for a moment, a memory replayed in stereo. I turn just in time to catch a glimpse of her tossing her dark, glossy hair beneath a glinting halo of upside-down wineglasses at the hotel bar.

  “Eleventh floor,” I say.

  The grad student I picked up at the reception, all elbow-patched corduroy and absurd woolen scarf and lips pouting suggestively around the word Lukács, pushes the button. I try to focus on this eager young man from Yale—​or is it Harvard? Fresh off my keynote, I wasn’t paying attention, but it hardly matters. The doors start to close. Once we’re alone, I’ll slide my hand down his chest, check his badge, and use the lanyard to yank him in close for a kiss as we rise skyward to my corner suite.

  This train of thought is halted by the shuffle-and-clatter of drunk women in interview heels. A pair of assistant professors I recognize from the reception waves for us to hold the elevator, and my grad student, playing the gentleman, leans past me for the button. As the doors reverse their course, I note with displeasure more stragglers on the way—​an elderly woman with a cane, a mother dragging a small boy. Not only do these newcomers promise to make my elevator ride with Harvard substantially less interesting, but their slipshod progress across the lobby is giving me ample time to reflect on the oddity of my first impulse, which was to ignore Gwen altogether, to pretend, as I was on the point of doing a moment ago, that I didn’t see her, didn’t know her, haven’t spent half a lifetime trying to be her.

  But I have seen her, and I can’t unsee her now.

  I dip into my pocket for the hotel key in its soft paper sleeve and hand it to my Ivy League companion. “Wait for me in my room,” I command, without listening for an answer. From ten paces away, the women are already squint-and-scanning our badges. In another moment one of them will recognize me from my talk and buttonhole me with the words, “Your book changed my entire way of thinking about X,” a conversation sure to segue into a full-blown explanation of her book, Discourses on Y, and a request that I read and endorse it. Without a backward glance, I step out of the elevator and into the lobby, calculating the odds that I could lose my starfucker to a bigger star in the time it takes him to get to the eleventh floor. These two women certainly don’t look important but, then, I absolutely refuse to squint.

  By now the lobby is filling up, and Gwen is temporarily obscured by clusters of conference attendees deep in probing conversations about Heidegger that might lead to screwing later on. I’ve sighted Gwen around so many corners over the years that for a moment I let myself think I am mistaken, experimenting with the mixture of relief and sadness this would bring. But the closer I get, the more certain I am that the woman perched at the bar, bare legs crossed at the knee, one hand pushing back her hair as if to listen more attentively to the handsome older man toward whom she is radiating her special brand of vanilla-cashmere calm, is Gwendolyn Whitney.

  My best friend.

  When she sees me, Gwen’s eyes widen and her mouth opens, and I nervously anticipate some outburst of emotion, something to bridge the ten-year gap since we saw each other last. But that’s not Gwen’s way. Instead, she lays her thin white hands on the bar, closes her eyes for a moment as if pained, and steps down from the bar chair, losing a few inches of height in the process. Whispering a word to her conversation partner, she walks around the back of his chair, and by the time I reach her, she’s settled her mouth into a smile tinged with just a hint of sadness—​an acknowledgment that we have not, despite our best intentions, kept up.

  “Gwen.”

  She notices my name badge. “Claire?”

  “I go by my middle name now.”

  “It suits you.” She opens her arms. “So good to see you.”

  I enter into the obligatory hug and find myself briefly enveloped in her subtle perfume. I back away quickly and the scent dies.

  “Of course, I should have known you’d be here.” She indicates the sign in the lobby. “How’s the conference going so far?”

  “Good. I just gave a keynote.” She looks a bit too surprised, so I add quickly, “There are several. It wasn’t the opening or closing address.” More of an audition, really, for the Very Important University with whom I am interviewing first thing in the morning. One more reason I really ought to hurry up to the room and conclude my business with Harvard on the early side.

  “Still,” she says, nodding appreciatively.

  “Are you here long?”

  She shakes her head. “Just for the night. I’m flying to Rome in the morning.”

  Typical of Gwen to avoid the big chains and spend the night in a luxe boutique hotel. I can’t help but feel a tingle of pride that our tastes have once again converged, however accidentally—​the Association of Emerging Studies, for all its problems, has a reputation for style. The quaint deco exterior of this historical 1920s high-rise has been preserved, its interior made over with a ferocious sleekness. “Wish I could say the same.”

  “But you’re happy at . . . ?” She checks my badge again, noting the name of my university and, I assume, its les
s-than-glamorous location. Even though Gwen and I are technically only friends in the sense of people who haven’t yet deleted one another from social media, it stings a bit to know she hasn’t followed my career online, knows nothing of my book and my other academic successes. However painful it is to be reminded of the tragic accident that led to Gwen leaving the Program in the middle of our first year, I have managed to keep up with her various career shifts since then—​the brief stint in law school, the turn to public policy, and then various NGOs for clean drinking water, the eradication of global poverty, that sort of thing. I am momentarily struck with the fear that her more virtuous world is so far removed from academia that she doesn’t realize my university is Research I, and therefore a terrific job.

  “Very happy,” I say, wishing I could add that if tenure review goes as it should, I’ll soon be done with backwaters for good. The hiring committee chair of the Very Important University did, after all, nod twice during my lecture. I content myself with saying, “I’m up for tenure next year.”

  Gwen frowns. “That can’t be right.”

  “I made good time,” I say modestly.

  “Still, that would mean it’s already been . . . ?”

  “Ten years.”

  She puts a slender hand to her forehead, closing her eyes briefly. Then she opens them again, and her smile returns. “Look at you. You have the life we used to dream about.”

  I take in the monastic luxury of her simple cream dress, suddenly self-conscious about my artsy academic getup—​black leather pants and a bulky woolen cocoon of a wrap. The oxblood boots that draw compliments from the tenured elite of bicoastal universities feel clumsy and adolescent next to Gwen’s pale, expensive-looking pumps.

  I smile tightly. “We’ll see if it lasts.”

  She shakes her head and waves her hand toward the tweedy crowd. “You’ll get tenure. You were born for this.”

  But Gwen is the one who was born for it, not me. She went to better schools, had better ideas, sounded smarter in class, looked smarter, was smarter. She cared about all the right things and hurt no one intentionally. She was perfect. If not for certain fatal events, she’d be the one giving the keynotes, and I’d still be in her shadow.

  The next moment she proves it, annihilating me with a single word.

  “I’ve missed you, Mac.”

  Mac

  1

  I was born Mackenzie Claire Woods in Wheatsville, Illinois, a Chicago suburb with a historic downtown and an ice rink in the shopping mall. My father wanted to give me an old-fashioned name like Mary or Sarah, but my mother overruled him. She thought Mackenzie sounded unique.

  A lot of other moms must have thought so, too, because five years later the whole kiddie pageant circuit was lousy with them. There were two in my “baby bunnies” ice-skating class, one in jazz-and-tap, and one in the baton-twirling camp my mom ran out of our backyard three summers running. To my mom, this only proved she’d picked a name worthy of a sequined sash.

  Though they lasted only a few short years, the pageants loom large in my memory. Childhood, to me, is the acrid smell of Cover Girl base, the scalp-tingle of a French braid, the flash of my mother’s diamond studs as she knelt to do my makeup, the sound of my father’s hands clapping when I won the crown.

  My mother trained me well, but she didn’t clap. She had her hands full with my baby sister, Lily, who had recently transformed from a babbling infant to a stiff little stranger prone to violent fits. My mom sat through my competitions waiting for Lily to go off, her features drawn so taut, you’d never believe she was the Miss Decatur, Illinois, with the brilliant smile in the framed mantelpiece pictures. Except for the earrings, they looked nothing alike.

  My father, on the other hand, looked just as he had in their wedding photo, the same thick brown hair rising from a decisive hairline. When I was very young, I confusedly believed he was a writer because of the awed way my mother spoke of “his” books on the bookshelf. In fact, he had only read them, not written them; forcing other people to read them was his trade. He was a high school English teacher, though he spoke as little as possible about his job and always kept a drink within arm’s reach. Wherever he went, he seemed to have a wonderful time, which is another way of saying that if he wasn’t going to have a wonderful time, he didn’t show up. He started coming to the pageants when I started winning them.

  So, I kept winning.

  Until, one day when I was eight, everything changed.

  * * *

  The day began, as so many did back then, with baton-twirling. Mom knocked a pair of drumsticks together, five-year-old Lily clinging to her shin, while I marched through the soft grass in a phalanx of pageant hopefuls, admiring the way the sun glinted on my baton. Then I noticed my father at the kitchen window, mixing a drink.

  “Mackenzie Claire!” my mom hollered. “Eyes on your baton!”

  My fingers tripped, and the baton fell to the ground with a soft thump. I glanced toward the window, but my father was already drifting away.

  After the lesson, my mother dragged him down to the basement to yell at him. I caught Lily’s name and mine; ten o’clock in the morning, for chrissake; and the least you could do. I turned up the TV and sat by Lily on the couch, picking the scab under my T-shirt where the rickrack on my leotard left a red welt.

  My father stomped up the basement stairs and into the living room, a shoebox under his arm. “Come on, princess. We’re getting out of here.” I knew he was talking to me. He hardly ever spoke to Lily, and never called her princess.

  We went to the mall. After he dropped off the box at a shoe repair place, he asked me where I wanted to go next, and I pointed at the ear-piercing kiosk I wasn’t allowed to visit until my tenth birthday, and he laughed.

  “The world’s your oyster, princess.” His breath was whiskey-sweet.

  When the hot spike of pain in my earlobes had dulled to a throb, we hit the food court for lunch. I pulled him toward the Hungry Panda, counting on him to forget my mother’s favorite expression, “A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.” I was dumping soy sauce over a glistening pile of fried rice when I noticed my father staring over my shoulder.

  I turned. Behind me was the carousel, a rotating gilt birthday cake I treasured from afar. Yet another thing my mother didn’t allow; there was never enough time, and the flashing lights were too much for Lily. But today was a special day, a father-daughter day. A pierced ears, Hungry Panda day. I held my breath and waited for him to ask if I’d like a ride.

  “This is it,” he said softly. “Mall Chinese and a fucking calliope.”

  My hopes ebbed. “What’s a cull-lie-pee?”

  He blinked at me, his eyes still far away. “Calliope. Queen of the Nine Muses. Her son Orpheus brought Eurydice back from hell but lost her when he looked back. Careless fellow, Orpheus.”

  I couldn’t help feeling this was some kind of test. I looked around. “Are they . . . here?”

  He laughed abruptly. “It’s also a kind of pipe organ. But that one’s a synthesizer. Fake, like everything else.”

  Although I had only taken a few bites of my lunch, he was clearly ready to go. He braced his palms against the table edge to scoot out his chair, but then he paused, leaning forward until I could see the little red spot in the corner of his left eye. “Listen, princess. You don’t belong here any more than I do. We were made for better things. Remember that.”

  I did remember, because after he dropped me back off at home that day, we never heard from him again. He never even picked up his shoes.

  * * *

  With my father gone, the pageants had to stop. There was no money for them, much less for ice-skating, voice lessons, jazz-and-tap. It was only a matter of time before everything worth having, from cable TV to name-brand macaroni and cheese, disappeared from our house. My parents’ wedding photo vanished, too, along with all other pictures of my father.

  And then my name was gone.

  “I have to go back t
o work. I’ll be taking classes at night,” my mother said, putting her hands on my shoulders. “I need you to be a brave girl, Mac.”

  Mac. As if she didn’t have time to say the whole thing. It stung like a slap.

  But if the pageant world was over for good, at least its vague militarism had prepared me well for the role of brave girl. I attacked my new duties with zeal. Lily entered kindergarten, and every morning we marched to the bus stop together, her hot, clenched fist in my hand. After school I met her at the door of her special class and ushered her safely through the gauntlet of kids who only stopped shrieking, it seemed, to point and stare. At home, I’d make a snack and play with her wispy brown curls while we watched TV. On nights when my mom had class, I lay beside her in the dark and sang songs from commercials until she fell asleep.

  Sometimes, I burned with a helpless hatred of the things that made her, and therefore us, different. Other people’s emotions affected Lily like rasps drawn over her skin, and the rocking and hand-flapping she used to comfort herself drew stares in public. Her long silences and refusal to make eye contact disquieted strangers. Then, too, her tantrums had grown more intense since our father left, and harder to predict; sometimes when we walked together to the bus, she would come to a full stop, tilt her head back, and wail, while kids hung out of the bus windows yelling obscenities. I had to stop holding her in my lap after she accidentally split my lip with her elbow during a commercial she didn’t like. We couldn’t eat out, even when the budget allowed; the one time my mom took us to Bob Evans, to celebrate her nursing job, Lily’s napkin fell off her lap and the ensuing chaos meant we had to leave before the appetizers arrived.

  At school, Lily’s survival was my survival. By fifth grade, I was an expert at protecting her, taking out hall passes to check on her at recess, skipping my own recess to patrol her lunch. I’d tackle any kid in any grade who called her a name, flailing my fists until I ran out of fight or a teacher split us up. Once I threatened to throw one of her bullies into the river that ran through downtown Wheatsville—a glorified creek, really, but I’d seen a mob movie while my mom was at work one night and thought it sounded cool. I was suspended for “violent behavior,” and the school counselor recommended therapy.