“I STILL MAINTAIN THAT WE COULD HAVE JUST PHONED him, and saved ourselves the trip,” Leander said as we pulled through Sherringford’s main gates. “Especially since Jamie won’t even let us stay in Manhattan for dinner.”
I sighed. “I told you, I have—”
“A presentation,” the two of them said together.
“Well, I wasn’t sure you were listening. I’m sorry if I didn’t want to get designer grilled cheese—”
My father sighed. “It looked lovely, didn’t it? Through the window?”
I tried not to snap at him. We were approaching my dorm, and I had missed the dining hall’s dinner hours because of the traffic back into Connecticut, and I was starving. I was always a jerk when I was starving. Holmes used to—no. No matter what I thought I’d seen, I wasn’t allowing myself to go down that road.
“I don’t know why you took me with you,” I said patiently. “I thought I’d made it really clear. I like spending time with you guys, and I know you’re headed back to England soon, Leander, but next time, can’t we just, like . . . go to the movies? In town? I don’t want to do this . . . this playacting anymore. I think I’ve grown out of it. And anyway, if I need to study, that should take priority.”
It felt good to say that. Final. Adult.
“Priority,” my father echoed. He and Leander exchanged a look, and then Leander turned back to me.
“Jamie,” he said. “You will get into school somewhere lovely, I assure you. You can study literature, and read on the weekends, and go punting or whatever they do at Oxford—”
“Hush, you went punting,” my father said, pulling up to the curb. “Don’t pretend you don’t know what punting is.”
“Well, then, your son can punt too, the rivers there are lovely for boating.”
“Punting?” I asked. “Also, who just, like, gets into Oxford?”
Leander cleared his throat. “Listen, Jamie—you can behave yourself. You can play by the rules. And I’m sure after that you’ll get a job working for some newspaper, or writing your novel in a little turret room somewhere, just like you’ve always talked about. Of course, in those lives, you wouldn’t possibly need any of the investigative skills we’re offering to teach you now. None of the learning to read people, or to understand them, or sort through their motives—”
“Oh, come on—”
My father nodded. “No, it’s not at all useful to learn to catalog the world and then winnow it down to the most important details. Especially for a writer. Can’t have that.”
“You’re not asking me to do that, though,” I said, a bit desperately. “This isn’t solving puzzles or logic problems, this isn’t a second stain under the carpet or some ginger encyclopedia league, this is Moriarty shit, and Leander, I was there on that lawn, too, in Sussex. I heard what you said. I heard it. You said you were done. So why are you out here, looking for Charlotte?”
His eyes darkened. “We’re looking for Lucien.”
“Dad,” I said. “Please.”
Silence, heavy like the shadows in the late-January light.
“Because”—Leander’s voice went rough—“because after that awful mess, I thought her parents would finally step in. I thought that Emma and Alistair, bless their black little hearts, would stop farming out their daughter’s emotional upbringing to rehab facilities and tutors and finally pay some attention to what was going on with her. Do you know, in that week I spent with Emma, in that basement, I found out that she didn’t know her own daughter had been raped? And her reaction was to be—disappointed. She told me that she thought Charlotte could take care of herself. In the meantime, her daughter is happily cultivating an honest-to-God blood war because she thought her father had kidnapped me, and she wanted to blame it on a Moriarty instead.” He went quiet for a long minute, staring out the window at the students streaming by. “I should have stepped in earlier. I should have taken her in. I don’t—I don’t know how hard I would have had to fight her father for custody. Probably not very.”
“She’s almost eighteen,” I said, after a moment. “She’s nearly an adult.” She made her own decisions. I made mine.
“You’re seventeen,” my father said, “and I’m not giving up my claim to you anytime soon.”
“Why do you really want me to come along?”
“Because you should want to,” Leander said. “Because it appalls me that you don’t.”
“To track down Lucien Moriarty. That appalls you.”
“Charlotte’s looking for him—because yes, this is the best way to find her.” He looked out the window. “She is your best friend. I don’t see anyone else taking her place. I see you lonely, and lost, and she never dragged you into anything you didn’t go into willingly. Jamie—”
My father frowned. “Leander—”
“Are you two even talking about me?”
“No. Both of you. We’ll talk about this later.” My father pulled his wallet out and handed me a twenty. “Order some delivery. Say hello to Elizabeth. Write your presentation, and think about it. Leander’s only in town for another few days.”
I was hardly listening. She could have told me what she was planning, I thought, what she thought was true, and she didn’t tell me, and then when it was over, she—I tried to take a breath. I couldn’t—I know it isn’t all her fault but I can’t get myself hurt like that again.
I told them I’d think about it. What else could I say?
I waited until the car had pulled away, for my heart to stop battering against my ribs. A line of trucks were making their deliveries; food came in on those giant blank trucks to the cafeteria at all hours. The last one in the line had a man hanging off the back like he was on garbage collection. He was built up like a weightlifter under his jumpsuit. Under his watch cap was a thatch of blond hair.
He looked like Hadrian Moriarty.
My face felt hot, my neck, hot, and as I bent over my knees, I unwound my scarf from my neck. Reacting like this to the mere mention of a Moriarty, thinking I was seeing ghosts—
No. I knew why. I knew exactly why I felt like I was trapped in a small, dark box, and I was even more of a coward if I couldn’t admit it to myself.
The man on the truck hopped off; they were delivering to my dorm. His hair was dark, not light, and he gave me a worried look as he trotted up to the door with a clipboard.
“All right there, Watson?” Kittredge asked, jogging by in a pack of my teammates.
An extra practice, one I’d skipped. They were wearing shorts, the heat steaming off them like they were kettles.
I nodded, held up a hand. The universal symbol for fine. All around me, campus was pale and bright in the snow. I could see all the exits. Everywhere was an exit. And still somehow it was like the paths away were disappearing, one by one.
When I finally made it into Michener Hall, Mrs. Dunham was at the front desk, doing a crossword puzzle over a cup of tea. “Jamie,” she said. “Have fun with—oh, dear. Are you all right?”
I smiled. It was automatic. I loved Mrs. Dunham with a strange sort of fierce pride, as though she belonged to me alone. She didn’t, of course. Our house mother knew all of our names and our birthdays, brought us soup when we were sick, and oversaw the small interchangeable army of hall assistants who were constantly getting fired for drinking with their students or sleeping through their shifts. Mrs. Dunham was the only real constant in our dorm, in my day-to-day life, and though I could’ve applied to live in the fancy senior residence hall this year, I hadn’t. I wasn’t ready to give her up.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Just starving. I missed dinner. I’m about to order in.”
“Well, Elizabeth was just here to pick you up for your lit mag meeting,” she told me, “and if you run, you might be able to catch her down the lane. Here. Do you have money? Chicken pad thai? Cherry Coke? Of course I know your order. Just pick it up here when you get back.”
I felt an obligation to tell Elizabeth what was going on, the text message and the throwing up and the details of the trip to New York. And at the same time, I didn’t want to at all. Maybe it was a habit I’d developed with Holmes, my choosing one person to confide everything in; maybe it wasn’t a healthy one. Though I thought Elizabeth could probably help me sort it out, I also didn’t want to dump it into her lap.
Especially after what happened to her last year.
“Let me just drop my bag,” I said, leaving the money with Mrs. Dunham and heading up the stairs. The whiteboard on my door was blank, the hall quiet but for the buzzing overhead lights. People were lingering in the dining hall, making their way to the library, studying with their doors shut.
I dug around in my backpack for my keys. No one at Sherringford locked their doors, except for me and Elizabeth.
No one except us had any reason to.
And despite my decision not to drag Elizabeth into this, I realized I had my phone in my hands. I had an Incident at lunch today, I wrote her. That’s why I disappeared.
It was the code we’d developed the first time she’d seen me have a panic attack, after I realized it was impossible to hide them from her.
Her response was immediate. Do you want me to come over? Maybe we can blow off lit mag and watch Incident-curing puppies?
We’d been watching a show called Puppy Surprise. It was, unsurprisingly, about people being surprised with puppies, and at her suggestion, we only let ourselves watch it when one of us was having a really, really awful day.
I don’t know if today qualifies, I wrote her, flopping into my desk chair.
Was it a puking Incident? she asked. Did anyone see? Do you feel okay now? Did your dad help? Or oh God did he make you go bowling again??
Her questions were stressing me out—she had a tendency to interrogate me in a way that wasn’t exactly soothing—but I laughed anyway. Bowling, at least, wasn’t on my father’s list.
It was; no; sort of; he made me go sleuth something; I have to write a presentation or else I would puppy show so hard. After a moment, I said, That sounds really wrong but I’m not sure why?
But it had worked; I was smiling.
See you at lit mag, babe, she wrote, and I put my phone down.
For a long minute, I twirled in my chair, then opened my laptop on reflex. I had an email from my sister (Can hear Mum and Ted having sex I think?? What does sex sound like? Jamie this is the LITERAL WORST, line of vomiting emojis) and a whole bunch of spam. I sent Shelby back a vomiting emoji and two knives and told her to call me. I opened my physics presentation. Looked over my homework for tomorrow. The King’s College London banner I’d tacked above my desk. A goal. I’d be on to the next part of my life soon. I had a nice girlfriend. A nice group of friends.
I was fine.
Sure, I was late for lit mag, but I felt calm, finally, and grateful for the quiet, and though I hurried down the stairs, I didn’t run. The night stretched out before me, calm and quiet too, and if I was five minutes late, nothing would change. Slowly, I wrapped my scarf back around my neck and picked my way through the snow.
As I approached the student union, I could see her through the glass door. Elizabeth, lingering by the stairwell. The harsh lighting made her blond hair fluorescent, and as I watched, she checked her phone. I stood there for a second, just looking at her. I knew that she had a poem in her backpack that she had written about the willow tree in her backyard at home. I’d been writing about last year, stories about art thefts and explosions and kidnappings that the rest of our club found “unrealistic.” Despite what they—and everyone at Sherringford—knew about the details of Dobson’s murder, the facts of my European misadventure were still too wild to believe.
And while I wrote compulsively about my life, trying to make heads or tails of it, Elizabeth refused to write about any of it at all. Her attacker. Her hospital stay. In the world of her poems, none of it had ever happened. I admired that, weirdly enough. Her determination to rewrite her life with the worst parts excised.
Standing there in the hallway, she looked a little like a stranger. I never looked at her from across a room anymore; she was always under my arm. In a lot of ways, boarding school made it difficult to date without feeling married. Every morning, I passed the three redbrick buildings between my front door and hers. I met her in the lobby of her dorm, which always smelled like microwave popcorn and too-sweet perfume. Because I usually slept through breakfast, she had a to-go cup of tea for me, and we walked to class together, talking about homework, warming our hands with our hot drinks. Four times a week, we’d walk together to lunch; three times a week, to dinner. We worked in the library most nights in the table by the café. After lights out, we didn’t send each other selfies, or even really text—what else did we have to say?
Now that it was winter, we’d stopped wandering the grounds, looking for places to make out; instead, we laid together in my bed, me on the outside, her on the inside, and instead of talking, we listened for a hall assistant to come by so that I could drop my right foot down onto the carpet. (During guest hours, keep one foot on the floor! said the signs in the stairwells. Below, someone had drawn an anatomically correct picture of something you could do with all four feet firmly on the ground.) Mostly, we were talking. About New York City versus London; about her sister, who wrote and recorded these strange, aching songs we played off YouTube; about where we’d go if we had a car and I could take her on a proper date. Sometimes she’d just sleep on my chest while I read for AP English, and I listened to her breathe while I dog-eared my text. It made me feel sort of guilty, but I had enough to do that finding time to work was a relief. My American applications were in, but the English ones weren’t due for another few months, including King’s College London, my top choice. Unlike Tom and Lena, who were set to coast through senior spring, I was still on hard burn.
Most of the time, I felt like I was being sensible with her, this girl who was willing to trust me with her heart, even after everything that had happened to her because of me. I was treating her carefully. She was treating me carefully. Elizabeth had brought up the idea of us sleeping together a few weeks ago, and we tabled it—maturely. But maybe we only felt comfortable doing that because if we weren’t making out, why would we be having sex?
In other moments, I felt like I was dating the foreign exchange student who lived in my house. She was familiar, almost too much so, and still she was strange to me. And safe. She was safe.
Together, we were safe.
And still, for whatever reason, I couldn’t make myself go inside to meet her.
I watched her, now. Her worried eyes, her mouth. Her making the decision to go upstairs without me. When she was out of sight, I sent her a text—sorry, just got back, go on without me.
It’s okay, babe, she wrote back. I’ll call you after. I didn’t think I could sit and listen to a group of people critique a piece of my thinly veiled autobiography tonight. If you were on the lit mag staff, you’d have to sit through them critiquing the work you’d submitted for each issue. Last fall, someone had said, Your narrator should make some better decisions. It was like therapy, except the therapists had been given bludgeons.
I wandered back to the dorm, slowly, trying not to live in my head. My presentation. I had to think about my presentation. A wind picked up, enough to drive the cold up my sleeves and down my shoes, and I strayed off the path to cut through the sciences building.
The first floor of the sciences building. Not the fourth. (Why was I thinking about the fourth floor? Stop thinking about the fourth floor, I told myself.) A straight path through.
Physics. I needed to get my head on straight. I was giving a presentation on astrophysics tomorrow, a five-minute introduction to basic theories that involved no math and still had taken me hours to wrap my brain around, and though I’d done all the heavy lifting, I still needed to organize it into something resembling a speech. I wandered through the physics wing, looking at the displays that the teachers had made on matter and force and energy, and by the time I made it back to my dorm, I’d managed to regain some semblance of focus. Why did I feel like I was going to fly apart?
At the front desk, no Mrs. Dunham. Just her MAKING ROUNDS sign, the letters faded. The bag of Thai food was hanging from my doorknob. I took it and unlocked the door.
Two steps in, I stopped. A warning in the back of my chest, some kind of panicked pull that surprised me. No. Nothing was wrong. It was just an aftershock from earlier, from my Incident, or that text, or maybe my panic over my father’s offer, and I forced myself to shut my eyes and breathe. I was safe. I was fine. To emphasize the point, I shut the door behind me and locked it.
I could see all the exits. I could see the whole of my room. No one else was there.
Still.
Grimly, I made myself check. In the closet. Under the desks. My papers were where I’d left them, the physics syllabus and my notes and the essay I’d written on Beloved. My sheets were a mess at the end of the mattress. I’d left the window cracked to counteract the overeager radiator, but I was three floors up, and no one could have climbed up the front of our building to break in here, not since the school installed all those spotlights after Dobson’s murder.
A breath. Another. I set my dinner up next to my laptop and went to click over to my physics presentation. With luck, I could be done and in bed by midnight.
It wasn’t there.
I had left with my presentation open on my laptop, and it wasn’t there.
I checked the cloud. My email. I searched my files. I opened up a different word processing app, just in case I’d used it by accident. Nothing.
Five hours of work. I had been gone for fifteen minutes. And it was gone.
How could I be so stupid? I rifled through the papers on my desk, knowing there wasn’t a hard copy but looking anyway, like an idiot, a panicking idiot. I would have had to shut the application. Drag the file to the trash. When I’d come in, was I really that distracted? That upset? How could I have—
A feeling, like a finger skimming the back of my neck. I whirled around in my chair, but I was alone.
That was, of course, when my phone buzzed.