I DON’T KNOW HOW LONG I SAT THERE IN MY DESK CHAIR, making myself breathe in and out.
Finally, I stopped to look at my phone. The text was from my father: Leander wants to know if you’ve made up your mind.
The worst thing about my life so far? I wasn’t stupid. It would be so much easier if I was. But we’d been in New York City today, chasing after Moriartys, and I’d come back to an instance of casual sabotage. Even now, I saw the big red circle I’d made on my physics syllabus—individual presentations, 40% of your grade. It wasn’t murder. It wasn’t a kidnapping. It was small, and insidious, and I knew the way things would work now. I could recognize a pattern.
It would only get worse. But I was tired of giving in.
Someone was punishing Charlotte by punishing me.
It was either that, or my girlfriend was really mad at me for skipping writing club.
“Fine,” I said out loud. “Fine,” and I stayed up until dawn to get the damn thing redone.
THE NEXT DAY I HAD FRENCH CLASS FIRST THING. ELIZABETH walked me there, her hand in the crook of my arm. She was telling a story about her roommate leaving piles of orange peels underneath their bunk beds, how they smelled amazing until they began to rot. They’d argued last night about what point they’d need to sweep them out from underneath the bed—four days? Five? Should they leave them there at all? Despite my exhaustion, I was interested by the story’s strange poetry, Elizabeth’s gestures, her laugh. The normalcy of it all.
“So the oranges feels like a metaphor for something,” she concluded, outside the steps up to the languages building. “I don’t know what.”
“I have that feeling a lot,” I said.
“I missed you last night. Writing club was stupid, as usual. More poems about people’s dead grandmothers. You know, you don’t look like you slept at all.” She hadn’t touched her own tea, though I’d drained mine, and she pressed her paper cup into my hands. “Were you thinking about . . .” She trailed off, but I could hear the end of the sentence: about last year, or about Charlotte Holmes.
“No, I had some work to do still for today. I left it until the last minute.” I hadn’t told her about my ruined physics presentation; saying it out loud made it feel real. Besides, just hearing the anxiety in those four words—were you thinking about—made me hesitate to tell her. I had to keep things positive so that I could keep going. “More evidence that I shouldn’t ever run off with my father in the middle of a school day.”
“He’s a bad influence.” She kissed my cheek. “But you should go with him more often, it makes you happy. Try to stay awake. Monsieur Cann already has it in for you.”
He did, but only because I’d skipped French III so many times last fall in favor of Sciences 442. How could I blame him for hating me? Today, I fumbled through his class so badly that Tom texted me under the table, are you okay? and I had to wave him off. Through AP Euro, I kept pinching my own arm until I gave myself bruises, and in Physics I read as carefully as I could from my presentation on the screen, trying not to sway on my feet, and the second it was over I made the executive decision to bail on the only class I knew I had an unshakeable A in—AP English—to get some sleep. On the way back to my dorm I passed Lena, bright like a robin in her red uniform blazer. She looked so awake it made me want to cry.
“Jamie,” she said, grabbing my arm. “What’s going on? You like . . . you look like hell.”
“Didn’t sleep,” I said, and forced a smile. I was so exhausted I could barely get back to my dorm.
In the hall outside my room, I made myself listen. Just in case someone was inside, waiting for me behind the door with a club. But I guess that was never the Moriartys’ way of doing things.
That was more Charlotte Holmes’s style.
I gritted my teeth and let myself in.
Inside, I pushed back against the urge to catalog my things, just in case my presentation-ruining fairy had paid another visit. What was the point? It was the sort of thing that would make you feel crazy—was I the one who left my planner on the chair, when I’d always put it instead on my bookshelf? Had I been the one to leave the window open? The window was open now, I noticed, and who knew if I’d been the one to prop it open—
A wave of panic. Despite my sharp, sleepless nausea and the scraped-out feeling in my head, I wasn’t at all tired anymore. But it was too late now to trek it to English.
I sat on the bed with my phone in my hands. What I wanted was to speak to someone who knew me. A conversation that would tie me back down to the knowable ground. It was dinnertime in England, I realized. My sister would be home from school, and if last night’s email was any indication, she was in desperate need of someone to complain to. I rang her on videochat, and she answered almost instantly.
“Hi,” she said, harried. “Shouldn’t you be in class?”
“Probably,” I said.
She shook her head. “Here, let me shut my door. Not like Mum is paying any attention to what I do anyway.”
“Still wrapped up in Dreamy Ted?”
Shelby shrugged. “I don’t know how dreamy he is. He’s bald, but not in that hot-guy way. His only hot-guy selling point is that he’s a little younger than she is. Rawr.”
“But Mum’s happy?”
“She’s happy, I suppose,” my sister said. “I don’t know. I think maybe I’m, like, an awful person, but I’ve decided I hate sharing her attention with someone else. You’ve been gone for so long, it’s become very Gilmore Girls around here. But Mum and I haven’t gone out for frappucinos in ages. We used to go almost every day.”
There was a note of apology in her voice. Shelby had been too young to really remember what it’d been like when my father left us for his new family in America. My years-long refusal to talk to him had struck her as a ploy for attention. (Looking back, I can say that it definitely was.) She didn’t have the same memory of him that I did; it mattered a lot less to her either way how often he called or if he remembered to send us cards on our birthdays. Weren’t all dads just a voice on the phone? Weren’t optional once-yearly visits across the ocean just the way things went?
I wasn’t enjoying the tables being turned on her. She and Mum had always been close, and if I could spare my sister anything, it would be taking a starring role in my own teen drama—My Parents Are Dating Other People Burn It Down.
“Tell her,” I said. “Tell her you miss her. Ask for Shelby-time. She adores you, she wants you to be happy. It won’t be an issue.”
Shelby flopped down backward on her bed. The camera wobbled, then steadied. “It doesn’t matter anyway, because—no. Hold on. I meant to tell you this. I—he like, scolded me last night. He told me to go back to my room and change.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Ted did? Seriously?”
“Yeah. I was wearing these shorts—kind of high-waisted, with tights, nothing that I hadn’t worn loads of times before, and he asked if I was going out to see a boy in those, and maybe I shouldn’t wear it if so, and he was ‘kidding’ but he wasn’t. Mum shut him down quickly.” She pursed her lips. “I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, you know? Like, he doesn’t have any kids. Maybe he’s trying it out, the dad thing.”
“He’s doing a gross job of it, then,” I said, making a mental note to follow up with Mum. “I hate that shit. It makes it sound like he’s looking at you, and finding you—”
“Attractive. Or whatever. I know. It’s horrid. And he’s not even that old.” Her voice went steely. “He better not try it again.”
I had that feeling I got every now and then, that I was missing out on something pretty significant, not seeing my sister grow up. “Or else?”
“Or else,” she said firmly. “Anyway, it might not matter, I’m not going to be around. I’m going to school in America.”
I sat up so quickly I hit my head on the bookshelf above my bed. “What? No. Absolutely not. Not Sherringford.”
At that, she laughed. “Not Sherringford. I refuse to go to your weirdo murder school, no matter how much money they offer me. No, there’s this, like, other boarding school in Connecticut that Mum dug up. It’s close to yours. But this one has a one-to-one student-to-horse ratio.” She waited for that to sink in. “Jamie, I know you’re awful at maths, but seriously. One-to-one. Everyone gets her own horse. And it’s an all-girls’ school, which is great.”
It wasn’t really all that surprising, when she put it that way. Shelby had spent our childhood begging for riding lessons, but Mum could never afford them. Instead, she’d given Shelby a Shetland-sized stuffed pony that my sister dragged around behind her on a lead. “I knew you were shopping around for a school, but I always sort of thought you’d stay in England. Isn’t this place expensive? How can she afford it?”
“I think they offer, like, gold-plated financial aid. Or maybe her new boyfriend is feeling generous. I don’t know.”
“And you’re okay with all this?”
“I—” She chewed her lip, thinking. “Mum has her own life here now. And I sort of feel like I’m in the way. This place sounds better than staying in London, slowly making myself invisible.”
I sighed. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.” Shelby blinked quickly, rubbed her eyes. “Anyway, I’m not going without looking at it first, I’m not stupid. That’s what I wanted to tell you, that Mum booked tickets to come out so I could see the campus, and if I like it, I can start right away. She was talking about wanting to see Dad. I guess she hasn’t seen him since—since—”
“Since last winter. Since he came to pick me up after Sussex.”
Past the phone in my hands, I could see the snow falling thickly out the window. Just this morning the weather was clear.
“Are you okay, Jamie?”
Shelby had sat up on her own bed. I didn’t like the pitying look in her eyes. “Fine,” I said, too sharply. “I’m fine.”
“Don’t be a jerk,” she sang, the way she’d do when we were kids. “You’re being a jerk, such a jerk, such a jerk—”
“Don’t you ‘Jerk Song’ me—”
She went up an octave. “You’re the biggest jerk in Jerkfordshire—”
“Shel, oh my God,” I said, trying hard not to laugh. It’d been a good instinct, to call my sister. “I hope you like that horse school. It sounds perfect. We’ll talk more about it when you’re here.”
“I miss you too.” She wrinkled her nose at me. “Bye, Jamie. See you soon.”
I stood and pulled the curtains closed. Enough light still snuck through to speckle my bedspread, like I was living underwater. I watched it for a while, lying down on my bed, the shimmer of it against my wall. Thought bleary thoughts about the ocean in winter. I wanted to see it again, I decided. Maybe the North Sea up in Scotland, instead of the southern coast. I’d go once I was in uni. I’d take the train up alone. Watch the sheep out the window, the rolling hills. Stop a night in Edinburgh to tour my father’s old stomping grounds. I wanted to relearn what it was like to be me, in places that I loved, to remember what it was like to be enough. Pretend there wasn’t anyone out to get me.
Maybe there wasn’t. Maybe I had made some kind of mistake, had saved over the file for my presentation, named it something stupid and lost it in a folder. Maybe, after the last two years, my instincts were just shot to hell. None of this had ever been about me, after all.
The exhaustion rolled up and over me like a blanket.
In the dream I had, I’d been an orphan living in Holmes’s house. Her father had been chasing me, had the two of us terrified, hiding together in a basement. We were alone down there in the dark, but I could hear a crowd murmuring around us, someone stutter-coughing, the beginnings of applause. When I turned to tell Holmes we were being watched, a spotlight drew down over her face. Her eyes went fluorescent.
Just say your lines, she said.
The basement’s dark edges bled out beyond us. Footsteps, above, on the ceiling. We would be found. They were an audience in search of a play.
I don’t know them, I whispered back. Do you?
I watched her mouth, the site of every bad decision. She’d light a cigarette and put it between her lips. She’d take a fistful of pills. She’d kiss me. She’d say something unforgiveable, she’d do any of the wretched things she did, this girl who existed only to be in opposition to the world, and she’d wait for me to tell her to stop and I never would, ever, I would have myself shot in the snow before I told her to stand down.
You wanted it both ways, she said, so you get nothing. No. You get to spend the rest of your life waiting for permission. The spotlight flickered. It did that when she told the truth. When it steadied, it was so everyone could watch us. The audience had arrived, but it only made her that much more intimate. Her hand stole up to my cheek. She whispered, Even now, you want permission to be a victim. It’s all you’ve ever wanted. Someone to come and save you.
She said it like she was reading a love letter.
Charlotte, I said.
That isn’t my name. The light flickered. Jamie. Jamie. Jamie—
“—WAKE UP.” SOMEONE WAS FLICKING THE LIGHT ON AND off, on and off. Were we still in the basement? Where were the windows? The exits? I’d been taught to look for the exits. I’d had it drilled into me.
No. I was in my room. I sat up so quickly I saw spots. “Who’s there?”
“Wow, you’re really out of it.” Elizabeth was leaning against my closet door. Her red blazer was startling in the dim light. Was it nighttime? Was it even still the same day?
“Sorry,” I said, rubbing my face. “Sorry, I was— I’m awake now. Um. Is it dinner?”
“You slept through dinner.” She crossed her arms. “I came to check on you. Mrs. Dunham said she hadn’t seen you since this morning.”
I swallowed. “I missed the rest of my classes,” I said.
“You missed the rest of your classes.”
I’d never heard her use this voice with me. Ever. The last time she spoke to someone this flat, it was when she eviscerated Randall for making a sexist joke.
And then what she was saying sank in. “Shit. Oh, shit. I can’t—” AP calc. I’d missed AP calc. Did I have anything due? Would Miss Meyers notice? She never even looked up from her notes, and I never raised my hand anyway, did I—
“Jamie,” Elizabeth said, low. “Seriously.”
I couldn’t account for the murderous look on her face. “Did I do something?” I snapped. “Why are you pissed? Last I checked, you weren’t the one who blew an entire class day because of a nap.”
She stalked toward me with a sudden intensity. “You emailed me,” she said. “You emailed me, which is already super weird, and you told me that you needed to talk to me, but not until after dinner, and I’m supposed to come in at this specific time, so I show up—I blew off my English study group, by the way—I come in to find you, what, pretending to be asleep, whispering your ex-girlfriend’s name? Charlotte, Charlotte, Charlotte. You’re covered in sweat, and your room is disgusting—why are your walls sticky? What the hell is going on? Is this some kind of horrible joke? Why would you do this to me?”
She was inches from me now, her finger up like she wanted to stab it into my eye, or my throat, and she seemed seconds away from crying—I had never seen Elizabeth cry, I didn’t know that anything could push her this far out of control—and I should have been horrified, stumbling to deny it, to explain.
I didn’t. Because, as my eyes adjusted, I could see the wall behind her, sprayed down with brown liquid that ran in winding lines to the desk below. To my laptop, open, my email inbox visible on my screen. The top half of my screen, anyway. The bottom half was flickering between black and static. The keyboard was dripping wet, the desk chair, the corkboard, the end of my bed. The King’s College London pennant above my desk.
Beside it, a crumpled can of the Diet Coke I kept in my fridge for her. I brought it to her every day at lunch like an apology. For liking her, liking her so much, and for still loving someone else instead.
Someone had shaken it and sprayed it all over the laptop my mother had bought with the money she’d been saving to buy herself pottery classes. My mother, who never did anything for herself.
Guilt on guilt on guilt. It closed its hand around me, tightened.
“Jesus, Jamie,” Elizabeth was saying. Louder now. Loud enough to be heard in the hall. “What is going on? I know you’re having panic attacks, I know you’re feeling like shit about something. Is it something else, other than what you’ve told me? What’s happening?”
All I could think about was how, earlier, I’d been so certain that a Moriarty was after me, that this was their new ploy. Punishing me until Charlotte reappeared to save me.
Either that, or my girlfriend was punishing me for something. It had been funny when I thought it last night. Not today, with her standing in the middle of the wreckage of my room.
“Did you do this?” It slipped out of my mouth like a curse. I hadn’t meant to say it, to think it—I hadn’t ever wanted to feel this scared again.
“Are you serious?”
“You heard me. Did you do it.” It was like I couldn’t stop. “Did you wreck my laptop to get me back for something?”
Elizabeth’s eyes welled. “What did that girl do to make you like this?”
With that, it was like our fight jerked into a higher gear.
“What she did? Or hey, how about if I was just this way all along?” There were certain things I didn’t want Elizabeth to touch. Not ever. This was one of them.
Nobody knew the whole of it. Nobody except me and Holmes and Scotland Yard, and I wanted to keep it that way. How else could I possibly move on, if everyone looked at me and knew how much of a fool I’d been?
“So what, you’ve just been an asshole from the start?” Elizabeth was crying. “Why are you talking to me like this?”
I opened my mouth, then shut it. Did I mean my accusation? Had she really gone into our club meeting last night, or had she beaten me back to my dorm to delete my project? No. It was impossible. She wasn’t any part of this. I wasn’t so selfish to drag her back into this mirror world where Moriartys had gemstones shoved down girls’ throats.
I was selfish in other ways.
“I’m sorry,” I said. It was all I had.
“Fine. Say nothing. Fine,” she said again, and she turned on her heel and marched out into the hall.
Noise out there. Doors opening, closing.
“No, Randall,” I heard her say. “Leave me alone. Leave me alone. Don’t talk to him. I’ll do it myself, when I’m ready.”
He stuck his meaty head into my room. Before he could say a word, I slammed the door in his face.
Then I picked up my phone, pulled up my father’s message. Leander wants to know if you’ve made up your mind.
The whole bloody world wanted me to go find Holmes? Fine. I’d go find Holmes. I’d find her and show her exactly how much damage she’d done.
I have, I wrote back. Pick me up in ten.