TEN MINUTES TURNED OUT TO BE . . . A LITTLE LONGER than ten minutes. My father replied, I appreciate the dramatics, but I have to finish my monthly sales report. We can fetch you after school tomorrow.
It was fine. I needed time to gather my thoughts, anyway. I begged uncooked rice and a garbage bag from the cafeteria, then settled my turned-off and upside-down laptop inside. The internet had told me the rice would soak up the liquid. I was dubious. The inside of the bag smelled like weird tapioca pudding.
With my laptop marinating beside me, I sat down to make a timeline. It wasn’t a complicated one. Whoever was doing this didn’t think they needed to make it complicated.
Their loss.
Deleting my physics presentation? It happened in the thirty minutes between my leaving the dorm and coming back. My father had dropped me in front of my building, so it’s possible that someone clocked my arrival—but they would have had to then watch for me to leave again, and to know I wasn’t going to creative writing club as usual. Mrs. Dunham had seen me enter and leave, but she hadn’t known when I’d return. Sure, maybe she’d immediately broken into my room and deleted my files, but—
My stomach curdled. Mrs. Dunham. I refused to believe it.
And anyway, it was beyond belief to imagine that she would have emailed Elizabeth and told her to come to my room, much less sneak in herself and sabotage my laptop while I was sleeping. It took someone with brass balls to do something like that, and while I didn’t doubt Mrs. Dunham had courage—she was the house mother to a hundred teenage boys; I was sure she’d seen some of the grossest scenes imaginable—I couldn’t imagine her being so stonehearted or so cruel. Not even for Lucien Moriarty’s money.
Because that’s what it came down to, wasn’t it? Who could be bribed. Unless we had another fanatic on our hands like Bryony Downs, made from Holmes’s bad behavior, the culprit had to be someone being paid off by the Moriartys. It made it impersonal. Gross. It maybe made it easier to solve.
Notes, then. A plan.
I would start by apologizing to Elizabeth. She deserved it. It was just dumb luck that she’d shown up while I was having that nightmare; no one could have counted on that. More likely they had snuck in to ruin my laptop, found me sleeping, and then sent Elizabeth that email, urging her over to take the blame. Muddy my understanding of the situation.
I had no illusions about my own importance. In the end, this was a person who was after Charlotte Holmes, and I was the means to that end. That had to be my working assumption, right? Me being the collateral damage.
Either that, or I’d made some brand-new enemies at Sherringford without even knowing.
I rubbed at my eyes for a minute.
Right. I had to toss my room for bugs. It only took ten minutes; the room was small, and last year I’d learned the most effective way to dismantle my dorm furniture. I slit the mattress, felt down the closet, checked the shelves, looked behind the mirror. I didn’t find anything.
Why on earth had they called in Elizabeth? Had they known I would flip out and blame her? It was more likely that they’d just hidden the bug well. I put a pin in that for now.
The next question was how they got in, and when. I could check the keycard records for the dorms. We each had one, a heightened security measure after Dobson’s death that allowed the school to track who entered every building and when. You beeped in. The problem was, you didn’t need to beep out. Someone could have been waiting in the dorm all day, waiting. There were security cameras, though. Holmes would know how to tell if the footage had been tampered with. And would someone go through all the trouble to do that? Wasn’t there an easier way to strike at Holmes? What was their motive, bringing me into this? You don’t need to know the motive, Holmes would say. You need the method. You need a pair of eyes. What you need is to get out of your head, Watson—
I shut my notebook.
I was thinking about it—her—like we were in this together. We weren’t. This was just blowback from last year. From my former life. I’d solve this, and be done. Still, it wouldn’t happen tonight. I had homework to do, and I didn’t even know what it was, thanks to my ill-advised, relationship-ending nap.
Lena was in my AP English class. It was a place to start.
Homework? I texted her. Slept through class.
Her response was instantaneous. Not talking to you you made a butt of yourself to Elizabeth and you didn’t apologize?? Jesus Jamie.
Elizabeth. Who I’d blamed for all of this. Who I was too ashamed to think about right now.
I’ll talk to her tomorrow. Giving her time to cool down.
It was a lie, and Lena knew it. You’re a coward. I’m not doing you any favors, she texted back.
It was fair. Still, I rolled my eyes. Elizabeth was the only sophomore in upperclassman housing, and she lived in Lena’s dorm. Carter Hall housed the school-wide security team on the ground floor. Elizabeth’s room shared a wall with them. Living there was the only way her parents would let her come back to school after last year, and who could blame them?
I knew that if I went to Lena’s, I wouldn’t be leaving until she (and probably a squad of security guards) personally supervised my apology to my girlfriend. Ex-girlfriend?
Oh, God. I’d fucked up.
Experimentally, I pulled the laptop out of its rice bath. It made a sloshing sound. I stuck it back in.
My phone buzzed. I’m throwing a party tonight and if you bartend and apologize to Elizabeth and suck generally less I will give you the assignment. There was a pause. Then she sent a knife emoji.
Today was not going as planned. I’d might as well just roll with it.
THAT WAS HOW I FOUND MYSELF AT AN UTTERLY DEBAUCHED party in the access tunnels on a Tuesday night.
The tunnels that ran below Sherringford were built back when the school was a convent, and nuns needed a way to walk to prayers in the freezing months without freezing themselves. When the school purchased the property back in the early nineteenth century, they’d walled the tunnels off. It was only in the last fifty years or so that they’d put them back into use. Now they were used by the maintenance staff.
Also by the school drug dealers, couples looking for places to hook up, the deputy head of school looking for a safe place to stash his thousand-dollar reclining bike, the rugby team during Spirit Week to lock freshmen overnight in the boiler room, and Charlotte Holmes, back when she was looking for a place to practice her fencing.
Tonight, the party was in a cavernous room midway between Carter and Michener Halls, far enough away from either to be heard. That was the idea, anyway. Lena had apparently weaseled the access code from a janitor (“Weaseled how, exactly?” Tom had asked) and sent out the invitations.
Mine hadn’t exactly been an invitation, I guess. Usually I wouldn’t be cradling eight designer shampoo bottles filled with vodka in a dark room somewhere underneath the quad at ten o’clock. On a Tuesday.
It was the Tuesday part that was really getting to me.
“Would it be better if it was on a Friday?” Mariella was asking. She seemed genuinely curious, but it was hard to gauge sarcasm over the thumping EDM.
The room Lena had picked was for Winter Wheel storage. Students paid forty bucks to keep their bikes underground through the snowy months; come March, they’d be hauled back out again. The brick walls were hung thick with them. They deadened the sound. Right now, the room was only half-full of people, but knowing Lena like I did, we’d be at capacity by midnight. Already there was a game of poker happening in the corner, a kind of bastardized five-card stud. Holmes would have been horrified.
“Are we celebrating something?” I asked Mariella. She was setting up a strobe light. I had no idea how or why she had a strobe light.
“Tom got into Michigan,” she said. “Which is shocking to everyone, including Tom.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” he said, coming up behind us. I didn’t know how he could eavesdrop over the bass.
“Congratulations, man.” I freed a hand to shake his. “When were you going to tell me?”
Tom looked a little uncomfortable. “Tomorrow, maybe? I heard you had a . . . well, a bad day. Here, let me get you a table. I think Kittredge said he was bringing mixers for the shampoo vodka.”
“So it’ll be Bright and Shiny Volumizing Vodka Diet Coke,” I said. “Great.”
Tom stuck his hands in his sweater-vest pockets. “Can I talk to you for a second?”
“Yeah,” I said, surprised. “Mariella, could you—”
“I’m on it,” she said, and took over laying out the bar.
He and I wove our way out into the hall. Lena had been right; when we shut the door behind us, almost no noise escaped.
“I meant what I said,” I told him, my voice too loud in the silent hall. “Congratulations. Michigan’s a hard school to get into.”
“My parents wanted Yale,” he said, then winced. “No. Sorry. I’m working on that. They want Yale, but I don’t, and it’s not, like, unreasonable to not want to go there. I want a good education and no student loans, because God knows they want the Ivy League but won’t pay for it. And anyway, only one Sherringford student a year gets into Yale, and it’s not going to be me.”
I nodded.
“Therapy,” he said, as explanation. “I’m working on things.”
“Therapy. Do you like it?” It’d been one of the conditions of Tom coming back to Sherringford, after he’d worked with Mr. Wheatley to spy on me last fall. Therapy, and biweekly check-ins with the dean, and no grades lower than a B. The Tom Bradford I knew this year was more subdued, but also much more grounded.
Sometimes I was shocked that he and I were still on speaking terms. But then, he and I hadn’t really been great friends to begin with. If betrayals were measured by how close you were before they happened, then Tom hadn’t betrayed me all that much.
“Do I like therapy? I mean, I don’t know. I think it’s working. I feel like I understand my decisions more. Sometimes I make better ones.” He scuffed a foot on the ground. “Look, Watson—”
“Jamie,” I said, pained.
“Jamie.” Tom looked at me. “I didn’t invite you tonight on purpose, and it’s not because of this thing with Elizabeth.”
I didn’t know what to say. We weren’t that close, sure, but we were friends. We ate lunch together most days. We studied together in the library at night. I knew his business, and he knew mine.
At least I’d thought I did.
“I don’t really know what to say to that,” I said.
Somehow that pissed him off. “See? Look at you! I say something totally fucked up to you and you’re not even mad. It’s like it doesn’t even make a dent.”
“You’re like, five steps ahead of me right now. What are you even talking about?”
“This! All this!” Tom kicked at the dirty linoleum. The sound echoed down the empty hallway. “You don’t care. We’re not friends, not really. You’re not really friends with Lena. You’re not even really with Elizabeth—oh sure, you think you are, and maybe she does too. But it’s a total lie.”
He was hurt, and it was his party, and even if I wanted to push back against what he was saying, I still felt like shit about it. “I guess I didn’t realize it,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”
“It’s not— Jesus, Watson. Nothing. I get nothing from you. You don’t tell us anything. It’s clear there’s something going on—”
“Jamie,” I said.
“What?”
“Jamie. Don’t call me Watson.”
A group of girls rounding the corner paused, not sure if they should interrupt. The one in front had blond hair and a party dress and a baggie full of bright pills in her hand. She looked like the girl Mariella had brought to our lunch table yesterday. A freshman. They all looked like freshmen, too young to be here.
“Why?” Tom demanded. “Because I’m not on the rugby team with you, I can’t use last names? Are you still punishing me for last year? I don’t care if you are, just tell me so we can work it out! I—”
Whatever defense I’d been marshaling came apart. Because while I wasn’t punishing him, I was doing something worse. I didn’t think about him at all. Him or Lena or even Elizabeth, not in the way she deserved, not even now when I knew I had hurt her.
Once I had been good at friendship, or I thought I’d been. I’d followed friendship abroad, to art squats and police stations and cavernous parties, to my father’s house when he and I weren’t speaking, to Holmes’s room to hold vigil at night. And now I didn’t even know what to say to someone who was telling you, clumsily, that they missed you. Maybe Tom and I had been closer than I thought.
What would I have said, back when I was still myself? How did you slip back on a skin you’d shed?
What was wrong with me?
“It’s fine,” I said, turning to open the door. The girls took that as their cue to sweep by us; the one in front knocked into me, dropping her purse and her baggie of pills. I stooped to pick up her bag, then kicked the drugs behind me. She didn’t seem to notice.
I turned back to Tom. “Hey, how about you call me whatever you want, and I’ll stop being a shitty friend. Let’s get you a shot, yeah?”
I sounded like a buffoon.
He gave me a disgusted look. “Talk to your girlfriend,” he said, pushing past me into the party.
When I looked up, I saw, to my horror, that Elizabeth was trailing along the hall ghostlike, a scarf wrapped around her shoulders like a shawl.
The music swelled. Someone cheered, and then the heavy door clicked shut and closed us off from the sound.
“Hi,” Elizabeth said, standing there under the horrible industrial lights. It was obvious that she’d been crying. Her eyes had a glassy, faraway quality, and with the shawl around her arms she looked like a seer, or a sea-witch. “Listen—”
“I’m sorry,” I said straightaway.
“You are.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yeah. That whole thing—it was crazy, and awful, and I shouldn’t have blamed you. Of course you had nothing to do with it. But I didn’t send that email. All this weird shit’s been happening, it’s like it’s last year all over again, and I didn’t want to tell you because I didn’t want you to have to deal with it—”
“I know,” she said.
“You know?” This hallway, apparently, was the place where I knew nothing. “How?”
She lifted her chin. “Because you sent me another email asking me to meet you at this party. But Tom told me he wasn’t inviting you. He thought it’d make me want to come out, if I knew you wouldn’t be here.”
“Oh,” I said stupidly. My email. Like an idiot I still hadn’t changed my password. I’d been too busy pretending to be a detective. Pretending, and totally failing.
“It’s the Moriartys, right?” Elizabeth stumbled over the words, like they cost her something.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think—I think so.”
“And Charlotte?”
“Yeah.”
She pulled the scarf more tightly around herself, her gaze drawn inward. “Okay.”
“Okay,” I said, and waited. I found myself waiting for her to unveil, layer by layer, her intricate, ridiculous plan. We’d charge back in. We’d be the heroes. We’d end it, finally, once and for all.
But that was a different girl. That was a different me beside her.
“All I know,” Elizabeth was saying slowly, “is if they want us at this party, then we need to get the hell out of here, now.”
We made it all the way to the door to Carter Hall before the panic started.