I’D ARRANGED TO MEET ELIZABETH OVER HER LUNCH break; I’d called her, so she knew for sure this time that it was me. The parking lot was near the far end of the quad, at the bottom of a slope, and I could see her walking toward me long before she arrived—the red flag of her blazer under her parka, her legs in tights, the scattering bright of her hair.
She was beautiful, and magnetic, and I was wasting her time.
I knew it especially when she passed me a hot paper cup from the cafeteria. “Cocoa,” she said. “I figured you wouldn’t want anyone to see you in there, since you’re sort-of suspended.”
“Thanks,” I said, cupping it in my hands. “I don’t think they have a watch out for me, but yeah, I’m trying to lay low.”
We looked at each other for a long minute.
“You’re not a good boyfriend,” she said, like it was simple. Maybe it was. “Someone is playing on that, I think. They want me to be mad at you. I am, but for different reasons.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I know.”
“I thought that I could—I really like you. You’re really cool, and really pretty, and—”
“I know,” she said, a bit despairingly. “I think I am too.”
“And I just have my head somewhere else. I’m graduating, and last year was a mess, and I know I haven’t been good to you.” I had this urge to reach out to touch her, but I didn’t know what that would accomplish. “I don’t know if it’s because of that, or if I’m just not a good guy.”
Elizabeth shifted her weight from foot to foot. “Just because you know something about yourself doesn’t mean you should be forgiven for it.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, again.
It was over, then. It was for the best.
“So stop.”
“I’m sorry—what?”
“Stop,” she said again, louder. “If you know it, just stop. Stop. You like me. This shouldn’t be this . . . hard. I can’t believe you’re so hung up on someone you never even dated, not really—was she ever your girlfriend? She broke your heart anyway. Maybe that makes it worse. Do I need to break your heart? Is that how I can get in there, under your skin?”
An hour ago, I’d been thinking about Holmes in my bed. Even the memory now made me feel claustrophobic, too hot, and whether it was the way love should feel, I didn’t know. “I don’t know,” I said aloud. “I don’t want that to be true.”
“I’ll help you clear all this up,” she said. “This mess.”
“What mess? The Moriarty mess? Elizabeth—”
“Stop it with the pity voice.” She crossed her arms.
“Why would you put yourself in that kind of danger? What would any of this prove?”
“That I’m a better person than she is?”
I took it like a knife to the gut. No matter how many times I’d thought it to myself, that Holmes was a garbage human, a real piece of work— “Don’t say that. It isn’t true. This isn’t a contest of who’s less of a fuck-up. I think I’d lose, if it was.”
“Stop,” she said, shaking a little with the force of what she was saying. “I’ll help you clear this up, because it involves me, and I hear things around here that you don’t, and God, Jamie, you need a little help, I think.”
“It has to be over, though,” I said. “Between us.”
“Okay. Fine. So we’ll fix this. Then we’ll see.”
I should have said no. I had Lena’s help. I had my father and Leander. I had a five-day maybe-suspension lighting a fire under my ass. But Elizabeth was so adamant, and so cracklingly smart, it felt wrong to refuse her help.
“Where do we start?”
We walked slowly back up the hill toward school. “Anna’s in the hospital. Word is that Lena put her there, what with the ratting her out for the MDMA.” Elizabeth’s mouth twisted. “No one’s really sad about that. Anna’s not a prize.”
“I don’t know her that well.”
“She’s Sherringford swine,” she said with a bitterness I didn’t expect. “Lots of money. There are these amazing scholars who teach at this school, people who’ve written biographies of Elizabeth Bishop, who worked at the White House, who worked at NASA, and Anna doesn’t take notes and pays her hallmates to write her essays. Money gets you a lot here. But a thousand dollars is a whole ’nother level.”
“Did it exist in the first place? Like, did she bring it to the party?”
Elizabeth gestured with her cup. We were approaching the student union. “Let’s go find out.”
The union had a restaurant inside, the Bistro, where for ten dollars you could have them make you a sandwich with the same ingredients they had in the cafeteria. Students went in the evening, if they’d had to miss dinner for sports or studying, and the faculty had lunch there if they hadn’t packed their own. I hadn’t heard of any students going during school hours. It seemed sort of pointless.
But there they were, Anna’s friends, in pleated skirts and snow boots, eating their sandwiches next to the fireplace. Three of them had their hair up in high cheerleader ponytails, but the girl at the center had her long red hair loose and wavy. They sat almost as if arranged.
“They’ve been watching too many CW shows,” Elizabeth said, and determinedly started forward.
“Elizabeth,” the redhead said, placidly. “Hi. Oh, hi, Jamie.”
I didn’t know any of their names, but I guess I had just supposedly scammed their friend, so. “Hi,” I said.
“Was the money real?” Elizabeth asked.
I blinked. I was used to Holmes maneuvering herself in with a suspect, building trust and planting bombs. She never went for the jugular this soon.
“No,” the redhead said, and took another bite.
There was some history between the two of them that I was missing. “I don’t remember you at poker night. Were you there?”
The redhead regarded me over her sandwich. “I wasn’t invited. I don’t have an upperclassman boyfriend.”
“We don’t either,” one of the girls said.
“You wish you did,” the redhead retorted.
The other girls looked at each other. One shrugged. They went back to their conversation.
“Jamie’s not a status symbol,” Elizabeth said. “He’s—”
“Something you wanted and went out and got. I was there. I was your friend, before you dumped me.”
“I’m sorry,” I told her, backing away. “I sort of feel like I shouldn’t be here—”
“So the money wasn’t real,” Elizabeth was saying. “Did you put her up to it? Who did? Why was she there?”
One of her friends piped up. “She wanted to be there. We all did. Kittredge was there.”
“Kittredge?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “He’s gorgeous.”
The redhead shrugged. “Don’t go thinking it’s all about you,” she told me. “It’s not.”
“No,” I said, trying not to laugh. They were talking about a guy who had farting contests with his roommate that you could hear all the way out in the hall. “It’s all about Kittredge, I guess.”
“And the money—”
“Look, honestly? I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Anna,” the redhead said. “She spends a lot with Beckett Lexington and his stash. She spends a lot at Barney’s online. Maybe she overspent and was embarrassed. She told Lainey and Aditii and Swetha that she was going to stake them”—the other girls, if their expressions were any indication—“and maybe she didn’t realize she was too short on cash to do it. Got to the party, decided to blame you. I don’t know. I think there’s more to it than that.”
“If anyone knows, it’s Jason Kittredge,” said Aditii. Lainey? “He was on her from the second she showed up. He’ll know if she had it to begin with.”
“Thanks.” Elizabeth lingered there for a beat. “Marta,” she said to the redhead. “Your hair looks really good.”
“Thanks,” Marta said. Her eyes didn’t soften. “I like your boots.”
“Thanks.”
This strange ritual complete, we left.
“What’s the story there?” I asked, pushing the union door open.
“There isn’t one,” Elizabeth said. “They wanted things from me they couldn’t have.”
I stared at her, washed over with the strangest déjà vu. “What?”
“It’s pretty simple. Undying loyalty.” She pulled out her phone. “Which means, no fuckboys. And everyone’s a fuckboy. Crushes are fine, boyfriends aren’t. Dinner with the group every night at seven. Those are the rules.”
“Wait. They think I’m a fuckboy?”
“You have a fuckboy haircut,” she informed me, rapid-fire texting someone. “And no, I’ve been dating you for too long for anyone to think that. You were famously in love with a junkie who’d dropped out of school, you’d been framed for murder together and now she was gone, and they thought it was all crushingly romantic. Marta told me you’d break my heart. And we stopped being friends over it.”
I didn’t know what to say. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Elizabeth put her phone away. “Because I didn’t want you to tell me it was true. I have to go to Biology. I’ll see you later?” She kissed me on the cheek, and trotted up the hill.
There was so much about this girl I still didn’t know.
Three hours to kill until the end of the school day, when I could corner Kittredge in his room. I ducked into the library and hurried quickly up into the stacks, to the PQ–PR section. It was silent—most students didn’t have a free period, and almost no one had it after lunch—and smelled overwhelmingly like old leaves. The heater, as usual, was working overtime. I shed my outer layers into a pile and sat down at a carrel.
On the ride back to my father’s last night, I’d finally changed my email password. I pulled the account back up to go through the sent messages again. The remarkable thing was that the fake emails sounded so much like me. Whoever had been forging my mail had read through my old messages, listened to the tone, noted the way I’d signed off. The final one “I’d” sent yesterday, to Elizabeth, read:
E,
I’m so sorry about before. Maybe it’s best if we meet somewhere public, and then we can go talk? Come to Tom’s party—I’ll be there. J x
It was stupid to be unnerved by it—the template was literally right there, in the hundreds of samples I’d sent just this school year—and still I was. The initials (E, J) were easy enough to copy, and the one-or-two-x sign-off was standard practice for any email you sent in Britain. But the long-short sentence combo, the statement that ended in a question mark, the dash—they were all things I did all the time and hadn’t realized until now.
There wasn’t any clue there, at least not that I could tell. Nothing to learn except this wasn’t a slapdash job. They would have taken at least a few hours to learn how to convincingly sound like me.
It had to be Lucien. Who else could it be? But I’d seen firsthand what you got from forming conclusions before you had the facts. You dragged in Moriartys, Milo Holmeses, you threw your weight around trying to make your guess right. You ended up with a friend shot dead in the snow.
On my phone, a text popped up in my international app. I was grateful for the distraction. I’ll see you soon, Shelby said. Checking out that school, then headed to Dad’s house. Lots to tell. Hear you’re in trouble again. Shock-er.
I sent her a line of vomit emojis and a see you soon.
I still had time to kill, so I did my best to begin a response paper for AP Euro on one of the school computers. It was hard to feel focused. If I was suspended for stealing in the spring of my senior year, it didn’t matter what grades I got; I wouldn’t be going to college anywhere.
I felt a weird sort of calm about it. Maybe it was fatalism. Maybe it didn’t matter if it was. I was good at writing papers—not amazing, but good enough—and we had been reading about the causes of the First World War, and I found myself getting into the rhythm of it, laying down sentences, rearranging them, contradicting myself, and then stopping to figure out what I actually thought.
I was so engrossed that I didn’t notice Kittredge was sitting next to me until he leaned in and breathed, hot and disgusting, into my ear, “You were looking for me? Because I have a lot to say to you.”