THE RUGBY PLAYERS I KNEW WERE MASTERS AT A CERTAIN kind of intimidation. It had everything to do with their bodies—drawing their shoulders back to call attention to their size, or yelling and hollering with their friends until the veins in their neck stood out. Licking a guy’s forehead to make him squeal “like a girl”; pissing in a guy’s shoes to see if you could make him step in them and scream “like a girl”; coughing up shit from their lungs and spitting it, breathing heavy in each other’s faces, then howling; pushing each other over on the field between plays, all to see if their macho macho-ness would break someone down into what they saw as feminine weakness.
Being a girl was their worst fear, and they chalked up all kinds of behavior to “girliness,” things that didn’t make sense. I don’t know why they were so specifically afraid of it. From what I could tell, most of them liked girls, had them for friends, wanted so badly to date them or screw them that it was all they could talk about after practice. But when we were all in a pack together, practicing a game where we tackled each other into the ground like beasts, there were the guys who liked the game, and then there were those who lusted for it, the hard takedown, the feeling of pushing someone else down into the mud. It bubbled up outside of practice in physical ways. Not all my teammates were like that. Barely half, if I had to count. But it was more than enough for me. I’d learned to go stoic and invisible when this kind of shit started so that I didn’t become its target. It was a strategy Kittredge took too.
Not today.
I turned in my chair. “You have things to say to me? Say them.”
He licked his lips. “You’re trying to blame this on me,” he said. “Marta told me. She told me everything.”
“Blame what on you, exactly? What are you being blamed for?” All I did was berate people, anymore. I might as well be my ex–best friend. “I don’t see you being threatened with suspension, or anyone pointing their finger at you for a thousand goddamn dollars. So what? Because Elizabeth and I asked questions about who Anna talked to last night, I’m suddenly putting your ass to the fire? I don’t think so.”
Kittredge shook his head. “I didn’t take her money,” he said.
“Her alleged money—”
“Stop saying that,” he interrupted. I had taken this strategy from Holmes, and it rarely failed—people could always be provoked to correct you. “You act like you know what happened, but you don’t. I saw it. She had this fat wad of bills in her pocket, she took it out to show me.”
“She did? Why?”
He looked around carefully, but the library stacks were empty except for us. “Because she said someone gave it to her. She was laughing, like, in disbelief—it’s not like she needed the money, she said. But she was giddy about it. I couldn’t tell if it was the MDMA. I don’t do that shit, so I don’t know.”
“I don’t either.”
“Listen.” He spread his hand on the table, then balled it up. “If I were you, I’d be talking to Beckett Lexington. He sold her those pills. Maybe he was giving her a cash advance on some sales she was going to do for him. He does that, sometimes—Randall was telling me.”
It was a better working theory than anything I had. My estimation of Kittredge went up a notch. “I will,” I said.
Kittredge stood. “We didn’t talk about this. Okay?”
“You don’t want Anna to find out,” I said.
“No.” He eyed me cautiously. “But I also don’t want someone suspended for shit they didn’t do. Beckett works at the school radio station. Start there.”
He stuck out his hand. I clasped it, and just like that we weren’t animals anymore.
“Let’s just get out of Sherringford before it eats us alive,” Kittredge said.
But Beckett Lexington wasn’t easy to find. I checked the radio station, a poky little warren in the basement of Weaver Hall, and found the system on autoplay, records scattered across the floor. The cafeteria wasn’t open for another hour, so I couldn’t corner him at dinner. Finally I looked up his room in the online directory. Apparently he lived on the first floor of my dorm. But I hesitated at the steps up to Michener. Mrs. Dunham would be at the front desk, and she would have heard about my forced leave of absence. I wasn’t sure I wanted to risk being thrown off campus, especially by someone I respected.
My phone buzzed. Your mother’s getting in tonight, my dad had texted. What time do you want me to pick you up?
Can I let you know? I wrote back.
I was standing in the shadows, debating, when Mrs. Dunham came to the door. “It’s freezing,” she said, ushering me in. “Come on, I’ll put the kettle on for you. Isn’t that how you say it? ‘Put the kettle on’?”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
She waved a hand. “I won’t tell the administration if you won’t,” she said, walking back up to her desk. “I’m just icing some cookies I brought from home. Do you want to help?”
There were worse things to do on a stakeout.
I dragged a chair over from the lobby. Mrs. Dunham’s desk was a riot of cheerful uselessness. Her knitting was in a basket, full of the bright scarves she made to send off to her daughter at school, and a series of dala horses she’d brought back from Sweden, red and blue in a line, that she said were for luck. She kept her coffee mug on an ever-rotating stack of poetry books, Mary Oliver and Frank O’Hara and Terrance Hayes, and beside that a tablet that was always streaming something mindless, a buddy cop show or a British baking program. All of her projects could be abandoned at a moment’s notice if she needed to run off to put out some small fire in the dorm.
Today, she had sugar cookies in a giant plastic container, and a number of smaller ones full of red and blue and green frosting. She handed me a knife, then started back up her baking show. I watched the door and tried very hard not to eat every cookie I iced.
Guys came in and out, on their way back from practice or the library or the union, and I steeled myself against the looks I’d get if the news about Anna’s money and my “leave of absence” had spread. But they didn’t. A few said hi, or asked if I was sick, since I hadn’t been in class, and I told them, yes, very sick, not contagious, no, I’ll see you guys next week.
When things were going wrong, it was so easy to imagine that everyone knew, that everyone was talking about it. But nobody cared nearly as much about your life as you did.
We finally came to the bottom layer of cookies just as the 4:30 lull hit, the moment before everyone came down to go to dinner. No sign of Beckett Lexington yet. I looked again at Mrs. Dunham’s desk, but this time my eyes drifted down to the place she kept the master key.
“Something strange happened to me the other day,” I said.
“Oh?” she asked, only half-listening. A girl on the baking show had burnt her English muffins.
“Yeah,” I said. “Someone got into my room and sprayed a can of soda everywhere.”
Mrs. Dunham turned to me, shocked. It looked genuine. “That’s terrible, Jamie. Are your things okay?”
“Not really. But, you know, I lock my door. I was just wondering if anyone came through and asked for the master key yesterday afternoon.” I was starting to feel a little sick from everything I’d eaten.
Frowning, Mrs. Dunham pulled out the maintenance record. “A carpenter at seven a.m., fixing a broken window sash—”
“Too early.”
“And of course Elizabeth when she came up to find you after dinner.” She glanced at me. “Do you want me to stop doing that? I do know that you like to keep your door locked even when you’re in there, love, but she’s your girlfriend—”
“It’s fine,” I told her. “I appreciate it.”
“You two have been through enough. I like to make your lives easier in little ways, if I can,” Mrs. Dunham said, stoutly. She returned to her record. “Otherwise, I gave it to a student at bed check when he locked himself out. Do you want his name?”
“No.” I was starting to feel really nauseous, actually, enough that I was starting to sweat. “No, that’s too late. It’s okay.” I pushed the cookies back toward her. “Thanks for looking.”
“You know,” she said, “you actually don’t look very well. Do you want to go to the infirmary?”
I reacted to the word “infirmary” the way you would to being hit in the face.
“Oh! Oh—you know Nurse Bryony doesn’t work there anymore, it’s fine to go if you’re ill, you’d be safe—”
“I’m fine,” I said, gasping a little. PTSD, Lena had said. Was it true? I hardly even knew what that was.
“Jamie,” she said, reaching out to touch my forehead. Unthinking, I jerked away.
Because the week I was having wouldn’t allow for anything else, Beckett Lexington chose that moment to walk in the front door.
“Watson,” he said, stomping his snow boots on the mat. “You look awful, man.”
I couldn’t deal with it right now. “I feel awful,” I said. “Can you hold on a second? I think—Elizabeth said she wanted to talk to you—”
He brushed his asymmetrical hair out of his face. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s cool. Hey, can I have one of those?”
“Of course,” Mrs. Dunham said, holding the container out.
I hunched over my phone, trying very hard not to look at Beckett stuffing a red-and-green cookie into his mouth. SOS, I texted Elizabeth. Beckett Lexington at Michener. Kittredge thinks he gave Anna the money. Having an Incident, like an asshole.
You’re not an asshole. There in five, she wrote back, almost immediately.
I wasn’t sure what information she could get out of him, especially if she went after him with a hatchet like she had the girls at lunch, but I was in no state to try to interrogate someone. All I could really do was call my father. “Dad,” I said, as soon as he picked up. “You need to come get me. Like, now.”
“I’m just in town running errands,” he said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
I waited for him outside on the steps, breathing in and out, slowly, trying not to immediately assume that I’d been infected with a nanovirus. Ever since the run-in with Bryony Downs where she’d stuck me with an infected spring, I could work myself up into a panic any time I felt ill.
Panic, or fear, or was it trauma, or maybe Mrs. Dunham was poisoning me—
No. The cold air felt good on my face. I shut my eyes for a second, swaying, and when I opened them Elizabeth was staring at me.
“You okay?”
I gestured inside to Beckett scrolling through his phone, cookie in hand. “Talk to him?” I asked.
Unexpectedly, she grinned. “You have frosting on your face,” she said. “Blue frosting. You look like a snowman. Did you eat cookies for dinner?”
I hadn’t eaten lunch, I remembered; we’d left the Bistro without me ordering anything. In fact, I hadn’t eaten anything all day. The thought made the nausea lessen, a little. It’s just panic, I told myself again.
“Jamie,” she said, starting up the steps toward me.
“I’m okay,” I said. She had a knit hat on, and the color matched her eyes. In that moment I was so grateful that I could cry. “Thank you. For everything you’re doing to help. You don’t need to be doing it.”
She took off a glove, then reached out and, with a finger, took a bit of icing off my lips. “Well,” she said softly. “Of course I’m helping.”
My father’s sedan pulled up to the curb.
“That’s my cue,” I said.
“I’ll go talk to Lexington. Find out what he knows. Will you call me later?”
“Yeah,” I said, and on impulse, I kissed her cheek. “Talk to you tonight.”
I popped the trunk of his car and made room for my backpack amidst a cluster of grocery bags. There were fancy things spilling out of them—goat cheese, a few bottles of wine, some pickled Italian things I didn’t recognize. I swallowed down my nausea and hopped into the front seat.
“You’re excited to see Mum, I take it,” I said. “Big dinner plans?”
My father shrugged. “Just trying to be a good host.”
The car was warm, too warm, and I cracked the window as he pulled out of the school gates. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m feeling kind of gross.”
He gave me a look. “Apparently not that gross. How’s Elizabeth? Are you two back on?”
“No. Maybe. No. No, we’re not.” I knew it wasn’t a good answer. I thought about saying something like I can only solve one mystery at a time, and then cringed. What was it that Elizabeth had said? Being aware of it didn’t excuse your crappy behavior?
My father didn’t say anything else until we’d made it out of Sherringford Town and into the cold, white fields beyond. “It isn’t nice to leave people in the dark,” he said, finally, with an odd vehemence.
I looked at him. “Am I leaving you in the dark about something?”
“Elizabeth,” he said, gripping the wheel. “That poor girl. She has expectations, you know, and I don’t want you jerking her around. It’s not very nice. I don’t like to see that kind of behavior in you.”
I didn’t like it in me either, but it was sort of beside the point—my father never came down on me like this for anything. “Are you all right? Is everything okay with Abbie?”
“You don’t need to get yourself involved in that.”
“Okay,” I said, unsettled. I’d groused a lot over the years about my father’s relentless good humor, but I was discovering I didn’t know what to do when it wasn’t there.
The night got darker, streetlights winking out as we drove further into the countryside. It wasn’t proper farmland, with farms and turbines and hay for miles and miles; instead, the road wandered through little towns, none of them any bigger than a gas station and a couple of bars, surrounded by ancient farmhouses. During the day it was unremarkable, but at night, with the snow turning into sleet, those old houses were strange and sad.
“Then again,” my father said, out of nowhere, “it isn’t fair for her to expect things from you that you can’t give her. Has she even said anything to you about it?”
I blinked. “Yes?”
“Well, that’s good. Good. Good for her. That’s better than—than just wanting things and never saying anything about it and hanging around, feeling tortured, instead of communicating your feelings like an actual adult.”
We were definitely not talking about Elizabeth. “Dad.” I swallowed, then said, “Is everything okay with Leander?”
He almost swerved off the road. “What are you talking about?”
“I think you know what I’m talking about,” I said, not unkindly.
More silence. More farmhouses, standing like sentinels in the dark. My father pounded his hand against the wheel once, twice, three times. “Your stepmother doesn’t like Leander hanging around so much, looking at her like—she says, and I quote—‘like he’s just waiting for James to realize how much more he likes him than me.’”
“He’s been at the house a lot, I take it.”
“He’s renting a place down the road,” my father said. “I haven’t gotten to see him this much in ten years! We’ll usually put together a few weekends in the summer—run around Edinburgh like we used to, tidy up the ends of some case he’s solving—but you know, it was never enough. It was the best when he lived so close to us, in London, but that of course made your mother furious. I—ah. I shouldn’t be telling you this.”
“Probably not,” I said.
“Abbie is different, you know. More adventurous. We have a lot of fun.” He nodded, as if talking himself into something. “She thinks he’s in love with me.”
There it was. “Is he?” I asked.
“No.” He sounded almost relieved that the conversation had made its way here, as though this had been the end point all along. “No! No. No, he’s not. Just because he’s gay doesn’t mean he’s in love with his straight best friend. I hate when people insinuate that. You know, that’s insulting to both of us, and anyway, I’m just—he’s brilliant, you know? Leander is the life of every room, and he’s obviously a good-looking man. He could have anyone he wanted, he’s not just hanging around pining after me. Of all people! That would be absurd. That would be . . .”
He trailed off.
“It would be really sad for him,” I said, looking down at my hands.
“Oh, God,” my father said.
The sleet was coming down harder. Little dots and dashes of hail were bouncing off of the windshield.
“Yeah.” I paused. “He’s your favorite person?”
Mechanically, he put on the wipers. “I’ve never—I’m not attracted to men. He’s not an exception to that.”
“But he’s—”
“He’s my favorite person.” He was talking almost as if to himself. “Don’t you wish sometimes that who you—you spent your life with was determined just by that? Wouldn’t that make it less complicated?”
I was seventeen years old. I was dating-or-not-dating another girl who was right now questioning the campus dealer about a crime I hadn’t committed, and I was in love with my best friend, who I hadn’t seen for a year but who lived on in my day-to-day like a splinter in my goddamn heart. I thought about the rest of my life a lot more than I’d like to admit.
“I don’t think that makes it less complicated,” I said.
Our house came into view. Despite the weather, the garage was open and lit up, and inside it, figures were hauling in suitcases from a rental car.
“Your mother’s here,” my father said happily as we pulled up into the drive. He was doing that adult thing that I hated, where he pretended an uncomfortable conversation hadn’t happened. “Go in through the front, will you, and make sure the cat hasn’t gotten out? And see if your stepmother needs help.”
I grabbed my backpack and a few of the grocery bags, trying not to look inside them (my stomach still wanted to pretend that food didn’t exist), and fought my way through the sleet through the front door.
Abbie wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Neither was the cat. I was checking inside the pantry, looking for it, when my phone rang. It was a number I didn’t recognize. “Hello?”
“Jamie, it’s me.”
“Shelby?” I said, moving around some bags of potatoes. No cat. “Where are you? Aren’t you here? Are you okay?”
“Are you alone?” Her voice was urgent, ragged.
I grabbed the pantry door and shut it. “I am now. What’s wrong?”
“Jamie, everything is seriously so messed up, I don’t even know where to begin, and I think I only have a minute—”
My heart was racing. “What’s happening, Shel?”
“That school? In Connecticut? It’s not a school, Jamie, it’s like some kind of rehab, and I have no idea why I’m here but I’m here, I’m in the infirmary because I fainted, I guess, when I figured out what was going on, and I’m using the phone here because they took mine, but the doctor might be back, and Jamie, you have to do something, you have to come get me—”
“Rehab?” I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. “What was their justification? What the hell is going on?”
“It was Mum. I don’t even understand it. She’s super furious about the stuff going down with you, still, which is weird, first of all, because usually she, like, rages but then gets over it, and then she was going through my things and she found a bottle of vodka in my drawer, but it wasn’t mine, I swear, I’d never seen it before!”
“I believe you—”
“And Ted tried to talk her down and then— Footsteps. I hear footsteps. Wait.”
I stood there in the dark pantry, clutching the phone to my face, listening to my sister’s frightened breathing. I’d never felt so helpless in my life.
“They’re gone,” she whispered. “I don’t know when they’re coming back. But the school—I can’t. It’s like a wilderness camp, and there are horses, but it’s like survivalist, they put you in the woods for days, there’s no school at all, and Mum insisted—and she and Ted got married—”
“What?”
“It was supposed to be a surprise.” Shelby had been talking so quickly I could only half-understand her. “In the middle of the day yesterday. In London, at the courthouse. So like . . . meet your new stepdad?”
“Are you serious—”
A rustle, a man’s voice. “No no,” she was saying, and then the line went dead.
The nausea hit me again, full force, this vertiginous feeling like I was crashing, and I was sure now that all of it was panic.
I made myself breathe. Be logical, I thought. Be a grown-up. Shelby could be lying about the vodka, it could have been hers. The school could just be more severe than she was used to. It could be homesickness. Ted could be a nice guy.
Breathe.
From the garage, I heard my father saying a hearty congratulations. Laughter. The garage door groaning to a close.
They staggered in through the door, then, laughing—my mum with her hand on my father’s arm, chatting excitedly, my new stepdad hauling a pair of bags behind them.
“Jamie,” my mother said when she saw me, rushing forward. “I swear you’ve gotten taller—hello, sweetheart.” She grabbed me by the shoulders; she was never this effusive. “It’s so good to see you.”
“Hey,” I said, forcing myself to sound friendly. “Where’s Shelby? Thought she was coming.”
“Loved her school,” Ted said, behind my dad. “Just loved it. Wanted to start right away.” He had a wonderful speaking voice, a round tenor with a Welsh accent.
“She did,” my mum said, and turned back to me. “Just loved it. And we have news!”
“Gracie, not so fast,” Ted said. “I haven’t even met the boy yet.”
“Hi,” I said, stepping forward to shake Ted’s hand. I was going to rewrite this conversation, take control. I’d figure out exactly what was going on. “I’m Jamie, it’s nice to finally meet you.”
He took it, scowling a little. Ted was tall, broad-shouldered, surprisingly bald. Maybe my sister had mentioned that to me before? But he didn’t have eyebrows either—it looked almost as though he’d shaved them—and his eyes beneath were small and shrewd. He looked like someone, I thought, my pulse beginning to speed up. Who did he look like?
“Jamie,” he said. “Hi. Ted Polnitz.”
“His given name is Tracey,” my mother said, coming up beside him, smiling. She’d had her hair done, her makeup. She was wearing a necklace that belonged to my grandmother, pearls on a long string. She looked beautiful. “Tracey! Isn’t that cute? But he prefers his middle name. Theodore. More serious. And we have plans for tonight—a reception!”
“A wedding reception,” my father said, bemused. “We’re doing a dinner thing in New York. Tonight.”
I was hardly paying attention. “You remind me of someone,” I said to Ted, slowly.
He grinned at me. “I get that a lot.”
“Jamie?” my mother asked. “Are you okay?”
When he smiled my new stepfather looked just like August.
And Phillipa. And Hadrian.
“I’m fine,” I said to Lucien Moriarty. “Really. It’s just so good to finally meet you.”