“I’m pretty good at reading you, you know,” I told her.
“That might be true,” she said gamely. “But did you know that my father worked for the M.O.D. for fourteen years before the Kremlin got wind of a scheme of his and tried to have him assassinated? Or that, growing up, I had a cat called Mouse? She’s white and black and very fussy, and once the neighbor boy tried to drown her in a bucket. My mother hates her. Milo joined up with MI5 at age seventeen. No, that’s false, Milo runs the world’s largest private security company. Or no, actually, he’s an enfant terrible preparing a hostile takeover of Google. He’s unemployed. He’s a complete tosser. For years he was my favorite person in the world.”
I held my hand out rather stupidly between us; my thumb hadn’t moved. I’d spent too much time imagining what her life was like, before me, so I drank in all these facts—even the contrary ones—as if they were water.
“Pay attention to my face, Watson. Not my words. Listen to my tone. How am I sitting? Where am I looking?” She snapped her fingers. “I own three dressing gowns. I dislike guns; they cheapen confrontations. I first took cocaine at age twelve, and sometimes I take oxycodone when I’m miserable. When I met you, my initial thought was that my parents had set it up. No, it was that you were dreamy.” Grinning, I put my thumb up; she pushed it back down. “No, I thought, finally what someone wants from me, I can give them. I know how to play to an audience. I liked you. I thought you were another chauvinistic bastard who thought I couldn’t take care of myself.”
“All true,” I said, quietly, before she could continue. “All of it. At one point or another, including the business about your brother. He’s done all those things, been all those things. You thought all those things about me.”
“Explain your method.” Holmes pulled a cigarette out of her pocket and lit it.
“Because, somewhere in that brain of yours, you’ve decided I should know more about you, but you don’t want to do it outright. No, it can’t be simple, you’re Charlotte Holmes. You have to do it sideways, and this is the most sideways approach you could dream up.”
She exhaled in a long stream, head tipped to the side. I suppressed a cough. “Fine,” she said, finally, and I chanced a smile. Grudgingly, she returned it. “But none of those deductions were methodical, Watson. That was all psychology. I loathe psychology.”
“It’s okay,” I told her. “I hate losing at games, too.”
The next day, she put me through another session, this time with a new test subject. I shouldn’t have been surprised that she brought in Lena.
We met on the quad after classes, shivering and stomping our boots. Lena’s hair hung in a braid down her back, and her hat had a knit flower that drooped down over her brow. She had a date with Tom in town that night, she told us, so she couldn’t stay too late. It was odd to watch her next to Holmes in her trim black coat, hands stuffed into the fur muff strung from her neck. When the wind nipped at us, Lena huddled against her roommate with a familiarity that was almost shocking. I wondered what they talked about together. I couldn’t imagine it.
For two hours, until the tips of my fingers were literally blue from the cold, I practiced reading Lena’s tells. (In the process, I learned her down to the ground. I really didn’t need to know that much about her sex life.) By the end of it, I was so exhausted from shivering that I wanted nothing more than to go to bed with a cup of something warm. Thankfully, when I went a full ten minutes without mislabeling one of Lena’s statements, Holmes let us call it a day. We ducked into the Stevenson Hall lobby for warmth.
“You guys are up to secret things, I can tell. How are your secret things?” Lena asked, unwinding the scarf from her neck.
“They’re about to go much better.” Holmes discreetly stuffed a roll of bills into Lena’s coat pocket. “Run the poker game as usual tomorrow, will you? I don’t want anyone to note a change in my behavior.”
Lena pulled the money back out and pressed it into Holmes’s hand. “Keep it,” she said. “I kind of like being your test subject.”
Holmes froze. “But—”
“Ugh, don’t be weird about it. We’re friends. And I don’t, like, need the money.” Standing on her tiptoes, she kissed me on the cheek. “Thanks, Jamie. That was a lot of fun, but I want to get to ask you inappropriate questions. Maybe we could have pizza in town sometime.”
“You’re having pizza in town with Tom tonight,” Holmes said.
“Sure,” I said, ignoring her. “I’d like that.”
Holmes had on the kind of scowl toddlers get when their favorite toy is stolen away. “We’re done here,” she announced, and dragged me off by my elbow.