Tom and Lena. Mine and Holmes’s shadow-selves. Or maybe we were the shadows, and they the happy, well-adjusted versions. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’m fine.”
After throwing some books in his bag, he took off. He must’ve bumped the keyboard as he went, though, because the video he’d been playing unpaused. The girl on the screen began shimmying out of her clothes again. I plunked down in Tom’s chair and closed the window, then sat there for a minute, staring at the notes Tom had pinned above his desk, the tiny mirror he’d put there.
That’s when I noticed it.
His desk and mine were across from each other, meaning that most nights we did our homework back to back. The only mirror in our room had been clumsily hung to the right of where I sat, its bottom half obscured by my desk. If I sat up in the middle of the night, I’d catch a glimpse of my reflection and panic that we had an intruder. That was, more or less, all that mirror was good for.
I didn’t mind that much. I cared a bit about what I wore on the weekend, but our school uniform was exactly that, a uniform, and so the way I looked in it didn’t change. Tom, on the other hand, wore all kinds of product in his hair, and rather than lean awkwardly over my desk to apply it, or do it in the bathroom (which he claimed was “embarrassing,” as if he’d be dispelling some notion that his boy-band mop grew in that way), he’d tacked up a locker-sized mirror above his desk.
All this is to say that, when I looked up into Tom’s mirror, I was at the precise angle to see that there was a gap between my own mirror and the wall. A small gap. A centimeter.
In that centimeter’s worth of dark, I could see the glimmer of a reflection.
Something was back there.
I walked over, got down on my knees, made blinkers with my hands to block the overhead light. Still I couldn’t make out what was behind it. After straightening a wire hanger from my closet, I rattled it in the gap in an attempt to dislodge whatever was back there. I hit on nothing, even when I ran it from top to bottom. When I looked again, I could still see the glimmer of light reflecting off something.
Was it a lens?
I took a deep breath and tried to gather my thoughts. On the bed, my phone buzzed, and I seized it, thinking it might be Holmes. It would be a relief. We’d both been horrible to each other, we’d both been keyed up, and defeated, and lost—I couldn’t imagine what being lost felt like for someone as whip-smart as Charlotte Holmes—and I refused to believe that she’d meant what she’d said. It had to be her. She’d come right over. Everything would be fine.
But the text was from my mother, asking if I’d forgotten our weekly call. She’d try again later tonight, she said, and signed it with kisses.
I looked back into the gap. The light was still shining.
Someone had been in here. Someone had put this thing in my room.
In a sudden, towering wave of rage, I jerked the desk away from the wall, scattering my textbooks in the process. Standing in the space I’d cleared, I braced both my hands against the mirror and pulled. It refused to give. I planted my feet, trying to remember what Coach Q had taught us about taking down a bigger opponent, and pulled, harder. Harder. There was a faint cracking sound—probably its bolts beginning to pull from the plaster—but it still refused to move. Panting, I stared at my reflection. My eyes were all pupil, my face sweaty and red. I looked how I did at the end of a rugby match. Like a Neanderthal.
Fine. I’d be a Neanderthal. With a grunt, I picked up my chemistry text from the desk and slammed it into the mirror.
It didn’t give on the first try, or the second. Around the tenth, I stopped counting and instead watched the webbed crack grow from the middle of the mirror to its edges. Outside, in the hall, someone yelled What the hell is going on, but I ignored them; it wasn’t hard to. The mirror may have been sturdily constructed, but like all things made of glass, it eventually gave. There was a great loud splintering crack as it broke, and I spun away, throwing the textbook up to shield my face. It hadn’t shattered out so much as down, but some pieces had flown out and stuck into the flesh of my hands. I was in such a fury that I couldn’t feel them there.
Because when I turned to look, I saw a small, circular lens, the size of my thumbnail, with a cord that ran into a wireless device. It’d been adhered to the wall with a bit of tape.
But how could the camera capture anything through the mirror? I bent and gingerly picked up one of its larger pieces—I’m not sure why I bothered; my hands were already bleeding—and turned it front to back. Both sides appeared to be glass. A two-way mirror.