James dropped his foil and gaped down at me with wide, bulging eyes.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Camilo yelled.
James stepped back like a sleepwalker, slowly, entranced. His fingers flexed at his side, his knuckles gleaming red. I tried to speak, but my mouth was full of iron, blood dribbling down my chin, soaking the front of my shirt. The two soldiers propped me up, and my head drooped heavily forward, like all the tendons in my neck had snapped.
Camilo was still shouting. “Unacceptable! What the hell’s gotten into you?”
James looked up at him instead of me. “I—” he began.
“Get out,” Camilo said. “I’ll deal with you later.”
James’s mouth moved wordlessly. Water suddenly welled in his eyes, and he turned and ran out of the room, leaving his coat and gloves and everything else behind.
“Oliver, are you all right?” Camilo crouched beside me, lifting my chin. “You got all your teeth?” I closed my lips, swallowed blood, and gulped hard against the reflex to vomit. He pointed first at the taller of the two soldiers, then at the other one. “You, help me get him to the infirmary. You, run and find Frederick, tell him I need to see him and Gwendolyn immediately. Move.”
The world reeled as they hoisted me up, and I hoped dully that I’d lose consciousness and never wake up again.
SCENE 6
I didn’t get out of the infirmary until after eleven. My nose was broken, but not badly. A splint had been taped over the bridge to keep it straight, and beneath that, red and purple bruises were spreading under both my eyes. Gwendolyn and Frederick had been to see me, asked what happened, apologized profusely, and then requested that I keep it as much to myself as possible and call it an accident if other students asked. We didn’t, they said, need any more gossip or any more trouble. By the time I got back to the Castle, I hadn’t decided whether I would comply or not.
I went immediately upstairs, but not to the Tower. It seemed unlikely that James would be there, but I didn’t want to risk it. Instead I knocked softly on Alexander’s door. I heard a drawer scrape shut, and a moment later he appeared, one hand on the doorknob.
“Fuck, Oliver,” he said. “Pip told me what happened, but I didn’t think it’d be this bad.” His eyes were bloodshot, his lips dry and cracked. He didn’t look much better than I did.
“I don’t really want to talk about it.”
“Fair enough.” He sniffed, wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Can I help?”
“My head hurts like a bitch and right now I’d rather not feel anything above the neck.”
He opened the door wider. “The doctor is in.”
I didn’t go in Alexander’s room often, and I was always surprised by how dark it was. Sometime in the last few weeks, he’d tacked a tapestry over the window. His bed was buried under a pile of books, which he gathered up and dropped on the already cluttered desk. Crumpled rolling papers, broken matches, and dirty clothes littered the floor. He gestured at the bed, and I sank gratefully down on the mattress, my pulse pounding hard between my temples.
“Can I ask what happened?” he said, as he rummaged in the top drawer of his desk. “I won’t make you talk about it. I just want to know whether I should shove James in the lake next time I see him.”
Unsure if the remark was simply Alexander’s morbid sense of humor or something more deliberate, I shifted on the bed, chalked it up to lingering paranoia, and decided to ignore it.
“Have you seen much of him lately?” I asked. “I feel like he’s never here.”
“He comes in and out. You’d know better than I would.”
“He usually comes in after I’ve gone to bed, and by the time I get up, he’s gone.”
Alexander shook a few little florets of weed out of a film canister and crumbled them into a cigarette paper. “If you ask me, he’s getting a little too deep into his role. Method, you know? Doesn’t know where he stops and Edmund starts anymore.”
“Well, that can’t be good.”
He looked up at me and my busted nose. “Clearly.” He made a face like he’d just bitten his tongue. “Did they give you some kind of painkillers for that?”
I produced a bottle of little white pills from my pocket.
“Grand,” he said. “Gimme two of those.”
I handed them over. He crushed both under the film canister and sprinkled the resulting powder on top of the weed in the paper. Then he reached into the drawer again, came up with another mysterious pill bottle. He popped the top off, tapped it on the heel of his palm. Another white powder, finer. He added this to the joint without telling me what it was. I didn’t ask.
“So what happened?” he said, as he started rolling. “You guys were doing the Five-Three combat and he just clocked you?”
“Basically.”
“What the fuck. Why?”
“Believe me, I’d love to know.”
He ran his tongue along the sticky edge of the paper, then pasted it down with one fingertip. He twisted the end into a tiny curl and handed the joint to me. “There,” he said. “Smoke that in one go and you won’t feel anything for a week.”
“Terrific.” I stood and grabbed onto the back of his chair. My head was throbbing.
“You all right?”
“I will be in a few minutes.”
He didn’t sound convinced. “You sure?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll be fine.” I felt my way to the door like a blind man, hands moving from one piece of furniture to the next until I reached the wall.
“Oliver,” he said, as I opened the door to let myself out.
“Yeah?”