“Thanks.” I nodded at her and went the way she’d indicated. The foyer was dark and empty. Wind rushed against the front door, rattled the panes in the transom window. The bathroom door was closed, but a light peeked out underneath and I opened it without knocking.
The scene there was even stranger, more unsettling than the one in the library. James leaned over the sink, his weight on his fists, the knuckles of his right hand split and bleeding. A huge fractal crack in the mirror stretched in jagged lines from corner to corner, and a long black streak on the counter led to the tip of an uncapped mascara wand. The tube had rolled onto the floor and gleamed against the baseboard, a flash of metallic purple. Meredith’s.
“James, what the hell,” I said, pins and needles prickling down my spine. His head jerked up as if he hadn’t heard the door, didn’t know I’d come in. “Did you break the mirror?”
He glanced at it, then back at me. “Bad luck.”
“I don’t know what’s going on, but you’ve got to talk to me,” I said, distracted by the drumming of my pulse in my ears and the mismatched thud of music through the wall—persisting, unimpeded. “I just want to help. Let me help, okay?”
His lip was trembling and he tucked it behind his teeth, but his arms were quivering, too, like they couldn’t support his weight. A crack split his face into four different pieces in the mirror. He shook his head. “No.”
“C’mon. You can tell me. Even if it’s bad, even if it’s really bad. We’ll find a way to fix it.” I realized I was begging and swallowed hard. “James, please.”
“No.” He tried to push past me, but I blocked him in. “Let me go!”
“James! Wait—”
He threw his weight against me, drunkenly, heavily. I braced myself against the door with one arm, caught him around the shoulders with the other. He shoved harder when he felt my hand on him and I crushed him against me, fighting to keep him from knocking me aside or toppling both of us to the floor.
“Let me go!” he said, voice muffled where his face was caught in the crook of my arm. He strained against me for a moment longer, but I had him in a strangely solid grip, his arms trapped between us, hands pushing futilely against my chest. He seemed so small all of a sudden. How easy it should have been for me to overpower him.
“Not until you talk to me.” My throat tightened, and I was afraid I would cry until I realized James was crying already, sobbing even, huge clumsy breaths making his shoulders shudder and jerk in my grip. We wavered in what had somehow become an embrace until he lifted his head, found his face too close to mine. He writhed away from me, then stumbled out into the foyer and said, with a child’s petulant anger, “Don’t follow me, Oliver.”
But I pursued him blindly, idiotically, like a man in a dream compelled by some great mysterious force to move forward. I lost him in the press of people dancing in the dining room, the lights hazy and indistinct, blue and purple, electric shadows moving dizzily from wall to wall. I pawed my way between dancers, searching for James’s face in the blur of people. I caught a glimpse as he slipped into the kitchen and followed close on his heels, almost falling in my haste to catch up with him.
Wren, Colin, Alexander, and Filippa had joined the third-years. James looked over his shoulder, saw me, then grabbed Wren’s arm and pulled her away from the others.
“James!” she squeaked, tripping after him. “What are you—”
He was already dragging her out of the kitchen, toward the stairwell tower.
“Don’t—!” I said, but he talked over me.
“Wren, come up to bed with me, please.”
She stopped dead, and we all froze around her, watching. But all she could see was James. Her lips moved soundlessly and then she stammered, “Yes.”
He looked over her head at me, something strange and bitter and vindictive in his expression, but for only a split second. Then he was gone, pulling her out of the room behind him. In disbelief I tried to follow them, but Alexander caught me by the shoulder. “Oliver, no,” he said. “Not this time.”
He and Filippa and I all stood staring at one another, while the silent third-years stared at us. Music surged on obliviously behind us, and the wind roared outside. I stood paralyzed in the middle of the room, too dismayed to speak or move. To notice, at first, that Meredith was missing.
SCENE 3
I woke up alone in Filippa’s room. After James disappeared into the Tower with Wren, I’d spent the night wandering the Castle in a daze, wondering where Meredith had gone and more worried than I would confess to anyone. By the time the place emptied and everyone else was in bed, I came to the unnerving conclusion that she wasn’t coming back. At half past three I knocked on Filippa’s door. She opened it wearing an oversized flannel shirt and wool socks pulled halfway up her calves.
“I can’t go up to the Tower,” I told her. “Meredith’s gone. I don’t want to sleep alone.” Finally I understood the feeling.
She opened the door, tucked me into bed, and curled up in a ball beside me, all without saying a word. When I shivered she shifted closer, draped one arm over my side, and fell asleep with her chin perched on my shoulder. I listened to her breath and felt her heart beat against my back and tricked myself into thinking that maybe, when we woke up, everything would be back to normal. But what kind of normal did we have to go back to?