“Like when I hold your hand to calm you down when you get worked up, right? It’s what I do with my little brothers.”
His eyes went blank, like he just turned off. “And the kiss?”
“I only kissed you because you needed a distraction. And it had been a long day.” And because I wanted to. But that wouldn’t help, so I kept it to myself.
I watched his coldness return, watched everything about him harden to glass, and wondered if the next thing I said wouldn’t be the divot that started a spider’s web of cracks. Would I eventually shatter him? I wondered. That’d be a trick. I was the one who felt too fragile to keep talking.
I softened my tone. “I—I just can’t now.”
He nodded as though I’d said the sky was blue.
I was practically whispering when I said, “You wouldn’t like me if you knew me.” And I had plans for my life. Plans that didn’t include a boy or his junior detective crime--fighting fantasies.
He nodded again and looked to the ceiling when he said, “Boats today. I think I found a pattern.”
And then he stormed down the hall away from me, leaving me with my plans. Only, just then, they didn’t feel like nearly enough.
x x x
Sadie Mae stood in my way in the hall, so that I might have stomped straight into her if she hadn’t put her hand on my shoulder at the last minute. “Wow, bad day?” was her only reaction to the seething glare I offered whoever it was that was in my way. She laughed after she said it, of course, in that way she had that always pushed me off my guard.
“Not many good ones this week. You?”
“I’ll just say right here that whoever thought up the idea of paying dead white authors by the word should have a special place in hell with the rest of the sadists.”
“Literature, then?”
Sadie opened her giant bohemian bag, which she’d probably sewn herself, to show me the tonnage of paperbacks she was hefting around campus with her. I was surprised the stitches weren’t giving way. “No idea why I thought I’d want to go to Oxford. I mean, what self-respecting Southern belle chooses to do this to herself?”
“If only you were better at maths.”
“Math,” she corrected. “This is not a plural word in my culture.”
I laughed for the first time that day—perhaps the first time that month, if I were to think back. It was barely a stuttered hiccuping thing, but the sound brightened Sadie’s whole expression.
“I don’t suppose you’d want to study together, like we did back when?”
That thought was sobering. Sadie used to come to my house and stay deep into the night, sprawled on the floor with one of my pillows and her stack of reading. My house didn’t even seem like the same place anymore. I was pretty sure Sadie wouldn’t stay long if she did come over now.
“So, that’s a no.”
“No,” I said quickly. “I mean, yes. We could. Just not at my house. Things are . . . different.”
I knew we couldn’t go to Sadie’s dorm. Her dorm mother was the second coming of Stalin when it came to guests. That Sadie managed to regularly sneak in past curfew was a testament to her criminal tendencies.
“Library, maybe?” I offered.
“Say the London Library and I’ll be yours forever.”
“Sure,” I said with a grin. “London Library.”
Sadie’s expression brightened again and she batted her eyelashes. “You do know the way to my heart.”
“I can’t tonight. I’ve got to get out of this thing I said I’d do. But Thursday?”
She prattled off a where and when we’d meet, and I wondered if she’d actually be there when I showed up. All I could do was try.
x x x
By the time Sherlock and I were in the middle of the lake in an orange boat with a light-yellow bottom, I had almost decided it might be easier to duck out of our little game and discover what I could on my own. But the minute he pulled a stack of papers from his messenger bag, all my thoughts of leaving shimmered from my head. Front and center on the very top page was the Man in Green from the photo, one of the three men Mr. Patel stood behind. FRANCISCO TORRES, FOUND DEAD IN PARK, the headline screamed above his head. I snatched the printout from Sherlock’s hands and skimmed the -article, which pointed to the irony of an infamous bank robber, who’d been released on a technicality after serving only half his sentence, falling victim the very next day to the petty theft of a mugging in Regent’s Park.
“What does this have to do with anything?” I managed to choke out. I forced myself to return the article with a smidge of disinterest in my expression, but not before memorizing the date and page number so I could find it later.
“You said Patel was in trouble with the law. So was this one.”