Nihal, who sat cross-legged on the floor, glanced up and offered a solemn nod in greeting. A square of butcher paper was splayed in front of him, pinned open by a pair of textbooks. With black-smeared hands, he sketched the outline of something huge and oblong, the charcoal nub hushing across the rough paper. Freshman Marcus sat in the same windowsill he’d claimed last night, typing in furious spurts on his laptop. An angry constellation of acne had lit up on the center of his chin, and he kept rubbing it, looking upset. Meanwhile, Isaac sat on the piano bench with a guitar in his lap, strumming a chord progression. With his long hair bound loosely, messy strands all over the place, and his omnipresent T-shirt-and-dark-jeans combination, he looked kind of like an extra from Grease.
“Julian,” Isaac sang in a ridiculous nasal voice, as I shut the door. “Yeah, Julian the hooligan, oh. There’s no foolin’ Julian, oh-oh. Or droolin’ on Julian—”
“By all means,” Nihal drawled, “keep going until I’m completely deaf.” He tilted his head to scrutinize his sketch from another angle.
Isaac grinned, slapping his palm over the guitar strings. They gave an atonal complaint. “My bad. Didn’t mean to interrupt your self-portrait.”
I walked around the butcher paper, squinting at it from Nihal’s perspective. The drawing was missing his facial hair. It also had no ears. Or a neck. “That’s a self-portrait?” I asked.
Nihal sighed, giving me a long-suffering look. “It’s an avocado.”
“Ah.”
He leaned over the butcher paper again. “I would advise taking Trav’s advice and ignoring everything Isaac says.”
I glanced at Isaac, who seemed happy with himself, like a cat that had just shoved something breakable off a counter.
“Oh my God,” Marcus whispered from the window.
We looked over. “What?” Isaac said.
“Grimsley,” Marcus said, turning his laptop to face us. A graph took up the left half of the screen. “Look at his poll numbers,” he said, his voice growing frantic. “Is this really happening? I can’t believe this.”
Isaac shot a knowing glance at Nihal. “Kid’s the second coming of Ted.”
Nihal hummed a tuneful little chuckle—“hm-hm-hmm!”—before going back to his charcoal avocado.
Isaac saw my questioning expression and said, “Ted graduated last year. He commuted like forty-five minutes to Lake Placid to canvass for local midterm elections, if that gives you any idea.”
“Hey.” A frown darkened Marcus’s round face, making him look ridiculously young. Borderline fetal. How did the freshmen age backward this much every year? “Th-the locals and midterms,” he protested, “are just as important as presidential elections.” He turned his laptop back to himself, rubbing his acne patch again. The computer screen streaked blue into his ash-brown hair. “Maybe more important,” he said, “if you look at the math. Like, your vote gets more weight by proportions and stuff. Since less people vote.”
“Fewer people,” Nihal corrected, not looking up from his drawing.
“Yeah. That.” Marcus’s voice slid into a mumble. “God, who would actually vote for Grimsley . . .”
“Definitely not you,” Isaac said, “’cause you’re, you know, fourteen.”
“Well, yeah, and also ’cause I have a conscience.”
Grinning, I set my backpack next to the door. The hanging flag caught my eye, and I leaned close, inspecting the crows’ beady eyes, remembering how they’d flashed in the candlelight. Since we had no sports teams, you couldn’t find our mascot printed on cutesy pennants, but you’d find the birds lurking around campus if you knew where to look. Crow statues clung to the ends of the stone banisters outside the Ewing and Wingate dorms, and the chapel’s stained glass windows had deep blue birds worked into the designs. The most obvious, though, were the pair of iron crows perched at the apex of Arthur’s Arch, our main gates, named for Arthur Blaine of Kensington-Blaine fame. The birds’ wings were spread, and they gazed down at everyone who entered campus.
I touched the banner the embroidered crows held, tracing the cursive golden swirls of the Latin motto. Verbis defectis musica incipit.
“Music,” said Nihal behind me, “springs from failing words.”
A chord sang out from Isaac’s guitar, mellow and lovely, and then he ruined it by breaking into that fake nasal warble again. “Music springs from failing words, yeah, yeah. Latin springs from total nerds, yeah, yeah. Um. Ostriches are giant birds? Yeah?” He picked out a quick scale on the guitar, maneuvered it from his lap, and leaned it against the wall, moving with the painstaking care of someone setting down a newborn. Then he unfolded from the piano bench and loped toward the door. “Back in a bit.”
He hummed down the stairwell, leaving silence behind him. A breeze floated in through one of the open windows and stirred the warm air. I loosed a slow breath.
“Welcome to Isaac,” Nihal said, outlining the avocado’s center stone.
“Is he always that . . . ?”
“He says whatever comes into his head, 100 percent of the time. And nobody has the heart to tell him to shut up. It’d be like kicking a kitten.”
I laughed. If singing and drawing didn’t end up working out, Nihal had a future in narrating nature documentaries. He spoke like he was reading from a script, every line laden with careful disinterest.
Marcus let out an uncertain laugh too, a split second too late for it to sound natural. Glancing over at the boy curled on the curve of the window ledge, I wondered what it must be like, being a freshman in the Sharps. He and Erik had gotten to Kensington only a couple weeks ago—they probably didn’t know anything but the reputation, the obsession, the fan following.
Then again, what did I really know about the Sharps besides that? They didn’t seem as full of themselves as I’d assumed they were. They were something else, an unknown variable, a family I wasn’t a part of yet. I felt like the weird estranged aunt crashing the reunion. The estranged, cross-dressing aunt.
I relaxed into the sofa. Nihal straightened up, serious brown eyes fixing on me. “So, Julian,” he said, “how long have you been singing?”
I was instantly suspicious. Was he trying to wring information out of me? Had he noticed something off?
But no. He was just curious, and I was just paranoid, and it had been a while since I’d had a personal conversation longer than thirty seconds.
Nihal told me he lived outside Newark. He was a sophomore, which surprised me, since he seemed older than any of the Sharps except maybe Trav, although maybe that was the beard at work. And to my disappointment, he had no interest in narrating nature documentaries, even though fame and fortune were obviously waiting for him there.
“Thank you, though,” he deadpanned. “I’ve always wanted to sound overeducated and uninteresting.”
“Ha. Goals.”
“In all seriousness,” he said, “my sister’s applying for med school, and is looking at nine straight years of school, and I’ve started to wonder if there’s a point at which your brain hits a plateau and can’t absorb any more information.”
I tugged Antigone out of my backpack. “I bet.”
“She went to Kensington, too,” Nihal said, carving shadows into the avocado pit. “Imagine my parents’ relief when she said she was more interested in pre-med than jazz theory.”