“Sorry,” I said, rubbing my face. “Sorry, I was— I’m awake now. Um. Is it dinner?”
“You slept through dinner.” She crossed her arms. “I came to check on you. Mrs. Dunham said she hadn’t seen you since this morning.”
I swallowed. “I missed the rest of my classes,” I said.
“You missed the rest of your classes.”
I’d never heard her use this voice with me. Ever. The last time she spoke to someone this flat, it was when she eviscerated Randall for making a sexist joke.
And then what she was saying sank in. “Shit. Oh, shit. I can’t—” AP calc. I’d missed AP calc. Did I have anything due? Would Miss Meyers notice? She never even looked up from her notes, and I never raised my hand anyway, did I—
“Jamie,” Elizabeth said, low. “Seriously.”
I couldn’t account for the murderous look on her face. “Did I do something?” I snapped. “Why are you pissed? Last I checked, you weren’t the one who blew an entire class day because of a nap.”
She stalked toward me with a sudden intensity. “You emailed me,” she said. “You emailed me, which is already super weird, and you told me that you needed to talk to me, but not until after dinner, and I’m supposed to come in at this specific time, so I show up—I blew off my English study group, by the way—I come in to find you, what, pretending to be asleep, whispering your ex-girlfriend’s name? Charlotte, Charlotte, Charlotte. You’re covered in sweat, and your room is disgusting—why are your walls sticky? What the hell is going on? Is this some kind of horrible joke? Why would you do this to me?”
She was inches from me now, her finger up like she wanted to stab it into my eye, or my throat, and she seemed seconds away from crying—I had never seen Elizabeth cry, I didn’t know that anything could push her this far out of control—and I should have been horrified, stumbling to deny it, to explain.
I didn’t. Because, as my eyes adjusted, I could see the wall behind her, sprayed down with brown liquid that ran in winding lines to the desk below. To my laptop, open, my email inbox visible on my screen. The top half of my screen, anyway. The bottom half was flickering between black and static. The keyboard was dripping wet, the desk chair, the corkboard, the end of my bed. The King’s College London pennant above my desk.
Beside it, a crumpled can of the Diet Coke I kept in my fridge for her. I brought it to her every day at lunch like an apology. For liking her, liking her so much, and for still loving someone else instead.
Someone had shaken it and sprayed it all over the laptop my mother had bought with the money she’d been saving to buy herself pottery classes. My mother, who never did anything for herself.
Guilt on guilt on guilt. It closed its hand around me, tightened.
“Jesus, Jamie,” Elizabeth was saying. Louder now. Loud enough to be heard in the hall. “What is going on? I know you’re having panic attacks, I know you’re feeling like shit about something. Is it something else, other than what you’ve told me? What’s happening?”
All I could think about was how, earlier, I’d been so certain that a Moriarty was after me, that this was their new ploy. Punishing me until Charlotte reappeared to save me.
Either that, or my girlfriend was punishing me for something. It had been funny when I thought it last night. Not today, with her standing in the middle of the wreckage of my room.
“Did you do this?” It slipped out of my mouth like a curse. I hadn’t meant to say it, to think it—I hadn’t ever wanted to feel this scared again.
“Are you serious?”
“You heard me. Did you do it.” It was like I couldn’t stop. “Did you wreck my laptop to get me back for something?”
Elizabeth’s eyes welled. “What did that girl do to make you like this?”
With that, it was like our fight jerked into a higher gear.
“What she did? Or hey, how about if I was just this way all along?” There were certain things I didn’t want Elizabeth to touch. Not ever. This was one of them.
Nobody knew the whole of it. Nobody except me and Holmes and Scotland Yard, and I wanted to keep it that way. How else could I possibly move on, if everyone looked at me and knew how much of a fool I’d been?
“So what, you’ve just been an asshole from the start?” Elizabeth was crying. “Why are you talking to me like this?”
I opened my mouth, then shut it. Did I mean my accusation? Had she really gone into our club meeting last night, or had she beaten me back to my dorm to delete my project? No. It was impossible. She wasn’t any part of this. I wasn’t so selfish to drag her back into this mirror world where Moriartys had gemstones shoved down girls’ throats.
I was selfish in other ways.
“I’m sorry,” I said. It was all I had.
“Fine. Say nothing. Fine,” she said again, and she turned on her heel and marched out into the hall.
Noise out there. Doors opening, closing.
“No, Randall,” I heard her say. “Leave me alone. Leave me alone. Don’t talk to him. I’ll do it myself, when I’m ready.”
He stuck his meaty head into my room. Before he could say a word, I slammed the door in his face.
Then I picked up my phone, pulled up my father’s message. Leander wants to know if you’ve made up your mind.
The whole bloody world wanted me to go find Holmes? Fine. I’d go find Holmes. I’d find her and show her exactly how much damage she’d done.
I have, I wrote back. Pick me up in ten.
Eight
Charlotte
THE SUMMER AFTER THE INCIDENT WITH MY TUMBLING teacher and the Adderall and Professor Demarchelier, my family took our yearly retreat to Lucerne.
We spent a fair amount of time in Switzerland in those years. Milo was attending boarding school there, at a place that, even at twelve, I knew our family could hardly afford. The winter instruction took place at a ski lodge in Austria, in Innsbruck (hence the name of the place, the Innsbruck School), and during the spring and fall, Milo took his classes with the sons of prime ministers and kings in Lucerne.
“I don’t want to go back,” he’d said at the end of spring break, in a rare moment of dissent. My brother took his orders from our father unflinchingly, as though our family unit were a military operation. “I know enough already to start my own business. That’s all we’ve—I’ve—ever wanted to do, anyway. Plenty of people finish school at eighteen.”
We were at the dinner table. It was the only guaranteed time during the day for the four of us to be together. Consequently, it was my own personal hell. I pushed my plate away, watching my father closely.
He tilted his head to the side. “Why do you think that you attend your school?” I studied his hands on the table. They were still.
Milo considered the question, chewing. He never seemed to feel the reflexive dread I did when our father considered us like that, like prey. “For the connections?”
“Not for the skiing?” I asked under my breath. In those days, I had less control over myself.
Luckily, my father didn’t hear. My mother reached out one viselike hand under the table and captured my knee. She wanted me to shut my mouth. This was because she loved me.
“The connections,” my father said. “A bit baldly stated, but yes, good. Now, as you noted, you are eighteen. How useful is it for you to know the Belgian prime minister?”
“For me to know the prime minister?” Milo said, slowly. “But I go to school with the prime minister’s son.”
“And?” my father asked. On the table, he curled and uncurled his hands. This was a warning. If one lay flat on the table, it meant a punishment was forthcoming, and whether it would be directed at Milo or me was a coin toss.