“Would it be better if it was on a Friday?” Mariella was asking. She seemed genuinely curious, but it was hard to gauge sarcasm over the thumping EDM.
The room Lena had picked was for Winter Wheel storage. Students paid forty bucks to keep their bikes underground through the snowy months; come March, they’d be hauled back out again. The brick walls were hung thick with them. They deadened the sound. Right now, the room was only half-full of people, but knowing Lena like I did, we’d be at capacity by midnight. Already there was a game of poker happening in the corner, a kind of bastardized five-card stud. Holmes would have been horrified.
“Are we celebrating something?” I asked Mariella. She was setting up a strobe light. I had no idea how or why she had a strobe light.
“Tom got into Michigan,” she said. “Which is shocking to everyone, including Tom.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” he said, coming up behind us. I didn’t know how he could eavesdrop over the bass.
“Congratulations, man.” I freed a hand to shake his. “When were you going to tell me?”
Tom looked a little uncomfortable. “Tomorrow, maybe? I heard you had a . . . well, a bad day. Here, let me get you a table. I think Kittredge said he was bringing mixers for the shampoo vodka.”
“So it’ll be Bright and Shiny Volumizing Vodka Diet Coke,” I said. “Great.”
Tom stuck his hands in his sweater-vest pockets. “Can I talk to you for a second?”
“Yeah,” I said, surprised. “Mariella, could you—”
“I’m on it,” she said, and took over laying out the bar.
He and I wove our way out into the hall. Lena had been right; when we shut the door behind us, almost no noise escaped.
“I meant what I said,” I told him, my voice too loud in the silent hall. “Congratulations. Michigan’s a hard school to get into.”
“My parents wanted Yale,” he said, then winced. “No. Sorry. I’m working on that. They want Yale, but I don’t, and it’s not, like, unreasonable to not want to go there. I want a good education and no student loans, because God knows they want the Ivy League but won’t pay for it. And anyway, only one Sherringford student a year gets into Yale, and it’s not going to be me.”
I nodded.
“Therapy,” he said, as explanation. “I’m working on things.”
“Therapy. Do you like it?” It’d been one of the conditions of Tom coming back to Sherringford, after he’d worked with Mr. Wheatley to spy on me last fall. Therapy, and biweekly check-ins with the dean, and no grades lower than a B. The Tom Bradford I knew this year was more subdued, but also much more grounded.
Sometimes I was shocked that he and I were still on speaking terms. But then, he and I hadn’t really been great friends to begin with. If betrayals were measured by how close you were before they happened, then Tom hadn’t betrayed me all that much.
“Do I like therapy? I mean, I don’t know. I think it’s working. I feel like I understand my decisions more. Sometimes I make better ones.” He scuffed a foot on the ground. “Look, Watson—”
“Jamie,” I said, pained.
“Jamie.” Tom looked at me. “I didn’t invite you tonight on purpose, and it’s not because of this thing with Elizabeth.”
I didn’t know what to say. We weren’t that close, sure, but we were friends. We ate lunch together most days. We studied together in the library at night. I knew his business, and he knew mine.
At least I’d thought I did.
“I don’t really know what to say to that,” I said.
Somehow that pissed him off. “See? Look at you! I say something totally fucked up to you and you’re not even mad. It’s like it doesn’t even make a dent.”
“You’re like, five steps ahead of me right now. What are you even talking about?”
“This! All this!” Tom kicked at the dirty linoleum. The sound echoed down the empty hallway. “You don’t care. We’re not friends, not really. You’re not really friends with Lena. You’re not even really with Elizabeth—oh sure, you think you are, and maybe she does too. But it’s a total lie.”
He was hurt, and it was his party, and even if I wanted to push back against what he was saying, I still felt like shit about it. “I guess I didn’t realize it,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”
“It’s not— Jesus, Watson. Nothing. I get nothing from you. You don’t tell us anything. It’s clear there’s something going on—”
“Jamie,” I said.
“What?”
“Jamie. Don’t call me Watson.”
A group of girls rounding the corner paused, not sure if they should interrupt. The one in front had blond hair and a party dress and a baggie full of bright pills in her hand. She looked like the girl Mariella had brought to our lunch table yesterday. A freshman. They all looked like freshmen, too young to be here.
“Why?” Tom demanded. “Because I’m not on the rugby team with you, I can’t use last names? Are you still punishing me for last year? I don’t care if you are, just tell me so we can work it out! I—”
Whatever defense I’d been marshaling came apart. Because while I wasn’t punishing him, I was doing something worse. I didn’t think about him at all. Him or Lena or even Elizabeth, not in the way she deserved, not even now when I knew I had hurt her.
Once I had been good at friendship, or I thought I’d been. I’d followed friendship abroad, to art squats and police stations and cavernous parties, to my father’s house when he and I weren’t speaking, to Holmes’s room to hold vigil at night. And now I didn’t even know what to say to someone who was telling you, clumsily, that they missed you. Maybe Tom and I had been closer than I thought.
What would I have said, back when I was still myself? How did you slip back on a skin you’d shed?
What was wrong with me?
“It’s fine,” I said, turning to open the door. The girls took that as their cue to sweep by us; the one in front knocked into me, dropping her purse and her baggie of pills. I stooped to pick up her bag, then kicked the drugs behind me. She didn’t seem to notice.
I turned back to Tom. “Hey, how about you call me whatever you want, and I’ll stop being a shitty friend. Let’s get you a shot, yeah?”
I sounded like a buffoon.
He gave me a disgusted look. “Talk to your girlfriend,” he said, pushing past me into the party.
When I looked up, I saw, to my horror, that Elizabeth was trailing along the hall ghostlike, a scarf wrapped around her shoulders like a shawl.
The music swelled. Someone cheered, and then the heavy door clicked shut and closed us off from the sound.
“Hi,” Elizabeth said, standing there under the horrible industrial lights. It was obvious that she’d been crying. Her eyes had a glassy, faraway quality, and with the shawl around her arms she looked like a seer, or a sea-witch. “Listen—”
“I’m sorry,” I said straightaway.
“You are.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yeah. That whole thing—it was crazy, and awful, and I shouldn’t have blamed you. Of course you had nothing to do with it. But I didn’t send that email. All this weird shit’s been happening, it’s like it’s last year all over again, and I didn’t want to tell you because I didn’t want you to have to deal with it—”
“I know,” she said.
“You know?” This hallway, apparently, was the place where I knew nothing. “How?”
She lifted her chin. “Because you sent me another email asking me to meet you at this party. But Tom told me he wasn’t inviting you. He thought it’d make me want to come out, if I knew you wouldn’t be here.”
“Oh,” I said stupidly. My email. Like an idiot I still hadn’t changed my password. I’d been too busy pretending to be a detective. Pretending, and totally failing.
“It’s the Moriartys, right?” Elizabeth stumbled over the words, like they cost her something.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think—I think so.”
“And Charlotte?”
“Yeah.”
She pulled the scarf more tightly around herself, her gaze drawn inward. “Okay.”
“Okay,” I said, and waited. I found myself waiting for her to unveil, layer by layer, her intricate, ridiculous plan. We’d charge back in. We’d be the heroes. We’d end it, finally, once and for all.