“No,” I said, too quickly, then forced a smile. “No. I’m fine.”
It was like a dance I knew all the steps to, one I could perform upside down, backward, on a sinking cruise ship that was also on fire. In the fall we ate on the quad; in the spring, the steps outside the cafeteria. It was winter, so we’d claimed our usual table inside by the hot bar, and I listened to the low hum of the lights keeping the food warm. Mariella and Tom went over their odds of getting into their choice of college early decision. They were supposed to hear this week (Tom, University of Michigan; Mariella, Yale), and they couldn’t talk about anything else. Lena was texting someone under the table, eating her tofu with her free hand, while Randall and Kittredge compared bruises from practice. Kittredge was sure someone was digging holes into the rugby field at night. Randall was sure that Kittredge was just a clumsy asshole. Elizabeth, as always, was reading a novel next to her tray, deaf to everyone else as she turned the pages in her own Elizabeth-world. I never knew what went on in there. I didn’t think there was enough time before graduation for me to find out.
More than anyone else I knew, Elizabeth was competent. Frighteningly competent. If her uniform pants came back from the tailor a half-inch too long, she’d learn how to hem them herself. If she wanted to take both Shakespeare and Dance II, and they were scheduled for the same time, she’d have an independent study in Romeo and Juliet Through Irish Step Dancing approved by the end of the day.
If the boy she’d had a crush on came back to school heartsick and bitter, she’d wait a semester for him to get over himself before she asked him out. Go with me to homecoming? the note slipped in my mailbox had said, this past fall. I promise not to choke on a diamond this time.
I’d accepted. I really wasn’t all that sure why, at the time—though I wasn’t still mourning my and Holmes’s not-relationship, I hadn’t been looking at girls. Mostly, I’d been studying. It was as boring as it sounded, but if I didn’t bring up my grades, there wasn’t any possibility of me getting into college anywhere, much less where I wanted to go.
Dobson’s murder won’t excuse your grades forever, you know, the guidance counselor had said. Though it’ll make for a really compelling college essay!
So I studied. I played rugby, both seasons, in hopes that if my grades still weren’t good enough, some dream college somewhere was looking for a wiry English halfback. I took Elizabeth to homecoming out of a sense of duty—that plastic diamond down her throat was more or less my fault, even if I hadn’t put it there myself—and to my surprise, I’d had a better time with her than I’d had with anyone in months.
It hadn’t surprised Elizabeth. “You have a type, you know,” she’d said, laughing under the dance floor lights. Her blond hair was in long, ribbonlike curls, and she had this bright necklace that swung as we danced, and when she laughed, she did it with her whole body, and I liked her. I really liked her.
I had the strange sense that I was taking an old chapter of my life and writing over it until the text beneath was gone.
“What’s that?” I asked. I wasn’t really sure I wanted to hear the answer. Already, with the music, the smoke machine—I had one foot in this year and one foot in the last.
But she’d grinned at me, wickedly. It was a different kind of wicked than what I was used to. Wicked without secrets. Wicked without danger. It was the smile of a smart girl who was coming into her own, who knew she was about to get the thing she wanted.
“You like girls who don’t take any of your shit,” she’d said, and kissed me.
She was right. I liked girls who pushed back; I liked girls with thoughtful eyes. Elizabeth had both, and even if sometimes I got the sense that I was an item on her checklist that she had successfully crossed off (Date boy you crushed on freshman year), well—
Well, it was more my own bullshit than anything I got from her. Because, as usual, I was staring out the bright-lit window, thinking about my essay for AP Euro, my problem set for calculus, about the million other balls I had up in the air—and more than that, convincing myself that I did need to think about them, that I needed to make myself care.
Then someone dropped a tray behind me with a sharp pop and a clatter, and I was back there again.
Me on a lawn in Sussex, August Moriarty at my feet, blood on all that snow. Police sirens edging closer. Charlotte Holmes’s white, chapped lips. Those last few seconds. That other life.
“I’ll be right back,” I said, but no one was listening, not even Elizabeth, lost in her book. At least I made it to the bathroom before I started to dry heave.
One of the lacrosse starters was in there washing his hands. “Brutal,” I heard him say over my retching. By the time I came out of the stall, I was alone.
I braced myself against the sink, staring at the drain, the fissured ceramic around it. The last time this had happened to me, it’d been a slammed car door, and that time the nausea had been followed hard by rage. Horrible, mind-bending rage, at Charlotte for making assumptions, at her brother, Milo, for gunning a man down and getting away with it, at August Moriarty, who’d told me, two weeks too late, to run—
My phone pinged. Elizabeth, I thought, as I fished it out. Checking on me. It wasn’t a bad thought.
But it wasn’t Elizabeth. It wasn’t any number I knew.
You’re not safe here.
That feeling, like someone hit Play on a movie I’d forgotten I was watching. A horror movie. About my life.
Who is this? I wrote back, and then, horrified, Is that you? Holmes?, and then I called the number once, twice, a third time, and by then they’d shut the phone off.
Leave a message, it said. I stood there, stunned, until I realized I’d let it record a few seconds of my breathing. Hurriedly, I ended the call.
I made it back to our lunch table somehow, my head crackling with dehydration and fear. Elizabeth was still reading. Randall was eating his third chicken sandwich. Mariella and Kittredge and that Anna girl were bitching again about the cereal bar, and there was a whole ecosystem here, a landscape that functioned fine without me.
Why would I put any of this on them? What did I want to do, go back to being some kind of victim? Even Elizabeth, the person I’d usually turn to, couldn’t help me here. She’d dealt with enough because of me.
No. I squared my shoulders. I finished my burger.
I kept one hand on my phone, just in case.
“Jamie,” Lena was saying.
I shook my head.
“Jamie,” Lena repeated, frowning a little, “your father’s here.” I was dully surprised to see him hovering over our table, his wool cap dusted with snow.
“Jamie,” he said. “A bit in your own head?”
Elizabeth smiled up at him. “He’s been like this all day,” she said. “Off in dream land.” I didn’t point out that she’d been ignoring all of us in favor of Jane Eyre.
I put on a smile as best I could. “Ha, yeah, you know. Lots of, uh, school things. Schoolwork.”
Across the table, Lena and Tom exchanged a significant glance.
“It’s true,” I said, and my voice wobbled a little. “Uh, Dad. What’s up?”
“Family emergency,” he said, sticking his hands in his pockets. “I’ve already signed you off campus. Go on, grab your bag.”
Oh God, I thought. This again. Plus, I wasn’t sure if my legs would hold me if I stood. “Can’t. French class. We have a quiz.”
Tom frowned. “But that was yester—”
I kicked him, weakly, under the table.
“Family emergency,” my father said again. “Up! Come along!”
I ticked it off on my fingers. “AP English. Physics. I have a presentation. Stop looking at me like that.”
“Jamie. Leander’s waiting in the car.”