Can I let you know? I wrote back.
I was standing in the shadows, debating, when Mrs. Dunham came to the door. “It’s freezing,” she said, ushering me in. “Come on, I’ll put the kettle on for you. Isn’t that how you say it? ‘Put the kettle on’?”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
She waved a hand. “I won’t tell the administration if you won’t,” she said, walking back up to her desk. “I’m just icing some cookies I brought from home. Do you want to help?”
There were worse things to do on a stakeout.
I dragged a chair over from the lobby. Mrs. Dunham’s desk was a riot of cheerful uselessness. Her knitting was in a basket, full of the bright scarves she made to send off to her daughter at school, and a series of dala horses she’d brought back from Sweden, red and blue in a line, that she said were for luck. She kept her coffee mug on an ever-rotating stack of poetry books, Mary Oliver and Frank O’Hara and Terrance Hayes, and beside that a tablet that was always streaming something mindless, a buddy cop show or a British baking program. All of her projects could be abandoned at a moment’s notice if she needed to run off to put out some small fire in the dorm.
Today, she had sugar cookies in a giant plastic container, and a number of smaller ones full of red and blue and green frosting. She handed me a knife, then started back up her baking show. I watched the door and tried very hard not to eat every cookie I iced.
Guys came in and out, on their way back from practice or the library or the union, and I steeled myself against the looks I’d get if the news about Anna’s money and my “leave of absence” had spread. But they didn’t. A few said hi, or asked if I was sick, since I hadn’t been in class, and I told them, yes, very sick, not contagious, no, I’ll see you guys next week.
When things were going wrong, it was so easy to imagine that everyone knew, that everyone was talking about it. But nobody cared nearly as much about your life as you did.
We finally came to the bottom layer of cookies just as the 4:30 lull hit, the moment before everyone came down to go to dinner. No sign of Beckett Lexington yet. I looked again at Mrs. Dunham’s desk, but this time my eyes drifted down to the place she kept the master key.
“Something strange happened to me the other day,” I said.
“Oh?” she asked, only half-listening. A girl on the baking show had burnt her English muffins.
“Yeah,” I said. “Someone got into my room and sprayed a can of soda everywhere.”
Mrs. Dunham turned to me, shocked. It looked genuine. “That’s terrible, Jamie. Are your things okay?”
“Not really. But, you know, I lock my door. I was just wondering if anyone came through and asked for the master key yesterday afternoon.” I was starting to feel a little sick from everything I’d eaten.
Frowning, Mrs. Dunham pulled out the maintenance record. “A carpenter at seven a.m., fixing a broken window sash—”
“Too early.”
“And of course Elizabeth when she came up to find you after dinner.” She glanced at me. “Do you want me to stop doing that? I do know that you like to keep your door locked even when you’re in there, love, but she’s your girlfriend—”
“It’s fine,” I told her. “I appreciate it.”
“You two have been through enough. I like to make your lives easier in little ways, if I can,” Mrs. Dunham said, stoutly. She returned to her record. “Otherwise, I gave it to a student at bed check when he locked himself out. Do you want his name?”
“No.” I was starting to feel really nauseous, actually, enough that I was starting to sweat. “No, that’s too late. It’s okay.” I pushed the cookies back toward her. “Thanks for looking.”
“You know,” she said, “you actually don’t look very well. Do you want to go to the infirmary?”
I reacted to the word “infirmary” the way you would to being hit in the face.
“Oh! Oh—you know Nurse Bryony doesn’t work there anymore, it’s fine to go if you’re ill, you’d be safe—”
“I’m fine,” I said, gasping a little. PTSD, Lena had said. Was it true? I hardly even knew what that was.
“Jamie,” she said, reaching out to touch my forehead. Unthinking, I jerked away.
Because the week I was having wouldn’t allow for anything else, Beckett Lexington chose that moment to walk in the front door.
“Watson,” he said, stomping his snow boots on the mat. “You look awful, man.”
I couldn’t deal with it right now. “I feel awful,” I said. “Can you hold on a second? I think—Elizabeth said she wanted to talk to you—”
He brushed his asymmetrical hair out of his face. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s cool. Hey, can I have one of those?”
“Of course,” Mrs. Dunham said, holding the container out.
I hunched over my phone, trying very hard not to look at Beckett stuffing a red-and-green cookie into his mouth. SOS, I texted Elizabeth. Beckett Lexington at Michener. Kittredge thinks he gave Anna the money. Having an Incident, like an asshole.
You’re not an asshole. There in five, she wrote back, almost immediately.
I wasn’t sure what information she could get out of him, especially if she went after him with a hatchet like she had the girls at lunch, but I was in no state to try to interrogate someone. All I could really do was call my father. “Dad,” I said, as soon as he picked up. “You need to come get me. Like, now.”
“I’m just in town running errands,” he said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
I waited for him outside on the steps, breathing in and out, slowly, trying not to immediately assume that I’d been infected with a nanovirus. Ever since the run-in with Bryony Downs where she’d stuck me with an infected spring, I could work myself up into a panic any time I felt ill.
Panic, or fear, or was it trauma, or maybe Mrs. Dunham was poisoning me—
No. The cold air felt good on my face. I shut my eyes for a second, swaying, and when I opened them Elizabeth was staring at me.
“You okay?”
I gestured inside to Beckett scrolling through his phone, cookie in hand. “Talk to him?” I asked.
Unexpectedly, she grinned. “You have frosting on your face,” she said. “Blue frosting. You look like a snowman. Did you eat cookies for dinner?”
I hadn’t eaten lunch, I remembered; we’d left the Bistro without me ordering anything. In fact, I hadn’t eaten anything all day. The thought made the nausea lessen, a little. It’s just panic, I told myself again.
“Jamie,” she said, starting up the steps toward me.
“I’m okay,” I said. She had a knit hat on, and the color matched her eyes. In that moment I was so grateful that I could cry. “Thank you. For everything you’re doing to help. You don’t need to be doing it.”
She took off a glove, then reached out and, with a finger, took a bit of icing off my lips. “Well,” she said softly. “Of course I’m helping.”
My father’s sedan pulled up to the curb.
“That’s my cue,” I said.
“I’ll go talk to Lexington. Find out what he knows. Will you call me later?”
“Yeah,” I said, and on impulse, I kissed her cheek. “Talk to you tonight.”
I popped the trunk of his car and made room for my backpack amidst a cluster of grocery bags. There were fancy things spilling out of them—goat cheese, a few bottles of wine, some pickled Italian things I didn’t recognize. I swallowed down my nausea and hopped into the front seat.
“You’re excited to see Mum, I take it,” I said. “Big dinner plans?”
My father shrugged. “Just trying to be a good host.”
The car was warm, too warm, and I cracked the window as he pulled out of the school gates. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m feeling kind of gross.”
He gave me a look. “Apparently not that gross. How’s Elizabeth? Are you two back on?”