The Case for Jamie (Charlotte Holmes #3)(19)

“So the oranges feels like a metaphor for something,” she concluded, outside the steps up to the languages building. “I don’t know what.”

“I have that feeling a lot,” I said.

“I missed you last night. Writing club was stupid, as usual. More poems about people’s dead grandmothers. You know, you don’t look like you slept at all.” She hadn’t touched her own tea, though I’d drained mine, and she pressed her paper cup into my hands. “Were you thinking about . . .” She trailed off, but I could hear the end of the sentence: about last year, or about Charlotte Holmes.

“No, I had some work to do still for today. I left it until the last minute.” I hadn’t told her about my ruined physics presentation; saying it out loud made it feel real. Besides, just hearing the anxiety in those four words—were you thinking about—made me hesitate to tell her. I had to keep things positive so that I could keep going. “More evidence that I shouldn’t ever run off with my father in the middle of a school day.”

“He’s a bad influence.” She kissed my cheek. “But you should go with him more often, it makes you happy. Try to stay awake. Monsieur Cann already has it in for you.”

He did, but only because I’d skipped French III so many times last fall in favor of Sciences 442. How could I blame him for hating me? Today, I fumbled through his class so badly that Tom texted me under the table, are you okay? and I had to wave him off. Through AP Euro, I kept pinching my own arm until I gave myself bruises, and in Physics I read as carefully as I could from my presentation on the screen, trying not to sway on my feet, and the second it was over I made the executive decision to bail on the only class I knew I had an unshakeable A in—AP English—to get some sleep. On the way back to my dorm I passed Lena, bright like a robin in her red uniform blazer. She looked so awake it made me want to cry.

“Jamie,” she said, grabbing my arm. “What’s going on? You like . . . you look like hell.”

“Didn’t sleep,” I said, and forced a smile. I was so exhausted I could barely get back to my dorm.

In the hall outside my room, I made myself listen. Just in case someone was inside, waiting for me behind the door with a club. But I guess that was never the Moriartys’ way of doing things.

That was more Charlotte Holmes’s style.

I gritted my teeth and let myself in.

Inside, I pushed back against the urge to catalog my things, just in case my presentation-ruining fairy had paid another visit. What was the point? It was the sort of thing that would make you feel crazy—was I the one who left my planner on the chair, when I’d always put it instead on my bookshelf? Had I been the one to leave the window open? The window was open now, I noticed, and who knew if I’d been the one to prop it open—

A wave of panic. Despite my sharp, sleepless nausea and the scraped-out feeling in my head, I wasn’t at all tired anymore. But it was too late now to trek it to English.

I sat on the bed with my phone in my hands. What I wanted was to speak to someone who knew me. A conversation that would tie me back down to the knowable ground. It was dinnertime in England, I realized. My sister would be home from school, and if last night’s email was any indication, she was in desperate need of someone to complain to. I rang her on videochat, and she answered almost instantly.

“Hi,” she said, harried. “Shouldn’t you be in class?”

“Probably,” I said.

She shook her head. “Here, let me shut my door. Not like Mum is paying any attention to what I do anyway.”

“Still wrapped up in Dreamy Ted?”

Shelby shrugged. “I don’t know how dreamy he is. He’s bald, but not in that hot-guy way. His only hot-guy selling point is that he’s a little younger than she is. Rawr.”

“But Mum’s happy?”

“She’s happy, I suppose,” my sister said. “I don’t know. I think maybe I’m, like, an awful person, but I’ve decided I hate sharing her attention with someone else. You’ve been gone for so long, it’s become very Gilmore Girls around here. But Mum and I haven’t gone out for frappucinos in ages. We used to go almost every day.”

There was a note of apology in her voice. Shelby had been too young to really remember what it’d been like when my father left us for his new family in America. My years-long refusal to talk to him had struck her as a ploy for attention. (Looking back, I can say that it definitely was.) She didn’t have the same memory of him that I did; it mattered a lot less to her either way how often he called or if he remembered to send us cards on our birthdays. Weren’t all dads just a voice on the phone? Weren’t optional once-yearly visits across the ocean just the way things went?

I wasn’t enjoying the tables being turned on her. She and Mum had always been close, and if I could spare my sister anything, it would be taking a starring role in my own teen drama—My Parents Are Dating Other People Burn It Down.

“Tell her,” I said. “Tell her you miss her. Ask for Shelby-time. She adores you, she wants you to be happy. It won’t be an issue.”

Shelby flopped down backward on her bed. The camera wobbled, then steadied. “It doesn’t matter anyway, because—no. Hold on. I meant to tell you this. I—he like, scolded me last night. He told me to go back to my room and change.”