The Case for Jamie (Charlotte Holmes #3)(2)

So time passed, as time tends to do.

It was January again in Connecticut, and it wouldn’t stop snowing. I didn’t care. I had a literary magazine to edit, drills for the spring rugby season, hours of homework every night. I had friends, new ones, who didn’t demand all my time and patience and unearned trust.

It was my final semester at Sherringford. I hadn’t seen Charlotte Holmes in a year.

No one had.

“I SAVED YOUR SPOT,” ELIZABETH SAID, PULLING HER BAG off the chair beside her. “Did you bring—”

“Here,” I said, pulling a can of Diet Coke out of my backpack. The dining hall had done away with soft drinks last year (and the all-day cereal bar, a loss we were all publicly mourning), but my girlfriend neatly sidestepped the rules by keeping a six-pack of soda in my room’s mini-fridge at all times.

“Thanks.” She popped the top and poured it into a waiting glass of ice.

“Where is everyone?” I asked, because our lunch table was empty.

“Lena is still microwaving her tofu. She’s trying this soy sauce–honey thing this time, it smelled awful. Tom’s therapist had to reschedule his session, so he’s there, but he should be almost done. Mariella’s still in line with her friend Anna, she might sit with us today, and I don’t know where your rugby bros are.”

I grimaced. “I saw them over by the bread. I think they’re carbo-loading.”

“Gettin’ huge,” Elizabeth said, in a credible imitation of Randall.

This was an old joke; I knew my line. “Huge.”

“Huuuuge.”

“Yuuuuge.”

We snickered. It was part of the routine. She got back to her burger; I got back to my burger. Our friends showed up, one by one, and when Tom finally arrived, he patted me on the back and stole a fistful of my fries. I raised an eyebrow at him, the how was therapy eyebrow, and he shrugged back that it was fine.

“Are you okay?” Elizabeth asked. In my darker moments, I thought it was her favorite question.

“I’m fine.”

She nodded, looking back down at her book. Then looked back up. “Are you sure? Because you sound a little—”

“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.