The Case for Jamie (Charlotte Holmes #3)(27)

Also by the school drug dealers, couples looking for places to hook up, the deputy head of school looking for a safe place to stash his thousand-dollar reclining bike, the rugby team during Spirit Week to lock freshmen overnight in the boiler room, and Charlotte Holmes, back when she was looking for a place to practice her fencing.

Tonight, the party was in a cavernous room midway between Carter and Michener Halls, far enough away from either to be heard. That was the idea, anyway. Lena had apparently weaseled the access code from a janitor (“Weaseled how, exactly?” Tom had asked) and sent out the invitations.

Mine hadn’t exactly been an invitation, I guess. Usually I wouldn’t be cradling eight designer shampoo bottles filled with vodka in a dark room somewhere underneath the quad at ten o’clock. On a Tuesday.

It was the Tuesday part that was really getting to me.

“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—”