The Case for Jamie (Charlotte Holmes #3)(28)

“Jamie,” I said.

“What?”

“Jamie. Don’t call me Watson.”

A group of girls rounding the corner paused, not sure if they should interrupt. The one in front had blond hair and a party dress and a baggie full of bright pills in her hand. She looked like the girl Mariella had brought to our lunch table yesterday. A freshman. They all looked like freshmen, too young to be here.

“Why?” Tom demanded. “Because I’m not on the rugby team with you, I can’t use last names? Are you still punishing me for last year? I don’t care if you are, just tell me so we can work it out! I—”

Whatever defense I’d been marshaling came apart. Because while I wasn’t punishing him, I was doing something worse. I didn’t think about him at all. Him or Lena or even Elizabeth, not in the way she deserved, not even now when I knew I had hurt her.

Once I had been good at friendship, or I thought I’d been. I’d followed friendship abroad, to art squats and police stations and cavernous parties, to my father’s house when he and I weren’t speaking, to Holmes’s room to hold vigil at night. And now I didn’t even know what to say to someone who was telling you, clumsily, that they missed you. Maybe Tom and I had been closer than I thought.

What would I have said, back when I was still myself? How did you slip back on a skin you’d shed?

What was wrong with me?

“It’s fine,” I said, turning to open the door. The girls took that as their cue to sweep by us; the one in front knocked into me, dropping her purse and her baggie of pills. I stooped to pick up her bag, then kicked the drugs behind me. She didn’t seem to notice.

I turned back to Tom. “Hey, how about you call me whatever you want, and I’ll stop being a shitty friend. Let’s get you a shot, yeah?”

I sounded like a buffoon.

He gave me a disgusted look. “Talk to your girlfriend,” he said, pushing past me into the party.

When I looked up, I saw, to my horror, that Elizabeth was trailing along the hall ghostlike, a scarf wrapped around her shoulders like a shawl.

The music swelled. Someone cheered, and then the heavy door clicked shut and closed us off from the sound.

“Hi,” Elizabeth said, standing there under the horrible industrial lights. It was obvious that she’d been crying. Her eyes had a glassy, faraway quality, and with the shawl around her arms she looked like a seer, or a sea-witch. “Listen—”

“I’m sorry,” I said straightaway.

“You are.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yeah. That whole thing—it was crazy, and awful, and I shouldn’t have blamed you. Of course you had nothing to do with it. But I didn’t send that email. All this weird shit’s been happening, it’s like it’s last year all over again, and I didn’t want to tell you because I didn’t want you to have to deal with it—”

“I know,” she said.

“You know?” This hallway, apparently, was the place where I knew nothing. “How?”

She lifted her chin. “Because you sent me another email asking me to meet you at this party. But Tom told me he wasn’t inviting you. He thought it’d make me want to come out, if I knew you wouldn’t be here.”

“Oh,” I said stupidly. My email. Like an idiot I still hadn’t changed my password. I’d been too busy pretending to be a detective. Pretending, and totally failing.

“It’s the Moriartys, right?” Elizabeth stumbled over the words, like they cost her something.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think—I think so.”

“And Charlotte?”

“Yeah.”

She pulled the scarf more tightly around herself, her gaze drawn inward. “Okay.”

“Okay,” I said, and waited. I found myself waiting for her to unveil, layer by layer, her intricate, ridiculous plan. We’d charge back in. We’d be the heroes. We’d end it, finally, once and for all.

But that was a different girl. That was a different me beside her.

“All I know,” Elizabeth was saying slowly, “is if they want us at this party, then we need to get the hell out of here, now.”

We made it all the way to the door to Carter Hall before the panic started.





Ten


Charlotte


THE FIRST TIME I MET JAMIE WATSON, I DIDN’T PAY HIM much attention at all. I’d spent months underwater. My summer in Sussex after my first Sherringford year had been unbearably quiet. I’d been reading about anglerfish because I was certain that I had hung some terrible inadvertent lantern over my head that had drawn Lee Dobson in. Like the anglerfish, I had sizable teeth, but I was coming to learn I used them poorly in a crisis.

Reading took me away from myself, so I tried to be reading all the time. When I wasn’t, I found myself doing small things I’d never done before. Imagining some noise when there was none. Scratching my right knee, only the right knee, until I finally broke the skin. Standing up at dinner while my father was speaking because I was certain I was about to start screaming. My father was starting to look old. My father had stopped looking at me at all.

I spent that summer getting myself clean. As clean as I could. This had, as you’d imagine, suboptimal results, but I was working with what I had. I was realizing I had hardly enough of myself to keep for myself, and then at Sherringford in the fall when Watson came up to me on the quad, all I thought was, Here is someone else who wants something from me that I am unable to give.