The Case for Jamie (Charlotte Holmes #3)(39)

I did it, all that they asked.

But my parents never came to visit. My uncle never called. My friends rotated in and out, and it wasn’t friendship, it wasn’t even conspiracy, it was them looking for an ear and I was the silent sort who would listen. The Funfetti cake they’d eat when they got out, the radio station they’d play on the way to the beach, the prom, the ex-girlfriend, the ex-boyfriend, the relentless pushing toward a future that they could see and I couldn’t. What future? If I “got better,” where would I go? What did my next year look like?

My resolve faded. I am, of course, human. I couldn’t find a reason to change without any conceivable reward, and anyway, the teachers in rehab were wretched. I didn’t need to relearn the periodic table. I had mental energy to spare. I put it to use. Taught the other girls how to palm their pills, how to cut holes into their mattresses. Did it in plain sight. I wanted to feel bigger, louder, stronger, so I took stimulants. Took cocaine. It was the easiest thing to find. It was the most obvious drug I could do. I had a mission: at Petaluma, as with most places, it was far easier to be dismissed as a destructive influence than to ever “graduate.”

So I was dismissed. I went back to Britain for my mother to evaluate my progress; as with all things, I’d been given an opportunity to go home right after I’d stopped wanting to. They didn’t send me away this time. At home I had my lab. At home I had my violin. I had Wi-Fi and a driver and silence, so much silence, and no one to speak to and no lessons, no school. Demarchelier had gone off to work at a lab in Tunisia. No one thought to replace him. I took an online organic chemistry course. I finished it in three weeks, studying sixteen hours a day, and then when I finished I had four college credits and still the itching in my veins. I took a week to paint my walls black. I repainted them navy. Black again. Bone white. I ran endless miles on my mother’s sad little treadmill, and there were good things, too, there were the plants I kept, there were the uninterrupted hours with my violin, and the plants again, the lab table, the sifting and mixing, the motions of my hands. Doing my work reminded me of my body. It gave me a modicum of control. Then I’d look down and remember my skin, the fact of it, and the burning would begin again.

I woke up one morning to find I was content. I would feel this forever, I told myself, stretching my arms above me in bed. I could be alone. I could stop being a creature made of want.

The next day, I began feeling the itching inside of my mouth.

In short order I had a supplier in Eastbourne. It was easier than breathing.

I had my tells. Watson could never see them, though he looked for them every day. Maybe they were only there when I was using. Maybe without the drugs I was a blank. My mother always knew when I was back on; she raised the alarm straightaway. She was “done,” she said, watching the housekeeper empty my drawers; she would never touch my things herself. My father, of course, wasn’t there. He was consulting at Whitehall, now, in London; one of his contacts from Milo’s school had finally wrangled him a position. When he’d been caught out at MI5 double-dealing information, his reputation had suffered, and without his good name he had had no work. My father had steadfastly refused to take any job that didn’t make him the lion at the top of the food chain. The charismatic megafauna. He had chosen not to work, for years, rather than feel that lack of power. We had suffered for it.

And now he had wriggled his way back in. He was being groomed for office. It would be the first thing written down if he were vetted: junkie daughter a liability.

I would get help. Or, at least, the appearance of help.

I was sent to the cheaper places, the stranger ones, the ones that threw all of us addicts in together indiscriminately. The one in Brighton—I couldn’t think in all that white. Girls in sweats with dirty hair, painted nails, and none of us allowed sharps so our leg hair grew long. There was nothing to do so I taught myself German. All day and night I spoke it in my head: nichts, danke, nichts, danke, nichts, danke. I told myself I’d go to see my brother and I would know the language. I graduated. I went, and he looked at me like I was an object to wrap in glass. Went back. I had my schoolgirl French; now I was fluent. It was easier to learn since I still had my Latin. Learned euchre, whist, cribbage, Texas hold ’em, played cards all day at a table full of girls trying not to want.

I wanted. I couldn’t stop. I took it and buried it in the ground beneath me and when I couldn’t I found another way. I would try anything so I didn’t feel like I was wrong. I grew like a plant would in the dark, twisting in on itself in search of any bit of light.

I kept my own company. That was a polite way of saying that I was my only friend and if I wanted to be alone I’d have to get rid of myself.

I didn’t.

The money ran out, or their patience did, and my parents finally pulled me home to stay. There was about to be a scandal. They were marshaling their forces. They’d hired August Moriarty, you see.

I SPENT THAT EVENING IN A LUXURY HOTEL IN MIDTOWN Manhattan taking money from dilettantes.

The girls I was playing poker with tonight, Jessa Genovese and Natalie Stevens and Penny Cole, were actresses. They were also models, and hawkers of diet tea on social media, and girls who had very expensive athleisure wear gifted to them by brands. As Watson would say, they had a hustle. I could respect that. For some, the most thrilling chase had a bag of gold at the end, not a criminal.

If I sound disdainful, it was because I was jealous of them.