A Study in Charlotte (Charlotte Holmes, #1)(29)

It felt, disconcertingly, as though I stood with one foot in a novel and one foot in a shopping mall. I might’ve belonged here, but Holmes very much didn’t. I turned to ask exactly what her plan was, when I caught her mouthing the words to “Dancing Queen.”

“Oh my God,” I said as she startled. “Oh my God. You just wanted to come here to—”

“There are excellent opportunities for observation and deduction here,” she said hurriedly. “Look at the specimen pool! Everyone with their guard down, probably a good few drinking—the girl next to you has a flask of peach schnapps in that little bag of hers—and perhaps that dealer is here, somewhere, and—”

“—to dance.” I was trying very hard not to laugh. “Would you like to?”

“Yes,” she said, and fairly dragged me out onto the floor.

Holmes, for all her strange and myriad skills, proved to be a terrible dancer. But what she lacked in skill she made up for in absolute abandon. Under the kaleidoscope lights, her hair went blue, then red, then blue again, the music so loud that my head throbbed in time, and she flung her arms straight up as the chorus came, throwing her head back to mouth the words. She knew the words to the next one, too, and the song after that, and she sang them all with her eyes shut, shuffling her feet like a grandfather. For a glorious twelve minutes, I orbited her, and when she grabbed my hand and said, “Twirl me,” I spun her around as she laughed.

A slow song came on, some treacly number by an English boy band my little sister liked. All around us, people slipped into each other’s arms. Across the room, I saw Tom, resplendent in his ridiculous suit, dip Lena while she giggled.

Holmes and I stood there, in the middle of the floor, trying not to look at each other.

I struggled to hide my panic. From the corner of my eye, I could see that Holmes’s cheeks were still pinked from dancing.

“Um,” I said.

There was a tap on my shoulder. The wispy blond girl that had asked me to the dance stood there, her dress a dramatic red. “Hi,” she said shyly. “I thought you weren’t allowed to come.”

I watched Holmes rapidly catalog my reaction. After a moment, the girl turned to look at her, too.

“Oh my gosh, I’m sorry. I’m in your way.” A little line appeared between her eyebrows, and I thought, for a moment, that she was going to cry. I was sure Holmes noted that too. Her brain was like a bear trap: nothing escaped alive.

This had to be a nightmare. I’d look down, and I’d be naked, and the dance floor would become my math classroom, and then I’d wake up.

I didn’t.

“We’re not— I’m not— I need something to drink,” I managed, and darted away like the coward I was.

The thing was, I didn’t know if I wanted to slow dance with her. Holmes. Or maybe I could just imagine it a bit too readily, how it would feel to have my hands on the small of her back, to have her uncertain breath hot on my neck. Her soft laughter as the boy band sang I wanna kiss you, girl. How I’d drop my hands to her waist, pull her even closer to me.

But if I squinted, I could see that blond girl in my arms just as easily. Honestly, it wasn’t very fair to any of us. I knew myself pretty well; I could be so easily taken in by the now, not thinking much about the after. But with Holmes, all I could think about was the after. Silent drives at dawn, wildfire conversations, sneaking into locked rooms to steal away evidence to our little lab—I wanted those things. I wanted the two of us to be complicated together, to be difficult and engrossing and blindingly brilliant. Sex was a commonplace kind of complicated. And nothing about Charlotte Holmes was commonplace.

Even the way she filled out her dress.

No. I wasn’t going to think about that. Our track record proved that we were too volatile to survive that sort of shake-up. Just this morning, she’d chased me from her lab, wielding her violin like a weapon. Tomorrow night we might be sharing a cell. Tonight?

Tonight, I was getting punch.

Mr. Wheatley, my creative writing teacher, was manning the refreshments table with a pretty-ish woman around his age. He looked deathly bored, but brightened a bit when I made it to the front of the line. It wasn’t long. Not many of us were too lame to have someone to slow dance with.

“Jamie,” Mr. Wheatley said, though I could hardly hear his voice above the music. “What’ll it be?”

“How’s the punch?” I asked.

“Horrible.” He leaned in to the woman next to him. “This is one of my best students,” he said, pointing to me. “Jamie, this is my friend Penelope. She’s keeping me company tonight.”

I didn’t know that Mr. Wheatley had even liked my writing. Everything I’d turned in, my poems especially, came back to me in a mess of green ink. But I’d been working hard to revise them into something better, and it was nice to know my work was paying off.

“It’s lovely to meet you.” I shook hands with Penelope. She had a sort of standard art teacher look to her, with her curly hair and loose-fitting dress. A nice counterweight for Mr. Wheatley, I thought, who always buttoned his shirts up to his collar.

“She’s a writer friend from New Haven,” he said. “A poet. She teaches at Yale. Jamie might be someone you’d want in your freshman workshop, in the not-too-distant future.”