A Study in Charlotte (Charlotte Holmes, #1)(56)

I hadn’t realized I was thinking out loud until Tom cleared his throat.

“I had a friend like that once,” he said.

“Oh?” I said, uninterested. But Tom had a thoughtful expression on, and I didn’t want to be cruel.

“Andrew,” he said. “He was the only person I really kept in touch with after I left for Sherringford, and last summer, we hung out all the time. He’s this all-state football star, and he always gets perfect grades, and I swear he could get away with murder because of it. Because ninety percent of the time, he was so good, he could stay out all night downtown, partying, and he’d come in at dawn and his parents would just buy that he was out late studying. I felt . . . invincible when I was around him.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Cops caught us drinking down by the lake, and he pinned the whole thing on me.” Tom flashed a self-deprecating smile. “His family is like a big deal—they have all this money, and we don’t, not anymore—so they got the charges dropped. But I was in the doghouse for months. The worst part of it was that he stopped talking to me. If anything, I should’ve been the one who got to tell him to eat shit.”

“I’m sorry.” It was hard to imagine Tom being on anyone’s bad side. He was the guy who could wear a baby-blue suit to homecoming and still have one of the hottest girls in school as his date.

“It’s not worth it being the sidekick,” he said. “I bet she just uses you to do her dirty work. Andrew used to do that to me.”

“Sometimes,” I said, hiding how close to the bone that cut.

He gave me a knowing look. “So she doesn’t even let you do that.”

“No,” I snapped. “She trusted me to sniff out Mr. Wheatley. And I went out and got a f*cking concussion because no one would investigate the school nurse. I don’t call that doing nothing.”

Tom looked like I’d hit him. “You what?”

“All right, it was stupid, and I couldn’t have planned it exactly—maybe I would’ve broken my arm, or twisted my ankle—but I couldn’t exactly fake having to stay in the infirmary all day, could I? How else could Holmes have snuck in there without breaking in? The door’s alarmed, they keep everyone’s medicine in there.”

“No—I—”

He was casting around for words, but none were coming. Did he really think that I was so useless I couldn’t help her out at all?

“I didn’t know you were that stupid,” he said finally.

“Thanks, you twat.”

“Don’t mention it,” he said. “Look, I’m meeting Lena for dinner, so I gotta go. I’m doing some work at the library after that, but we can talk more about your life choices tonight, if you want to.”

Tom and Lena. Mine and Holmes’s shadow-selves. Or maybe we were the shadows, and they the happy, well-adjusted versions. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’m fine.”

After throwing some books in his bag, he took off. He must’ve bumped the keyboard as he went, though, because the video he’d been playing unpaused. The girl on the screen began shimmying out of her clothes again. I plunked down in Tom’s chair and closed the window, then sat there for a minute, staring at the notes Tom had pinned above his desk, the tiny mirror he’d put there.

That’s when I noticed it.

His desk and mine were across from each other, meaning that most nights we did our homework back to back. The only mirror in our room had been clumsily hung to the right of where I sat, its bottom half obscured by my desk. If I sat up in the middle of the night, I’d catch a glimpse of my reflection and panic that we had an intruder. That was, more or less, all that mirror was good for.

I didn’t mind that much. I cared a bit about what I wore on the weekend, but our school uniform was exactly that, a uniform, and so the way I looked in it didn’t change. Tom, on the other hand, wore all kinds of product in his hair, and rather than lean awkwardly over my desk to apply it, or do it in the bathroom (which he claimed was “embarrassing,” as if he’d be dispelling some notion that his boy-band mop grew in that way), he’d tacked up a locker-sized mirror above his desk.

All this is to say that, when I looked up into Tom’s mirror, I was at the precise angle to see that there was a gap between my own mirror and the wall. A small gap. A centimeter.

In that centimeter’s worth of dark, I could see the glimmer of a reflection.

Something was back there.

I walked over, got down on my knees, made blinkers with my hands to block the overhead light. Still I couldn’t make out what was behind it. After straightening a wire hanger from my closet, I rattled it in the gap in an attempt to dislodge whatever was back there. I hit on nothing, even when I ran it from top to bottom. When I looked again, I could still see the glimmer of light reflecting off something.

Was it a lens?

I took a deep breath and tried to gather my thoughts. On the bed, my phone buzzed, and I seized it, thinking it might be Holmes. It would be a relief. We’d both been horrible to each other, we’d both been keyed up, and defeated, and lost—I couldn’t imagine what being lost felt like for someone as whip-smart as Charlotte Holmes—and I refused to believe that she’d meant what she’d said. It had to be her. She’d come right over. Everything would be fine.