But at Sherringford, I kept the writer thing to myself. A constant, low-level drone of fear kept me from showing my work to anyone; with someone like Dr. Watson in your family, you didn’t want to invite any comparison. I did my best to hide my work away, so I was surprised when it almost came up that day over lunch.
Tom and I had grabbed sandwiches and sat down under an ash tree off the quad with some other guys from Michener Hall. Tom was digging around in my bag for some paper to spit his gum into. Normally it would’ve annoyed me, having someone shuffle carelessly through my things, but he was acting like any of my old Highcombe friends would, and so I let him.
“Can I tear a sheet out of this?” he asked, holding up my notebook.
It was only through sheer force of will that I kept from grabbing it out of his hands. “Yeah,” I said indifferently, fishing chips out of a bag.
He flipped through it, quickly at first but slowing as he went. “Huh,” he said, and I shot him a warning look that he didn’t see.
“What is it?” someone asked. “Love poems? Erotic stories?”
“Dirty limericks,” Dobson, my hallmate, said.
Tom cleared his throat, like he was about to perform a page from what was, to be honest, my journal.
“No, drawings of your mom.” I snagged it and tore a page from the back, making sure to tuck it under my knee afterward. “It’s just a journal. Notes to myself, that kind of thing.”
“I saw you talking to Charlotte Holmes on the quad,” Dobson said. “You writing about her?”
“Right.” There was a nasty note in his voice I didn’t like, and I didn’t want to encourage it with a real response.
Randall, his ruddy-faced roommate—he was on the rugby team with me—shot him a look, and leaned in like he was about to tell me a secret.
“We’ve been trying to crack that nut for a year,” he said. “She’s hot. Wears those tight little pants. But she doesn’t go out, except for that weird poker game, and she doesn’t drink. Only likes the hard stuff, and does it alone.”
“They’re trying PUA,” Tom said to me mournfully, and at my blank look, he elaborated. “Pick-up artistry. You neg the girl—like, an insult hidden in a compliment. Dobson keeps telling her he’s the only guy who likes her, that everyone else thinks she’s ugly and strung out but that he likes the junkie look on girls.”
Randall laughed. “Doesn’t fucking work, at least not for me,” he said. “I’m moving on. Have you seen those new freshmen? A lot less work for a lot more payoff.”
“Not me. I cracked the nut.” Dobson smirked at Randall. “And, you know, she might do me some favors again. Since I can be such a charming date.”
Liar.
“Stop talking,” I said quietly.
“What?”
When I get angry, my English accent thickens until it’s clotted and snotty, a full-on cartoon. And I was furious. I probably sounded like the bloody Queen.
“Say it again, and I’ll fucking kill you.”
There it was, that weightless rush, that floor-bottoming-out exhilaration that comes from saying something you can’t take back. Something that would lead to me smashing in some deserving asshole’s face.
This was the reason I played rugby in the first place. It was supposed to be a “reasonable outlet” for what the school counselor called my “acts of sudden and unreasonable aggression.” Or, as my father put it, snickering like it was some joke, “the way you get a little punchy sometimes.” Unlike him, I never looked back on them with anything like pride, the fights I got into at Highcombe and, before that, in my public school in Connecticut. I always felt disgusted with myself afterward, ashamed. Classmates I liked just fine the rest of the time would say something that would set me off, and immediately, my arm would cock back, ready to swing.
But I wasn’t going to be ashamed this time, I thought, as Dobson jumped to his feet, swinging wildly. Randall grabbed his shirt to hold him back, his face a mask of shock. Good, hold him, I thought, that way he can’t run, and I applied my fist to Dobson’s jaw. His head snapped back, and when he looked at me again, he was smirking.
“You her boyfriend?” he said, panting. “’Cause Charlotte didn’t tell me that last night.”
In the background, shouting—the voice sounded like Holmes’s. A hand pulled at my arm. In the second I was distracted, Dobson broke free of Randall’s grip and tackled me to the grass. He was the size of a steam liner, and with his knee on my chest, I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. Leaning into my face, he said, “Who do you think you are, you little prick?” and spat, long and slow, into my eye. Then he hit me in the face, and hit me again.
A voice cut through the blood-roar. “Watson,” Holmes shouted, at what sounded like an enormous distance, “what the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
I was maybe the only person to ever have his imaginary friend made real. Not entirely real, not yet—she was still dream-blurred to me. But we’d run through London’s sewers together, hand in muddy hand. We’d hidden in a cave in Alsace-Lorraine for weeks because the Stasi were after us for stealing government secrets. In my fevered imagination, she hid them in a microchip in one small red barrette. It held back her blond hair; that’s what I’d pictured her with, back then.
Truth be told, I liked that blurriness. That line where reality and fiction jutted up against each other. And when Dobson had said those ugly things, I’d lunged at him because he’d dragged Holmes kicking and screaming into this world, one where people left litter on the quad and had to leave a conversation to use the toilet, where assholes tormented a girl because she wouldn’t sleep with them.
It took four people—including a visibly shaken Tom—to haul him off me. I lay there for a moment, wiping the spit out of my eyes, until something leaned in to darken my view.
“Get up,” Holmes said. She didn’t offer me a hand.
There was a crowd around us. Of course there was. I swayed a little on my feet, flushed with adrenaline, feeling nothing. “Hi,” I said stupidly, wiping at my bleeding nose.
She looked at me for a measured moment, then turned to face Dobson. “Oh baby, I can’t believe you fought for me,” she drawled at him. There was a smattering of laughter. He was still restrained by his friends, and I could hear him panting from where I stood. “Now that you’ve won me, I guess I’ll lay down and spread for you right here. Or do you only like your girls drugged and unconscious?”
Shouts, jeers. Dobson looked more shocked than angry; he went limp against his restrainers. I snickered; I couldn’t help it. Holmes spun, and stared me down.
“And you. You are not my boyfriend,” she said evenly, the drawl completely vanished. “Though your wall-eyed stare, your ridiculous rambling, and the way your index finger twitches when I talk says you so very much want to be. You think you’re defending my ‘honor,’ but you’re just as bad as he is.” She jerked a thumb at Dobson. “I don’t need someone to fight for me. I can fight for myself.”
Someone whistled; someone else began a slow clap. Holmes’s expression didn’t change. Some teachers showed up, and after that the dean; I was questioned, given a compress, questioned again. The whole time I couldn’t stop replaying it. As I bled onto my shirt in the infirmary, waiting to see if I’d be expelled and shipped back home, it was still the only thing I had banging around in my head. You’re just as bad as he is, she’d said, and she’d been absolutely right.
But I had never wanted to be her boyfriend. I wanted something smaller than that, and far, far bigger, something I couldn’t yet put into words.
The next time I sought out Charlotte Holmes, it was because Lee Dobson had been murdered.
two
IT WAS CLOSE TO DAWN WHEN THE SHOUTING STARTED.
At first, it only registered as part of my dream. The shouts were those of an angry mob; someone had armed them with torches and pitchforks, and they chased me into a barn under a sky full of stars. The only hiding place I could find was behind a nonplussed cow, chew
ing her cud.
You didn’t need to be a psychologist to understand what it meant. After my fight with Dobson, I’d gone from being unknown to notorious. People who didn’t even know me suddenly had opinions about me. Dobson wasn’t very popular; he was a meathead, and nasty to girls, but he had a number of thick-necked friends who made their presence known when I walked into the dining hall. Tom, for his part, was secretly thrilled. Gossip was Sherringford’s favorite currency, and by his reckoning, he’d found a key to the Royal Treasury.
But for me, not much had really changed. I was still uncomfortable at Sherringford, only more so. My French class began falling silent when I walked in. A freshman girl stammered out an invitation to homecoming one morning outside the sciences building while her friends smothered giggles behind her. She was cute, in a blond, wispy kind of way, but I told her that I wasn’t allowed to go. It was almost true. I’d been suspended from all school functions for a month—clubs, days in town, and thank God, the rugby team, though I’d been assured I would keep my scholarship—but they’d forgotten to ban me from the dance. It was a light punishment, I was told by the nurse who examined my broken nose. To me, it didn’t seem like a punishment at all.
After the fight, I’d kept an eye out for Holmes, though I didn’t know what I could possibly say if I did see her. That week, she canceled her poker game, though I wouldn’t have gone anyway—showing up would’ve made me look like the awful stalker she already thought me to be. It was hard to avoid someone at Sherringford, with its five hundred students and postage-stamp campus, and yet somehow she had managed it. She wasn’t in the dining hall; she wasn’t on the quad between lessons.
I don’t think I would have spent so much time thinking about it—about her—if I wasn’t also coming to grips with how poorly I fit in at Sherringford. By the time all the trouble with Dobson started, I’d made friends—mostly through Tom, who seemed to know everyone from the cute girls in my classes to the upperclassmen playing ultimate Frisbee in the quad. Soon, I knew them too. But there was a flimsiness to all of those friendships, like a strong wind might blow them away.
For one thing, people were always talking about money.
Not upfront, not How much do your parents make? More like, What do your parents do? Was your mom a senator? Did your dad manage a hedge fund? Oh my God, I’ll be in the Hamptons for Christmas, too, I heard one girl tell another in a voice that carried across the room. More than once, I saw students buying drugs from the creepy blond townie who lurked in the corners of our parties and around our quad at night. When they weren’t using their parents’ money to fund their coke habits, my classmates were globe-trotting. I overheard the girls in my French class trading notes on who was building orphanages in Africa last summer (never a specific African country, just “Africa”), who was backpacking through Spain.
Sherringford wasn’t one of those schools like Andover or St. Paul’s, filled with future presidents and baseball stars and astronauts. Sure, we had electives like screenwriting and Swahili, teachers with PhDs and tweed jackets, students sent off to the lesser Ivy League schools—but we were a rank or two below extraordinary, and maybe that was the problem. If we weren’t in the fight to be the best, we’d fight instead to be the most privileged.
Or they would, anyway. I’d just landed myself a front-row seat to their match. And somewhere out there, in the dark, Charlotte Holmes prowled, playing entirely by her own rules.
The night of Dobson’s murder, I’d been up late mulling over how to fix things between us. Holmes and I. I was fairly sure that I’d blown any chance of our ever being friends, and that thought kept me up until half past three. I’d been asleep for what felt like a moment when I was woken by the panic spreading down our hall. Tom had already thrown on clothes and gone to investigate before I’d even dragged myself from my bed. I thought, hazily, that it must be a fire drill and that I had somehow missed the alarm.
But there was a crowd gathered at the end of the hallway: guys from our floor, mostly, but our gray-haired hall mother was there as well, and beyond her was the school nurse and a knot of policemen in caps and uniforms. I pushed through them until I found Tom, staring blank-faced at a door wrapped in police tape. It stood open about an inch, and beyond it, the room was dark.
“What is it?” I asked him.
“Dobson,” Tom said. When he finally turned to face me, I saw the frightened look in his eyes. “He’s dead.”
I was shocked to realize he was frightened of me.
The guy behind me said, “That’s James Watson, he’s the one who punched him,” and the buzz around me ratcheted up to a roar.
Mrs. Dunham, our hall mother, put a protective hand on my shoulder. “It’s all right, James,” she said, “I’ll stay here with you.” Her glasses were askew, and she’d thrown a ridiculous silk robe over her pajamas; I hadn’t known that she stayed nights in the dorm, or that she even knew my name. Still, I was fiercely glad she was there, because a man in a button-down shirt broke away from the policemen and crossed straight over to me. “James, is it?” he asked, flashing a badge. “We’d like to ask you some questions about tonight.”
“Oh no, you don’t,” Mrs. Dunham said. “He’s a minor, and you need his parents’ permission to question him without a guardian present.”
“He’s not under arrest,” the man insisted.
“All the same,” she said. “Sherringford policy.”
“Fine.” The detective sighed. “Do they live close by, son?” He produced a notepad and pen from his trouser pocket, like this was Law & Order.
Well. It kind of was.
“My mother lives in London,” I said, and my voice sounded strained even to my ears. Tom’s stare was hardening into something like a glare. Behind him, a boy who lived next door to me was quietly crying. “My father lives here in Connecticut, but I haven’t seen him in years.”
“Can you give me his number?” the detective asked, and I did, pulling out my phone to read out the digits I’d never once called myself. He said some other things about staying put, and getting some sleep, and them coming by to see me in the early afternoon, all of which I agreed to. Did I have a choice? He gave me his card: it read Detective Ben Shepard in a businesslike font. He didn’t look much like the other policemen I’d seen, on-screen or otherwise. On first glance, he gave an impression of grocery-store averageness, but as I stared at him, holding his card, I saw that his face had an unusually eager cast to it, like a dog eyeing a lofted ball. He didn’t look like he had a tragic past, some murdered mother or brother that drove him to become a detective. He looked like someone who played video games with their kids. Who did the dishes without being asked.
That impression of goodness unsettled me more than if he’d been a mustache-twirling villain. Because it was clear that Detective Shepard thought I was the bad guy.
He gave me what was meant to be a reassuring smile. Then he left, him and the other policemen, and everyone else milled around for another few minutes until Mrs. Dunham sent them back to their rooms. They shoved past me. All of them did, Harry and Peter and Mason and even Tom, wrapped in his ubiquitous sweater-vest. The looks they gave me were uniform. Outsider, their faces said. Killer, you deserve what’s coming to you.
Mrs. Dunham offered to make me some cocoa, but I had no idea what I’d say to her, or to anyone, so I said thanks but no thanks, I’d just go to sleep. As if sleep was even a remote possibility.
Tom wasn’t in our room. He’d probably decided to sleep on someone’s floor, I thought. He was afraid of me now. In a flash of rage, I picked up my pillow to chuck it across the room—and stopped cold. If someone heard me on a rampage, it wasn’t going to help my case in the slightest. It was this anger that had gotten me into this mess in the first place, I reminded myself, and squashed the pillow against the bed instead.
Anger, and Charlotte Holmes.
When I snuck back down the hallway, the yellow tape over Dobson’s door caught the light like a mirror, one I re
fused to look too closely into. I kept moving.
I made it all the way to Lawrence Hall before I realized I didn’t have her number. Her phone number, or her room number—in fact, I was only vaguely sure she lived in this dorm. The rows of darkened windows stared down at me as I struggled to make a decision. Any moment now, the sky would start to brighten. Lights would begin to go on. The girls who lived here would shower and dress and gather their textbooks on the way out the door. How far would they get before they heard that one of their classmates had been murdered? How long would it take for them to start believing I’d done it?
I didn’t even know what I’d say when I found her. What possible reason did she have to believe I was innocent? The last time she saw me, I was beating the daylights out of the victim.
My sense of purpose dissipated like a sputtering balloon, and I sat down on Lawrence’s front steps to get my head on straight. Campus was silent and dark, except for the lights of the emergency vehicles that crowded around Michener.
“Watson,” the voice hissed. “Jamie Watson.”
Holmes stepped neatly out of a small stand of trees; I hadn’t seen her there at all. In fact, I didn’t think that I was meant to, as she was dressed in head-to-toe blacks: trousers, gloves, a pair of dark sneakers, a jacket zipped all the way to her chin, even the backpack slung over her shoulders. Her face was a pale moon against all that darkness, her lips compressed in anger until she opened her mouth to say something that, from her expression, I didn’t want to hear.
So I spoke before she did. “Hi,” I said, in my usual stupid way. “I was looking for you.”
Her eyes widened, then narrowed, and I watched her rapidly recalculate something in her head. “This is about Dobson.”
A Study in Charlotte Page 2