She went up an octave. “You’re the biggest jerk in Jerkfordshire—”
“Shel, oh my God,” I said, trying hard not to laugh. It’d been a good instinct, to call my sister. “I hope you like that horse school. It sounds perfect. We’ll talk more about it when you’re here.”
“I miss you too.” She wrinkled her nose at me. “Bye, Jamie. See you soon.”
I stood and pulled the curtains closed. Enough light still snuck through to speckle my bedspread, like I was living underwater. I watched it for a while, lying down on my bed, the shimmer of it against my wall. Thought bleary thoughts about the ocean in winter. I wanted to see it again, I decided. Maybe the North Sea up in Scotland, instead of the southern coast. I’d go once I was in uni. I’d take the train up alone. Watch the sheep out the window, the rolling hills. Stop a night in Edinburgh to tour my father’s old stomping grounds. I wanted to relearn what it was like to be me, in places that I loved, to remember what it was like to be enough. Pretend there wasn’t anyone out to get me.
Maybe there wasn’t. Maybe I had made some kind of mistake, had saved over the file for my presentation, named it something stupid and lost it in a folder. Maybe, after the last two years, my instincts were just shot to hell. None of this had ever been about me, after all.
The exhaustion rolled up and over me like a blanket.
In the dream I had, I’d been an orphan living in Holmes’s house. Her father had been chasing me, had the two of us terrified, hiding together in a basement. We were alone down there in the dark, but I could hear a crowd murmuring around us, someone stutter-coughing, the beginnings of applause. When I turned to tell Holmes we were being watched, a spotlight drew down over her face. Her eyes went fluorescent.
Just say your lines, she said.
The basement’s dark edges bled out beyond us. Footsteps, above, on the ceiling. We would be found. They were an audience in search of a play.
I don’t know them, I whispered back. Do you?
I watched her mouth, the site of every bad decision. She’d light a cigarette and put it between her lips. She’d take a fistful of pills. She’d kiss me. She’d say something unforgiveable, she’d do any of the wretched things she did, this girl who existed only to be in opposition to the world, and she’d wait for me to tell her to stop and I never would, ever, I would have myself shot in the snow before I told her to stand down.
You wanted it both ways, she said, so you get nothing. No. You get to spend the rest of your life waiting for permission. The spotlight flickered. It did that when she told the truth. When it steadied, it was so everyone could watch us. The audience had arrived, but it only made her that much more intimate. Her hand stole up to my cheek. She whispered, Even now, you want permission to be a victim. It’s all you’ve ever wanted. Someone to come and save you.
She said it like she was reading a love letter.
Charlotte, I said.
That isn’t my name. The light flickered. Jamie. Jamie. Jamie—
“—WAKE UP.” SOMEONE WAS FLICKING THE LIGHT ON AND off, on and off. Were we still in the basement? Where were the windows? The exits? I’d been taught to look for the exits. I’d had it drilled into me.
No. I was in my room. I sat up so quickly I saw spots. “Who’s there?”
“Wow, you’re really out of it.” Elizabeth was leaning against my closet door. Her red blazer was startling in the dim light. Was it nighttime? Was it even still the same day?
“Sorry,” I said, rubbing my face. “Sorry, I was— I’m awake now. Um. Is it dinner?”
“You slept through dinner.” She crossed her arms. “I came to check on you. Mrs. Dunham said she hadn’t seen you since this morning.”
I swallowed. “I missed the rest of my classes,” I said.
“You missed the rest of your classes.”
I’d never heard her use this voice with me. Ever. The last time she spoke to someone this flat, it was when she eviscerated Randall for making a sexist joke.
And then what she was saying sank in. “Shit. Oh, shit. I can’t—” AP calc. I’d missed AP calc. Did I have anything due? Would Miss Meyers notice? She never even looked up from her notes, and I never raised my hand anyway, did I—
“Jamie,” Elizabeth said, low. “Seriously.”
I couldn’t account for the murderous look on her face. “Did I do something?” I snapped. “Why are you pissed? Last I checked, you weren’t the one who blew an entire class day because of a nap.”
She stalked toward me with a sudden intensity. “You emailed me,” she said. “You emailed me, which is already super weird, and you told me that you needed to talk to me, but not until after dinner, and I’m supposed to come in at this specific time, so I show up—I blew off my English study group, by the way—I come in to find you, what, pretending to be asleep, whispering your ex-girlfriend’s name? Charlotte, Charlotte, Charlotte. You’re covered in sweat, and your room is disgusting—why are your walls sticky? What the hell is going on? Is this some kind of horrible joke? Why would you do this to me?”
She was inches from me now, her finger up like she wanted to stab it into my eye, or my throat, and she seemed seconds away from crying—I had never seen Elizabeth cry, I didn’t know that anything could push her this far out of control—and I should have been horrified, stumbling to deny it, to explain.
I didn’t. Because, as my eyes adjusted, I could see the wall behind her, sprayed down with brown liquid that ran in winding lines to the desk below. To my laptop, open, my email inbox visible on my screen. The top half of my screen, anyway. The bottom half was flickering between black and static. The keyboard was dripping wet, the desk chair, the corkboard, the end of my bed. The King’s College London pennant above my desk.
Beside it, a crumpled can of the Diet Coke I kept in my fridge for her. I brought it to her every day at lunch like an apology. For liking her, liking her so much, and for still loving someone else instead.
Someone had shaken it and sprayed it all over the laptop my mother had bought with the money she’d been saving to buy herself pottery classes. My mother, who never did anything for herself.
Guilt on guilt on guilt. It closed its hand around me, tightened.
“Jesus, Jamie,” Elizabeth was saying. Louder now. Loud enough to be heard in the hall. “What is going on? I know you’re having panic attacks, I know you’re feeling like shit about something. Is it something else, other than what you’ve told me? What’s happening?”
All I could think about was how, earlier, I’d been so certain that a Moriarty was after me, that this was their new ploy. Punishing me until Charlotte reappeared to save me.
Either that, or my girlfriend was punishing me for something. It had been funny when I thought it last night. Not today, with her standing in the middle of the wreckage of my room.
“Did you do this?” It slipped out of my mouth like a curse. I hadn’t meant to say it, to think it—I hadn’t ever wanted to feel this scared again.
“Are you serious?”
“You heard me. Did you do it.” It was like I couldn’t stop. “Did you wreck my laptop to get me back for something?”
Elizabeth’s eyes welled. “What did that girl do to make you like this?”
With that, it was like our fight jerked into a higher gear.
“What she did? Or hey, how about if I was just this way all along?” There were certain things I didn’t want Elizabeth to touch. Not ever. This was one of them.
Nobody knew the whole of it. Nobody except me and Holmes and Scotland Yard, and I wanted to keep it that way. How else could I possibly move on, if everyone looked at me and knew how much of a fool I’d been?
“So what, you’ve just been an asshole from the start?” Elizabeth was crying. “Why are you talking to me like this?”
I opened my mouth, then shut it. Did I mean my accusation? Had she really gone into our club meeting last night, or had she beaten me back to my dorm to delete my project? No. It was impossible. She wasn’t
any part of this. I wasn’t so selfish to drag her back into this mirror world where Moriartys had gemstones shoved down girls’ throats.
I was selfish in other ways.
“I’m sorry,” I said. It was all I had.
“Fine. Say nothing. Fine,” she said again, and she turned on her heel and marched out into the hall.
Noise out there. Doors opening, closing.
“No, Randall,” I heard her say. “Leave me alone. Leave me alone. Don’t talk to him. I’ll do it myself, when I’m ready.”
He stuck his meaty head into my room. Before he could say a word, I slammed the door in his face.
Then I picked up my phone, pulled up my father’s message. Leander wants to know if you’ve made up your mind.
The whole bloody world wanted me to go find Holmes? Fine. I’d go find Holmes. I’d find her and show her exactly how much damage she’d done.
I have, I wrote back. Pick me up in ten.
Eight
Charlotte
THE SUMMER AFTER THE INCIDENT WITH MY TUMBLING teacher and the Adderall and Professor Demarchelier, my family took our yearly retreat to Lucerne.
We spent a fair amount of time in Switzerland in those years. Milo was attending boarding school there, at a place that, even at twelve, I knew our family could hardly afford. The winter instruction took place at a ski lodge in Austria, in Innsbruck (hence the name of the place, the Innsbruck School), and during the spring and fall, Milo took his classes with the sons of prime ministers and kings in Lucerne.
“I don’t want to go back,” he’d said at the end of spring break, in a rare moment of dissent. My brother took his orders from our father unflinchingly, as though our family unit were a military operation. “I know enough already to start my own business. That’s all we’ve—I’ve—ever wanted to do, anyway. Plenty of people finish school at eighteen.”
We were at the dinner table. It was the only guaranteed time during the day for the four of us to be together. Consequently, it was my own personal hell. I pushed my plate away, watching my father closely.
He tilted his head to the side. “Why do you think that you attend your school?” I studied his hands on the table. They were still.
Milo considered the question, chewing. He never seemed to feel the reflexive dread I did when our father considered us like that, like prey. “For the connections?”
“Not for the skiing?” I asked under my breath. In those days, I had less control over myself.
Luckily, my father didn’t hear. My mother reached out one viselike hand under the table and captured my knee. She wanted me to shut my mouth. This was because she loved me.
“The connections,” my father said. “A bit baldly stated, but yes, good. Now, as you noted, you are eighteen. How useful is it for you to know the Belgian prime minister?”
“For me to know the prime minister?” Milo said, slowly. “But I go to school with the prime minister’s son.”
“And?” my father asked. On the table, he curled and uncurled his hands. This was a warning. If one lay flat on the table, it meant a punishment was forthcoming, and whether it would be directed at Milo or me was a coin toss.
In the silence, our housekeeper came around and refilled our water glasses. The sound was soothing, and—and I couldn’t focus. I kept staring at my father’s hands, thinking, I will not throw up. It would make too much noise. My father would hear and there would be consequences, perhaps he would comfort me or perhaps he would be mad, I never did know and there was no way I could control it then so I would control it now, my panic, and I would not throw up.
I was twelve. I wanted to make him proud. I swallowed.
Milo was watching our father’s hands as well. “It isn’t important for me to know the Belgian prime minister. Except that I could introduce you to him. Through his son.”
My father’s fingers were curling around his fork. They were spearing a piece of meat and bringing it to his lips.
“Then you understand why you’ll stay at Innsbruck,” my father said, and “Charlotte, eat your veal,” and that was that, and I did not throw up. Not that night.
Our trip to Lucerne coincided with Milo’s return to school. We took a guesthouse outside the town, small and “sweetly Scandinavian” and full of tatty, comfortable furniture. We would be there for his orientation week.
It was not economical for both of us to attend boarding school, my father had told me, and unlike me, Milo had already learned everything that Alistair Holmes had to teach him. He needed an advanced education. But I was taken along on these trips because I still had my uses. I knew how to listen. I knew how to remember, and how to report back the important parts to my father in digest. I was left to play with the children, to glean what I could about their parents.
That year, the year I was twelve, the children I played with weren’t precisely children. I spent the first week thrown together with the table-tennis prodigy Quentin Wilde. He was fifteen. His family had gotten him access to the school’s facility before classes had even started so that he would not miss a single day of his training regimen.
Quentin needed an audience, apparently, and I was to be said audience. I was told to watch him play. I was told to be suitably impressed. His mother was an American energy secretary of some sort and his father stayed at home to care for their children. I wasn’t sure what care he was providing, as Quentin and his siblings all attended boarding school, but it didn’t seem to extend to his son’s physical well-being. It was hard to focus on the table tennis, as I hated it, and as Quentin’s hair was, as his name suggested, wild. I couldn’t help thinking how badly it needed to be cut.
(Late the night before, so late that it was nearly morning, my parents had had an argument, and I’d been awake to hear it.
This is absurd and you know it, my mother had said. Even through the wall I could tell she was seething. I was good at listening through walls. I’d been trained, after all. You realize that it costs nearly my entire yearly salary to send Milo here. You don’t apply for aid—
Which would make our financial situation publicly known. Which would defeat the purpose of all of this. A slammed drawer, the same sound that had woken me. Another soft, hollow thud. Be rational, Emma.
I am being rational, she said, lower. Being a woman with a contrary opinion does not render me hysterical. The very least you could do would be to pretend, at least to your children, that they’re something more than stepping-stones for your career. That you love them.
For God’s sake, I believe in being honest with them—they know I love them—
Do you, now? Take some responsibility, Al! You’ve lied so much that you’re beginning to believe yourself. You were sacked from the ministry! You were caught selling information! It’s like you’re beginning to think that you’re the wronged party, and now you’re putting our children through the—the gauntlet of your expectations so that you can use them like some ladder to climb back to the top—
You’re mixing your metaphors, my father said coldly. His tone meant, You’re drunk, and perhaps she was. I didn’t know if that negated her argument.
You should want better for them. I do. I’ll take them and leave, I will—I’ll take Lottie, at least—don’t you see she’s skin and bones? Don’t you care?
I had never supposed my mother liked me this much. I allowed myself to feel pleasure for a few moments before my critical brain resurfaced. My father had taught me: People have motives, Lottie. People aren’t blindly altruistic. Even if all they’re getting is the thrill of self-righteousness, they’re seeking some reward.
But if my mother said he was wrong about my education, perhaps the things he’d told me during lessons were wrong as well. Still, I’d never heard her contradict him in person. Not ever. And now she was saying that he, too, had motives, and they were even less altruistic than most people’s, though I was also old enough to know that perhaps she was just emptying her arsenal at him as an offensive. (Arsenal. That was the football team
my father had been discussing yesterday. I played with the idea for a moment. Arsenal, games, arsenals, losing—)
It wasn’t clear who was telling the truth, if anyone was at all.
You’re coddling her, my father was saying. She shows so little promise anyway. The Jameson diamonds? That was a sad accident, and you know it. You’d take her and in the name of her protection, you’ll spoil whatever potential she actually has. I won’t allow it.
Your expectations—
This time, the sound was glass, and shattering, and loud enough to wake my brother in the twin bed next to mine. Go to bed, Emma, my father said, and this time he said it, You’re drunk, and Milo reached out to touch my shoulder before he shut his eyes again.)
It’s important to know that I had this in mind.
Quentin needed a haircut. I knew how to cut mine; I did quite a nice job at it. I offered to cut his, and he accepted, and back at our empty guesthouse, taking my shears out from my kit, I stood in the bathroom alone. I knew I was a few steps away from breaking.
But I could fix it. Myself. I had a method: I let myself feel it, my crackling, sleepless brain, the boredom of watching some idiot boy hit a ball for hours and hours, the unfairness of spending my days in late July, in Switzerland, in a stuffy gymnasium when I could be reading the encyclopedia or blowing things up in the backyard, and the sad fact that even if my mother wanted me as a bargaining chip it was preferable to not being wanted at all, and then I scooped up those feelings the way I’d been taught and buried them in the ground below my feet.
For the first time, my method didn’t work.
I tried again. I stood there for some time, shivering with the force of it, and it rose up from my stomach this time, a clutching, sad sort of panic, and my thoughts moved faster. I felt it. Felt everything. I knew I wanted to erase myself from the top down, like a drawing, and that still I wanted someone to touch my edges and tell me that they loved me despite them. I tried again. I failed. I was crying, and marveling at the idea of myself crying (crying!), when Quentin found me.
The Case for Jamie Page 7