The Name of the Star

by Maureen Johnson

Jaz got out of her chair and stepped over the various people sitting on the floor around us. I didn’t want to stop watching, but she was clearly upset, and I didn’t want to leave her alone.

  “I hate what they’re doing,” she said as I followed her. “I hate the show they’re making of all of this. It’s horrible, and it’s frightening, and people treat it like it’s reality television.”

  “I think they’re just reporting it because people want to know,” I said, following her a few steps behind.

  “I don’t have to watch it, though.”

  My Cheez Whiz had, sadly, not arrived. I offered to make Jazza some tea instead, but she didn’t want any. She planted herself on her bed and started refolding her laundry. We had a service at Wexford where they came once a week and took away our laundry bags, and when we returned in the afternoon, we’d find them outside our door, our clothes clean and folded. But Jazza always shook out her things and refolded them in her special way. I sat on my own bed and took out my computer, but before I could even open it, my phone rang. It was Jerome. I’d recently given him my number in art history so that we could meet up to work on a project. This was the only time he’d ever called.

  “You guys should come over,” he said as soon as I answered. He sounded very excited.

  “Over where?”

  “Aldshot. Where else? We can go on the roof.”

  “What?”

  “Come on,” he said. “It’s all kicking off. We can get an amazing view from the roof. I know how to get up there.”

  “You’re insane,” I said.

  “Who is it?” Jazza asked.

  I cupped my hand over the phone.

  “It’s Jerome. He wants us to go over to Aldshot. To the roof.”

  “Then you’re right,” she replied. “He is insane.”

  “Jazza says you’re—”

  “I heard her. But I’m not insane. Leave Hawthorne the back way and cut around to the back of Aldshot. No one is going to catch you. Everyone’s been checked in for the night.”

  I repeated the message. Jazza glanced over from her folding. Her expression conveyed the idea that she still wasn’t very impressed with the suggestion.

  “Say this,” Jerome said. “Say these exact words. Say ‘she’d never think you had the guts to do it, which is why you should.’”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “Just say it.”

  I repeated the message exactly as he said it. The words had a strange, almost magical effect. Jazza seemed to lift up off the bed a bit, her eyes aglow.

  “Have to go for a moment,” Jerome said. “Text me when you’re coming. This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance. We’ll be able to see everything from up there, and no one will know, I promise.”

  He hung up. Jazza was still suspended there, half sitting and half standing on the edge of the bed.

  “What kind of voodoo was that?” I asked. “What did that mean?”

  “He means,” Jazza said, “that Charlotte would never suspect I had the guts to use the exit.”

  “The exit?”

  “There’s a way to get out. The ground-floor bathrooms. There are bars over the windows, but one of the windows . . . the screws that hold the bars on have been loosened. All you have to do is open the window, reach outside and give them a little turn, and they fall right out. Then you can push the bars back enough to get out of the window. I know about them because Charlotte was the one who developed that system. She loosened the screws. We can’t, though. We’d get expelled.”

  “They said anyone caught leaving school grounds might be expelled,” I said. “It is school grounds.”

  “Yes, but we can’t be in Aldshot,” Jazza said, her voice getting lower and lower. “That’s just as bad. Well, not just as bad, but bad . . .”

  Maybe it was simply that I had flown all the way to England and then been locked in a building for a month. I really, somewhat bizarrely, wanted to see Jerome. Jerome with his floppy curls and goofy Ripper obsession.

  Jazza prowled the space between her bureau and the closet, stoking some internal fire. I had to add more fuel, and quickly.

  “Who’s most likely to catch us? Charlotte. And is Charlotte going to report her own vandalism? Is she really going to rat on someone using the exit she made?”

  “Possibly,” Jazza said.

  “Let’s set that possibility aside, then,” I replied. “Come on. You know it would burn her if you had the guts to use it and she didn’t. And you’ve been good forever. No one is going to suspect you of doing this. So you have to.”

  Some emotion took Jazza over for a moment. She got up and clenched her hands together, then studied the arrangement of her books with great intensity.

  “All right,” she said. “Let’s do it. Let’s do it now, before I back out. Tell him we’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

  First, there was feverish changing. We pulled off our pajamas and threw them to the floor. I put on my Wexford sweats, while Jazza put on a pair of black yoga pants and a dark hoodie. We both tied our hair back and wore sneakers. Action wear.

  “Wait,” Jazza said as we were about to step out the door. “We can’t wear the shoes. We were just downstairs in socks. It’s going to look like we’re up to something. In fact, we should put our pajamas back on. We’ll change downstairs in the toilets.”

  So we pulled off those clothes and put the pajamas back on and stuffed our sneaking clothes into our bags, because it was perfectly normal to carry your bag around the building for your books or your computer. We crept downstairs, though there was no crime in going down the stairs. Everyone, including Claudia, was riveted to the news, so we were able to slip by the common room door and continue on to the end of the hall, to the bathroom. The bathroom on this floor wasn’t as big as our bathroom, because it didn’t have showers, and it wasn’t designed for thirty girls to get ready at the same time. This was the bathroom you used when you were in the common room and didn’t feel like going up the stairs. It had one stall, which was unoccupied. Jazza and I changed quickly. Jazza went into the stall, opened the window, and climbed onto the toilet seat so she could work her arm through the bars at the right angle.

  “I can feel it,” she whispered. “I can twist it off.”

  She scrunched up her face as she worked. I heard the tiniest, tiniest tink as the screw hit the sidewalk below.

  “That’s one,” she said. She turned gingerly on the seat and started working on the other. Tink again.

  The bars were one large unit, all attached together. Jazza pushed them out. There was an opening of about a foot and a half for us to squeeze through, and a short drop to the ground.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “You first,” she said. “Because this is your idea.”

  We awkwardly switched positions. I got up on the seat and stuck my head outside, taking a deep breath of the cold London air. Once I went out this window, I was breaking the rules. I was risking everything. But that was the point, really. And who cared what we did when there was a killer out there? We were only going a few feet to another building, anyway. Mentally, I was already rehearsing my “but it wasn’t off the grounds” defense.

  I got up on the sill and put my legs through the opening. It was an easy jump to the ground, barely a jump at all. For a moment, I thought Jazza wasn’t going to come, but she got up the courage and did the same thing.

  We were out.

  12

  IT HAD TURNED INTO A CRISP, PERFECT AUTUMN night. The sky was clear, and I could smell leaves in the air, and just a little bit of burning wood. We couldn’t walk through the square, obviously; we’d be seen by someone looking out one of the windows. So we had to run over a street and come around the long way, using off-school property. We’d approach Aldshot from behind. It would take about ten minutes to go this way, and we were now definitely breaking the rules, but we’d started this thing, and we had to contin
ue it.

  Once we were clear of the building and around the corner, we slowed to a fast walk.

  “Rory,” Jazza said breathlessly. “Is this stupid, what we’re doing? Not because of the school thing, but because of, you know, the Ripper thing. What with him being out right now, killing people.”

  “We’re fine,” I said, blowing on my hands as we hurried along. “We are literally walking around a corner. Together.”

  “This is stupid, though. Isn’t it?”

  “What you need to remember is that you are doing the interesting thing, and Charlotte is not. And if we get caught, I will claim I made you go. At gunpoint. I am American. People will assume I’m armed.”

  We walked faster, speeding down one of the small residential streets that backed up to Wexford. Inside many of the flats, I could see lights and a few parties of people drinking. You could see the reflection of televisions in so many of those windows—the now-familiar bright red and white logo of BBC News shining out into the dark. We made a sharp left at the shuttered shoe repair shop and ran the last block to approach Aldshot from behind.

  Aldshot was the twin of our building, except that it had the word MEN carved in bas-relief over the front door. Even without that hint, you could tell that this building was full of guys. Hawthorne had distinctive and pretty curtains in many windows, the occasional plant on the windowsill, or some other decorative item. Even the light was different, because of all the lamps girls brought in, with paper shades diffusing and coloring the light. In Aldshot, no one changed the curtains, so they were all the standard grayish green. The decorations on their windowsills tended to be stacks of bottles or cans or—in fancy cases—books. The lights were all the standard issue. Weird how two identical buildings could be so different.

  I could already see our point of access—it was a fire escape door, which had been propped open an inch or so by a small book wedged in the opening. We made it across the street and pressed ourselves against the side of the building, then we crept along, under the ground-floor windows. I reached forward and carefully opened the door, and we slipped inside. We were in the cold, fluorescent-lit concrete stairwell. I closed the door softly.

  “We did it,” Jazza whispered.

  “Seems that way.”

  “Now we just wait here?”

  “I guess.”

  “I don’t feel very hidden.”

  “Me either.”

  We quietly approached the inner door that led to the ground floor of Aldshot. I could hear male voices and a television. Jazza and I huddled together, unsure what to do next, until we heard a door open on the floor above us. Jerome’s curly head peered down at us over the railing, and he waved us up.

  “I disabled all the alarms,” he said. “Prefect secret. Everyone’s downstairs watching.”

  He looked very satisfied with himself. He took us up two more flights, until we reached another door. This one was a lot more serious-looking, with a bar across it and a huge DO NOT OPEN: DOOR ALARMED sign in red. Jerome pushed this open with a bold stroke. The Klaxon I had been expecting didn’t sound. We were suddenly on the wide roof of Aldshot in the bright cold, nothing but the sky above us.

  “My God,” Jazza said, cautiously stepping out. “I did it. We did it. We really did it.”

  We all took in the freedom for a moment. Jazza stood back, but Jerome and I went up to the edge. Below, I got a good view of our square, the halls, and all the streets around. Everything was lit—every streetlight, every window, every shop. The tall buildings of the City—the financial district of London that was right next to our neighborhood—were beacons, filling the air with even more light. London was awake, and watching.

  “It’s great, isn’t it?” he asked.

  It was great. This, I realized, is what I came for. This view. This night. These people. This feeling buzzing through the air.

  “I suppose it’s safe up here,” Jaz said, coming a little closer and hugging herself for warmth. “The building is locked, and it’s not easy getting up here. Plus, there’s police all round. And helicopters.”

  She pointed at the bright lights of the helicopters drifting above like oversized bees. There were at least three we could see from where we were standing. The dragnet was on.

  “Safest place in London right now,” Jerome said. “As long as we don’t fall off.”

  Jazza backed up a few steps. I peered down carefully. It was a sheer drop down to the cobblestones. When I looked up again, Jazza had wandered off to examine the view from the other side. It was just Jerome and me facing the square and the sky.

  “Worth it?” he asked, smiling.

  “So far,” I said.

  He laughed a little, then took a few steps back and sat down.

  “It’s almost time,” he said. “And we don’t want anyone to see us.”

  I sat next to him on the cold roof. He had everything ready—several windows on his computer open to various news and Ripper sites.

  “You really like this, don’t you?” I asked.

  “I don’t like people getting murdered, but . . . yeah, people are going to ask us where we were when this happened. This is going down in history. I want to be able to remember where I was and have that somewhere be cool. Like on the roof.”

  Just the way he looked, the wind lifting up his hair a little, his profile in the low light . . . Jerome was different to me now. He was more than just the friendly and somewhat strange guy I’d gotten to know. He was smart. He was adventurous. He’d been chosen to be a prefect, which had to mean something. I felt the like blossom in me.

  “What happens now?” Jazza asked, coming over and joining us.

  “We wait,” Jerome said. “Catherine Eddowes was killed sometime between one forty and one forty-five. It’s going to happen soon.”

  1:45 arrived. Then 1:46, 1:47, 1:48, 1:49 . . .

  The newscasters spun on and on, filling time by showing the same film of police cars going through the streets. I started to feel weird waiting on the roof for someone to die. It was obvious that the news people had run out of ways of saying “nothing has been found.” They returned to descriptions of the third body. The early reports confirmed that this was indeed a third Ripper murder. This was the quickest one, just a slash to the neck.

  Two o’clock. Five past two. Jazza got up and began to hop on the balls of her feet and hug herself for warmth. I watched her gleeful pride slipping away with every passing minute.

  “I want to go back,” she said. “I can’t stay up here anymore.”

  Jerome looked to her, then over to me.

  “Do you want to stay, or . . .”

  There was just a touch of sadness in his voice. This made me go tingly all over. But there was no way Jazza wanted to go back by herself, and really, neither did I.

  “No,” I said. “We should go back together.”

  “That’s probably the best idea,” he said.

  He escorted us back down the fire stairs, to the back door.

  “Be careful,” he said. “Text me when you’re there safe?”

  “Okay,” I said. I smiled a little. I couldn’t help it.

  The door shut, and we were once again outside in the cold. I didn’t want to take the long way around, for several reasons—not the least of which was the fact that the Ripper was actually in East London somewhere. Cutting through the square was the safest and most direct route—but it also was the one that increased our chances of getting caught by several orders of magnitude. We’d be approaching Hawthorne straight on. Still, I thought we could do it.

  There were lights along the sides of the square, but we could probably stay hidden by keeping near the trees where it was always dark and shady. Even if Claudia were staring out of the window, she’d need night vision goggles to see us creeping along under the trees’ cover. I wouldn’t have put it past Claudia to have night vision goggles, but again, she was probably watching the news with everyone else. That’s wh
ere we had last seen her. The common room was in the back of the building.

  Jazza stared at the square, making the same mental calculations.

  “Really?” she asked.

  “It’s about fifty feet. Come on. Tree to tree, like a spy!”

  “I don’t think that’s how spies work,” she said, but she followed me as I bolted into the dark of the square. We made ridiculous dodges from tree to bush to tree, the leaves crunching under our shoes. When we reached the other side, we had to make the dash across the cobblestone street in front of Hawthorne, then sneak under the windows to the back of the building. The bathroom lights were off. As far as I could remember, we’d left them on. Someone had come in since. We’d managed to close the window as we got out, but we left it open just a crack on the bottom so we could push it back up again. I boosted Jazza up, and she squirreled under the bars and inside. I was about to do the same when I realized someone was next to me. It was a man, bald and dressed in a slightly oversized gray suit.

  “Should you be doing that?” he asked politely.

  “It’s okay,” I said quickly, once I swallowed a scream of surprise. “I go here.”

  “I take it you’re not supposed to be out.”

  There was something strangely familiar about the man, something I couldn’t quite place. It was something about his eyes, his bald head, his outfit. And he was creepy. Maybe it was just because he was some middle-aged man standing around school grounds, talking to underage girls. That would do it. That’s the technical definition of creepy.

  Jazza appeared at the window.

  “Now!” she whisper-shouted, reaching down for me.

  “Good night, girls,” the man said, walking on.

  I scraped up one of my knees on the bricks getting in, but I made it, tumbling into the stall. We quickly pulled the bars back into place and shut the window. We changed back into our pajamas frantically. There was still a lot of noise coming from the common room. We looked at each other, then began our slow walk down the hall. The idea was to casually pass the door. As we did, I glanced inside. The bottom of the screen read NO FOURTH BODY FOUND. Jazza kept on going, slipping along in her fuzzy socks.