“Formal?” I said.
“Fancy dress means costumes,” Jazza said.
It was clearly one of those mornings when I was particularly American. That happened sometimes.
“Thursday the eighth is the final Ripper night. So they’re having an early Bonfire Night party the Friday before, and then they’re going to lock us in until the Ripper stuff is over. Hope you like being indoors, because we’ll be in all week.”
“I don’t care,” Jazza said. “Just as long as it ends.”
“Who knows?” Jerome said. “Maybe this Ripper wants to keep it going. No reason for him to stop. Maybe he wants to be the new and improved Ripper.”
Jazza shook her head and got up to refill her tea.
“What if he does that?” I asked Jerome. “What happens?”
“Well, then the police have no idea when he’ll strike or where or how many times, and everyone freaks out every single day. I don’t think the eighth of November is the thing to worry about—it’s what comes after. I think that’s when whatever this is really starts.”
“But you’re an insane conspiracy nut,” I pointed out.
“Granted.”
Jerome and I had reached that point where I could say things like that. It was only a slight exaggeration. I ripped off a piece of my doughnut and threw it at him. He had eaten everything on his plate and had no food to fire back with, so he crumpled his napkin and chucked it at my head. Charlotte gave us a reproachful look from the end of the table.
“Don’t make me use my powers on you,” he said quietly.
“I’d like to see you try.”
I sent a low-flying piece of doughnut just inches over the table surface, right at his prefects’ tie.
“Jerome . . . ,” Charlotte said.
“Yes?” he replied, not looking over.
“You know you shouldn’t be doing that.”
“I know many things, Charlotte.”
He turned and gave her a smile and gave me a little shiver. It was pleasantly evil. I remembered now—Charlotte and Andrew had once gone out. Andrew and Jerome were best friends. Jerome probably did know many things. Charlotte simply turned away, as if she had forgotten what was going on.
“Okay,” I said very quietly. “Your powers are a little hot.”
It was as open a declaration as I’d ever made. I waited to see how he would respond. He looked down at his plate, still smiling.
“What’s going on now?” Jazza said, setting down her tea and throwing a leg over the bench.
“We’re annoying Charlotte,” I said.
“Finally,” Jazza replied in a low voice, “a hobby of Jerome’s I can fully support. Carry on.”
I didn’t even mean for it to, but Jazza’s commenting got to me. I started to watch Boo when we sat in the library together that afternoon during our free period. We sat across from each other at a table in the corner, our laptops back to back. I was trying to cram in the writing of the aforementioned essay. This was the first major assignment I’d had for literature—seven to ten pages on any work of my choice that we’d already read. I was doing mine on Samuel Pepys’s diary, mostly because that was the reading I understood the best. Boo had her computer open, but she was reading a gossip site. I could see the reflection in the window.
“What are you working on?” I asked quietly.
“What?” she said, pulling off her headphones.
“What are you working on?”
“Oh. Just reading.”
“What are you doing your essay on?”
“Not sure yet,” she said, yawning.
I gave up and went to get a book. Boo followed me, dawdling along behind me, staring at the books like they were very interesting objects from some other universe. As I made my way to the criticism section, I saw Alistair sprawled in the middle of an aisle, reading. He had his book on the floor and was idly turning the pages with one hand.
“Hi,” I said, switching on his light.
“Hello.”
Boo regarded Alistair with surprise. She immediately walked up to him.
“Oh . . . hello. I’m Bhuvana. Everyone calls me Boo.”
“Boo?”
Boo burst out laughing. Alistair and I just stared at her.
“Sorry,” she said. “I am called Boo. That’s always funny, though.”
Alistair nodded dismissively and turned back to his book.
“It’s nice to meet you,” Boo said. “Really.”
“Is it?” he asked.
“This is Alistair,” I explained to Boo. Then to Alistair I said, “I need a good book on Samuel Pepys.”
“McCalistair. The one with the blue cover and the gold lettering.”
I scanned the shelf for a book that fit this description.
“Rory and I are roommates,” Boo said. “I’m new.”
“Well done,” Alistair replied. “So there are two of you now.”
“Three,” I said. “We have a triple.”
I found the book and held it up to him for confirmation. He nodded. It was huge—a two-hander with a layer of dust on top. I thought we were done, but Boo sat down on the floor next to Alistair.
“Is this your favorite spot?” she asked.
“It’s private,” he said.
“You go,” she said, waving me off. “I’m going to talk to Alistair for a while.”
I had serious doubts about how well that would go down with Alistair, but he raised no objection. If anything, he seemed slightly curious about Boo and her incredibly forthright approach to conversation. Whatever the case, if it gave me five minutes away from her, I was taking it.
I went back downstairs to my table and opened the book. It had a pronounced old book smell, and pages that had been allowed to turn very slightly golden, but not brown with age. Alistair had given me a serious book, one that covered every aspect of Samuel Pepys’s life. It was time to be a serious student, so I found the section of the book devoted to the section of the diary I was reading at the moment and tried to develop an interest. But what I was really watching was the light in the aisle upstairs. It clicked off, and neither Boo nor Alistair emerged, and Boo didn’t switch it back on. They had to be talking, or . . .
It was hard to imagine Boo and Alistair instantly making out, but that actually made a lot more sense than the idea of them having a long conversation. Alistair liked books and emo eighties music and being poetic—and Boo liked the opposite of all of those things.
Her notebooks were there, just inches away from me. I hesitated for a moment, then, using my pen, dragged the one marked Further Maths over to me, keeping one eye on the balcony in case Boo emerged. I flipped open the notebook. Not many pages had been used. The ones that had were covered in doodles and song lyrics and the occasional equation for what looked like good measure. There was no work in it at all, not a single effort to solve a single problem set. I closed the book and pushed it back.
Since I’d already violated her privacy, I decided there was no reason to stop there. I pulled over the history notebook. Same thing. A few scribbled notes, some doodles, but nothing usable. Boo really wasn’t trying, to an alarming extent. Jazza was right. Chances were, Boo would be kicked out soon enough, and we’d get our room back. I wasn’t proud of this thought, but it was the reality.
Boo came out of the aisle above, and I dropped the heavy research book on top of her notebook as she passed along the balcony toward the stairs. Once she was on the stairs, her view was blocked, and I shoved the notebook back to about the place where I’d found it. Boo wasn’t exactly meticulous, so I didn’t think she’d notice if it was an inch or two out of place.
She dropped down in her seat and put her headphones back on. I kept my eyes on the book, as if I’d been reading all along. She had her laptop open, like she was working, but I could see her screen’s reflection in the window. She was watching a soccer match online. We were pretending for each other.
; There was something very weird about Boo Chodhari, something more than the fact that she wasn’t doing any work for school. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I had a strong feeling I should be watching her a lot more carefully.
19
SATURDAY MORNING, I HEADED OFF TO ART HISTORY with Boo at my side. Jazza had gone home for the weekend. Boo and I were on our own for a few days. I had been assigned the task of reporting back every single thing Boo did in her absence. I hadn’t told Jazza about the library incident yet, mostly because it really didn’t make me look good. In boarding school, you have to respect other people’s privacy. I couldn’t just say that I’d been looking at Boo’s notes. That violated the unspoken code.
“I still can’t believe this,” Boo groaned as we walked over to the classroom buildings. “Class on Saturday mornings. Isn’t that against the law or something?”
She pronounced the word something like somefink.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Probably not.”
“I’m going to look it up, because I think it is. Child welfare or somefink.”
In the classroom, everyone was milling around with coats on. Today we were taking one of the trips Mark had promised us on the first day.
“Everyone have their Oyster cards?” Mark asked. “Good. So, we’ll walk over to the Tube together. If we get separated, go to Charing Cross. The museum is right there. We’ll meet in room thirty in one hour’s time.”
Jerome lingered with his hands in his pockets, waiting for me to walk with him. I hadn’t taken the Tube yet since my arrival, so I was nerdily excited about this. Our lives at Wexford were very contained. I was finally going to London, even though I’d been in London the whole time. There was the famous sign—the big red circle with the blue line through it. The white-tiled walls and the dozens of electronic ads that kept time with you as you went down the escalators, changing their displays so you could watch an entire commercial. The floor-toceiling ads for albums and books and concerts and museums. The whoosh of the white trains with the red and blue sliding doors. Boo put her earbuds in immediately and slipped into a daze once on the train. I sat next to Jerome and watched London go by, station after station.
When we got off, we were on Trafalgar Square, the massive plaza with Nelson’s Column and the four big stone lions. The National Gallery was just behind them, a palace-like structure on its own island of cobbles and stone.
“Today,” Mark said, when we finally assembled in room thirty, “I want you to get the feel of the galleries by doing something quite simple and, I think, fun. I want you to partner up and choose one object or subject, then find five treatments of that subject in paintings by five different artists.”
“Partners?” Jerome asked.
“Sure,” I said, trying to smile in a relaxed way.
I don’t think Boo actually knew we were partnering up. She hadn’t taken her earbuds out and was now looking at the assignment sheet with a baffled expression. I hurried Jerome out of the room before she noticed where we had gone. Around us, I could hear other people making their choices—horses, fruit, the Crucifixion, domestic bliss, windmills, the Thames, business transactions. None of these things seemed very interesting.
“So what do you think we should do?” Jerome asked.
We had stopped by The Rokeby Venus, which is a huge painting by Diego Velázquez of a woman lounging around, admiring her face in a mirror held by Cupid. But the picture is painted from behind, so the focus of the painting is mostly her butt.
“I suggest we do ours on ‘five treatments of the human butt,’” I said.
“Agreed,” he said, smiling. “Bottoms it is.”
For the next hour, we went around the National Gallery assessing butts. There are a lot of naked butts in classical paintings. Big, proud, classical butts everywhere, sometimes draped with a little cloth for flavor. We favored the bigger butts with the most detail. We gave points for best cracks, best dimpling, and best smiley curvature around the upper thigh. We differed on only one issue: I liked the reclining butts, Jerome liked the action butts. Butts leading people into battle, butts about to get on a horse, butts giving speeches, butts looking dramatic. Those were his kind of butts. I liked the way the more relaxed butts squished on one side, and the cheeky over-the-shoulder look most of their owners gave. “Behold,” they seemed to say. “Amazing, isn’t it?”
Within an hour, we had three excellent butts on our list. We made notes about the paintings, the periods, the colors, the context, all that. We had just gone back into one of the smaller galleries, one full of tiny paintings, when I felt Jerome standing much closer to me than he really needed to.
“Now, that,” he said, “is a fine butt.”
I looked around. This was primarily a fruit room, with a few paintings of angry priests thrown in for kicks. Only one painting was blocked from my view by a woman standing right in front of it. The woman was wearing a very form-fitting kneelength skirt with a red swing jacket with cropped arms. The jacket stopped right at her waistline, so her butt was well displayed. She even wore seamed black stockings and low, thick heels. Her bobbed hair was elaborately arranged in tight curls, close to the head.
From the loopy smile on his face and the way he was craning his neck a little, I finally figured out that he meant my butt, not hers. It took me a second to realize Jerome could come out with a line that bad—and mean it. I wasn’t even sure how my butt looked in my Wexford skirt. Gray, I guessed. Kind of woolly. But there was a goofy sincerity to his effort that made me flush. We were going to public kiss. Actually here, in this museum, in front of real people and possibly our classmates.
“Sorry,” he said. “I had to say it.”
“It’s okay,” I said, stepping closer. “But I think she heard you.”
“What?” he asked.
We were pretty much face-to-face now, whispering to each other.
“I think she heard you.”
“Who heard me?”
“The lady.”
“What lady?”
We were chest-to-chest and stomach-to-stomach. I had my hands on his waist. He put his hands on my hips as well, but he wasn’t making a kissing face. He was making a “what are you talking about?” face, which is squishier.
The woman turned and looked at us. She had to have heard everything we were saying about her. For someone so dressed up, her face was remarkably plain. She wore no makeup and her skin was dull. More than that, she looked extremely unhappy. She walked out of the gallery, leaving us alone.
“We chased her off,” I said.
“Yeah . . .” Jerome detached his hands from my hips. “Still not following you.”
Just like that, the moment blew away. There would be no kiss. Instead, we were both confused.
“You know what?” I said. “I’m going to go to the bathroom for a second.”
I tried not to run through the maze of rooms, past the pictures of fruit and dogs and kings and sunsets, past the art students doing sketches and the bored tourists milling around trying to look interested. I needed the bathroom. I needed to think. I was getting dizzier by the second. First, I saw a man standing in front of me that my roommate didn’t see. Second, I had just seen a woman standing in front of a painting, and Jerome hadn’t seen her. The first time kind of made sense. It was Ripper night, we were rushing back, we were scared of getting caught, it was dark. Yes, Jazza could have missed him. But there was no way Jerome could have missed what I was talking about today—which meant either we didn’t understand each other at all, or . . .
Or . . .
I found the bathroom finally, and it was empty. I looked at myself in the mirror.
Or I was crazy. Healing Angel Ministry crazy. I certainly wouldn’t be the first in my family to see people or things that weren’t there.
No. It had to be simpler than that. We had to just be misunderstanding each other. I paced the bathroom and tried to come up with some interpretation of his word
s that made it all make sense, but nothing came to mind.
Boo came in.
“You all right?” she said.
“Uh . . . yeah. Fine.”
“You sure?”
“I just . . . I must not be feeling well. I’m just a little confused.”
“Confused how?”
“It’s nothing,” I said.
I went into one of the stalls and locked the door. Boo stood outside.
“You can tell me,” she said. “Honestly. You can tell me anything, no matter how weird it sounds.”
“Just leave me alone!” I snapped.
Nothing for a moment, then I saw her feet backing away from the stall. She paused by the door, then I heard it open. I looked out to see if she had gone. She had. I emerged and went to the sinks. “I misunderstood,” I said aloud to myself. “That’s all. I don’t get the English stuff yet.”
With that, I splashed some water on my face, fixed on a smile, and stepped out. I would find Jerome. I would make him explain to me what I was missing. We would laugh, then we would kiss with tongue, and all would be well.
As I walked back through the galleries, I saw Boo on the phone, pacing. She never spoke to anyone that intently. Then she hung up and dodged around a group of tourists and headed toward the lobby. Little threads began to connect themselves in my head. I didn’t know what this all added up to, but something was coming together. A strange and sudden impulse came over me.
While we were technically in class, Mark wasn’t watching us—and when the class was over, we were free to leave on our own. And I couldn’t stay here anymore, anyway.
So I followed her.
She stood on Trafalgar Square, just under the museum steps, and made another phone call. I watched this from above, from the raised entrance of the museum. Then she hurried to the entrance of Charing Cross Tube. I went down the stairs after her, tapping my Oyster card on the turnstile, and followed her down the escalators to the tracks. She got on a Northern Line, the black line, and rode the train two stops. At Tottenham Court Road, she switched to the Central Line going east—that was the way back to school. Our stop was Liverpool Street. But at Bank, she switched again, to the District Line, still going east. To keep out of her sight, I had to stay at the far end of the cars and hope she wasn’t paying too much attention. Luckily for me, Boo was Boo, head down, looking at her phone, adjusting her music.
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