That same reporter took a particular shine to me.
Following me from class to class, murmuring words of sympathy before launching into questions like Do you really think Lee Dobson’s death was an accident? and Is it true you keep a snake in your dorm room? From the logo on the cameraman’s kit, I knew they were from the BBC. I would have known it anyway from the reporter’s plummy accent and haughty chin, the very image of some grown-up Oxbridge wanker. He’d been sent across the pond to try to get some dirt on the Holmeses; I was sure by the way he kept turning the conversation back to Charlotte. Somehow, he’d gotten ahold of my class schedule, and for days he waited for me between classes, his cameraman always towering behind him.
The worst was the afternoon I thought I’d gotten away clean. The two of them were talking to a townie on the sciences building steps as I came out the front door. “Yeah, man,” he was telling them, “I’ve heard the stories too. I have a lot of, uh, friends who say Charlotte Holmes is the head of this messed-up cult and James Watson is, like, her angry little henchman—”
I hurried past them, head down, but the reporter charged after me, calling my name, reaching out to pull on my arm.
I whipped around, ready to deck him. The cameraman stepped forward eagerly, training his lens on my face.
“See what I mean!” the townie said. I got a good look at him, this time. He was around thirty years old, with mean little features and thick blond hair. Tom had pointed him out to me as the campus drug dealer—I’d seen him lurking around campus at night.
Apparently these days he had more credibility than I did.
“Back off,” I said quietly, and put my collar up. They let me walk on alone, but we all knew they’d be back the next day.
Except they weren’t. Evidently, the reporters bothered enough of us that parents had begun to complain. Sherringford officially closed our campus to the public.
When I asked Holmes if she was relieved, she smiled politely. “My brother has an arrangement with the press,” she said. “They’ve never bothered me.”
Morale was low, and so it wasn’t a surprise that the school decided to go ahead with our homecoming weekend despite all the commotion. Our school’s green and white banners streamed from the chapel and the library; the dining hall announced they would be serving steak and salmon for dinner. In the days leading up to the dance, girls walked in droves to town and returned with long dresses in tied-off plastic bags. They had ordered them months before, from New York, and Boston, and one even from Paris. That was according to Cassidy and Ashton, who gossiped relentlessly through every one of our French classes. But it wasn’t just girls who were preening in preparation. Tom was taking Lena, and he must have had his parents ship him his suit from Chicago. I had no idea how else he’d get his hands on a powder-blue jacket and vest.
It might have been a waste of time and money, but for once I understood it. Better to focus on pageantry than on death.
When I told Holmes that, she threw her head back in one of her rare laughs. “For a boy, you are massively melodramatic.” I couldn’t really argue with that. She had plenty of data to draw from, because I spent every spare moment I had in Sciences 442.
We had lunch there, and dinner—or rather, I ate in the ravenous way I always did while she made a series of deductions about my day. You had Captain Crunch for breakfast, she’d say, and you’ve tried a new shaving cream you don’t like, the whole while pushing her food around her plate to disguise the fact that she wasn’t eating. I bothered her about that, the way she picked at her food, and she’d eat a fry or two to appease me; ten minutes later, I’d bother her some more. One night, I mentioned that my favorite song was Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box,” and an hour later, messing around on her violin, she played the opening measures of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” I don’t think she realized she’d been doing it; when she caught my gaze, she jumped about a foot and slid directly into Bach’s “Allemanda.” (I learned the names of everything she played. She liked when I asked, and I liked to listen.)
The way we were with each other wouldn’t have made sense to anyone else if I’d tried to explain it. I had a habit of volleying any ridiculous statement she’d make back over the net with top spin, and we’d ramp ourselves up into fierce arguments that way about beetles and Christmas plays and the color of Dr. Watson’s eyes. We bickered over possible suspects: she was sure that our murderer had a Sherringford association, but I couldn’t imagine why he or she wouldn’t have acted the year before. I still couldn’t imagine why I’d be a target. When I found a nest of prescription bottles hidden in her violin case, we had a pitched battle over the fact that she was still using oxy. “It’s none of your business,” she’d said, furious, and grew even angrier when I insisted that it, in fact, was. How could it not be? I was her friend. Maybe that’s why the worst rows we had were about nothing at all. After we had it out one night about the way she always sprawled out on the love seat, leaving me to sit on the floor, I stormed from the lab to find, the next morning, that she’d brought in a folding chair. “For you,” she said, with an idle gesture; it was all we really had room for in that small space.
But we didn’t always egg each other on like that—more often, it was the opposite. Instead of yelling at her, I’d find myself sucked in by her hypnotic stare and unrelenting train of logical thought until I was letting her do something like pluck out my nose hair for an experiment. (To be fair, she did promise to do my chemistry homework for a month in exchange.) She taught me how to pick a basic lock, and after I’d finally maneuvered my pins into the right position and heard the telltale click and fallen back against the love seat in relief, she pulled a blindfold over my eyes and made me do it again. Later, after Holmes said she hadn’t been allowed any when she was little, I bought a full-to-bursting bag of bulk candy from the union store and set it before her like an offering to a king. Deep in thought, she’d refused to try any of it, rolling her eyes at the very suggestion. When I returned from stepping out to take a call from my mother, I found her trying, very unsuccessfully, to bite into an everlasting gobstopper.
With all my time spent in Sciences 442, the outside world grew more and more strange. Sometimes, spending a day in Holmes’s lab made it feel like a bunker we’d stocked against a nuclear apocalypse and moved into before it happened. When Tom texted me to ask who I was taking to the dance, I found myself blinking hard in the lab’s dim light, trying to remind myself that I could actually emerge into the unirradiated world and go.
But I didn’t have a date, and told myself I didn’t want one. When I thought about the dance, I kept imagining it taking place at some other Sherringford: one where spending an evening with the most fascinating girl I knew meant disco balls and shitty music, not Bunsen burners and bloodstains. One where going out into a sea of my classmates would be something other than absolute torture. There was no way to forget I was a murder suspect when people I didn’t even know still stopped talking every time I walked into a classroom. Dobson’s room was still roped off with yellow police tape. His former roommate Randall still tried to trip me in the hallways. My teachers all either handled me like glass or ignored me, except for whispery Mr. Wheatley, my creative writing teacher, who pulled me aside to say he was happy to listen if I ever needed an ear. I thanked him, though I didn’t take him up on it. He was just offering because he was a nice guy. Even so, it felt good to have someone acknowledge, sanely, what was happening to me.