I should have had something witty to say. Something strange and funny and just a little bit morbid, something I could say under my breath as I dropped down on the seat beside her. Something to make her look up sharply and think, I want to know him.
I had nothing.
I turned tail and fled.
TOM ARRIVED HOME HOURS LATER, CHEERFULLY EMPTY-HANDED. “She cleaned me out,” he laughed. “I’ll win it back next time.” That’s when I learned that Holmes’s poker game had been running weekly since she showed up the year before. They’d just gotten more popular since Lena started bringing vodka. “And probably more lucrative for Charlotte too,” Tom added.
For the next weeks, I hit snooze over and over in some wild hope that the morning would just pack up and leave me alone. The worst of it was first-period French, taught by the autocratic, red-suspendered Monsieur Cann, whose waxed mustache looked like it belonged on a taxidermist’s wall. Almost every other Sherringford student had been there since freshman year, and that early in the morning all anyone wanted to do was sit by their oldest friends and catch up on the night before. I was no one’s oldest friend. So I took an empty double desk for myself and tried not to fall asleep before the bell rang.
“I heard she made, like, five hundred dollars last night,” the girl in front of me said, pulling her red hair into a ponytail. “She probably practices online. It’s not fair. It’s not like she needs money. Her family has to be loaded.”
“Close your eyes,” her seatmate said, and blew lightly on her friend’s face. “Eyelash. Yeah, I’ve heard that too. Her mom is like, a duchess. But whatever. It’s probably just going up her nose.”
The redhead perked up at that. “I heard it was going into her arm.”
“I wonder if she’d introduce me to her dealer.”
The bell rang, and Monsieur Cann shouted, “Bonjour, mes petites,” and I realized that, for the first time in weeks, I was completely awake.
I spent the rest of the morning thinking about that conversation and what it meant for her. Charlotte Holmes. Because they couldn’t have been talking about anyone else. I was still mulling it all over as I walked across the quad at lunch, dodging people left and right. The green was choked with students, and so in a way, it wasn’t a surprise when the girl I was thinking about stepped out from what seemed to be an invisible door and directly into my path.
I didn’t run into her; I’m not that clumsy. But we both froze, and began doing that awful left-right-you-go-first shuffle. Finally, I gave up. Screw all of this, I thought mulishly, it’s a small campus and I can’t hide forever, I might as well go ahead and—
I stuck out my hand. “Sorry, I don’t think we’ve met. I’m James. I’m new here.”
She looked down at it, eyebrows knitted, like I was offering her a fish, or a grenade. It was sunny and hot that day, early October’s last gasp of summer, and most everyone had slung their uniform blazer over one shoulder or was carrying it under their arm. Mine was in my bag, and I’d loosened my tie, walking down the path, but Charlotte Holmes was as fastidiously put together as if she were about to give a speech on etiquette. She had on slim navy pants instead of the pleated skirt most of the girls wore. Her white oxford shirt was buttoned up to her neck and her ribbon tie looked as if it’d been steamed. I was close enough to tell that she smelled like soap, not perfume, and that her face was as bare as if she’d just washed it.
I might’ve just stared at her for hours—this girl that I’d wondered about off and on my whole life—had her colorless eyes not narrowed at me suspiciously. I started, as if I’d done something wrong.
“I’m Holmes,” she said finally, in that marvelous, ragged voice. “But you knew that already, didn’t you.”
She wasn’t going to shake my hand, then. I slid both of them into my pockets.
“I did,” I admitted. “So you know who I am. Which is awkward, but I figured—”
“Who put you up to this?” There was a flat kind of acceptance in her face. “Was it Dobson?”
“Lee Dobson?” I shook my head, bewildered. “No. Put me up to what? I mean, I knew you’d be here. At Sherringford. My mum told me that the Holmeses had sent you; she keeps in touch with your aunt Araminta. They met at some charity thing. Right? They signed the His Last Bow manuscript? It went for leukemia patients or something, and now they write emails back and forth. Are you in my year? I was never clear on that. But you’ve got a biology textbook there, so you must be a sophomore. A deduction, ha. Maybe best avoid those.”
I was babbling like an idiot, I knew I was, but she had been holding herself so straight and still that she looked like a wax figurine. It was so at odds with the commanding, freewheeling girl I’d seen at the party that I couldn’t make heads or tails of it, what had happened to her since then. But my talking seemed to calm her down, and though it wasn’t funny, or morbid, or witty, I kept on going until her shoulders relaxed and her eyes finally lost some of their sharp sadness.
“I know who you are, of course,” she said when I finally stopped to draw breath. “My aunt Araminta did tell me about you, and Lena, though it would have been obvious anyway. Hello, Jamie.” She extended a small white hand, and we shook.
“I hate it when people call me Jamie, though,” I said, pained, “so you might as well call me Watson instead.”
Holmes smiled at me in a closed-mouth kind of way. “All right, then, Watson,” she said. “I have to go to lunch.”
It was a dismissal if I’d ever heard one.
“Right,” I said, tamping down my disappointment. “I was going to meet Tom anyway; I should go.”
“Right, see you.” She stepped neatly around me.
I couldn’t leave it at that, and so I called after her, “What did I do?”
Holmes flung me an unreadable look over her shoulder. “Homecoming’s next weekend,” she said drily, and went on her way.
By every account—and by that, honestly, I meant my mother’s—Charlotte was the epitome of a Holmes. Coming from my mother, that wasn’t a compliment. You’d think that after all this time, our families would have drifted apart, and in most ways I suppose we had. But my mother would run into the odd Holmes at Scotland Yard fund-raisers or the Edgar Awards dinners or, as in the case of Holmes’s aunt Araminta, an auction of my great-great-great-grandfather’s literary agent’s—Arthur Conan Doyle’s—things. I had always been enthralled with the idea of this girl, the only Holmes who was my age (as a kid, I thought we’d meet and the two of us would go on wild adventures), but my mother always discouraged me without saying why.
I knew nothing about her but that the police had let her assist on her first case when she was ten years old. The diamonds she helped recover were worth three million pounds. My father had told me about it during our weekly phone call, in an attempt to get me to open up to him. It hadn’t worked. At least, not in the way that he’d planned.
I dreamed about that diamond theft for months. How I could’ve been there by her side, her trusted companion. One night, I lowered her down into the Swiss bank from a skylight, my rope the only thing holding her above the booby-trapped floor. The next, we raced through the cars of a runaway train, chased by black-masked bandits shouting in Russian. When I saw a story about a stolen painting on the front page of the newspaper, I told my mother that Charlotte Holmes and I were going to solve the case. My mother cut me off, saying, “Jamie, if you try to do anything like that before you turn eighteen, I will sell every last one of your books in the night, starting with your autographed Neil Gaiman.”