(Before they’d divorced, my father was prone to saying, “You know, your mother’s only a Watson by marriage,” with a pointedly lofted eyebrow.)
The only real conversation my mother and I’d had about the Holmeses happened right before I left. We’d been discussing Sherringford— Well. She had been monologuing about how much I’d like it there while I packed up my closet in silence, wondering if I flung myself out the window, would it properly kill me or just break both my legs. Finally, she made me tell her something I was looking forward to, and to spite her (and because it was true), I told her I was excited, and nervous, to finally meet my counterpart in the Holmes family.
Which didn’t go over well.
“Lord knows how your great-great-great-grandfather put up with that man,” she said with a roll of her eyes.
“Sherlock?” I asked. At least now we weren’t talking about Sherringford.
My mother harrumphed. “I always imagined he’d just been bored. Victorian gentlemen, you know. Didn’t have too much going on. But it never seemed to me that their friendship ran both ways. Those Holmeses, they’re strange. They still drill their children from birth in deductive skills. Discourage them making friends, or so I’ve heard. I can’t say it’s healthy to keep a child away like that. Araminta is nice enough, I suppose, but then again I don’t live with her. I can’t imagine what it was like for the good Dr. Watson. The last thing you need is to take up with someone like her.”
“It’s not like I’m going to marry this girl,” I said, digging in the back of my closet for my rugby kit. “I was just interested to meet her, that’s all.”
“I’ve heard that she’s one of the stranger ones,” she insisted. “It’s not as if they’ve sent her away to America on a lark.”
I looked pointedly down at my suitcase. “No, that’s usually not a reward.”
“Well, I hope for your sake she’s lovely,” my mum said quickly. “Just do be careful there, love.”
It’s stupid to admit to it, but my mother isn’t usually wrong. I mean, the whole sending me to Sherringford thing was a terrible idea, but I understood it at its core. She had been paying quite a bit—money we didn’t really have—for me to attend Highcombe School, and all because I’d insisted that I wanted to be a writer. There were a few famous novelists who taught there . . . not that any of them had really taken to me. Sherringford, despite its obvious drawbacks (Connecticut, my father) had as strong an English program, or better. And they offered to take me for free, as long as I did my best impression of an excited rugger for them now and again.
But at Sherringford, I kept the writer thing to myself. A constant, low-level drone of fear kept me from showing my work to anyone; with someone like Dr. Watson in your family, you didn’t want to invite any comparison. I did my best to hide my work away, so I was surprised when it almost came up that day over lunch.
Tom and I had grabbed sandwiches and sat down under an ash tree off the quad with some other guys from Michener Hall. Tom was digging around in my bag for some paper to spit his gum into. Normally it would’ve annoyed me, having someone shuffle carelessly through my things, but he was acting like any of my old Highcombe friends would, and so I let him.
“Can I tear a sheet out of this?” he asked, holding up my notebook.
It was only through sheer force of will that I kept from grabbing it out of his hands. “Yeah,” I said indifferently, fishing chips out of a bag.
He flipped through it, quickly at first but slowing as he went. “Huh,” he said, and I shot him a warning look that he didn’t see.
“What is it?” someone asked. “Love poems? Erotic stories?”
“Dirty limericks,” Dobson, my hallmate, said.
Tom cleared his throat, like he was about to perform a page from what was, to be honest, my journal.
“No, drawings of your mom.” I snagged it and tore a page from the back, making sure to tuck it under my knee afterward. “It’s just a journal. Notes to myself, that kind of thing.”
“I saw you talking to Charlotte Holmes on the quad,” Dobson said. “You writing about her?”
“Right.” There was a nasty note in his voice I didn’t like, and I didn’t want to encourage it with a real response.
Randall, his ruddy-faced roommate—he was on the rugby team with me—shot him a look, and leaned in like he was about to tell me a secret.
“We’ve been trying to crack that nut for a year,” he said. “She’s hot. Wears those tight little pants. But she doesn’t go out, except for that weird poker game, and she doesn’t drink. Only likes the hard stuff, and does it alone.”
“They’re trying PUA,” Tom said to me mournfully, and at my blank look, he elaborated. “Pick-up artistry. You neg the girl—like, an insult hidden in a compliment. Dobson keeps telling her he’s the only guy who likes her, that everyone else thinks she’s ugly and strung out but that he likes the junkie look on girls.”
Randall laughed. “Doesn’t fucking work, at least not for me,” he said. “I’m moving on. Have you seen those new freshmen? A lot less work for a lot more payoff.”
“Not me. I cracked the nut.” Dobson smirked at Randall. “And, you know, she might do me some favors again. Since I can be such a charming date.”
Liar.
“Stop talking,” I said quietly.
“What?”
When I get angry, my English accent thickens until it’s clotted and snotty, a full-on cartoon. And I was furious. I probably sounded like the bloody Queen.
“Say it again, and I’ll fucking kill you.”
There it was, that weightless rush, that floor-bottoming-out exhilaration that comes from saying something you can’t take back. Something that would lead to me smashing in some deserving asshole’s face.
This was the reason I played rugby in the first place. It was supposed to be a “reasonable outlet” for what the school counselor called my “acts of sudden and unreasonable aggression.” Or, as my father put it, snickering like it was some joke, “the way you get a little punchy sometimes.” Unlike him, I never looked back on them with anything like pride, the fights I got into at Highcombe and, before that, in my public school in Connecticut. I always felt disgusted with myself afterward, ashamed. Classmates I liked just fine the rest of the time would say something that would set me off, and immediately, my arm would cock back, ready to swing.
But I wasn’t going to be ashamed this time, I thought, as Dobson jumped to his feet, swinging wildly. Randall grabbed his shirt to hold him back, his face a mask of shock. Good, hold him, I thought, that way he can’t run, and I applied my fist to Dobson’s jaw. His head snapped back, and when he looked at me again, he was smirking.
“You her boyfriend?” he said, panting. “’Cause Charlotte didn’t tell me that last night.”
In the background, shouting—the voice sounded like Holmes’s. A hand pulled at my arm. In the second I was distracted, Dobson broke free of Randall’s grip and tackled me to the grass. He was the size of a steam liner, and with his knee on my chest, I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. Leaning into my face, he said, “Who do you think you are, you little prick?” and spat, long and slow, into my eye. Then he hit me in the face, and hit me again.