“And you didn’t wake me up? What time is it?”
“You’re wearing a watch.”
“What time is it, Holmes?”
She looked blankly at me. “Seven?”
I swore, fumbling my phone out of my pocket. It was five till noon. I had a text from the school saying that classes were canceled and that grief counseling would be available in the infirmary. I also had thirteen missed calls. Ten of them were from my father, at least two were from England—Unavailable, read the caller ID—and one was a local number that I didn’t recognize. I played the message on my voicemail.
“This is Detective Shepard, calling for James Watson. . . .”
At her chemistry set, Holmes peered into the bottom of an Erlenmeyer flask. “Yellow precipitate,” she announced, more to herself than for my benefit. “Excellent. Absolutely perfect.” Humming tunelessly, she poured the solution into a test tube and stoppered it, sliding it into her pocket.
I listened to the end of Shepard’s message with a sinking stomach. “Is there a bathroom nearby?” I asked her blearily. “I need to wash my face.”
She pointed wordlessly to the laundry sink in the corner, and I splashed myself with cold water. “According to the detective,” I said, “they’ve all spoken to each other, and apparently my father is afraid I’ve hung myself from a tree branch, and we’re all meeting in my room in thirty minutes. What am I going to say to him?”
It was a rhetorical question, and a confused one, at that, but she walked over to perch on the love seat’s battered arm. “Your father?” she asked, and I nodded. She twisted her hands in her lap, and I noticed that the soft inside of one elbow was puckered with scars. I heard it was going into her arm, the redhead had said.
“I haven’t seen him since I was twelve.”
“Do you want to tell me why?” she asked. It was clear that she knew that this was what friends did—showed interest in each other’s lives, offered a willing ear when the other was upset—and that she was doing her best to mimic it. It was also clear that she’d rather be pouring a gallon of water onto a live wire.
Then again, maybe she did that for fun, anyway. Who the hell knew.
“You could tell me,” I said. “I’m sure you’ve already come to some deductions. Read some invisible bits of my past in my pinky finger.”
“It isn’t a party trick, you know.”
“I know,” I told her. “But it might be easier. For both of us.”
“Easier?” Holmes sighed, and tossed me my jacket. “Come on, or we’ll be late.”
A sharp wind cut through the quad, but the sky above was mercilessly clear. Everywhere, students huddled in clusters of two or three against the cold. Quite a few were openly crying, I noticed as we walked past; freshmen who probably didn’t even know Dobson were hugging each other.
But when they spotted me and Holmes, everyone just . . . stopped. Stopped talking, stopped weeping, stopped telling tearful stories. One by one, they turned to glare at us, and then the whispering started.
Holmes tucked her small white hand in the crook of my arm and powered me along. “Listen to me,” she said rapidly. “Your parents are English, but you were raised in America; I know that from what my family has said about yours. Your accent isn’t very strong, but how you stress your sentences is very specifically London. And you love London; I could tell from the look on your face when you first heard me speak, like you’d had a glimpse of home. You must have lived there, and at a particularly impressionable time in your life. Add in the fact that you said ‘bathroom,’ not ‘toilet’ earlier—and other times, you’ve shied away from using any slang at all, rather than make a decision to be English or American about it—and so you must have moved to London around age eleven or twelve. Am I correct?”
I nodded dizzily.
It was hard to hear Holmes talk, to learn that every one of my insignificant words and actions broadcasted my past, if one just knew how to look. But it would have been harder still to walk through the quad in silence while the rest of the school played judge, jury, and executioner. She’d known that, I thought. That’s why she’d saved her deductions for this walk: two terrible birds, one stone.
“Your jacket wasn’t always yours. It was made in the 1970s, judging from the cut and the particularly awful brown of the leather, and while it fits you well enough, it’s a touch too big in the shoulders. I’d say you’d bought it secondhand, vintage, but everything else you’re wearing was made in the last two years. So either you inherited it, or it was a gift.” She slipped her hand into my coat pocket to pull it inside out. “Magic marker stains,” she said with satisfaction. “I saw this earlier, on the couch. I doubt you were carrying Crayolas around last winter. No, more likely that it was around your house while you were growing up, and either you or your younger sister wore it, at one point, while playing at art teacher.”
“I didn’t tell you I had a younger sister,” I said.
She gave me a pitying look. “You didn’t have to.”
“Fine, so it was my father’s.” It wasn’t pleasant, being dissected. “So what?”
“You’re wearing it,” she said. “That’s enough to tell me you don’t hate him. No, it’s not as simple as hate. This is veering into psychology, and I’m sorry, I loathe psychology, but I imagine you wear the jacket because, somewhere, deep down, you miss him. You left for London at twelve, but your father lives here. You call him that, ‘my father’; you don’t call him your ‘dad.’ The very mention of him makes you tense up, and since we’ve established he hasn’t been beating you, I can safely say that it’s dread built up from a long silence. The last piece of it, of course, is your watch.”
We were nearly at Michener Hall, and Holmes paused, holding out her hand. I didn’t really see another option: I unfastened the clasp and handed it over.
“It’s one of the first things I noticed when I met you,” she said, examining it. “Far more expensive than anything else you wear. A ridiculously large watch face. And the inscription on the back—yes, here we are. To Jamie, On His Sixteenth Birthday, Love JW, AW, MW and RW.” Her eyes glittered at her discovery—no, at the confirmation of what she’d deduced—and I understood then what it would be like to hate her.
“Go on,” I said, so it would finally be over.
She ticked it off on her fingers. “Despised childhood nickname, so he doesn’t know you anymore. Very expensive gift for a teenager? Long-standing guilt. But the key is in the names. He didn’t just give you a gift from him; he made sure you knew it was from the whole family. His new family. Your mother’s name is Grace, my aunt’s mentioned it. So A stands for . . . Anna, let’s say, and MW and RW would be your half siblings, then. Even his birthday present to you is a clumsy attempt to get you to love them. You haven’t spoken for years because, most likely, he was cheating on your mother with . . . Anna? Alice? When your parents divorced, he stayed in America to start a new family. Abandoning, at least in your eyes, you and your sister.
“But your mother doesn’t resent him: she didn’t insist you box away a frankly ridiculous gift until you’re older. This watch is worth at least three grand. No, she let you wear it. They’re on good terms, even though they’re divorced; perhaps she’s relieved that he’s moved on, as she’d already accomplished that feat before the marriage had ended. Either way, she’d be upset that you aren’t on better terms with him—a boy needs his father, et cetera, et cetera. Your stepmother must be younger, then, but not so young that your mother disapproves.”