“Must not have eaten enough,” he said once he was upright again.
“After all your training?” moaned Gaz. “We could’ve made history! I bet thirty quid on you to crack a minute!”
I could swear Nick winked at me, but it was so slight, I may have imagined it. Terrance turned purple when he realized what happened, and when he was righted fifteen seconds later, he was roundly cheered by the entire crowd for this small individual victory against both Glug royalty and the real thing.
“Well done! You thumped me,” Nick said, clapping Terrance on the back.
Terrance just nodded, looking as though he was trying very hard to keep an avalanche of Pimm’s from decorating Nick’s shoes.
“Bloody sportsmanship,” Gaz grumbled, even as the Lemonhead declared us the winners.
Gaz was mollified by the fact that, as the Glugger with the best time, we gave him the Glug Mug trophy—a giant bottle entirely papered over with old Pimm’s labels—to keep in his window facing the quad. By the time we folded our arms around each other for the team photo that would hang in the JCR, everyone’s spirits and blood-alcohol levels were equally high. I remember Clive wriggling in and giving me a firm, overlong kiss on the cheek, and as the camera flashed, I had the distinct feeling that I’d been marked.
So when a knock came at my door much later that night, I was surprised that it was not Clive but Nick, holding the Glug Mug in one hand and a large carryall in the other. He still wore the traditional Glug uniform of microscopic shorts and a sweat headband.
“I talked to Gaz,” he announced, “and we decided this should go to you. Consider it your Cy Young trophy.”
“For baseball’s best pitcher?”
“Unless the Internet lied to me,” Nick said. “A pitcher can also be called a jug, which you chugged very nicely at your first Glug, so the Mug…” He paused. “I think I just wrote a poem.”
“It was beautiful,” I said. “I will take my Cy Young award and streak the quad with it.”
“Precisely what Gaz had hoped, I’m sure,” Nick said. “And Mr. Young, too.”
The polite thing to do was to invite him in, but my brain boiled over on me—was there a protocol for this? Was it crass to encourage a royal to park his stately behind on an unmade bed, even when there was nowhere else to sit? Was Nick even allowed to be here, given that my room was not bulletproof? Was my room bulletproof? No one had given me a dossier.
I came up with a workaround.
“Where should I put it?” I asked, pushing the door wide and gesturing at the space, which was an avalanche of books and printed pages. Oxford prefers intimate, often one-on-one sessions with professors, rather than seminars. It sounds great, but there is nowhere to hide, and I was learning that the hard way. I’d promised myself I would return to the grind after The Glug, but naturally, I was too wasted to do anything but shuffle some papers around and then watch DVDs.
Nick strode confidently inside—etiquette problem solved—and put the trophy on my desk. “Are you actually studying after a Glug? That has to be a first.”
“It’s my special time with Hans Holbein,” I said, flopping dramatically onto my bed. “Which is a problem, because I just realized our discussion is supposed to be about Hans Holbein the Younger, so now I have to start over.”
“Just say this: ‘Hans Holbein the Younger is the man whose portraits of Nicholas’s corpulent great-great-great-something-or-other Henry the Eighth are routinely ignored by filmmakers who want him to be a chiseled Adonis,’” Nick offered. “And maybe these will help.”
He handed me the bag he’d been holding. I peered inside and saw a mélange of weird-yet-delicious American junk food: Cracker Jack, Twinkies, Chiken in a Biskit, a slightly crushed box of strawberry Pop-Tarts, and a crumbled bag of Bugles. It looked like someone ransacked a 7-Eleven.
“This is perfect,” I said. “This is unbelievable.”
Nick looked pleased. “It’s to combat homesickness,” he said. “When you talked about your sister, it was like your volume setting got turned down a bit. Not that it needed to be,” he amended. “You just seemed blue. So I looked up America’s most revolting-sounding snack food and had someone in my network of spies send me a package.”
“Ceres?” I asked around the foil Pop-Tart wrapping I was opening with my teeth.
“I would never reveal my sources,” Nick said. “More importantly, is that woman surfing on a coffin?”
He gestured toward my open laptop. I had forgotten to pause what I was watching on it.
“If that’s Holbein research, then I seriously underestimated him,” Nick said.
“Turns out you can’t watch a DVD and type at the same time, so obviously I prioritized,” I said. “And yes, she is. A coven buried her alive. Her vampire brothers blackmailed someone into breaking all magical bonds for five minutes, but that started a tsunami. She’s making the best of it.”
Nick stared at me. “Pause that,” he said, walking over and quietly shutting the door.
I obeyed, thinking of how Lacey would react to me watching Devour with a prince dressed more like one of the Royal Tenenbaums while I wore ratty pajama bottoms and a Cubs T-shirt with no bra. She would stroke out.
“Right,” Nick said, sinking onto my bed. “I need a complete account of what’s going on here. And not a word to Gaz or Clive, or I’ll never hear the end of it.”
I scooted back on the bed to put a little social distance between us.
“Lacey promised to send me every new episode of our favorite show, which is this crazy-bad supernatural soap opera. I think the writers make all their decisions by throwing darts at a bulletin board,” I said. “There are vampires, werewolves, witches, one shape-shifter, a private investigator who can smell the future, and two panthers who seem like they know too much. Actual panthers, not CGI.”
Nick blinked. “Oh no. Night Nick is about to become obsessed with this.”
“Is that your insomniac side?” I guessed.
“More like his evil twin,” he said. “Freddie and I have a running joke about how once it gets late enough, Night Nick takes over, and Night Nick is a total bastard to Day Nick. He does things like watch TV for hours, instead of going to bed. Night Nick once watched all three Lord of the Rings movies instead of resting up for an official appearance with Gran. Day Nick got his ears boxed for it.” He sighed. “At least those are good. Night Nick usually has the worst taste.”
This is true. He is the only person I know who has sought out every cut-rate sequel to every dance movie of the past twenty-odd years, and I once caught him voting in the finals of a web series called So You Wanna Be the Next Real Housewife? (“It will be a crime if Ashleigh doesn’t win this, Bex,” he’d told me seriously. “Just look at her lip implants.”) I’d almost choked on my breakfast when the Guardian recently reported that our go-to TV program is Morning Worship.
Nick rewound the bit of Devour I’d been watching.
“Amazing,” he said. “You’d think the coffin would sink.”
“That’s the part that’s bugging you?”
A knock came at the door. Cilla barged in just as Nick slammed shut the laptop, closely followed by Clive, who tossed him a newspaper. On the front page, in the bottom right corner, a headline read, NICK SAYS NO TO POLO: “Horses Are Terrifying Beasts.”