“And this is your only way to do it in peace, because you don’t ever really get to be alone,” I said, not realizing until too late that I’d worked this out aloud.
Nick looked surprised, but pleasantly. “The PPOs and I have a pact—they let me lose them once a week, and I pretend not to know that they followed me here anyway,” he said. “As long as I’ve no idea where they are, I mostly forget about them.”
“Well, I should leave you to it, then,” I said. “I don’t want to step all over your one moment of privacy.”
He dropped back down onto the blanket. “Oh, don’t go racing away on my account. I’ve got loads of coffee to share and you look like you need it.”
“What, no morning tea?”
“I am going to tell you something extremely dramatic that would rock the monarchy to the core,” Nick said, opening the Thermos and pouring into the lid. “I am not a fan of tea. Gran keeps insisting that I’m simply not drinking it properly. After a while I gave in and told her she was right. It is not worth it to argue with the Queen about her PG Tips.”
“So your secret perversions are crosswords and coffee,” I said, settling in beside him and taking the steaming cup. “Truly depraved.”
“My father would agree with you.” But that time he wasn’t smiling.
“My dad and I once had a fight because I refuse to put ketchup on my hot dogs,” I said.
“That’s possibly the most American sentence I’ve ever heard.”
“I am possibly the most American person at Pembroke,” I pointed out. “But rest easy. We made up. The hole in our relationship was patched with Cracker Jack.”
Nick’s face was blank.
“Candied popcorn, with peanuts,” I clarified. “They sell it at baseball games. There’s always a prize inside, like a ring or something. I keep all mine—one for every game Dad and I ever went to together. I must have fifty by now.”
I felt Dad’s absence right then. Against all odds, the Cubs had a shot at winning the division, and it was hard for us to have our traditional pregame panic attacks, thanks to the time difference and the fact that he kept accidentally hitting send on all his emails in mid-sentence.
As if reading my mind, Nick asked, “So you two are close, then?”
“Yeah, my dad’s the best,” I said, hugging my knees to my chest. “We like to road-trip to away games and eat the grossest snacks we can find along the way, just the two of us.”
I picked at my shoe, swallowing a lump in my throat. Nick seemed to sense that my mood was shifting, and picked up the crossword again.
“‘Decrepit and remote cathedral church,’ two words, five and four letters,” he read from the crossword sheet. He frowned. “It’s an anagram, I think.”
“Do you honestly enjoy doing those, or is this just a competition?”
“When you get one right, you feel like the most brilliant person alive, which I could do with a bit more often,” he said. “But it mostly boils down to a competition with Freddie.”
“I know how that feels,” I said. “Lacey is really competitive, and she usually wins.”
“I find it hard to believe that you’re the loser, landing here at Oxford,” Nick said.
“I’m totally lucky to be here,” I said. “But she didn’t even apply. She claims pre-med does not allow for a year abroad.” It was a direct quote. “You know, when we applied to colleges, I didn’t think it made a difference where I went if what I wanted was art, so I followed her to Cornell. But after a while, that felt like her experience, not mine. Sometimes I wonder…”
Nick let me trail off.
“I’ve never told anyone this, actually,” I said. “But in eighth grade, Lacey cheated at algebra. Math was her one weakness, and I was pretty good at it. She spent the entire night before the test freaked out that she was going to fail, or worse, get a lower grade than I did for the first time ever. And then halfway through the test, I noticed her copying mine. Of course our grades came back identical, with all the same mistakes, but she told the teacher I’d copied her.”
Nick’s blue eyes got wide.
“Yeah. Pretty ballsy,” I said. “But I knew she wasn’t being malicious. She just didn’t know how to handle the role reversal when she wasn’t doing better than I was.”
“So what did you do?”
“I took the fall,” I said. “Told them I was afraid of being branded the stupid twin. They felt sorry for me, I got a month of detention, and after that, I threw a couple of tests so it’d look like I was making steady improvement.”
“That’s very stand-up of you,” Nick said, pouring me more coffee.
“It was also cowardly of me,” I said. “She was so grateful, she did all my chores for the month that I was grounded, and loaned me her favorite shirt, which…in Lacey currency, she might as well have given me gold bars.” I smiled at the memory. “It stresses her out when things don’t come easily, and I’ve always hated seeing her like that. But I probably didn’t need to be that laid-back. The cheating thing was the first time I volunteered myself into the sacrificial role, and now it’s almost like I’m stuck there.”
“Is that why you came all the way to Oxford, do you think?” Nick asked.
“I’m not sure I ever thought of it that way,” I said. “Maybe. I love being a twin, but people always want to define you in relation to each other, and I guess we slip into that trap, too.”
“I certainly know that feeling,” Nick said, tapping his crossword wryly.
“Not to get all philosophical on you before breakfast,” I teased.
“Yes, I prefer my philosophy with a side of toast, but we can’t have everything.”
A light breeze ruffled Nick’s crossword pages. He clamped a foot down on them and cocked his head contemplatively.
“I’m sorry it’s taken this long for us to have an actual conversation,” he said.
“It’s all good. We’re talking now. Even if it was mostly me yapping about my sister.”
“I feel like I have to be so careful all the time,” he said. “I have a non-hilarious conversation just once, and then the next day the papers write that I’m ‘Nick the Prick,’ because I wasn’t grinning like a madman. But if I’m having too much fun, I’m a drunken lout.”
Nick’s bitter tone, it turns out, was because both of these had already happened.
“It gets exhausting. I forget how to be sometimes when I’m not on,” Nick continued. “That’s why I like coming out here at dawn. I have insomnia but I can’t roam the halls like some medieval ghost when my room starts to feel constricting. I have to get out.”
“Well. You never have to be on with me. I promise,” I said, kicking out my legs and lying down on the blanket. “You can do your crosswords and drink your heathen coffee and chill. You’re not my sovereign.”
“Yes, your ancestors saw to that.” He grinned, stretching out next to me, folding his arms under his head. Then he jerked upward.
“Notre Dame,” he said. He felt around for the crossword and glanced at it. “Yes, ‘decrepit’ means it’s an anagram of ‘and remote,’ and you get Notre Dame, in France.”