A Study in Charlotte

“Are you okay?” Tom asked, hitting Pause. The girl in the video froze obediently.

“Fine,” I said. “Bad day.”

“You don’t seem to have a lot of good ones,” he observed. There was a smear of chocolate on his argyle sweater-vest, and I realized the wrapper on his desk was from the Flake bar Holmes had given me. It shouldn’t have been a big deal—Tom and I had standing permission to raid each other’s food stashes, within reason—but I took it like a blow to the gut.

“I don’t see why that’s shocking, considering,” I said, and willed him to go away.

Ever since I’d come to Sherringford, I’d existed in a state of constant loneliness without ever actually being alone. Privacy was an illusion at boarding school. There was always another body in the room, and if there wasn’t, one could enter at any moment. Being Holmes’s friend might have taken the edge off that loneliness, but it didn’t dissipate entirely. At best, our friendship made me feel as though I was a part of something larger, something grander; that, with her, I’d been given access to a world whose unseen currents ran parallel to ours. But at our friendship’s worst, I wasn’t sure I was her friend at all. Maybe some human echo chamber or a conductor for her brilliant light.

I hadn’t realized I was thinking out loud until Tom cleared his throat.

“I had a friend like that once,” he said.

“Oh?” I said, uninterested. But Tom had a thoughtful expression on, and I didn’t want to be cruel.

“Andrew,” he said. “He was the only person I really kept in touch with after I left for Sherringford, and last summer, we hung out all the time. He’s this all-state football star, and he always gets perfect grades, and I swear he could get away with murder because of it. Because ninety percent of the time, he was so good, he could stay out all night downtown, partying, and he’d come in at dawn and his parents would just buy that he was out late studying. I felt . . . invincible when I was around him.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Cops caught us drinking down by the lake, and he pinned the whole thing on me.” Tom flashed a self-deprecating smile. “His family is like a big deal—they have all this money, and we don’t, not anymore—so they got the charges dropped. But I was in the doghouse for months. The worst part of it was that he stopped talking to me. If anything, I should’ve been the one who got to tell him to eat shit.”

“I’m sorry.” It was hard to imagine Tom being on anyone’s bad side. He was the guy who could wear a baby-blue suit to homecoming and still have one of the hottest girls in school as his date.

“It’s not worth it being the sidekick,” he said. “I bet she just uses you to do her dirty work. Andrew used to do that to me.”

“Sometimes,” I said, hiding how close to the bone that cut.

He gave me a knowing look. “So she doesn’t even let you do that.”

“No,” I snapped. “She trusted me to sniff out Mr. Wheatley. And I went out and got a fucking concussion because no one would investigate the school nurse. I don’t call that doing nothing.”

Tom looked like I’d hit him. “You what?”

“All right, it was stupid, and I couldn’t have planned it exactly—maybe I would’ve broken my arm, or twisted my ankle—but I couldn’t exactly fake having to stay in the infirmary all day, could I? How else could Holmes have snuck in there without breaking in? The door’s alarmed, they keep everyone’s medicine in there.”

“No—I—”

He was casting around for words, but none were coming. Did he really think that I was so useless I couldn’t help her out at all?

“I didn’t know you were that stupid,” he said finally.

“Thanks, you twat.”

“Don’t mention it,” he said. “Look, I’m meeting Lena for dinner, so I gotta go. I’m doing some work at the library after that, but we can talk more about your life choices tonight, if you want to.”

Tom and Lena. Mine and Holmes’s shadow-selves. Or maybe we were the shadows, and they the happy, well-adjusted versions. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’m fine.”

After throwing some books in his bag, he took off. He must’ve bumped the keyboard as he went, though, because the video he’d been playing unpaused. The girl on the screen began shimmying out of her clothes again. I plunked down in Tom’s chair and closed the window, then sat there for a minute, staring at the notes Tom had pinned above his desk, the tiny mirror he’d put there.

That’s when I noticed it.

His desk and mine were across from each other, meaning that most nights we did our homework back to back. The only mirror in our room had been clumsily hung to the right of where I sat, its bottom half obscured by my desk. If I sat up in the middle of the night, I’d catch a glimpse of my reflection and panic that we had an intruder. That was, more or less, all that mirror was good for.

I didn’t mind that much. I cared a bit about what I wore on the weekend, but our school uniform was exactly that, a uniform, and so the way I looked in it didn’t change. Tom, on the other hand, wore all kinds of product in his hair, and rather than lean awkwardly over my desk to apply it, or do it in the bathroom (which he claimed was “embarrassing,” as if he’d be dispelling some notion that his boy-band mop grew in that way), he’d tacked up a locker-sized mirror above his desk.