August smiled to himself.
“Marie-Helene buys it,” I said, setting my jaw.
“That’s because she thinks you’re handsome.”
“And you don’t?”
Nathaniel was looking over at us now. I’d been staring. Quickly, Holmes turned to me, adjusting my collar. “You look ridiculous,” she said. Her hands were warm. “I like you much better as yourself.”
There was a trace of something in the air, sickly sweet and familiar. Forever Ever Cotton Candy. The Japanese perfume that August had given her years ago.
“You look good, Simon,” he was saying, reaching past her to clap me on the shoulder. “And really nice work, with the deductions.” It came out unnatural, like he’d learned how to compliment people from an instruction manual.
“Anyway,” Holmes said, pulling away from me. “We’ll deal with him later. Big fish first.”
“What big fish?”
There was a look on August’s face, something strange and drawn, but when I glanced again it was gone. “Charlotte, we’re going to go play pool,” he said.
“We’re playing pool? Don’t you mean in the pool?” I paused. “Why the hell would we play in the pool?”
“Go off, then,” she said, coiling a strand of hair around a limpid finger. She was already slipping back into character. “I imagine I’ll work faster on my own, anyway.”
Holmes and not-Holmes. Businesslike words in a porn star voice.
“I’m sure you will, Tabitha,” August told her, annoyed, and steered me away. Past the bar, past a circle of overstuffed chairs, past a group of men in suits all smoking and checking their phones while a girl in a skirt served them drinks. I wondered if she was one of the art students who lived here, too. If that was part of the deal. I felt sick.
There was a pool table in the corner. Unlike the heavy, ancient ones in Holmes’s house, this one was made of acrylic. You could see straight through its legs to the wall. Only the felt surface was an opaque white.
“This seems pointlessly complicated,” I said.
“What does?”
“This party. This situation. This pool table.” I kicked its leg. “Who got bored enough to make this thing?”
August was already racking the balls. “Are you any good at pool?”
I’d played some in the afternoons in a pub near my school. Which of course meant nothing, because I’d spent most of that time staring at Rose Milton, girl of my freshman daydreams. “Eh,” I said.
“Well, it’s all geometry and hand-eye coordination.” He tossed me a cue stick and lined up his shot.
“Terrific. So the idea was to drag me into the corner and ritualistically beat me, and then explain why you and Holmes ditched me in Milo’s Military Funhouse earlier?”
With a resounding crack, he broke the balls across the table. Two solids went in the far right pocket.
“Tell me,” he said, leaning against the wall. “Do you ever get sick of playing the victim?”
It was so far removed from anything he’d said before that I thought I must’ve imagined it. “Excuse me?”
“Jamie, I’ve known you for less than a day, and you already flinch every time I talk to you.”
“I’m not—”
“I haven’t been anything but nice. What, exactly, is the problem?”
“You seem—either you’re completely naïve, or you’re a fake. The way you talk to me is ridiculous. The way you look at her—” Deep breaths, I told myself. If I beat him into the floor, Holmes would kill me. “I guess I’m stripes.”
“You are, but it’s still my turn.” His eyes were on the table. The solid-colored balls had all wandered into improbable corners. I was sure he was working out some mathematical solution. “Are you really that insecure? Or is it something else?”
“Do you know what you are to her?” I snapped. “Because I do.”
“No, you don’t. Not from what I can tell. And I wasn’t asking you about Charlotte.”
I glared at him. His ugly tattoo, his posh accent, his twenty-three-year-old bullshit confidence. “Then spell it out for me, genius.”
“Maybe you need me to,” he said, and with an elegant motion, he knocked another ball into a pocket. “Maybe I need to say to you, out loud, that I didn’t diddle any children.” Another shot. Another ball. “Or that I didn’t feed her drugs. Or tell my brother to ruin her life and raze an American boarding school.”
“Or almost have me killed,” I said. “You didn’t tell him to do that either. Is there some reason you’re suddenly so mad at me?”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
August’s cue stilled in his hands. “I faked my death to escape my family. Jail time, too, but mostly them. My parents agreed to let me go; my siblings think I’m dead. I’m not the enemy. I’m not the bad guy. I thought I’d made that clear.” His face was mercilessly blank, like he’d wiped off all emotion with a cloth. But his words sounded genuine.
“I—well. ‘Enemy’ is kind of a strong word.”
“Jamie.”
“Just—take your shot.”
He looked back down at the table and, very deliberately, scratched.
I picked the cue ball off the floor. “You didn’t do anything to me, so you don’t need to feel bad. I don’t need a pity win.”
“No,” he said. “I think you need a chance to play.”
“That sounded like you’d been rehearsing it for a while.”
He scowled. “I’m trying to be nice to you.”
“Stop trying. You’re not nice. Or if you are, you’re out of practice.” I paused. “I’m not very nice either. God knows Holmes isn’t.”
That pried a smile from him, a real one, if sad. “I am nice, Jamie. I just . . . I haven’t talked to anyone in a while.”
We traded shots after that. August began playing with an ease that he hadn’t before, pointing out angles, lining up a shot for me when I couldn’t figure out how to get my blue two into the side pocket.
“Are you in love with her?” I asked him as he sank another ball.
His face went blank again. Was it his tell? Is this what he looked like when he was upset? “Are you?”
“It’s complicated.” I watched him, but his expression didn’t change. “If you aren’t, then why did you look at her the way you did? When we first arrived?”
August sighed. “I’ve been in Berlin for a few years now. I do data entry. Milo gives me a pile of spreadsheets—numbers, usually, about which air base has x number of metal gaskets—and I put it into a computer. They came from a computer in the first place, so it’s totally unnecessary. It’s fake-work. Make-work. There are actual things I could be doing for Greystone, but—”
“But you’re a Moriarty.” The waitress came by with her tray. I took a glass and offered it to August.
With a half smile, he accepted it. “Because of who my brother is, and who my aunt and uncle are, and so on, and so forth, I can’t be trusted with sensitive information. Or an interesting job, apparently.”
“Milo hates you that much?”
“Milo is a spymaster. God knows how that one worked out, for someone so determined to not leave their building. He doesn’t hate anyone. He doesn’t like anyone either. But he does love his sister, and she wanted me to have a place to go, so he did her a favor. I’m dead. Nobody out there can know I’m not dead. Nobody out in the world can recognize me. I had limited options. So I took it.” He downed his wine in a determined gulp. “Do you want to know why?”
“Yes,” I said, because I’d been wondering why for weeks.
“I took that job because there’s a ridiculous war on between my family and theirs, and I wanted to wave the white flag. If I made friends with Milo, if I convinced my parents to extend an olive branch, if I was able to smooth things over . . . but I was younger, then, and stupider. My parents won’t even talk to me anymore.”
I whistled. August made an ironic little bow. “You know what they say about
good intentions,” he said.
“No kidding.”
“So here I am. No friends. No family that aren’t criminals or would-be ones. Just me, and a mathematics dissertation I can’t finish researching, because dead men don’t do postdocs, and I work on fractals. In Antarctica. There are no dead man ships headed that way anytime soon. I live in a sad little room in Milo’s sad little palace. I can’t leave the building because . . .” He shook his head angrily. “Look, when Charlotte walked in, I was . . . I don’t know. It was like my past hadn’t been erased after all. The good and the bad, all of it—it was like it still existed somewhere out there. I still existed. I didn’t realize how lonely I’d been until I saw her.”
“And it’s as simple as that.”
“She’s my friend. Maybe it’s self-destructive for me to like her, but I do.” He shrugged. “I try not to blame her for what happened. Her parents—well, never mind. You can’t keep her in a box, Jamie, and you can’t let her do that to you, either. She and I were quite close, if you can believe it, and when it didn’t play out between us the way she needed it to, she threw a grenade at me and ran away.”
“August—”
“We were trained in the same way. We think the same way. We have the same self-destructive solutions to problems we face. . . .”
“So you’re casual bros now? I don’t buy it. You want me to believe you can just hang with the girl who ruined your life.” The words came out more caustic than I’d planned.
August blinked rapidly, almost as if he was fighting off tears, and there it was, the real emotion I’d been waiting to see—and it was brutal.
“It’s not like I have anything better to do,” he said finally. “Dead, remember?”
I eyed him. Despite the clothes and the polish and the heaps of self-pity, he was hard to dislike. Later I would wonder if it was because he reminded me of a version of Charlotte Holmes who’d been raised by the enemy.
“Do you ever get sick of playing the victim?” I asked him, because I was good at taking those kinds of openings.
“No,” he said, “it’s actually quite fun,” and he sank his last few balls one right after the other.
“Asshole.”
“For reference, that’s the only sensible way to answer that kind of question.”
“Rack the balls, dickweed,” I said, and for that night, at least, we were friends.
TWO GAMES LATER, MARIE-HELENE DRIFTED OVER IN time to catch me in the middle of a yawn.
“Long night?” She did that pretty-girl thing where she casually slid under my arm.
“No,” I told her as August took his fifth shot in a row. “I’ll win in the end.”
I wasn’t sure if I believed that. But Simon did. Simon liked how soft she was, too, and after a moment, I caught myself playing with the ends of her hair.
Honestly, it felt nice. Simple. When did I start thinking a good relationship had to be complicated?
Friendship I understood. There had to be an arc there, some kind of story that the two of you were telling just by being together. Something made up from what you wanted from the world and what you got instead. A story you reminded each other of when you needed to feel understood. I saw you in the quad that day, mine would go. I’d always thought you would be blond. I always thought you’d be my twin sister. My other half. And then I met you, and someone killed the meathead down the hall, and you became something else to me. Because other than our friendship, I felt like I had nothing to show for this year. Like I was a circuit board where all of the tangled cords ran straight to Charlotte Holmes.
And still it wasn’t just a friendship. When I’d met her, I’d stopped looking at girls in the way I used to, and I used to look at girls all the time. More than look—I made out with them in my room to Radiohead turned all the way up. I texted them to say goodnight. I was a good boyfriend, while the relationship lasted—though it never lasted long. Still, they were never my friends, not the way that Holmes was, and I didn’t know if what I was feeling was a kind of reversion to my former self. Was I re-becoming fifteen-year-old James Watson Jr., a pair of tickets to the Highcome School Spring Fling in my pocket? I was so much more now. I was past all the hopeless crushes, my inability to separate friendship and love.
Wasn’t I?
I’d been thinking for so long that what I wanted from Holmes was—everything. Like this thing between us was a Wonderland rabbit hole, that we could fall endlessly and never hit the bottom. I wanted us to belong to each other, completely, in a way where no one else could come close. Maybe I felt this way because she was so strange and private and still, somehow, had invited me in. Me, out of everyone in the world. Maybe it came from how we met, the two of us together in a foxhole. Maybe I wanted her to be my girlfriend because I didn’t see what could happen if I found myself wanting someone else. I wanted a stamp to put on our file: All boxes checked. No one else needed. She didn’t want me to touch her, but she wanted to be near me all the time. Closed circuit. Keep out.
Son of a bitch, I thought, and it wasn’t just because August had won this round, too.
“Too bad.” Marie-Helene leaned against my chest. “If you’re ready to give up, I can introduce you to someone. My drawing professor’s here. He doesn’t do video installation the way you do”—Thank God, I thought, I couldn’t BS a professor—“but maybe he could talk to you about Sieben admissions for next year?”
August was silently racking the balls for another game.
“I’ll be right back,” I told him, because the person Marie-Helene was waving at was the man I’d deduced to be Nathaniel.
“Okay, Simon,” August said, and I remembered how not-simple any of this was.
THAT WAS HOW I FOUND MYSELF STARING AT A SET OF charcoals in an industrial loft five blocks away.
“Think about form,” Nathaniel was yelling. “Think about style.”
“I’m thinking about killing him,” I told Marie-Helene, who looked horrified. Holmes would have snickered, but Holmes wasn’t there.
After an interminable hour listening to him gas on about creating from your gut, really feeling the rawness of the world in your work, I sympathized a bit more with Holmes and her aversion to expressed emotion. Talking about your feelings was a lot different from talking about “feeling” in the abstract. If this is what being an artist or a writer was like, maybe I wasn’t one after all. Especially if it involved growing some neck-beard. Nathaniel’s was as lush and overgrown as moss.
I decided that if this was the guy that Leander had been kissing, he was doing some serious slumming.
But Marie-Helene and the rest of his coterie hung on his every word. I understood why—he listened to his students’ opinions, knew things about their lives. He teased Marie-Helene about her “new crush” within minutes of meeting me. I thought about Mr. Wheatley, my old creative writing teacher, and how good it felt when he’d taken an interest in my work last fall. (Even if he’d feigned that interest for his own messed-up, villainous reasons.)
So maybe Nathaniel was a blowhard. He seemed like a nice guy, underneath it, and I sort of felt bad knowing that I was the villain in this situation.
Unless he was a villain, too.
“You should come to Sieben next year,” Nathaniel had said to me back at the party. “You’re a nice kid. Smart. I can tell that you’re smart. As usual, these miscreants are having a late night Draw ’n’ Drink tonight and they’ve talked me into coming along. Why don’t you show me what you’ve got? I can put in a good word for you with the admissions committee.”
Hence, we’d gone a few blocks over to this industrial loft, which maybe belonged to Nathaniel—God only knew—and now I was holding a piece of charcoal the way I held a cigarette the one and only time I tried to smoke one. Which, for the record, isn’t how you hold a cigarette or a charcoal.
“Is that what you call it? A charcoal?” I asked Marie-Helene, as the students around us shuffled around to look at each other’s progress, beers in hand. Na
thaniel was deeply engrossed in a girl’s work on the far side of the room. I had no idea how to approach him again, and people were beginning to put on their coats. The night was almost over.
“No.” Marie-Helene frowned at my sketchbook. “Simon, it’s been an hour. Everyone else has drawn the still life. . . .” She didn’t need to finish the thought. My page looked like it had developed chicken pox.
“It’s experimental,” I said, lifting my chin. “Very . . . Picasso-ian. My tutor always said my work was reminiscent of his Blue Period.”
Marie-Helene made a face. I couldn’t blame her, really. Simon was a pretty awful person.
SOS can you draw, I texted Holmes under the table. I’m about to be exposed as a fraud. Are you busy? Can you come?
The response was instantaneous. Not busy, she said. Have experienced abject failure. Auctioneer steadfastly denies any idea of stolen work bought/sold, even when persuaded to speak. (I didn’t want to know what sort of persuasion she meant.) Cannot draw but can fake it better than you. Address please.
She was there ten minutes later, leaning over my shoulder. “Simon,” she said, loud enough for everyone to hear, “are you still shy about drawing in front of people? He can be so self-conscious. Don’t tell me he fed you some line about making ‘experimental’ art.” With exaggerated slowness, Holmes shook her head at Marie-Helene. “Men. They’re such self-saboteurs. Can you show me where the wine is? I just had the worst night. . . .”
Nathaniel had been listening, because as Holmes led Marie-Helene away, he came over to me with a concerned expression. “Is that true, Simon? It’s okay—I know it’s a lot of pressure to work in front of more experienced artists. Do you want to talk about it?”
“Yes,” I said, “very much,” hating Holmes for fixing my whole FUBAR undercover op in about thirty seconds.
Nathaniel led me over to the corner kitchen. The loft was a giant, echoing space, brick walls and a concrete floor, but the kitchen only held a sink and a microwave. “Tea? I noticed you weren’t drinking.”