The party was in the basement kitchen. Though it was stocked with plates and pots and even a spindly four-burner stove, the pans were all so dented they looked like they’d been worn to war. Tom squeezed against the stove while I shut the door behind us; within seconds, one of the knobs rubbed a half-moon of grease onto his sweater-vest. The girl next to him smiled thinly and turned back to her friends, a tumbler of something dangling from her hand. There had to be at least thirty people in there, packed in shoulder to shoulder.
Grabbing my arm, Tom began shouldering us to the back of the tiny kitchen. I felt like I was being pulled through a dark, dank wardrobe into some boozy Narnia.
“That’s the weird townie dealer,” he whispered to me. “He’s selling drugs. That’s Governor Schumer’s son. He’s buying drugs.”
“Great,” I said, only half-listening.
“And those two girls? They summer in Italy. Like, they use ‘summer’ as a verb. Their dads run an offshore drilling operation.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“What, I’m poor, I notice these things.”
“Right.” If it was a joke, it was a lame one. Tom might’ve had a hole in his sweater-vest, but back in our room, he also had the smallest, thinnest laptop I’d ever seen. “You’re poor.”
“Comparatively speaking.” Tom dragged me along behind him. “You and me, we’re upper-middle class. We’re peasants.”
The party was loud and crowded, but Tom was determined to drag me all the way to the far wall. I didn’t know why, until a strange voice curled up through the cigarette smoke.
“The game is Texas Hold’em,” it said, hoarse, but with a bizarre, wild precision, like a drunk Greek philosopher orating at a bacchanal. “And the buy-in tonight is fifty dollars.”
“Or your soul,” chirped another voice, a normal one, and the girls in front of us laughed.
Tom turned to grin at me. “That one’s Lena. And that one’s Charlotte Holmes.”
The first I saw of her was her hair, black and glossy and straight down to her shoulders. She was leaning forward over a card table to pull in a handful of chips, and I couldn’t see her face. This wasn’t important, I told myself. It wasn’t a big deal if she didn’t like me. So what if somewhere, back a hundred years and change and across the Atlantic Ocean, some other Watson made best friends with some other Holmes. People became best friends all the time. There were, surely, best friends at this school. Dozens. Hundreds.
Even if I didn’t have one.
She sat up, all at once, with a wicked smile. Her brows were startling dark lines on her pale face, and they framed her gray eyes, her straight nose. She was altogether colorless and severe, and still she managed to be beautiful. Not the way that girls are generally beautiful, but more like the way a knife catches the light, makes you want to take it in your hands.
“Dealer goes to Lena,” she said, turning away from me, and it was only then that I placed her accent. I was forcibly reminded that she was from London, like me. For a moment, I felt so homesick I thought that I’d make an even worse show of myself and throw myself at her feet, beg her to read me the phone book in that extravagant voice that had no business coming out of such a thin, angular girl.
Tom sat down, flung five chips on the table (on closer inspection, they were the brass buttons from his blazer), and rubbed his hands together theatrically.
I should have had something witty to say. Something strange and funny and just a little bit morbid, something I could say under my breath as I dropped down on the seat beside her. Something to make her look up sharply and think, I want to know him.
I had nothing.
I turned tail and fled.
TOM ARRIVED HOME HOURS LATER, CHEERFULLY EMPTY-HANDED. “She cleaned me out,” he laughed. “I’ll win it back next time.” That’s when I learned that Holmes’s poker game had been running weekly since she showed up the year before. They’d just gotten more popular since Lena started bringing vodka. “And probably more lucrative for Charlotte too,” Tom added.
For the next weeks, I hit snooze over and over in some wild hope that the morning would just pack up and leave me alone. The worst of it was first-period French, taught by the autocratic, red-suspendered Monsieur Cann, whose waxed mustache looked like it belonged on a taxidermist’s wall. Almost every other Sherringford student had been there since freshman year, and that early in the morning all anyone wanted to do was sit by their oldest friends and catch up on the night before. I was no one’s oldest friend. So I took an empty double desk for myself and tried not to fall asleep before the bell rang.
“I heard she made, like, five hundred dollars last night,” the girl in front of me said, pulling her red hair into a ponytail. “She probably practices online. It’s not fair. It’s not like she needs money. Her family has to be loaded.”
“Close your eyes,” her seatmate said, and blew lightly on her friend’s face. “Eyelash. Yeah, I’ve heard that too. Her mom is like, a duchess. But whatever. It’s probably just going up her nose.”
The redhead perked up at that. “I heard it was going into her arm.”
“I wonder if she’d introduce me to her dealer.”