“I’m to fetch you,” I shouted back. My voice barely carried over the blaring fire alarm.
“I cannot hear you, so you might as well go away.” His arms flew into the air as he spoke, then dived down again, adjusting vials, tubes, and the flames of several Bunsen burners. He moved around the table with an odd sort of violent grace, like a mad symphony conductor directing the bubbles and billows, until finally he was facing me, though he did not look up. His school uniform was as disheveled as his lab: white shirt wrinkled and untucked, with sleeves rolled up to his elbows; navy-and-silver-striped tie loosened and askew; and blue sweater flung over the side of a chair so that one sleeve pooled on the dusty floor.
“I’m to fetch you,” I shouted again, adding, “because of the alarm,” which immediately silenced.
He did look up then, his dark blue eyes fiery with what appeared to be a form of righteous indignation, though his expression dulled to pure intrigue as he took in my appearance.
“You must come out to the courtyard when the alarm—”
“Edwardian?” He focused in on the buttons of my bodice, and it was all I could do to keep my hands from adjusting the neckline rather higher.
“Late Victorian,” I corrected. “But you—”
“Just a moment.” Sherlock scowled as he reached to flip his tablet back around to face him. He squinted at the screen and mumbled, “Period costuming,” as he typed one-handed.
“What about it?”
He followed my gaze down to his screen. “Topics I have not yet mastered.”
“You wish to master period costuming?” My hand slid up to rest on my hip as my lips formed the smile that most infuriated my father. It appeared to have no such effect on Sherlock.
“Asks the girl dressed to meet Her Highness Victoria.”
“Point,” I conceded.
“Ah, we’re keeping score. Good to know.”
I rolled my eyes, and then a silence fell between us that normally would have been my cue to dash, but the way he was staring made me feel squirmy. “I came from the theater, just now.” I waved my copy of the play in the space between us by way of explanation, though I wasn’t sure why I felt the need to explain myself to him. “It’s a graded performance of—”
“An Oscar Wilde. I’m not sure our school’s theater performs anyone else.”
I started to affirm that it was indeed an Oscar Wilde, but apparently the boy wasn’t finished with his guessing.
“You’re the understudy, though you’d rather not be. You took this class for some reason other than your love of the art form.” I opened my mouth to speak, but he stepped closer, his finger in the air. “Possible that it’s a family craft, and you do it to please a parent. Father? No, mother.”
I held back a sigh and stared at him until I was very sure he was done. He had already interrupted me three times in our short conversation, and I wasn’t sure I could repress my violent tendencies were he to cut me off once more.
“Close, but no.” Truth? He was almost exactly right. But I wasn’t about to feed the enormous monster of an ego that he displayed with every condescending quirk of his thin, girlish eyebrows. He would score no more points off me.
“Nonsense. That dress is at least two sizes too small, and not at all fitted for your figure, which is”—a soft pink skirted his cheek as he stared at my corset again—“endowed.” Only his deepening blush saved him from my outrage. “And despite my admitted lack of mastery on the subject, I do not for a moment believe that orange trainers were popular in late Victorian times. Then there’s the matter of your worn and tattered copy of the play, which, by the dated doodles I can now see on the cover, definitely belonged to your mother.”
“Are you quite done?” I asked, much more gently than I felt. I might also have slid my hands over the doodles in question. My mother had gone through some kind of Duran Duran obsession, apparently.
“Are you ready to admit that my observations are correct?”
“There are more pressing concerns.” I glanced behind him, but he didn’t take the cue.
“Nothing is more pressing than the truth.”