This was so obvious and outrageous a lie that I almost laughed out loud. Eloise didn’t have allergies. She smoked more than a tire fire.
“Your room was originally a triple,” Claudia went on. “There’s plenty of space. If you have anything in the third wardrobe, you need to get it out tonight. That will be all, I think.”
We returned to our room and shut the door.
“She knows,” Jazza said.
I nodded.
“This totally blows,” I added.
After briefly analyzing the dimensions, we concluded that there was no way this room was a triple. At most it was maybe four feet wider than the rooms around it, and it did have an extra window, but that was it.
“You never know,” Jazza said. She had recovered from the initial shock and was trying to be the ever-bright-and-cheery one. “She may be lovely. I mean, I like having just the two of us in here, but it might not be bad.”
“We’re losing our sofa.”
I looked mournfully at the extra bed we had turned against the wall and loaded down with Jazza’s two hundred cushions.
“We hardly ever use it,” Jazza babbled on. “And it could have been worse. It could have been so much worse.”
But I think she felt the same way I did. This was our room, our little peaceful spot in the universe, and we’d lost it because we’d snuck out. I fell silent and looked up at the sky through the panes of the window. It was getting dark so much earlier. It came on fast here. The trees were black outlines against the dark lavender of the London night sky.
“Crap,” I said.
17
THE NEXT MORNING, WE TOOK A FINAL LOOK AT OUR room as it was before we headed off to breakfast. When I returned to do a book switch-out after lunch, our room had a new occupant. Bhuvana was stretched out on the bed, talking on the phone. She gave me a little wave and a smile and wrapped up her conversation. She seemed fine with the position of the bed and had redecorated it with a huge pink and gray duvet and a stack of metallic silver and pink pillows. There were bags everywhere—suitcases, duffel bags, shopping bags.
Bhuvana was, as her name suggested, of Indian descent. She had very straight, very black hair, with one bright streak of artificial cherry red on the right side. It was cut into a severe line just at the shoulders, and she had razor-straight bangs. Along with the fact that she wore a lot of black eyeliner and long, dangling gold earrings, she reminded me of pictures of Cleopatra. She clearly wasn’t from India, though. Her accent was as British as they come—fast, urban, kind of Cockney, I guess. I could barely understand her at points.
“Aurora, yeah?” she said as she hung up the phone. She bounced off the bed to embrace me and give me two air kisses.
“Rory,” I corrected her. “You’re Bhuvana?”
“Boo,” she corrected me right back. “Only my gran calls me Bhuvana.”
“Only my grandma calls me Aurora.”
So we had that in common. Boo was several inches taller than me. She too had put her uniform on right away, but she wore it with a swagger, her tie slightly undone and jerked to the side.
“Did your parents just . . . drop you off?” I asked, looking at the stuff piled around the floor.
“Well, I live in London,” she said breezily. “I was in Mumbai visiting family, yeah? And I got sick, which is why I’m late for term. So, yeah, got catching up to do.”
Boo’s things looked like they had been hastily packed—everything randomly shoved into bags. Clothes, mugs, wires, pictures, trinkets. Her clothes were definitely more interesting than ours. Boo tended to lean toward the sparkly, the stretchy, and the dance-friendly.
“I’ve never boarded before,” she said, shoving handfuls of red and purple lace underwear into a drawer. “This is all new to me. Never been away from home.”
“Me neither,” I said.
“Let’s see . . .” She pulled out a wrinkled schedule from her pocket and passed it over to me. I pulled out my own wrinkled schedule from the front pocket of my bag. They were completely identical.
“I guess we do the same stuff,” Boo said, smiling. “Looks like we have hockey now.”
She produced a hockey stick from the rubble, as well as a proper mouth guard—a fancy, fitted one, not the kind you boiled, like mine. She also had the shoes and the pads and a bag to carry them all.
Once we arrived at the field, Claudia gave Boo a short test to determine her level of experience, and it was clear from her reaction that Boo was the girl she had been waiting for all her life. Boo was an athlete. She was fast, she was strong, she was coordinated. She ran up and down the field with that stick like a thing born to run up and down a field with a stick. She nailed me in the face guard with a ball. My new roommate was a champion.
“We play every day?” she asked excitedly as we returned to Hawthorne.
“Every day,” I answered miserably.
“That’s brilliant! We didn’t have much sport at my old school. Sorry about your face. Is it all right?”
“It’s fine,” I said. And it was fine, even though the shock of the blow had sent me flying backward and it had taken two people to help me get up.
From there, we returned for our quick showers, then we had one hour of further maths, which Boo did not like at all. All the confidence of the field drained from her face. I walked her to dinner and introduced her around. Jazza, of course, was gushing and polite, but I could see her taking in the details—the earrings, the stripe in the hair, the sound of Boo’s voice. I couldn’t tell what Jazza was thinking, but from the wideness of her eyes, I sensed faint alarm. Boo was not like us. Boo didn’t read Jane Austen in the tub or play cello for fun. Even with my limited knowledge of English accents, I could hear the rough edges of Boo’s voice. Her accent was urban. She put “yeah” at the end of her sentences.
Boo, for her part, greeted everyone warmly, and she shared my love of meats. We got almost the same meal—sausages and mash with extra gravy. She wasn’t a delicate eater. I liked that.
“You’ll have to take those earrings off, Bhuvana,” Charlotte said from across the table. “Earrings have to be close to the ear—studs or small hoops only. Sorry.”
She didn’t sound even remotely sorry. Boo eyed her, then removed the earrings and set them on the table next to her spoon.
“You’re head girl?” Boo asked, picking up her knife and chopping up a sausage.
“Yes. You can come to me any time you like to help you get settled in.”
“I’m all right,” Boo said. “I have these two.”
She indicated Jazza and me as if we had been friends all our lives.
“And it’s Boo,” she added. “Not Bhuvana. Boo.”
Boo didn’t exactly flex her muscles or punch her fist into her palm, but there was a certain pulling back of the shoulders that suggested that Boo was used to dealing with things in a very different way than Charlotte was used to. It wasn’t hard to imagine Boo grabbing hold of Charlotte’s updo and putting her face down in a plate of mashed potatoes. It was not difficult to imagine this at all.
“Boo,” Charlotte repeated coolly. “Of course.”
Back in our room, Boo continued to unpack. Jazza watched in silence, staring at the pile of heels and sneakers Boo had just dumped out of a plastic bag.
“So, yeah, I was in Mumbai, and I got really sick . . .” She pulled an electric kettle out of a pile of clothes.
“We’re not really supposed to have that in here,” Jaz said worriedly.
“It’s just a kettle,” Boo replied with a smile. “I’ve got to have my tea.”
“Well, me too, but—”
“I’ll hide it, then.”
Boo shoved the kettle on the windowsill and half covered it with Jazza’s lovingly hung curtain.
“But it’s the electricity, I think,” Jazza went on. “I think that the—”
There was a pounding at our door—the kind of heavy thump, thump, thump you might get during a friendly police raid when they come at
your door with a battering ram. Jazza jumped a little and mouthed “the kettle, the kettle!” but Boo was already opening the door. Call Me Claudia was standing there, resplendent in a bright plaid dress.
“Bhuvana!” she boomed. “Call me Claudia. Settling in all right?”
“Brilliant, yeah,” Boo said.
“Coming in midterm can be quite difficult. I assume you two will do everything to help her along?”
Jazza and I nodded and mumbled our yeses. Claudia lingered for a moment, a widening smile on her face. She was staring at Boo as if Boo were the source of true Enlightenment.
“Excellent hockey skills,” Claudia said. “Truly excellent.”
“I was captain of mixed hockey at my old school, yeah.”
“Excellent. Well, finish settling in. You know where I am if you need me.”
Boo closed the door behind Claudia. “See?” she said. “No problem with the kettle! So what do you lot do around here?”
“We study,” Jazza said. “And there’s tea and cereal down the hall.”
“For fun?” Boo said.
Jazza was stumped.
“We can’t go out much,” I said. “Studying. Stuff like that.”
“What school were you at before here?” Jazza asked politely.
“Just the local sixth form. But it’s not that good and they thought I was advanced and all, and my gran is paying, so they moved me here.”
Boo dumped out an entire bag’s worth of sequined pillows. Jazza’s gaze moved over all of Boo’s things, the electronics and clothes and accessories. I did the same, trying to figure out what she was looking for—and I saw soon enough. Something was missing. Books. There were no books at all.
“What subjects are you taking?” Jazza asked.
“Oh, same as Rory. French and, um . . .”
Boo flopped down on the ground and stretched herself long across the floor to reach the front pocket of her bag and plucked out the already crinkled schedule. She rolled onto her back to read.
“. . . further maths, literature, art history, and normal history.”
“Are you doing A levels in all of those?” Jazza asked.
“What? Oh, yeah. Well, maybe. Yeah. Some of them.”
Jazza and I sat on our beds on opposite sides of the room judging our new roommate, who was now doing some leg stretches and flashing us her blue lace underwear in the process. Boo went right on talking, unaware or unconcerned by any awkwardness. Mostly, she talked about television shows I didn’t know or had only heard of in passing.
There was nothing wrong with Boo. She was certainly friendly, and I was in no position to judge anyone for their attitude toward their work. Wexford wasn’t the toughest school in England, but it wasn’t the easiest either. Boo’s attitude toward her classes just wasn’t quite right. You didn’t just show up a month late, then roll around on the floor, barely aware of what subjects you were taking.
But then, I realized, I had no idea what happened in England. Maybe it was completely normal to do just that. I was the outsider, not Boo. I’d built up an illusion in this room with Jazza—an illusion that this was home, that I understood the rules here. Boo, quite accidentally, made me remember that I understood very little, and at any moment, the rules could change.
18
GATORS ARE JUST SOMETHING YOU HAVE TO ACCEPT where I come from. Most don’t go anywhere near the houses, even though there are lots of delicious children and dogs there. Every once in a while, though, an alligator has a lightbulb moment and decides to take a stroll and see the world a bit. One day when I was eight or so, I opened the back door, and I saw this thing way at the end of the yard. I remember thinking it was a big black log—so, of course, I went down to look at it, because what’s more exciting than a big log, right? I know. Children are stupid.
I had gotten about halfway down the yard when I realized the log was moving toward me. Something in the primitive part of my brain immediately said, “Alligator. Alligator. ALLIGATOR.” But for a second, I couldn’t move. I had to stand there and watch the thing come toward me. It looked genuinely happy, like it couldn’t believe its luck. It started slowly, waddling its way closer to get a better look. And there I was, with my brain still saying, “ALLIGATOR. ALLIGATOR.” Something finally clicked, and I started running like hell toward the house, screaming one of those high-pitched screeches only kids can do.
Okay, maybe it didn’t get that close and it didn’t move that much, but it still came toward me, and if you’ve been chased by an alligator at any distance or speed, I don’t think people should get all “But how far was it? And how fast was it going?”
And I’m not saying that having Boo Chodhari in my room was exactly like having an alligator in my yard, but there were certain similarities. It broke the illusion that this space was our own. It wasn’t. The school was just an environment—a little ecosystem—over which we had no control.
My initial assessment was correct—Boo and Jazza were not exactly the best match. Both of them were nice, and both of them tried, but they were simply too different. There were no fights, but they didn’t say much to each other, which was out of character for both of them. And Boo was always around. Always. If I went to study, she went to study. If I went to the bathroom, she needed to “do her teeth” or sit on the radiator and talk and file her nails. And her stuff . . . Her stuff was everywhere. Bras, shirts, papers, cords . . . There was a path of stuff from Boo’s bed to the closet to the door. We had to make our beds and keep things generally kind of tidy. Charlotte could enforce this. Before Boo came, Charlotte never bothered to check our room, because it was always fine. But now she was stopping by once, sometimes twice a day to get Boo to pick her crap up off the floor. This did not breed warm feelings between the two of them.
Also, Boo carried two phones with her at all times. Two. She tried to hide this fact at first, but I’d see her with them both. One was a very new, very shiny phone. The other was older, with actual buttons instead of on-screen ones. I finally asked her why, and she said that she reserved one phone for guys she’d just met. “So they don’t have your regular number, yeah? They have to earn the regular number, once I make sure they’re not creepers.”
And though she dutifully sat with us in our room and in the library or the common room, and she carried around books and opened them, Boo did absolutely no work whatsoever. In fact, she had the power to diminish the concentration of anyone sitting near her. You’d realize that she was humming under her breath or tapping her long nails on the table, or you’d hear the sound of a soap opera or reality show leaking from her headphones, and your own attention would dissipate.
Jazza quickly became obsessed with observing all Boo’s study habits and reporting them to me. The days got shorter. The air got colder and crisper, and my knowledge of Boo Chodhari’s every study habit grew exponentially.
“Has she even started on that essay you have for English literature?” Jazza asked me over breakfast on the three-week anniversary of Boo’s arrival. Boo generally didn’t make it to breakfast. That was the only time I didn’t see her.
“I have no idea,” I said, drinking my lukewarm juice. “I haven’t started it yet.”
“I just don’t understand her,” Jazza said. “She didn’t even bring any books with her. She does literally no work. Literally. She missed a month of school. And why does she always carry those two phones? Who carries two phones?”
I continued eating my all-sausage breakfast, letting Jazza get it out of her system.
“It’s you she likes,” Jazza said. “She always has to go where you go.”
“We’re in the same classes.”
“Your roommate again?” Jerome said as he joined us. This was not a new topic for breakfast.
“I’m finished now,” Jazza said.
Jerome started violently slicing apart his fried eggs. It was fascinating to watch him eat. He chowed down with the speed and force of a well-organized military campaign. He didn’t so much have breakfa
st as defeat it.
“Bit of news,” he said. “Someone’s donated a pile of money for a Bonfire Night party. No one’s going to be allowed out, so they’re doing something here.”
“What’s Bonfire Night?” I asked.
“Remember, remember the fifth of November?” Jerome said.
“Nope,” I replied. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Guy Fawkes Night,” Jazza explained, sighing at the change in subject. “Fifth of November, 1605. A group of people led by Guy Fawkes had a plan to blow up the Houses of Parliament, the Gunpowder Plot. But he failed and was executed. So on the fifth of November, we burn things.”
“And blow things up,” Jerome added, throwing down his fork. “Fireworks are very important. Anyway, it’s going to be a dance, and it’s fancy dress. Kind of a belated Halloween thing.”
“Formal?” I said.
“Fancy dress means costumes,” Jazza said.
It was clearly one of those mornings when I was particularly American. That happened sometimes.
“Thursday the eighth is the final Ripper night. So they’re having an early Bonfire Night party the Friday before, and then they’re going to lock us in until the Ripper stuff is over. Hope you like being indoors, because we’ll be in all week.”
“I don’t care,” Jazza said. “Just as long as it ends.”
“Who knows?” Jerome said. “Maybe this Ripper wants to keep it going. No reason for him to stop. Maybe he wants to be the new and improved Ripper.”
Jazza shook her head and got up to refill her tea.
“What if he does that?” I asked Jerome. “What happens?”
“Well, then the police have no idea when he’ll strike or where or how many times, and everyone freaks out every single day. I don’t think the eighth of November is the thing to worry about—it’s what comes after. I think that’s when whatever this is really starts.”
“But you’re an insane conspiracy nut,” I pointed out.
“Granted.”
Jerome and I had reached that point where I could say things like that. It was only a slight exaggeration. I ripped off a piece of my doughnut and threw it at him. He had eaten everything on his plate and had no food to fire back with, so he crumpled his napkin and chucked it at my head. Charlotte gave us a reproachful look from the end of the table.
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