will assess your current level, both through classwork and through some informal testing, and you’ll be provided with modified versions of the exams. If necessary, we’ll give you take-home exams that you can complete over the holidays. Your teachers are prepared to work with you if you are willing to put in the effort. All right?”
Claudia fished around in the top drawer of her desk and produced a small black box. She jacked this into her computer and pushed it across the desk in my direction.
“Are you right-handed?” she asked me.
I nodded.
“Just put your right index finger on the pad there and hold it still for a moment.”
There was a square on the top of the box marked off in white. I put my finger on it, and she clicked the mouse a few times.
“Rotten thing,” she mumbled. “Always takes a . . . ah. There we go. Now, let me show you how this works.”
She led me back to the front door and pointed to a small touchpad.
“Try it now to see if your fingerprint was accepted.”
I put my finger on the pad. A purple light came on, and there was a click.
“Oh, good. Sometimes it doesn’t like the first time we take the impression. This is how you get in and out. It gives you ten seconds, or you have to do it again. The system monitors the whereabouts of all students. We know when you go in and out of this building. And no one goes in or out between eleven at night and five thirty in the morning. Now, why don’t you go up and get yourself settled back in?”
The stairs of Hawthorne had a pronounced, musical creak as I walked back up to my room. My hall was much more narrow than I remembered, and I clunked along to my room with my last bag. Mr. Franks, our ancient custodian, had taken all my other things up at some point when I was in with Claudia. The room was weirdly bare. All of Jazza’s things were over on one side. The two other beds—Boo’s and mine—were stripped down to the mattress. I would have spread out in every direction, but Jazza had kept to her third with a devotion that made me tear up a little. It was like she refused to accept we weren’t there. The only thing Jazza had added was a new floor lamp—a wobbly thing with a plastic upturned shade. It gave the room a warm glow when I switched it on.
I went to the window and looked out at the square. That’s where the police had found the girl’s body. That was the square I ran across when I met the Ripper. Everything had a Ripper memory attached to it. Julia had given me a whole talk about forging new mental connections to things. She’d said that after a while, the Ripper stuff would take on less significance, and when I looked around Wexford, I’d have new, more positive thoughts come to mind.
She also said it could take a while.
The building was freezing. During the day, they shut the heat down to conserve electricity. It came back up again at night and in the morning, but it was never really that warm. In Bristol, my parents had kept the house so hot, the windows would steam. This was considered very American, but in our defense, we are Southern. We get cold.
I was not going to be a baby about a little cold. I put on my fleece and set to work unpacking boxes and bags. I refilled my drawers, trying to remember the exact way I had arranged things before my untimely departure. I piled all my textbooks in order of subject. Further maths, French, English literature (from 1711 to 1847), art history, and normal history. I stepped back and examined my effort. Yup. Those were my books. Familiar, yet foreign, a wealth of information stashed behind every spine.
What I needed to do now was figure out how behind I was. That meant going through all the notes my teachers had been sending me while I was gone, marking off chapters, counting up assignments.
I pulled out the lists I’d been given: the pages I was supposed to have read, the essays I was supposed to have started, the problem sets I’d been given. I did the math. It didn’t take long. Zero plus zero plus zero plus zero equals zero. When should I tell my teachers that I hadn’t actually done anything since I left?
I flipped to the front of my binder and looked at the term schedule. Just about two weeks. That’s all that was left of the term. So what if the exams started in . . . twelve days?
I shut the binder. One step at a time. Today’s step was just getting back to school. No need to take it all in at once.
I turned my mind to other matters. I still had no idea where Stephen, Callum, and Boo were, but now that I was back in London, it seemed like I’d have a much better chance of finding them. Possibly. I wasn’t exactly sure how. They didn’t really have a beat or a known routine. The only one who was ever in the same general place was Callum. He covered the Underground network. I guessed I could ride the Tube for hours and hours, trying to catch a glimpse of him at some station. That wasn’t much of a plan. London is a very big place—one of the biggest cities in the world—and the Underground went on for hundreds of miles and had dozens of stations and millions of riders.
I would think of something. In the meantime, I needed something to do, someone to talk to. And there was someone here I could have a chat with. But to do that, I needed to put the uniform back on. Back on with the gray skirt and the white blouse. I could feel myself becoming a Wexford person again through the feel of the fabric—the slight polyester squeak of the skirt, the stiff collar of the shirt. But it was always the tie that did it for me. I looped it around my neck and fumbled with it for a moment until I had it right. I was Wexford property again.
Alistair spent most of his time in the library because he thought Aldshot smelled bad. His favorite spot was up in the stacks, in the romantic poetry section, in a dark little corner by a frosted glass window. This was where I found him, spread out in his usual way.
Alistair died in the 1980s, when overcoats were big and hair was even bigger. He was used to people walking past him, or over him, or through him, so he didn’t really pay any attention when I stood by his Doc Martens.
I was careful to leave a lot of distance between us. Blowing up one potential friend by accident, well, that can happen. Blowing up another would be carelessness.
“Hey,” I said, “Alistair.”
A slow drawing up of the head.
“You’re back,” he said.
“I’m back,” I replied.
“Boo said they took you to Bristol. That you wouldn’t be coming back, ever.”
“I’m back,” I said again.
Alistair wasn’t the hugging type, but I took the fact that he hadn’t already started reading again as a sign that he welcomed my presence. I slid down the wall and took a seat on the floor, tucking up my legs so we didn’t tap into each other.
“One thing,” I said. “Never touch me. Don’t even get near me.”
“Nice to see you too.”
“No, I mean . . . something’s gone wrong with me. And now I am bad for you. Really. No joke.”
“Bad for me?”
It’s really hard to tell someone you can destroy them with a touch. It’s not the kind of thing that should ever come up in conversation.
“I’m unlucky,” I said, in an attempt to cover. “I attract nutjobs and trouble.”
“So why’d you come back?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“You got stabbed,” he said.
“I got better. I was bored sitting around at home.”
“And you came back here? Why didn’t you go back to America?”
“Someone’s renting our house,” I said. “And my shrink said I needed to come back to get my normal life back.”
“Normal life?” That got a dark little laugh.
It was good to see Alistair