A Study in Charlotte

For Kit and me, at sixteen

I had no idea that such individuals existed outside of stories.

A
S
TUDY
IN
S
CARLET
,
S
IR
A
RTHUR
C
ONAN
D
OYLE

T
HE FIRST TIME
I
MET HER WAS AT THE TAIL END OF ONE OF
those endless weekday nights you could only have at a school like Sherringford. It was midnight, or just after, maybe, and I'd spent the last few hours icing my sprained shoulder in my room, the result of a rugby scrimmage gone horribly wrong just minutes after it'd started. Practices tended to do that here, something I'd learned in the first week of school when the team captain shook my hand so voraciously I thought he was about to pull me in and eat me. Sherringford's rugby team had landed at the bottom of its division at the end of every season for years. But not this year, no; Kline had made a point of reminding me of that, smiling with every one of his strange little teeth. I was their white whale. Their rugger messiah. The
reason why the school shelled out not just a tuition scholarship for my junior year but my transportation costs, too—no mean feat when you visit your mother in London every holiday.

The only real problem, then, was how much I hated
rugby. I'd made the fatal mistake of surviving a maul on the rugby field last year at my school in London before accidentally sort of bringing our team to victory. I had only tried because, for once, Rose Milton was in the stands, and I had loved her for two passionate, secret, awful years, but as I learned later, the Sherringford athletic director had been in the stands as well. Front row, scouting. You see, we had quite a good rugby team at Highcombe School.

Damn them all.

Especially my cow-eyed, bull-necked new teammates. Honestly, I even hated Sherringford itself, with its rolling green lawns and clear skies and a city center that felt smaller than even the cinder-block room they gave me in Michener Hall. A city center that had no fewer than four cupcake shops and not one decent place to get a curry. A city center just an hour away from where my father lived. He kept threatening to visit. “Threatening” was the only word for it. My mother had wanted us to get to know each other better; they had divorced when I was ten.

But I missed London like an arm, or a leg, even if I had only lived there for a handful of years, because as much as my mother insisted that my coming to Connecticut would be like coming home, it was more like coming to a manicured jail.

All this is just to give you an understanding of how, that
September, I could have struck a match and happily watched Sherringford burn. And even so, before I had ever met Charlotte Holmes, I was sure she was the only friend I would make in that miserable place.

“Y
OU
'
RE TELLING ME THAT YOU
'
RE
THAT
W
ATSON.
” T
OM WAS
delighted. He smashed his round Midwestern accent into the flattest Cockney I'd ever heard. “My dear chap! My dear fellow! Watson, come here, I want you!”

The cell of a room that we shared was so small that when I flipped him off, I almost poked out his eye. “You're a genius, Bradford. Seriously. Where do you get your material?”

“Oh, but dude, this is perfect.” My roommate tucked his hands in the pockets of the argyle sweater-vest he always wore under his blazer. Through a moth hole, I watched his right thumb wriggle in excitement. “Because the party tonight is at Lawrence Hall. And Lena is throwing it because her sister always ships her vodka. And you
know
who Lena rooms with.” He waggled his eyebrows.

At that, I finally had to close my book. “Don't tell me you're trying to set me up with my—”

“Your soul mate?” I must've looked violent, because Tom put two very serious hands on my shoulders. “I'm not trying,” he said, enunciating each word, “to set you up with Charlotte. I'm trying to get you
drunk.
”

Charlotte and Lena had set up camp down in the Lawrence Hall basement. As Tom had promised, it wasn't hard to get past the hall mother. Each dorm had one (in addition to
our army of RAs), an older woman from town who oversaw her students from the front desk. They sorted mail, arranged for birthday cakes, lent an ear when you were homesick—but they also enforced the hall rules. Lawrence's was famous for sleeping on the job.

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.

T
OM 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.”

The bell rang, and Monsieur Cann shouted,
“Bonjour, mes petites,”
and I realized that, for the first time in weeks, I was completely awake.

I spent the rest of the morning thinking about that conversation and what it meant for her. Charlotte Holmes. Because they couldn't have been talking about anyone else. I was still mulling it all over as I walked across the quad at lunch, dodging people left and right. The green was choked with students, and so in a way, it wasn't a surprise when the girl I was thinking
about stepped out from what seemed to be an invisible door and directly into my path.

I didn't run into her; I'm not that clumsy. But we both froze, and began doing that awful left-right-you-go-first shuffle. Finally, I gave up.
Screw all of this,
I thought mulishly,
it's a small campus and I can't hide forever, I might as well go ahead and—

I stuck out my hand. “Sorry, I don't think we've met. I'm James. I'm new here.”

She looked down at it, eyebrows knitted, like I was offering her a fish, or a grenade. It was sunny and hot that day, early October's last gasp of summer, and most everyone had slung their uniform blazer over one shoulder or was carrying it under their arm. Mine was in my bag, and I'd loosened my tie, walking down the path, but Charlotte Holmes was as fastidiously put together as if she were about to give a speech on etiquette. She had on slim navy pants instead of the pleated skirt most of the girls wore. Her white oxford shirt was buttoned up to her neck and her ribbon tie looked as if it'd been steamed. I was close enough to tell that she smelled like soap, not perfume, and that her face was as bare as if she'd just washed it.

I might've just stared at her for hours—this girl that I'd wondered about off and on my whole life—had her colorless eyes not narrowed at me suspiciously. I started, as if I'd done something wrong.

“I'm Holmes,” she said finally, in that marvelous, ragged voice. “But you knew that already, didn't you.”

She wasn't going to shake my hand, then. I slid both of them into my pockets.

“I did,” I admitted. “So you know who I am. Which is awkward, but I figured—”

“Who put you up to this?” There was a flat kind of acceptance in her face. “Was it Dobson?”

“Lee Dobson?” I shook my head, bewildered. “No. Put me up to what? I mean, I knew you'd be here. At Sherringford. My mum told me that the Holmeses had sent you; she keeps in touch with your aunt Araminta. They met at some charity thing. Right? They signed the
His Last Bow
manuscript? It went for leukemia patients or something, and now they write emails back and forth. Are you in my year? I was never clear on that. But you've got a biology textbook there, so you must be a sophomore. A deduction, ha. Maybe best avoid those.”

I was babbling like an idiot, I knew I was, but she had been holding herself so straight and still that she looked like a wax figurine. It was so at odds with the commanding, freewheeling girl I'd seen at the party that I couldn't make heads or tails of it, what had happened to her since then. But my talking seemed to calm her down, and though it wasn't funny, or morbid, or witty, I kept on going until her shoulders relaxed and her eyes finally lost some of their sharp sadness.

“I know who you are, of course,” she said when I finally stopped to draw breath. “My aunt Araminta did tell me about you, and Lena, though it would have been obvious anyway. Hello, Jamie.” She extended a small white hand, and we shook.

“I hate it when people call me Jamie, though,” I said, pained, “so you might as well call me Watson instead.”

Holmes smiled at me in a closed-mouth kind of way. “All right, then, Watson,” she said. “I have to go to lunch.”

It was a dismissal if I'd ever heard one.

“Right,” I said, tamping down my disappointment. “I was going to meet Tom anyway; I should go.”

“Right, see you.” She stepped neatly around me.

I couldn't leave it at that, and so I called after her, “What did I do?”

Holmes flung me an unreadable look over her shoulder. “Homecoming's next weekend,” she said drily, and went on her way.

By every account—and by that, honestly, I meant my mother's—Charlotte was the epitome
of a Holmes. Coming from my mother, that wasn't a compliment. You'd think that after all this time, our families would have drifted apart, and in most ways I suppose we had. But my mother would run into the odd Holmes at Scotland Yard fund-raisers or the Edgar Awards dinners or, as in the case of Holmes's aunt Araminta, an auction of my great-great-great-grandfather's literary agent's—Arthur Conan Doyle's—things. I had always been enthralled with the idea of this girl, the only Holmes who was my age (as a kid, I thought we'd meet and the two of us would go on wild adventures), but my mother always discouraged me without saying why.