chapter 1

the first time i met her was at the tail end of one of those endless weekday nights you fan 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 her, 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 it's division at the end of every season for years. But not this year, no; kline had made a point of reminding me 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 hate 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, aweful years, but as I learned later, the Sherringford athletic director had been in the stand 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 the Sherringford itself, with its rolling green lawns and clear skies and a city center that felt smaller that 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 to get 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 devorce when I was ten.

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

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

" Your telling me your that Watson" Tom 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!"

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