The Name of the Star - Maureen Johnson [42]
She dropped onto her bed. I sat next to her.
“It’s fine,” I said. “You did fine. They promised we wouldn’t get in trouble.”
“I don’t care about that! I don’t understand how I didn’t see him. And who was that? That policeman? He didn’t look like a policeman. He looked our age. Can you be our age and be a policeman? I suppose you can, but . . . he doesn’t look like one, does he? Though, I suppose . . . I suppose policemen don’t look like any particular kind of person, but still. He doesn’t look like one, does he?”
No. He didn’t look like a policeman. Policemen were supposed to look . . . not like him. He did look young. More than that, he looked a little too well kept, with fancy designer glasses and smooth, pale skin.
Jazza took the card from my hand and examined it.
“This is a mobile number,” she said. “Shouldn’t a police card have the number of a main switchboard or something? Shouldn’t you just dial 999 if there’s a problem? I’ll bet you he’s a reporter. He has to be a reporter. It’s illegal to masquerade as a policeman.”
None of this was helping my queasy feeling. I began to pace.
“I think you should go back to the library and report what just happened,” she said.
“I don’t really want to go back out there right now.”
We had a few moments of independent fretting, then Jazza got up with a determined look on her face.
“If Claudia suspects something, that we went out, she might tell Charlotte. Charlotte’s her minion.”
“So? Charlotte doesn’t know we went out.”
“But she knows about the window bars in the toilet. Come on.”
I followed Jazza back downstairs, where she proceeded to the bathroom in what I suspect was supposed to be a very stealthy way. It was a little more rabbitlike, with quick moves and nervous glances. She dashed into the bathroom and, once she checked to make sure it was empty, went right to the window, opened it, and gave the bars a shake. They were firmly bolted again.
Jazza gripped the bars until her knuckles went white and closed the window.
“I hate her,” she said.
Even I wasn’t sure that it was fair to blame Charlotte for the fact that someone had become aware of the window bars. But Jazza needed to blame Charlotte. It was important for the balance of her mind. Someone had to be blamed if we went down for this, and I was glad it wasn’t me.
“We’re having tea,” she said calmly. “And we are not going to get upset. I am going to make the tea.”
With that, she strode back upstairs. She grabbed two mugs off the shelf above her desk and two tea bags from her jar of special tea bags. I left her to it, pulled my robe on over my clothes, and went to the window. Outside, the line of police was still marching down the green. They stretched from one side to the other, no more than two feet apart. The only area they avoided was the part with the white tent, which had its own staff searching the ground. They were quite literally looking at every single inch of the green.
Last night felt like it had happened years before.
And then I noticed that right below our building, down on the cobblestone street, was the young policeman. He was staring right at my window, right at me. Jazza was right. He couldn’t be a policeman. He looked really young. Yet, there he was, standing around in the middle of half the police in London. You would think that they would notice if there was a fake policeman in their midst.
I made eye contact with him, making sure he knew I saw him. He quickly walked away.
15
THE WHITE TENT WAS THERE ALL DAY SUNDAY. It glowed at dusk, when it was illuminated by dozens of high-powered work lights. The press was there too, hovering on the edges of campus, watching. The school sent around an e-mail saying how really, really safe it all was, even though there was a homicide investigation going on on the green at that very second, and several psychologists were being called in to talk to anyone who felt like they needed support.
And people were freaked out, but they showed it in weird ways. Back at home, people would have been weeping and doing a lot of very public group hugs. At Wexford,