Percy has parked the Rolls-Royce directly in the courtyard of the school’s main entrance. He stands leaning against the car, his cell phone in one hand, his cap in the other. The silver strands that run through his dark hair seem to increase every day. When he sees me, he immediately puts away his cell phone, puts his cap back on and stands up straight. That’s not really necessary, and he knows it.
I walk down the steps, and the people around me willingly avoid me. Apparently, I look just as bad as I feel. It’s all the fault of this damn events committee! I already regret that I didn’t just keep my mouth shut and keep the suggestion with the Victorian party to myself. When I think of the list of to-dos that the others formulated afterwards, I feel completely different. If I were to throw the party at home, I could delegate everything to service providers and wouldn’t have to lift a finger myself. But in this case, I’m the service provider, as Ruby told me with raised eyebrows.
I just want to scream when I think that I still have a whole term full of such meetings ahead of me. In addition to the fact that I find it unbearable not to be able to participate in training anymore.
This is definitely not how I imagined my last year of school.
When I arrive at the car, I actually just want to fall into the back seat, but before I can get in, Percy grabs my arm briefly.
‘Sir, you look as if your mood is not good.’
‘You have a splendid power of observation, Percy.’
He looks uncertainly back and forth between me and the car door. ‘You may want to curb your temper a little. Ms Beaufort is not in good shape.’
At the moment, the stupid event team is forgotten. ‘What happened?’
Percy seems indecisive for a moment, as if he is not sure what to tell me and what not. Finally, he takes a step towards me and says softly, ‘She just talked to someone. A young man. It looked like an argument.’
I nod, and Percy opens the door so I can get into the car.
Fortunately, the windows are darkened. Lydia looks terrible. Her eyes and nose are bright red, and tears have left dark gray traces on her cheeks. She has never cried as much as she has in the last few weeks, and it makes me incredibly angry to see her like this and at the same time to know that there is nothing I can do about it.
Lydia and I have always been inseparable. When you have a family like ours, you have no choice but to stick together, no matter what. I can only remember a few days in my life when I didn’t see my twin sister. Whenever she feels bad, I have a strange feeling in my chest – and she feels the same way. Our mother explained to us that this is often the case with twins, and made us promise early on to cherish this connection throughout our lives and not to recklessly jeopardize it.
‘What’s the matter?’ I ask after Percy has started the car.
She doesn’t answer.
‘Lydia—’
‘It’s none of your business,’ she hisses.
I raise an eyebrow and look at her until she turns away from me and stares out the window. That seems to be the end of our conversation.
I lean back and look outside as well. The brightly colored trees pass us by so quickly that they blur into a blurred picture, and I wish Percy would drive slower. Not only because the thought of home makes me sick, but above all to give me more time to break Lydia’s silence.
I’d like to help her, but I have no idea how. Over the past few weeks, I’ve tried everything to find out what happened between her and Mr. Sutton, but she blocks every time. Actually, I shouldn’t be surprised. We may be inseparable, but we’ve never talked about our love life. There are simply things you don’t want to know about your sister – and vice versa. But this time it’s different. She’s devastated, and I’ve only seen her like this once, almost exactly two years ago. And at that time it almost destroyed our family.
‘Graham’s going crazy,’ Lydia whispers suddenly, when I’m no longer expecting it.
I turn back to her and wait for her to continue. The anger I feel towards this scumbag of a teacher bubbles up in me again and again, but I push it back. I don’t want Lydia to close herself off to me any more than she already does.
‘I’m so afraid Ruby will tell Lexington,’ she croaks, her voice nasal.
‘She won’t do that.’
‘How do you know that?’ In her gaze, I recognize the same skepticism I felt towards Ruby when I first met her.
‘Because I continue to keep an eye on them,’ I answer after a while.
Lydia doesn’t look convinced. ‘You can’t run after her all the time, James.’
‘I don’t have to. She’s on the event team.’
Lydia looks at me in surprise, and I smile crookedly.
It is good to observe how the tension seems to fall off her shoulders, not completely, but at least a little bit. After a while, she says quietly: ‘I’ve totally forgotten about the event team. How corrosive is it there?’
I just grumble.
‘Have you talked to Dad yet?’ she asks cautiously.
I shake my head and look out of the window at the moment when the Rolls-Royce comes to a stop. In front of us, the façade of our mansion rises into the air, the gloomy sky with the heavy clouds above it a reflection of my mood and what lies ahead of me today.
‘How would you describe me in three words?’ asks Alistair over the music blaring from my stereo. He sits on the sofa, bent over his cell phone, and his blond curls fall into his forehead as he looks at the display with his head tilted.
I have just prepared two gin and tonics for us and come back to the sofa with the glasses. Without looking up, Alistair reaches out and takes one from me.
This is already our third round, and finally the blurry feeling in my head that I’ve been waiting for all this time sets in. It makes me forget that the others are at lacrosse practice. And above all, it represses the memory of the last two hours. My father’s voice is already only a quiet hiss.
‘How about ‘excessively engraver’?’
Alistair grins. ‘That would be correct. But I shall probably get on with modesty.’
Laughing, I drop down on the sofa next to him. I can’t get rid of the impression that he had already had a drink or two when I wrote to him and asked if he wanted to come over. Apparently, the fact that he is suspended from the team does not leave him as unscathed as he would have us believe.
In any case, he burst into my living room with the announcement that from now on I would keep my hands off Maxton Hall guys and take a closer look at ‘this online dating’ instead. He said that with a broad grin, as if he wasn’t really serious and only put on the profile because he was bored.
But I know him well enough to know that he is anything but indifferent to the matter. He’s tired of the guys in Maxton Hall because they just want to make out with him secretly. Unlike most of them, Alistair has been publicly admitting to his sexuality for two years – much to the displeasure of his asshole parents, who have been treating him like an outcast ever since.
If he finds someone online who doesn’t make him feel like a dirty secret, I’m all for it. Especially since it distracts me from my own problems, and that’s very convenient for me right now.
‘Does it have to be exactly three words?’ I ask. He shakes his head. ‘Then … ‘nice guy, lacrosse, sporty and looking for hot dates, blah blah.”
He grins crookedly. ‘Blabla, it’s okay.’
I slide a bit closer to him, with gin and tonic sloshing out of my glass and running over my hand. Cursing, I wipe them on my pants and then look at Alistair’s cell phone. When I see the draft for his profile, I laugh.
‘What?’ he asks challengingly.
‘You are not one eighty-five, liar.’
He snorts. ‘Yes.’
‘I’m one eighty-four, and you’re half a head shorter than me, man. Subtract ten centimeters, then you might be right.’
He thrusts my elbow into the side, and alcohol lands on my fingers again. ‘Don’t be such a damned killjoy.’
‘Okay, okay.’ I take three large sips from my glass and set it down on the table. Then I grab my laptop from the coffee table, open it and start looking for reasonably reasonable-sounding profile descriptions.
Asking Alistair if he wanted to come here was exactly the right decision. He immediately let his driver take him and from then on did nothing but distract me – without asking a single question.
‘Oh God,’ I murmur.
Alistair makes a questioning sound and leans over to look at the screen of my laptop.
I turn it a bit towards him. ‘I wanted to get inspiration for your profile description, but now I wish I had never clicked on that link. Who would write ‘Ideally I would do it with my twin, but since I’m an only child, you’ll have to suffice’ in his description?’
Alistair snorts away. ‘I don’t feel like it anymore. I just write 18, lacrosse, open to everything.’
‘No, man,’ I say, shaking my head. ”Open for Everything’ is almost a carte blanche for strange requests.’
He just shrugs his shoulders. After a few minutes, without looking up from his cell phone, he says, ‘By the way, Elaine asked for you.’
I raise an eyebrow, but I don’t reply. It’s the first time since Wren’s party that Alistair has brought up the subject, and I can’t tell from his voice whether this is going to be a serious conversation or not.
‘She’s worried about your young, fragile heart and wanted to know if you still think about her often.’
Okay, definitely not serious.
‘As if,’ I reply. I doubt that Elaine wasted a single thought on our night together. It’s probably Alistair, who can’t let go of the topic, because I’ve awakened his brotherly protective instinct with it.
‘I still can’t believe you had sex with my sister.’ He shakes his head and makes a choking sound. ‘Can’t you get engaged to her after all? I think then I could cope with the whole thing better.’
Grinning, I give him a slap on the shoulder. ‘If I’m going to get engaged to anyone, it’s certainly not so that you can sleep better.’
Alistair sighs in mock despair. Then he holds out his cell phone to me: ‘Can you at least help me with which picture I should take?’
He shows me two, one in which he lies shirtless and with his arms crossed behind his head on a lounger, another in black and white, in which he has photographed himself in the mirror and is wearing a suit.
‘The one on the couch,’ I say. ‘You’re wearing too much on the other one.’
‘I like your team spirit, Beaufort.’
After that, the topic of Elaine is fortunately ticked off, and I get us a fourth round of gin and tonics. We toast, and Alistair devotes himself to his new hobby again, while I half-heartedly scroll through my e-mail program.
I freeze when I see that I have received an appointment invitation from the Beaufort Offices. Reluctantly, I open the e-mail, which says nothing except: Next Friday, 7 p.m., business lunch with the sales management in London. Be on time.
From one moment to the next, my good mood disappeared. Instead, an ice-cold shiver runs down my spine as the memories of the argument with my father this afternoon come back.
You embarrass us.
We have a reputation to lose.
Childish, stupid boy.
I’m annoyed that I flinched when he came up to me with his hand raised, because I know better: In the presence of Mortimer Beaufort, you don’t show weakness or fear.
The appointment is nothing more than a punishment. He is fully aware that he is hitting me more than his words or his blows ever could. Actually, we have an agreement: As long as I go to Maxton Hall, he will leave me alone with everything that concerns our company. The fact that I now have to participate in this meal is his way of telling myself: ‘I control your life, and if you don’t pull yourself together, it’ll be over sooner than you think.’
Frustrated, I push the laptop off my lap and go to the bar. I pour myself a tumbler full of whiskey and stare into the brown liquid for a moment. Then I turn around and take him to the sofa.
Alistair looks at me. There is no trace left on his face of the grin from earlier. ‘Are you all right?’
I shrug my shoulders.
I wanted Alistair to come over so I could forget about my dad, not to talk about it.
Alistair doesn’t follow up. Instead, he holds out his cell phone to me. ‘I have a match.’ The display shows a picture of a black-haired guy with plenty of muscles.
I slide down a bit on the sofa until I can lean my head back. ‘What has he written in his description?’
‘That he needs someone to take care of his heart. And about his penis.’
‘How creative.’
‘Oh. And he has … just sent me a picture of his cock. How about you tell me your name before you show me your genitals?’ Alistair murmurs, and I have to laugh against my will.
That’s one of the reasons why Alistair is one of my best friends. If I wanted to, I could talk to him about what is repeating in my head in a continuous loop. I could talk to him about anything – but I don’t have to. In the meantime, we have been friends for so long that we are attuned to each other and know and respect our limits, even if we like to test them. I doubt that I could build up such a friendship with anyone else.
‘Are you hungry?’ I ask after a while.
Alistair says yes, and I call downstairs in the kitchen. After the argument with my father, I had lost my appetite, which is why I now feel completely starved.
While we wait for the kitchen assistant to bring us the food upstairs, Alistair continues to look at photos of half-naked guys, and I scroll through my blog list on my laptop. Besides some lacrosse sites and blogs of friends, I have been following mainly travel blogs for a few months now. Hardly anything makes me switch off as well as the reports and pictures from foreign countries. I mark some of the new entries for later – now I’m too drunk to be really receptive.
I have also saved the school blog on my list. Actually just to make fun of it, but when I see the lettering in the timeline now, Ruby’s face suddenly appears in my mind’s eye. My stomach makes a small leap that I don’t know if it’s due to hunger, alcohol or maybe something else.
My index finger takes on a life of its own, and I open the blog.
Little by little, I click through the school’s events – all boring – skim through articles – unbearably unimaginative – and look at the photos in search of Ruby’s face. Although her name is above many posts and she is mentioned by name at the school’s events, she is not seen in a single picture. Shortly after Lydia told me that she and Sutton were caught by Ruby, I googled her and tried to find out as much as I could about her online. But there was nothing. She doesn’t have a single account, neither on Facebook, nor on Twitter, nor on Instagram – at least not under her real name.
Ruby Bell is a phantom.
I keep scrolling. In the meantime, I have searched through the entire last year and still haven’t found what I’m looking for. Whatever that is. The longer I look, the more annoyed I become. Why the hell is there nothing to find about her?
‘Are you looking at the school blog?’ asks Alistair suddenly.
Caught, I look up. Alistair looks at my laptop with a disgusted expression. But when his gaze falls on the word I have typed into the browser’s small search field, his face suddenly lights up. ‘Oh, that’s how it is.’
‘What?’
His grin widens. ‘When I tell the others.’
I close my laptop. ‘There’s nothing to tell.’
Alistair’s answer is interrupted by the knocking of our maid Mary, who brings us the food. While she drives the little car into my room, I stagger to get up to refill my glass. Now, in addition to my father’s voice, I also have to push the image of Ruby’s smug face out of my mind.
