Locked (11 page)

“Poor kid,” says Mom, and I’m forever weirded out by the idea of Sherlock as a kid. “We should have him over for dinner sometime.”

Oh God. If ever there was a disaster in the making. “He’s not that sociable. He doesn’t really like…people.”

“People like that are just trying to make it seem like their loneliness is a choice, rather than vice versa.” She sounds sad as she says it, gazing out the dining room window. Then she tilts her head to the side again. “Is that…smoke?”

I push my chair back. It’s dark, but Sherlock’s porch light is on, and through our kitchen window, I can see wisps of smoke curling out from his.

Mom’s fork is frozen above her meatloaf. “Should I call the fire department?”

I’m already by the front door, pulling on my coat. “I think I better go over first and check it out.”

“Thanks, Irene. You’re always so good to strangers.”

And it hits me as I head out the door—that’s how she talks to me now. Like I’m a stranger.

I walk quickly. It’s a cold night, the moon hanging low and fat in the sky. I look both ways before crossing the street.

“Sherlock!” I shout, banging on the door twice before letting myself in.

The hallway is thick with smoke. I open windows as I go. At this rate, he’s going to turn the white walls gray. “Sherlock, where are you? You better not be smoking again.”

“In the kitchen,” his voice calls back. “It’s the microwave that’s smoking.”

“Tell the microwave it’s not allowed to smoke either.” I stick my head into the kitchen, texting Mom:
It’s fine, just burned popcorn
. When I look up, black smoke is billowing from the microwave. Sherlock is standing next to it, ineffectually waving a potholder at the dark clouds.

“You’re going to suffocate. Go stand by the window.” I squint into the microwave, my eyes watering, throat burning. A blackened, misshapen lump is the source of the smoke. “What the hell is that?”

He tosses his potholder aside. “A shoe.”

“And what did the shoe do to you that you decided to execute it via microwave?”

“It belongs to Mycroft.”

“Such a petty crime.”

He frowns. “It’s an experiment. I’m measuring the melting rate of certain types of rubber under various temperatures.”

“And I’m sure that has nothing to do with sibling resentment.” I fish through a drawer, miraculously find a pair of salad tongs, and carry the acrid-smelling shoe outside, where I deposit it on the gravel.

“It’s science,” he says scathingly, following me.

“Science that filled your house with smoke. Which, you know, if you breathe too much of, it kills you. That’s science too.” I inhale some night air to cleanse my lungs.

“I was also smoking,” he concedes, and I notice the cigarettes sticking out of his pocket.

I groan. “Just don’t smoke in the house, okay? It’s a fire hazard. Also a lung cancer hazard. You’re going to kill yourself before you’re thirty.”

“Says the person who walks in front of cars.”

“What’s wrong with you tonight?” I step back into the house, picking up an empty pizza box and fanning some of the smoke out the window. Sherlock watches me, tapping his foot in an irritable, irregular pattern. He’s scowling. “You seem…”

“Galileo.”

“Not what I was going to say.”

“I’m Galileo in prison. I’m a supercomputer in a junkyard. I’m being
wasted
, Irene. This town is killing me by inches, turning my mind to slush.” He rubs the back of his head violently, standing his hair on end. I make a mental note to attack him with a pair of scissors next time he’s distracted. If he even has scissors. The salad tongs probably wouldn’t work for a haircut.

“Well, at least it’s not making you melodramatic,” I mutter.

“I’ve been scrambling for distractions ever since I got here. You. Ares. The person who sent out that photo, which you won’t even let me investigate anymore.” He paces furiously. “All miniscule puzzles. None worth my time. I need a
challenge
.”

I stop. A distraction, am I? A miniscule one?

“Where do I buy drugs in this domesticized pasture of suburban bliss?” he asks.

Well, that just took a turn. “Drugs? Like, drugs drugs?”

“No, the non-drugs drugs. Yes,
drugs
. Cocaine will do. Adderall if not.”

“You’re not serious.”

“I’m always serious.”

“So, you’re saying all the times I wondered to myself if you were on crack, you were actually on crack?”

“Hilarious, Irene. You’ll be a YouTube sensation.” He storms into the living room and collapses into my long-suffering lawn chair. I follow him, switching on the light.

“I’m not finding you drugs, Sherlock.”

“Then you’re bloody well useless, aren’t you?”

I breathe in. And out. A few days ago, I would have just left. Screw Sherlock and his insanity. It’s times like this that he reminds me of a really smart, really good-looking five-year-old.

But I’d decided to be friends with him. I’m a little rusty when it comes to the rules of friendship, but I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to accept your friends as they are.

And this is Sherlock Holmes. I deal with long blank stretches of empty boredom by laying on my bed, staring at the ceiling, imagining situations in which I might die. Apparently Sherlock deals with it by microwaving shoes.

“We’re going out,” I announce.

He rolls his head toward me. “So you are going to find me drugs.”

“If there’s one thing you want to be sure about when it comes to me, it’s that I’m never going to buy you drugs.”

“Goody-goody,” he mutters. “Where are we going?”

I don’t answer. I just take his arm and pull him up out of the chair, and then out of the house. The shoe is still sending up tendrils of smoke as we cross the road. My kitchen light hasn’t been switched off. I poke my head past the front door. Mom’s doing dishes. “Mom, can I borrow the car? I left my homework at school.”

“Sure. Keys are by the door.” She doesn’t look up. “The neighbor’s fine, then?”

As fine as Sherlock Holmes can be. “Yep. See ya.”

“Aren’t you going to introduce me?” he asks ironically as we approach the car.

I chew my lip. Back when I was a social human being, it was the straight-A perfectionist crowd I hung out with. Mom always said she wanted me to have
smart
friends. Somehow I doubt Sherlock was what she meant. “Do you really want to be introduced?”

“Not at all.”

“Thought so. Come on.” I get in the car, buckling in and adjusting the mirrors. It takes me a minute to remember how to turn on the lights. I haven’t driven in a long time.

“I hope you’re taking me to the scene of a locked-room murder with no apparent clues,” he says, his silhouette softened by darkness. “I’d love a decent murder.”

I pause. “Promise me you won’t ever say that in front of anyone in a position of authority, okay?”

“I don’t make promises.”

It’s only a ten-minute drive to the docks. I used to love to swim. Now everything I can say about himself has to be prefaced with a
used to
. Nothing has caught my interest since Carol died.

Except Sherlock.

I pull into the parking lot, put the car into park, and climb out. The night sky is beautiful here. A million stars glitter above the endless blanket of water.

“What, are we going fishing?” Sherlock gets out of the car and stands beside me. No one else is here. We’re alone. “Oh, I see. You’re curing my boredom by indoctrinating me into the one sport that requires you do nothing but stare at one place for hours on end. And they say I’m the genius.”

“You’re the only one who says you’re a genius.”

“My opinion is the only one that matters on the subject.”

“Jesus. We’re not going fishing.”

“That Jesus character again. Did you take me here to baptize me?”

I whirl on him. “Shut up or this
will
become a murder scene.”

“In that case, I’m going to solve my own murder in advance—it was you. Nice quiet place for it. Careful not to leave fingerprints anywhere. Although the water is never as good a place to dump a body as people think.”

“You know, I almost wish there would be a murder,” I growl. “You’re eighty times more annoying when you’re bored. Oh, there, look, this friendship is already making me want a homicide. How healthy is that.”

“Healthy friendships are almost always boring.”

“As if you’d know.” I tilt my head back and breathe in the sea air. The night is cold but not windy, and the moonlight tops each ripple with cream. The beach stretches out, a long abandoned stripe of sand between the ocean and the rest of the world, keeping it at bay. In the summer, there’s always at least two bonfires flickering on the sand. In the summer, boats are always tied to the dock. Now the dock is totally empty, water licking at the metal.

Sherlock leans against the car hood. He looks so different at night. During the day, he looks out of place no matter where he is. At night, he looks like he belongs. The darkness makes all his edges more gentle. “You better not have brought me here to get sentimental about the moon.”

“Oh, God, I did not.” I shuffle. My brilliant plan is seeming stupider by the second. “I thought we could…jump in.”

“What for? Underwater fishing?”

“To stop you being bored.” Carol had dared me to do it once, on an October a million years ago. The thrill of it, the way I hadn’t been able to stop laughing just because I hadn’t known anything could be
that
cold…cold enough to shatter all the bad things. Cold enough to crystalize.

“I’ll be just as bored with pneumonia as I would without it, thanks.”

“You won’t get pneumonia, we’ll get right back out and warm up in the car.” The water looks soft. Comfortable. It’s weird how much I want to do this. “It’s a thing people do around here, okay? Young people.”

“Oh well, if the young people are doing it, that’s different.”

“You’re a young people.”

“And so are you, though one wouldn’t know it, going by the fact that you say
young people
as if you were eighty-five.”

I turn and open the car door. “Forget it.”

“Wait,” he says.

“No, Sherlock, it was a stupid idea, okay?”

I’d been seized with the urge to do something young. Something without any grief in it. It’d seemed like an appropriate way to mark the beginning of my friendship with him. It was one of those stupid little fantasies I have sometimes, not about anything big or magical, but just about doing something ordinary—something other people seemed able to do all the time.

“Irene, would you wait for two seconds?”

“No.” Suddenly it seems very important that we leave this place as soon as possible. “Let’s go home. We’ll watch a movie or something. I’m sorry.”

“If I were you, this is the point where I’d probably say
Christ
,” mutters Sherlock under his breath. Then he kicks off his shoes and yanks his shirt over his head. His chest gleams coolly in the moonlight.

I can’t take my eyes off him. I’m definitely a creepy friend. “Sherlock, what are you doing?”

“Not being bored,” he says, and takes a running leap off the end of the dock.

I cover my mouth. Then I sprint to the edge of the dock while the echoes of the splash fade into the night air. Sherlock bursts through the surface, gasping, his dark hair plastered to his forehead and his skin electric-white.

I start laughing. Idiot. “You okay?”

“You really were trying to murder me,” he hisses, his teeth chattering furiously. “By getting me to do this.”

“No I wasn’t. Look.” I leave my shoes beside his before closing my eyes, taking a deep breath, and jumping in.

The cold is like a fist through glass. I break into a thousand pieces, pieces that all swirl apart in the water and come back together when I explode through the surface. It feels like I’ve been put back together right. Better, even. I shout every expletive I know at the moon.

“You are a complete mystery to me, Irene Adler,” he manages.

I cackle and splash over to him, grabbing his shoulders and propelling him underwater again.

“D-definitely trying to kill me,” he splutters when he resurfaces.

I am so bizarrely fond of him. Of his dramatics and his smoking and his deductions and his rudeness and his lips and his unexpected moments of kindness. I feel warm about it, even though I’m freezing. I feel free, too. But also cold. Mostly cold. “C-come on, let’s get out.”

We haul ourselves back on top of the dock, panting. Sherlock rolls on his back. Water glistens on every inch of him, from the hard flatness of his stomach to the curve of his ribs.

“You’re pretty,” I say without thinking.

His eyes snap open. “You did not just call me
pretty
.”

“You’re right, I didn’t. You hallucinated it. Hypothermia.” I launch to my feet, sweeping up his shoes. “Last one to the car freezes to death.”

I get there first. I throw myself inside, lock the door, and blast the heat until Sherlock mimes breaking the windshield with his elbow.

“Are you bored now?” I ask when he’s slid into the passenger seat, his shirt clinging to him, his lips nearly blue. They weren’t blue when I kissed them. But I shouldn’t think of that.

“Too cold to be anything at the moment. Maybe next time I’ll set myself on fire.”

I twist the heat as high as it will go, and we stay there until neither of us are shivering anymore.

“Since when have you ever tried to say something properly?”

|||

(written on a grease-stained napkin)

New hypothesis: she likes me for my mind.

Often expresses amazement at my observations. My mind is the only thing about me that she could possibly find appealing. Certainly doesn’t like me for my personality. So: she finds my intelligence to be an effective distraction. Mystery solved.

Other mystery (why do I like her?) not solved.

Now I’m the anomaly.

Kissed her (strange. Had some effect on me). Jumped into freezing water for her. (Looked so sad.) Losing control of myself. Of my mind. Not good. Without my mind, she wouldn’t like me.

Completely random that of all places Mycroft should have picked this street, this house, and it was next to her, and she brought me a casserole. Entropy. Nothing more.