The The Name of the Star (18 page)

“Partners?” Jerome asked.

“Sure,” I said, trying to smile in a relaxed way.

I don't think Boo actually knew we were partnering up. She hadn't taken her earbuds out and was now looking at the assignment sheet with a baffled expression. I hurried Jerome out of the room before she noticed where we had gone. Around us, I could hear other people making their choices—horses, fruit, the Crucifixion, domestic bliss, windmills, the Thames, business transactions. None of these things seemed very interesting.

“So what do you think we should do?” Jerome asked.

We had stopped by
The Rokeby Venus,
which is a huge painting by Diego Velázquez of a woman lounging around, admiring her face in a mirror held by Cupid. But the picture is painted from behind, so the focus of the painting is mostly her butt.

“I suggest we do ours on ‘five treatments of the human butt,'” I said.

“Agreed,” he said, smiling. “Bottoms it is.”

For the next hour, we went around the National Gallery assessing butts. There are a lot of naked butts in classical paintings. Big, proud, classical butts everywhere, sometimes draped with a little cloth for flavor. We favored the bigger butts with the most detail. We gave points for best cracks, best dimpling, and best smiley curvature around the upper thigh. We differed on only one issue: I liked the reclining butts, Jerome liked the action butts. Butts leading people into battle, butts about to get on a horse, butts giving speeches, butts looking dramatic. Those were his kind of butts. I liked the way the more relaxed butts squished on one side, and the cheeky over-the-shoulder look most of their owners gave. “Behold,” they seemed to say. “Amazing, isn't it?”

Within an hour, we had three excellent butts on our list. We made notes about the paintings, the periods, the colors, the context, all that. We had just gone back into one of the smaller galleries, one full of tiny paintings, when I felt Jerome standing much closer to me than he really needed to.

“Now, that,” he said, “is a fine butt.”

I looked around. This was primarily a fruit room, with a few paintings of angry priests thrown in for kicks. Only one painting was blocked from my view by a woman standing right in front of it. The woman was wearing a very form-fitting kneelength skirt with a red swing jacket with cropped arms. The jacket stopped right at her waistline, so her butt was well displayed. She even wore seamed black stockings and low, thick heels. Her bobbed hair was elaborately arranged in tight curls, close to the head.

From the loopy smile on his face and the way he was craning his neck a little, I finally figured out that he meant my butt, not hers. It took me a second to realize Jerome could come out with a line that bad—and mean it. I wasn't even sure how my butt looked in my Wexford skirt. Gray, I guessed. Kind of woolly. But there was a goofy sincerity to his effort that made me flush. We were going to public kiss. Actually here, in this museum, in front of real people and possibly our classmates.

“Sorry,” he said. “I had to say it.”

“It's okay,” I said, stepping closer. “But I think she heard you.”

“What?” he asked.

We were pretty much face-to-face now, whispering to each other.

“I think she heard you.”

“Who heard me?”

“The
lady
.”

“What
lady
?”

We were chest-to-chest and stomach-to-stomach. I had my hands on his waist. He put his hands on my hips as well, but he wasn't making a kissing face. He was making a “what are you talking about?” face, which is squishier.

The woman turned and looked at us. She had to have heard everything we were saying about her. For someone so dressed up, her face was remarkably plain. She wore no makeup and her skin was dull. More than that, she looked extremely unhappy. She walked out of the gallery, leaving us alone.

“We chased her off,” I said.

“Yeah . . .” Jerome detached his hands from my hips. “Still not following you.”

Just like that, the moment blew away. There would be no kiss. Instead, we were both confused.

“You know what?” I said. “I'm going to go to the bathroom for a second.”

I tried not to run through the maze of rooms, past the pictures of fruit and dogs and kings and sunsets, past the art students doing sketches and the bored tourists milling around trying to look interested. I needed the bathroom. I needed to think. I was getting dizzier by the second. First, I saw a man standing in front of me that my roommate didn't see. Second, I had just seen a woman standing in front of a painting, and Jerome hadn't seen her. The first time kind of made sense. It was Ripper night, we were rushing back, we were scared of getting caught, it was dark. Yes, Jazza could have missed him. But there was no way Jerome could have missed what I was talking about today—which meant either we didn't understand each other at all, or . . .

Or . . .

I found the bathroom finally, and it was empty. I looked at myself in the mirror.

Or I was crazy. Healing Angel Ministry crazy. I certainly wouldn't be the first in my family to see people or things that weren't there.

No. It had to be simpler than that. We had to just be misunderstanding each other. I paced the bathroom and tried to come up with some interpretation of his words that made it all make sense, but nothing came to mind.

Boo came in.

“You all right?” she said.

“Uh . . . yeah. Fine.”

“You sure?”

“I just . . . I must not be feeling well. I'm just a little confused.”

“Confused how?”

“It's nothing,” I said.

I went into one of the stalls and locked the door. Boo stood outside.

“You can tell me,” she said. “Honestly. You can tell me anything, no matter how weird it sounds.”

“Just leave me alone!” I snapped.

Nothing for a moment, then I saw her feet backing away from the stall. She paused by the door, then I heard it open. I looked out to see if she had gone. She had. I emerged and went to the sinks. “I misunderstood,” I said aloud to myself. “That's all. I don't get the English stuff yet.”

With that, I splashed some water on my face, fixed on a smile, and stepped out. I would find Jerome. I would make him explain to me what I was missing. We would laugh, then we would kiss with tongue, and all would be well.

As I walked back through the galleries, I saw Boo on the phone, pacing. She never spoke to anyone that intently. Then she hung up and dodged around a group of tourists and headed toward the lobby. Little threads began to connect themselves in my head. I didn't know what this all added up to, but something was coming together. A strange and sudden impulse came over me.

While we were technically in class, Mark wasn't watching us—and when the class was over, we were free to leave on our own. And I couldn't stay here anymore, anyway.

So I followed her.

She stood on Trafalgar Square, just under the museum steps, and made another phone call. I watched this from above, from the raised entrance of the museum. Then she hurried to the entrance of Charing Cross Tube. I went down the stairs after her, tapping my Oyster card on the turnstile, and followed her down the escalators to the tracks. She got on a Northern Line, the black line, and rode the train two stops. At Tottenham Court Road, she switched to the Central Line going east—that was the way back to school. Our stop was Liverpool Street. But at Bank, she switched again, to the District Line, still going east. To keep out of her sight, I had to stay at the far end of the cars and hope she wasn't paying too much attention. Luckily for me, Boo was Boo, head down, looking at her phone, adjusting her music.

She got off at Whitechapel and stepped out onto the incredibly busy road full of market stalls and small restaurants of all kinds—Turkish, Ethiopian, Indian, American fried chicken. Across the street was the Royal London Hospital—a name I vaguely recognized from some news report. Whitechapel was Ripper central. I let her get a little bit ahead of me, but not too far or she'd be swallowed up in the crowd. I had to push my way along to keep her in my sights, weaving around the vendors who sold shopping bags and African masks and umbrellas. It was a busy Saturday afternoon, and the street was packed. The air was thick with the smells of shops selling grilled halal meat and spicy Caribbean chicken and goat. I got stuck several times behind people with bags or Styrofoam containers of food and had to use all the meager skills I had developed dodging hockey balls in the goal to get through. (Despite the fact that Claudia told me every day that dodging the balls was
not the point
of being in goal, it was the only lesson I learned.)

Boo walked quickly, turning off Whitechapel and heading down a side road, turning again and again, so quickly that within five minutes I knew I could never find my way back on my own. Boo began to wave frantically at someone over in the playground across the street. I looked over and saw a young woman dressed in a brown wool suit. It looked like an old-fashioned kind of uniform—a female soldier's uniform, but not a modern one. Her dark brown hair was tightly made up in a retro style, medium length and done up in tight curls around the edges, under her hat. She was picking up trash from the playground and throwing it away. No one got that dressed up in some kind of 1940s outfit to clean streets.

Boo glanced both ways and ran across the street, barely missing a car. I stepped behind a big red mailbox and watched her talking to the woman, guiding her over to a more secluded spot. After a minute or two, a police car came down the street. It slowed and pulled up next to the playground. Out of it stepped the young policeman from the day of the murder, the one Jazza thought was a reporter.

I felt myself go cold all over.

“What the hell?” I said out loud.

Now it was the three of them—the woman in the brown wool uniform, the young policeman, and my roommate—all in a very animated conversation. It was like the entire world was colluding to make me feel insane, and it was doing a
really good job
.

I tried to make sense of the scene. The policeman had to be a real policeman. If he was a reporter, as Jazza suspected, he couldn't go around in a disguise
all the time
. He wouldn't have a police car. Boo had come into the school right after the murders. Boo went everywhere I went. As for the woman in the uniform, I had no idea who she was, and I didn't care. The fact that Boo and the policeman were talking together in secret was enough.

And then, one of the many other people coming down the street walked through the woman in the uniform.

Through
her.

In response to this, the woman simply turned and glanced over her shoulder with a kind of “Well, that was rude” look. This was all I needed to see. There was something wrong with me, no question. I couldn't stay there hiding behind a mailbox. The little green man came up on the street-crossing sign, so I crossed, my head swimming. I walked right at them. I needed help. I could feel my knees weakening with every step.

“There's something wrong with me,” I said.

The three of them turned and stared at me.

“Oh, no,” the policeman said. “No . . .”

“I didn't!” Boo said. “She must have followed me.”

“Are you all right?” the woman asked, striding toward me. “You need to sit down. Come on, now.”

I allowed the woman to guide me to the ground. Boo came over and squatted by my side.

“It's fine, Rory,” she said. “You're okay.”

The police officer kept back.

“She needs our help,” Boo said to him. “Come
on,
Stephen. It was bound to happen.”

The woman in the uniform was still hanging over me.

“Just breathe evenly,” she said. She had one of those voices that you don't argue with, or even question.

“You're fine, Rory. Honestly. You're fine. We're going to help you.
Aren't we?
” Boo looked at Stephen as she said this.

“And do what exactly?” he finally said.

“Take her back to yours,” Boo said. “Talk to her. Jo, help me get her up.”

Boo helped me up on one side while the soldier woman took the other. Boo did most of the lifting. The policeman, Stephen, opened the door to the police car and waved me into the back.

“It wasn't supposed to happen like this,” he said. “But you had probably better come with us now. Come on.”

“Give her a paper bag to breathe into,” the woman in the uniform called to Boo. “Works wonders.”

“I'll do that,” Boo called. “See you later, yeah?”

As a small crowd of interested onlookers stopped to watch, I allowed Boo and the policeman to put me in the back of the police car.

20

S
O I GOT TO RIDE IN A LONDON POLICE CAR.

“My name is Stephen,” the policeman said as he drove. “Stephen Dene.”

“Rory,” I mumbled.

“I know. We met.”

“Oh, yeah. Are you actually a cop?”

“Yes,” he said.

“So am I,” Boo added.

Stephen was taking us right into the center of town. We went around Trafalgar Square, weaving our way around double-decker buses and cabs. We passed the National Gallery, where my day had started, and continued up the road, coming to a stop just a short distance beyond it. Stephen and Boo got out, and Stephen came and opened my door. He offered me his hand to help me out, but I rejected it. I needed to walk on my own. I needed to concentrate on a task, or I would lose my rapidly slipping grasp on reality. We were on a very busy street, full of theaters and shops and people.