She didn’t want to be angry. She didn’t want to be wandering around the lobby of a brutalist building with only hours left to go in this country before she would be ripped away from all this, from David, from the case, from the misting rain and the relentless tea drinking.
“Why did you leave?” Janelle said as they exited the theater at the end of the play.
“Sorry,” Stevie replied. “I just couldn’t sit there anymore.”
“I didn’t really like it either,” Vi said, rubbing the peach fuzz on the back of their head.
The events of the day had gotten the better of them. No amount of tiny cakes and tea and screaming English lords was going to fix it.
On the Tube ride back to Craven House, the group settled into a damp silence. The silence came from the knowledge that the trip was pretty much officially over at this point, and the damp from the invisible rain that had attacked them on the way to the station.
“I’m going to figure it out on the plane,” Janelle said out of nowhere. “How many schools. I’m going to pick them on the plane. I’ll have eight hours and probably no internet. I just need to get it done.”
She turned to Vi, silently asking the question, “Are you in?” Because their project was largely a joint one.
“Maybe,” Vi said. “Can we see? I might just want to watch movies. Planes are so . . . I get sad on planes sometimes.”
Janelle slid her arm over Vi’s shoulder and kissed their forehead. Stevie could tell she was disappointed in the answer, but if planes made Vi sad, there was no way she was going to push it.
“How about you?” she asked Nate. “Want to work lists with me?”
“What?”
“I need to spreadsheet,” Janelle said. “Figure this out. We can work on our lists. Want to?”
“I’m good,” Nate said.
“Just tell me how many you’ve gotten down to. I need to figure this out. I need to make something work.”
Stevie lifted her head from her phone （which wasn’t really getting a good signal on the Tube anyway）。 Something was happening here. Janelle was about as frustrated as Stevie had ever seen her. The fact that this trip hadn’t been quite what she’d expected was eating at her, and she had to pull a victory from the rubble.
“How many have you applied to so far?” she asked. “I need something to work with. Data.”
Nate looked up like Janelle had pulled a gun on him.
“Come on,” Janelle said. “What? Is it a secret?”
Nate’s expression suggested that it was very much a secret. He was being evasive in a way that didn’t quite make sense. Something bubbled in Stevie’s mind. There had been a pattern developing. She’d been clocking it without being entirely aware that she was doing so. Nate had been writing all the time—or, Nate had been doing something on his computer. He’d been skipping the occasional meal or coffee, and his credit card wasn’t working.
“Oh my God,” Stevie said. “You’ve been applying to schools. That’s what you’ve been doing.”
Nate’s face flushed a faint purple. She’d hit the mark. Janelle and Vi looked to Stevie in confusion.
“How many?” Stevie asked.
Nate looked at her with an expression that said, I am never letting you use my ace pride drone.
“Seventy-one,” he finally said.
Silence for a moment from the assembled.
“Is that even legal?” Vi finally asked.
“How?” Janelle said. “How did you apply to seventy-one schools? You’d had to have applied somewhere every day for the last two months.”
“Not every day,” Nate said, his shoulders sagging. “Not every day. There’s the Common application, and you can use a lot of the stuff over again. It’s not that—”
“How did you even get all the recommendation letters?” Vi asked.
“I didn’t use Ellingham,” he said in a low voice. “I asked my editor and agent to write letters, and this guy who runs a book festival. They gave me form letters that I could adjust to wherever I was sending them.”
“Seventy-one,” Janelle repeated. “That’s . . . how much did that even cost?”
Having admitted this much, Nate was prepared to give his full confession.
“Five thousand seven hundred and forty dollars,” he said. “So far. Some of them haven’t run my card yet. I don’t know where to go, okay? And I thought—if I’m going to have to be in debt for the rest of my life to go to school, I should probably pick the right one. But they’re all just . . . brick buildings and people walking around with backpacks and doing presentations in front of whiteboards full of triangles, and I have no fucking idea which one to choose. There are the little weird ones where you can make your own major so you can study the history of teacups or vibes or whatever you want. There are big ones that have buildings with pillars and they offer everything and it’s like living in a city. And then there’s where—like, they are all in cute little towns where the leaves are always changing, or are in the city. There are some near the beach. There’s one where everyone kitesurfs all the time . . .”
“Kitesurfs,” Janelle repeated. “You. Kitesurfing.”
“I don’t know! They don’t make you kitesurf. I’m just saying.”
“Do you even like the beach?” Stevie asked.
“Everyone likes the beach! I’m a swimmer! I’m just saying, I don’t know where to go so I figured I’d cast a wide net.”
The train arrived at their stop, and they disembarked quietly. At least Stevie had solved one mystery, even if it had raised more questions than it had answered.
When they got back to Craven House, Stevie went directly to David and Izzy’s side of the building. She knocked on his door but got no answer. She asked a few people who walked by, and eventually found someone who knew where Izzy’s room was—it was at the other end of the hall, through two fire doors and down a pointless set of three steps. Beyond the door, Stevie could hear music playing—low. Something calm. When she knocked, there was the sound of movement, a pause, and then Izzy opened the door. To Stevie’s surprise, she immediately caught her in an embrace.
“Come in,” she said.
Though Izzy had the same basic room as Stevie occupied, it had none of the plastic quality. The bed was covered in a thick, sunshine-yellow duvet with white dots. The walls were hung with prints and colorful boards on which schedules, reading lists, and little handwritten notes were pinned. Her desk was stacked with books, empty champagne bottles, a pair of engraved wineglasses, a feather boa around a mirror. There was a white shag rug on the floor, along with a pile of fuzzy pillows. David was resting on and against this assortment of plush objects. He nodded to her but didn’t move to get up.
“I was wondering if I could talk to David,” Stevie said.
“Oh. Of course. Of course.”
David peeled himself from the carpet with less enthusiasm than she anticipated. Stevie didn’t know what was happening, but it appeared that he wasn’t particularly eager to speak to her. Tonight. Their last night together. He stepped out into the hall, shutting the door behind him.