“Why?”
“I don’t know. He says it’s a gesture. He says it’s momentous.”
“Because he’s flirting with you.”
“How is hard copy flirting with me?”
“I have no idea,” Petra says.
The next day at school I hand the cartridge over to River from both my hands into both of his. The task he’s undertaking feels heavy to me, and I know he feels it too. I guess that’s why he wanted to print out whatever he finds on actual paper. Plus, we’ve driven all that way; I don’t want him to drop it. I also give him two brand-new packs of paper, five hundred sheets apiece. Probably he won’t find a thousand pages’ worth of secret memos, damning internal correspondence, buried transcripts, and incriminating emails, but who knows what he’ll find? Better to err on the side of too much than too little. Better to make sure no one notices all that missing paper and ink.
“I shall put it to immediate good use, my liege”—he bows his head and pretends he’s receiving a sword like I’m knighting him—“and honor you in the doing of it.”
It’s awkward, the way he talks sometimes, but I get that our relationship is kind of awkward. On the one hand, I did save him from getting beat up, which was nice but not very ladylike of me, not super respectful of his manliness. On the other, it’s not like I beat the offenders up myself; I just asked them, as old friends. On the one hand, his family did poison mine. On the other, we weren’t involved or even there, neither one of us. It makes me think of Romeo and Juliet again, how they had nothing to do with starting the feud, only with ending it, and how they ended it only by also ending their lives, and whether that means River’s not just flirting with me and talking like an Elizabethan courtier but actually destined to help put to right our ancient grudge with the Templetons or fall in love with me or die. And die, Monday would insist. Though of course Romeo poisoned himself, and that’s a whole different thing.
So my thoughts are dark, but my feelings are pure joy anyway, bubbling up, curling the corners of my mouth, my feet dancy little cheerleaders waving Pooh’s silver tassels like pom-poms. It is the irrepressible giddiness of doing something. It’s hope and optimism and expectation. Who knows what he might find and what it might change and what new differences it might kick off? （“Engender,” Petra would say.） I guess it’s good to be the liege.
But when he comes into the cafeteria the next day already halfway through lunch period, River looks grim.
He hands me a folder, a thin one, and three ten-dollar bills, damp and crumpled.
“You’re paying me?”
“Returning your money for the ink and the paper. I didn’t use much. I only got one little email thread.”
Shit. “Why?”
“The only time he doesn’t have his phone on him is when he’s in the shower, so I figured I’d take it then, look through it, forward anything pertinent to myself.”
“That’s a good idea.” I smile encouragingly.
“Yeah, but he takes really short showers here. So we don’t run out of bottled water. I only had a couple minutes. I barely had time to scan through his inbox. My grandfather wrote him yesterday. They went back and forth once. Three dumb emails. That’s all I could get.”
I press the thin folder to my chest.
“I apologize,” he says, “that I was not more worthy.”
“You are worthy.” It seems like the right thing to say, but I’m wondering: Worthy of what?
“I wanted to help but have fallen short.”
“You’ll get more.” Am I trying to convince him? Or me?
“I regret that I’ve failed you.”
I make myself look right into his eyes. “Thank you for helping us.” I try to mean it. I was picturing reams of documents, all unambiguous and implicating and accompanied by dates and signatures, and instead I’ve got one email thread. But he tried. And that’s more than we ever had any right to hope. It is a kindness, and maybe kindness from a Templeton is worth more than incriminating documents and smoking guns anyway. Maybe kindness leads to better things than emails would, no matter what they said. It is, in any case, quite a bit more unexpected.
Two
Mama and Mirabel saw Nathan at the bar （until Mama kicked him out）。 Tom Kandinsky saw Nathan at Bourne’s Best （and Worst） Pizza. Zacharias Finkelburg saw Nathan at the grocery store where he was buying cottage cheese and sliced turkey and diet cola. Mab and Petra saw Nathan driving on Maple, and he waved to them from his shiny black car. They pretended they did not see him, but they did. Pastor Jeff saw Nathan at church and said he did not sing, but he did stay after for the part where there is juice and cookies, but he did not drink the juice or eat the cookies, but he did talk to a lot of people and shake their hands. Kyle R. said he saw Nathan buying clothes at the Fitwit, and Kyle M. said there was no way someone like Nathan would buy clothes at the Fitwit, and Kyle R. said there was nowhere else to buy clothes in Bourne and Nathan was not going to go around naked, especially not now that it is getting cold out, and Kyle M. said he probably had his old clothes sent from Boston, and that is possible because Lulu Isaacs saw Nathan at the post office.