Page 8

Chapter 8

THE REMAINS OF THE DAY

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 4

At least, until I return to our room that night.

When I arrive after a solo study session in the Halo, Jasper is digging through his desk drawer, tossing aside dog-eared books and half-drank coffees from Laney’s Bean Shack. He spins around in the dress shoes that he didn’t bother taking off—animal. “You’re back!”

I blink from the doorway. Everywhere smells like cinnamon and hints of smoke from his guideline-breaking fire-hazard candles. I sneeze. “You’re making a mess.”

“For good reason.”

“And that is?”

“I’d like to convince you to assist me with my letters.”

I rush to shut the door behind me before Maverick the Residential Retainer can overhear. If Jasper were anybody else but the principal’s nephew, I’d throw the door at his face. “I already told you that I wouldn’t do a good job.”

“And I humbly offer a solution.” Jasper picks up a pile of pens, pencils, and notebooks, then strides across our room, dodging the books strewn along his side. His ponytail is barely holding its shape after a full day, hanging loose around his cheeks. “For you to write with the quality STRIP promises, you need a love tutor. I will so graciously be yours.”

My heart rate spikes so sharply, I swear, it rattles all my bones. “Love tutor?”

“Please, call me Tutor Jasper. Per your previous stated terms, I’ll convince my aunt to find me another room.”

I stare at the three moles below his thumb shaped like a constellation. The last hand in the universe I want to touch.

“Please choose the inscribing instrumentation that resonates with you most.” Jasper shoves the pile of writing materials into my arms. I grunt. “One lesson with me. That is all I ask. Then you may decide if we make the brilliant team that I believe we would.”

Two pens slip out of my grasp and hit the floor, where Jasper’s books have spread to the door. I look to the ceiling posters of Jasper, then the cardboard version of him between our beds. “You really chose to bring your life-sized cutout? Out of everything?”

“It was a gift from Poetic Fortune Digest . What else was I supposed to pack?”

“Gee, I don’t know.” I kick one of his books. “You have stacks of a certain something all over your desk. And your floor. And my floor.”

Jasper blinks. Potentially genuinely.

“A bookcase,” I say through clenched teeth.

Jasper surveys the empty space between our beds. “Oh. I see, von Hevringprinz.”

“You know you can just say my first name, right?”

“But your last name is beautiful.”

Spit lodges in my throat. I cough it out. “It’s long.”

“Could be longer. Consider Oscar Wilde’s real name.”

I thought I was the only one who knew this. “Oscar Fingal O’Fflahertie Wills Wilde?”

Jasper’s dimple pops. “Not as beautiful.”

I grin back until I realize what I’m doing. A serial heartbreaker like him has called a hundred other people beautiful too. We could never make a brilliant team .

But a bedroom of my own. Logically, that may be worth sucking it up and writing love letters with the one boy who broke my heart—and who can’t figure out who I am.

Jasper’s face falls. “Something the matter?”

“N-no,” I say quickly.

He squints back at me, like he’s trying to find an answer in my body language or facial features instead. “You’re quite evasive, you know that?”

“What do you mean?”

“Evasive. It means not straightforward. Avoidant. Hiding your thoughts.”

“I know what it means,” I snap, but my voice nearly warbles from the nerves shooting through me. One day in, and Jasper can already tell how desperately I’m trying to avoid him.

If I keep running from Jasper, that may only look more suspicious. Knowing him, he might try to dig deeper into my life than he already has.

“One lesson,” I say, even though it’s the last thing I want. “I’ll try it. No promises.”

Jasper’s face lights up again. “Wonderful!”

I bend over to spread the writing materials along the rug. What did Jasper say? To find what resonated? Well, no resonation detected. I follow my head instead of my heart when I avoid the pens and pick the first mechanical pencil I spot—how is Jasper confident with permanent ink?—and a standard composition notebook. When I look back up, Jasper’s arms are crossed.

“Write a poetic love letter and recite it,” he says. “Within five minutes.”

This is happening. I’m being told to recite a love letter to my long-dead crush. My stomach tightens. “Don’t I get a prompt?”

“You need one?”

“It’d help?”

“I see.” My desire to strangle him over how confused he sounds intensifies. “Imagine what typical adversities a couple would face when split by such an evil, towering, gated wall.”

That’s barely a prompt.

I go sit at my desk with my chosen pencil and notebook. I scribble down a first line, but the curtains rustling in the breeze are too distracting, and the scent of fall leaves mixing with the room’s explosion of cinnamon and floral fragrance is too overbearing. My brain floods with camp memories of Jasper, raising his hand with more meaningful questions and gaining more praise from guest speakers than I ever did.

Jasper snatches my pencil. I reach for it, but he tucks it behind his ear. “Time’s up.”

I glare at his wrist, devoid of a watch, even though Valentine repeatedly told us to bring one. “How would you know?”

“It felt like five minutes.”

“How are you surviving here?” I gesture to his empty wrist. “All we have is the bell tower. Neither of us even brought a clock for our room.”

Jasper points toward the curtains. “I can tell based on where the sun or moon is in the sky. You can’t?”

“No?”

He hums. Judgmentally. “Stand and read.”

I look down at my paper again.

Roses are red, violets are blue

I

Pushing in my chair, I debate lighting one of Jasper’s candles and setting the notebook on fire. Jasper is Rank One. He can’t see me fail already.

Think, Charlie . “Roses—”

“Look at me. I want to feel the emotion.”

I do, and the pressure skyrockets. Jasper’s eyes are such a familiar piercing blue, gazing back the same as when we’d write by the lake and he’d ask me to recite what I’d written for workshop. He always wanted to hear mine.

“You can trust me with your emotions,” Jasper says. “We’re roommates.”

Strangely, my first instinct is to believe him. Although Jasper has been as obnoxious as predicted since I got here, he’s also been oddly kind to me, constantly asking to be my dining hall buddy and trying to learn more about me so we can bond. Maybe it wouldn’t be the end of the world if he remembered.

“Jasper?” I say.

He watches me just as brightly as he did two years ago. It’s enough for my senses to come roaring back. Jasper showed me the same kindness then. The only difference is that I was still naive enough to believe it.

What am I thinking?

“Never mind.” I take a breath. “Roses are red. Violets are blue. I…” I rack my mind for something. Anything. “If only… this wall… weren’t between us, our love could… grew. Grow. Wait. Roses are red—”

Jasper yanks away the notebook. “You will attend love lessons with me daily.”

I must’ve heard wrong. “But I have to study!”

“This is a race against the clock, von Hevringprinz. On top of our usual demands, the winter mixer is nearly here. Our busiest event of the year.”

Delilah claimed the mixer is the only time Valentine students are allowed to have fun. I never believed her, though, since the word mixer only evokes a sense of cringe within me. What would she advise me to do if she knew I was being asked to break the rules? Would she encourage me to screw the Valentine system with a tossed middle finger in typical Delilah fashion or to keep my head down like Mom?

All I want to do is hunt down my phone locked in the depths of campus and message her updates like I did throughout school last year, even though she couldn’t read any until her own phone was released at the start of winter break. Now that I’m enduring this phone-less life, I get why she nonstop messaged me all day and night—which I admittedly slept through—until she returned to campus. Maybe I should’ve tried harder to stay up.

“Is the mixer that huge of a deal?” I ask Jasper, since he’s all I have instead.

“It’s everything. A tradition as ancient as STRIP itself. A celebration of every Valentine couple, new and old. We’ll serve hundreds of lovesick souls.”

I still don’t understand. STRIP can’t be worth all the risk that comes with it just for the sake of tradition, and it causes my biggest anxiety spike of the night.

It must be obvious because Jasper closes the distance between us to clap my shoulder. I instinctively lower my face. “I need one week to prepare a lesson plan,” he says. “You’ll start as our face in the library then. We’ll hold your lessons after. Agreed?”

Will I have the time? Create a strict study regimen, wake up early, and stay up all night to please a poet who only respects himself? Besides, spending more time with Jasper outside our trapped room would only give him more chances to look at me closer.

But it would give me a chance to keep an eye on him . Stop him from investigating into who I am on his own. Give me a small bit of control.

And the room. I need this room to myself.

“Fine, Jasper.”

“Tutor Jasper.” He grins.

I clench my jaw. “Tutor Jasper.”