The The Name of the Star (10 page)

“You really need another hobby,” Jazza said, opening the door to the refectory.

“I have plenty of hobbies. Anyway, the Ripper never showed any interest in kids or teenagers, so I don't think we have anything to worry about. Does that make you feel better?”

“Not particularly,” Jazza said.

“Well, I tried.”

Jerome stepped aside to let me go in first. We got in line and loaded our plates. We had barely started eating when Mount Everest rumbled in with Claudia and Derek, the housemaster of Aldshot, in tow.

“They don't look happy,” Jerome said.

He was right. There was a frazzled gloom around all three of them. They walked up to the dais in formation, Everest moving to the front, and Claudia and Derek flanking him with their arms folded across their chests, like bodyguards.

“Everyone!” he said. “Silence. I have an announcement to make.”

It took a moment for word to spread to all parts of the refectory that it was time to shut up.

“This evening,” he began, “as you all know, there is going to be a great deal of police activity in London because of the Ripper situation. Therefore, we are altering the schedule for today. All school activities after four P.M. are canceled so that teachers may return home.”

A cheer broke out.

“Settle down!” he said. “Dinner will be moved up to five P.M. so that kitchen staff can also return home before dark. All students will return to their houses after dinner and will remain there for the night. All other buildings will be off-limits and locked, including the library.”

A low groan went around the room.

“I want to convey the seriousness of this,” Everest added. “
Anyone
who attempts to leave school grounds faces the possibility of expulsion. Is that understood?”

He waited until he got a grumbled yes.

“I will meet with all prefects now, in my office.”

Jerome took a second to shove some extra food into his mouth before rising. At the end of our table, I saw Charlotte bounce up.

“This means I won't have that extra hockey practice this afternoon,” I said to Jazza. “No hockey.
No hockey
.”

I banged my spoon on the table for emphasis, but she didn't get excited.

“I wish I'd gone home,” Jazza said, poking at her food.

“It's going to be great,” I said, shaking her arm. “No hockey! And I totally think my new shipment of Cheez Whiz might get here today.”

True enough. I'd told all my friends I was out, and I fully expected to find a pigeonhole full of whizzy goodness this afternoon. But not even the promise of Cheez Whiz could remove the frown from Jazza's face.

“It's creepy,” she said, rubbing her arms. “All of this has just made things . . . I don't know. Everyone's afraid. One man has made the entirety of London afraid.”

There was nothing I could do. Jazza just didn't see the positive side of this. So I continued eating my sausages and let her have her moment. I was already thinking about the joy I'd feel in not walking to the hockey field and not standing in the goal and not getting hit with hockey balls. As a swimmer, it was a bliss she could never know.

11

So we were inside again, and like everyone else in London—and around the world, probably—we were all gathered around the television. The common room was packed to capacity. Most people had work they were doing, or they had their computers on their laps. We had hours to wait for news to report anything of interest, so newscasters were filling the time with statements like that.
Keep calm and carry on.
Also, stay in and hide because the Ripper is coming.

Luckily, we all had his schedule. Like an evil Santa, there was no doubt when he did his work. On the night of the Double Event, the first attack occurred in a dark alley somewhere around twelve forty-five A.M. on the morning of the thirtieth. The victim was named Elizabeth “Long Liz” Stride. Her throat was cut, but she wasn't, like the other victims, disemboweled. For some reason, the Ripper left the scene and hurried about a mile away, to a place called Mitre Square. There he murdered and completely mutilated a woman named Catherine Eddowes in five or ten minutes flat. They knew that because a policeman walked through Mitre Square at one thirty, and nothing was going on. When he walked through again fifteen minutes later, there were the gruesome remains.

As for the route: Liz Stride was murdered on Berner Street, now called Henriques Street. From there, he hurried west to Mitre Square. Mitre Square was a mere ten-minute walk from Wexford.

Up until now, the Ripper hadn't really freaked me out much. But with every passing hour, it started to have more of an effect on me. Two people were going to get murdered tonight, right around where I was sitting. And the whole world was going to sit and watch, just like we were.

The first news broke at 12:57. We all knew it was coming, but it was still a shock when the news anchor touched his ear and listened for a moment.

They had instantly created a live map with the murder scene and a circle radiating out from it in red. Our school was smack in the middle of this red section. The entire common room fell silent. Everyone looked up from what they were doing.

“I can now confirm that the body of a
man
has been found on Davenant Street, in a small private car park. Witnesses who found the body say that the victim had a wound to the neck. Though we have no further details at this time, that is consistent with the Ripper murders. I have with me Dr. Harold Parker, professor of psychology at University College, London, and technical adviser to the Metropolitan Police.”

The camera panned over to a bearded man.

“Dr. Parker,”
the anchor asked.
“What's your first reaction to this information?”

“Well,”
the doctor began,
“the first thing of note here is that the victim is a man. All the Ripper victims of 1888 were female prostitutes. However, it should also be noted that the third Ripper victim, Elizabeth Stride, was the only one who had no mutilations. Only her neck was cut. If this turns out to be the work of the new Ripper, it suggests a different pathology. This Ripper doesn't care about the sex or the profession of the victim—”

“I can't watch this anymore,” Jazza said. “I'm going upstairs.”

Jaz got out of her chair and stepped over the various people sitting on the floor around us. I didn't want to stop watching, but she was clearly upset, and I didn't want to leave her alone.

“I hate what they're doing,” she said as I followed her. “I hate the show they're making of all of this. It's horrible, and it's frightening, and people treat it like it's reality television.”

“I think they're just reporting it because people want to know,” I said, following her a few steps behind.

“I don't have to watch it, though.”

My Cheez Whiz had, sadly, not arrived. I offered to make Jazza some tea instead, but she didn't want any. She planted herself on her bed and started refolding her laundry. We had a service at Wexford where they came once a week and took away our laundry bags, and when we returned in the afternoon, we'd find them outside our door, our clothes clean and folded. But Jazza always shook out her things and refolded them in her special way. I sat on my own bed and took out my computer, but before I could even open it, my phone rang. It was Jerome. I'd recently given him my number in art history so that we could meet up to work on a project. This was the only time he'd ever called.

“You guys should come over,” he said as soon as I answered. He sounded very excited.

“Over where?”

“Aldshot. Where else? We can go on the roof.”

“What?”

“Come on,” he said. “It's all kicking off. We can get an amazing view from the roof. I know how to get up there.”

“You're insane,” I said.

“Who is it?” Jazza asked.

I cupped my hand over the phone.

“It's Jerome. He wants us to go over to Aldshot. To the roof.”

“Then you're right,” she replied. “He
is
insane.”

“Jazza says you're—”

“I heard her. But I'm not insane. Leave Hawthorne the back way and cut around to the back of Aldshot. No one is going to catch you. Everyone's been checked in for the night.”

I repeated the message. Jazza glanced over from her folding. Her expression conveyed the idea that she still wasn't very impressed with the suggestion.

“Say this,” Jerome said. “Say these exact words. Say ‘she'd never think you had the guts to do it, which is why you should.'”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Just say it.”

I repeated the message exactly as he said it. The words had a strange, almost magical effect. Jazza seemed to lift up off the bed a bit, her eyes aglow.

“Have to go for a moment,” Jerome said. “Text me when you're coming. This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance. We'll be able to see everything from up there, and no one will know, I promise.”

He hung up. Jazza was still suspended there, half sitting and half standing on the edge of the bed.

“What kind of voodoo was that?” I asked. “What did that mean?”

“He means,” Jazza said, “that Charlotte would never suspect I had the guts to use the exit.”

“The exit?”

“There's a way to get out. The ground-floor bathrooms. There are bars over the windows, but one of the windows . . . the screws that hold the bars on have been loosened. All you have to do is open the window, reach outside and give them a little turn, and they fall right out. Then you can push the bars back enough to get out of the window. I know about them because Charlotte was the one who developed that system. She loosened the screws. We can't, though. We'd get expelled.”

“They said anyone caught
leaving
school grounds might be expelled,” I said. “It
is
school grounds.”

“Yes, but
we
can't be in Aldshot,” Jazza said, her voice getting lower and lower. “That's just as bad. Well, not
just
as bad, but bad . . .”

Maybe it was simply that I had flown all the way to England and then been locked in a building for a month. I really, somewhat bizarrely, wanted to see Jerome. Jerome with his floppy curls and goofy Ripper obsession.

Jazza prowled the space between her bureau and the closet, stoking some internal fire. I had to add more fuel, and quickly.

“Who's most likely to catch us? Charlotte. And is Charlotte going to report her own vandalism? Is she really going to rat on someone using the exit
she
made?”

“Possibly,” Jazza said.

“Let's set that possibility aside, then,” I replied. “Come on. You know it would burn her if you had the guts to use it and she didn't. And you've been good forever. No one is going to suspect you of doing this. So you
have
to.”

Some emotion took Jazza over for a moment. She got up and clenched her hands together, then studied the arrangement of her books with great intensity.

“All right,” she said. “Let's do it. Let's do it now, before I back out. Tell him we'll be there in fifteen minutes.”

First, there was feverish changing. We pulled off our pajamas and threw them to the floor. I put on my Wexford sweats, while Jazza put on a pair of black yoga pants and a dark hoodie. We both tied our hair back and wore sneakers. Action wear.

“Wait,” Jazza said as we were about to step out the door. “We can't wear the shoes. We were just downstairs in socks. It's going to look like we're up to something. In fact, we should put our pajamas back on. We'll change downstairs in the toilets.”

So we pulled off those clothes and put the pajamas back on and stuffed our sneaking clothes into our bags, because it was perfectly normal to carry your bag around the building for your books or your computer. We crept downstairs, though there was no crime in going down the stairs. Everyone, including Claudia, was riveted to the news, so we were able to slip by the common room door and continue on to the end of the hall, to the bathroom. The bathroom on this floor wasn't as big as our bathroom, because it didn't have showers, and it wasn't designed for thirty girls to get ready at the same time. This was the bathroom you used when you were in the common room and didn't feel like going up the stairs. It had one stall, which was unoccupied. Jazza and I changed quickly. Jazza went into the stall, opened the window, and climbed onto the toilet seat so she could work her arm through the bars at the right angle.

“I can feel it,” she whispered. “I can twist it off.”

She scrunched up her face as she worked. I heard the tiniest, tiniest
tink
as the screw hit the sidewalk below.

“That's one,” she said. She turned gingerly on the seat and started working on the other.
Tink
again.