I could practically hear Lacey roll her eyes. I did hear Lacey tapping away on her laptop.
“It’s super frustrating that I can’t find anything but grainy pictures of him on the Internet,” she said. “The whole point of Google is stalking your sister’s foreign hookups.”
“He’s dishy. You’d approve,” I said, lifting up my cheese plate to pull my quilt over my toes. My radiator had one setting: inefficient. “Kind of a Clark Kent type.”
“Ooh, I do approve,” Lacey said. Then her tone turned wistful. “I can’t believe I’m not there. Or that you’re not here. It’s so bizarre. I feel like half my inner monologue went silent.”
Before Oxford, the longest Lacey and I had been apart was eight hours. We picked wildly divergent bedroom décor, yet ended up sleeping in the same room every night rather than retreating to our separate corners. Her school schedule never aligned with mine, but by dinnertime we’d snap back into place like a rubber band. We’d go to the same summer camps, and I’d bring home demerits for skipping sessions to skinny dip in the river, while she’d have an armload of excellence awards and sheaves of phone numbers from excited acolytes she’d immediately forget; it was enough to have secured them. We never deliberately froze anybody out, but it was challenging for other people to get very close. Scientists needed fifty years to split the atom. Our classmates didn’t stand a chance.
Neither had boys. Lacey always dated whatever guy was currently the hottest commodity—our school’s all-state point guard, or the kid who won a ton of cash on high-school Jeopardy!—and I’d drift along with whatever plus-one of his she fixed me up with, and inevitably our double dates would turn into them staring awkwardly off into space as Lacey and I monopolized each other’s conversation. In fact, our classmates voted us Cutest Couple, and I don’t think it was a joke. I even dumped my freshman-year boyfriend at Cornell when I overheard him referring to Lacey as The Trojan, because, as he disparagingly told his fraternity brother, she was around so much that she was the world’s most effective birth control.
So I don’t think Lacey quite believed it when I announced my England plans. History had borne out that our gravitational pull was simply too strong. Even as infants, Mom said that she’d set us down two feet apart in our crib, and an hour later we’d somehow be snuggled right up next to each other again, as if we were still in the womb. Nothing had ever come between us before, so it must have seemed highly unlikely that I’d willingly put an ocean there.
“It feels weird that you haven’t met any of these people,” I told her that night. “I keep turning to tell you things, expecting you to be here.”
“How am I going to survive organic chemistry without you drawing obscene cartoon molecules on my flash cards?” she complained affectionately.
“Well, we can’t be attached at the hip forever,” I reasoned. “Nobody will let me hang out in the operating room sketching people’s innards while you rebuild their aortas, or whatever.”
“Why not? It’d be like a souvenir,” Lacey said. “But fine, don’t worry about me, up here with my face in a cadaver while you’re living with a prince.” She tsked. “I can’t believe you don’t even have any gossip on him. You are the worst.”
“I rarely see him, Lace,” I said. “Half the time he doesn’t socialize with us. He hasn’t even come into town.”
By the sheer happenstance of Ceres Whitehall de Villency inexplicably (to me) opting for a year at Cornell, I’d landed smack in the middle of Nick’s tight social cluster—everyone in our hall was a proven-loyal chum, or the offspring of one—and my own assimilation came largely thanks to Cilla, who didn’t so much take me under her wing as wrestle me there. I think we were mutually grateful that we got along so well: me because Oxford was the first time I’d been without Lacey, my genetically built-in best friend, and Cilla because her proximity to Nick made her suspicious of outside girls’ motivations, and her other choices on our floor were unsatisfying. Lady Bollocks was too aloof and consumed with horsy pursuits, Joss spent all her free time sewing and immersing herself in the essence of whatever oddball she was dating (which accounted for her current insincere punk look), and the mysterious eighth door in our hallway belonged not to a coed, but to Nick’s personal protection officers. We were forbidden to buddy up with this taciturn quartet of ex-military men, so we never knew their names, instead christening them based on their various personal qualities (PPO Stout was as tall as he was wide; PPO Twiggy was svelte but could snap you like one; PPO Popeye occasionally had spinach in his teeth; PPO Furrow was a frowner). None was older than forty, all had wives and children at home, and yet to do their jobs they bunked two at a time in the most inelegant fashion—it must have felt like trying to shove a cat into a mouse hole—which surely put them on the fast track to sainthood.
Nobody said it directly, but I sensed that coming on strong with questions about Nick would raise the hackles of both my new friends and his trained killers, and it wasn’t worth it just to find out if Nick wore boxers or briefs. So I couldn’t tell Lacey much about him that she didn’t already know from People. The day I got accepted to Oxford, she dragged her old Royal Family commemorative issue from the dusty archives under her bed, and showed me pictures of three-year old Nick roaming Balmoral’s moors in buckle shoes and a tweedy plaid jacket, or waving from the Buckingham Palace balcony during a state occasion while Freddie waggled his tongue. None of it did much to create an image of an actual person; just a poster boy, a character in a far-off story.