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A flash of jealousy lights within me. Finlay is so free, so fuck-it in his breezy attitude, while I’ve never felt as constrained in Lochkelvin. He can live in Edinburgh. He can research. He can hunt people down, piece together clues, get information. It’s exactly what I want to do — with my whole life, with what lies beyond these stone walls. The accomplishment of investigative work, of being a detective and pinning down the truth.
“I’ll come with you,” I say softly, knowing the inevitable response.
“No,” Finlay and Rory answer simultaneously, and I scowl at the desk like a scolded child. “Look, if the worst comes tae the worst, if we’re no’ here come May and I fuck up the January prelims, then I can re-sit a’ these daft exams. It’ll be a pain in the arse but I can dae that.Youcannae, no wi’oot strugglin’. So just, for me, keep yer heid doon and focus on gettin’ yer As. Okay? The better ye dae noo, the mair freedom ye’ll have at the end up.”
He’s right, and I hate that. But he’s right and he flouts all the same rules the world has created for me, and I hate that even more.
“If this is what you want,” Rory murmurs to Finlay, though he still looks thoroughly displeased. “You’ll be cutting it fine, though.”
“I know.” He glances at each of us, and with an amused half-smile, he notes, “But I have somethin’ worth comin’ back for.”
He leans forward across the spread of bad news and presses his soft lips to mine. My eyes flutter shut as I breathe him in, wishing I could just hold him close to me forever. But Finlay is a force of nature, a ball of stubborn, madcap energy, that refuses to be tied down. His tongue teases with mine, a taste of everything I’ll miss, and as the night ticks slowly on, it’s worry that overfills my heart.
29
Like Luke, Finlay leaves in the dead of night later that week. He takes with him his guitar, which he plays to me before leaving, fingers picking out a gentle, melancholic melody in the safety of our politics class. Unlike Luke, we don’t risk gathering in the entrance hall to see him depart. Finlay insists he’d never find it in him to leave if we had. He kisses us, each of us, on the mouth. Danny looks slightly dizzy after his unexpected peck, at which Finlay just laughs.
Our meetings in politics class are held nightly, even once Finlay is gone. It’s somewhere to breathe and debrief. Some nights we sit on the desks, push the desks together into a wider table or ignore the desks entirely and sit curled up on the floor, limbs tangling with limbs. We catch up with the news, though without Finlay our discussions are more paranoid and doom-laden than genuinely insightful with the occasional flash of optimism. Conversations bounce differently when Finlay’s not in the room to wisecrack.
When we’re not in class, we’re neck-deep in textbooks and study notes. Every day closer to the exams is another petal plucked from a daisy. Studying becomes a competitive sport. Fights break out in the newly sanctified library — over people wanting the same book, over a lack of table space, over people whispering too loud. I note that books from the new section on Savior Benji aren’t exactly flying off the shelves. They just lie there, comically bright and juvenile, waiting for someone, anyone, to give them attention.
Everyone seems increasingly tetchy. Exams are all we can think about: the process justifying the mad pressure-cooker environment we’re stuck inside, as we inch further up the cliff, where our unknown futures await beyond its edge. For Finlay to have even contemplated fucking up his exams is unheard of. It violates the intellectual code that Lochkelvin holds so dear. And these days, drowning in the syrup of words and numbers and facts, I envy him more than ever.
“Well, this is going to piss off a lot of people,” Rory murmurs one night, tiredness underlining his gray eyes. He flings away the newspaper in disgust, and it lands alongside my lap. The Independent has a close-up photo of Nicola Miller on its front page with the headline ‘GOTCHA!’ Camera flashes light up her face, and eyes caught mid-dart give her an extra wild edge. She looks like a harried A-list celebrity.
“They’ve sentenced her?” Danny asks, startled and staring down at her photo. “But… it’s not like she was even a royalist. She was just looking into—”
“The truth,” I finish quietly. “The truth about Antiro.”
“This is what happens when you look too deeply into matters the powers that be don’t want you to,” Rory says. His dark blond head rests against the wooden base of the chalkboard. He gazes unseeingly across the rows of table legs, as though they represent the many, many obstacles stuck in our way.
“‘Gotcha’,” I repeat slowly, disturbed by the callousness of this one-word headline. “Journalists really have no sense of loyalty toward each other, huh.”
Danny scratches his head. “A Scottish journalist in an English jail, convicted by a kangaroo court, and for what? Research? Because this doesn’t make Benji look good. He must know that, right?”
“He doesn’t need to look good anymore. That was phase one. He must believe he’s popular and powerful enough to move onto the good old ‘quash the non-believers’ stage of a regime. Making an example of Miller means he can spook the naysayers into falling in line.”
Nicola Miller’s furious face is splashed across every newspaper like a warning shot. In some photos, she looks windswept and angry; in others, simply tired. It makes me consider each newspaper’s biases — are those editors similarly angry? Compared to the other publications, The Daily Toot carries a particularly striking full-length image of Nicola Miller outside the trial. Positioned on grand court steps above rows deep with paparazzi, she’s wearing a smart dark belted Mac, her ink-black hair blowing in the breeze, her apple-red lips a sharp contrast to her powdered white skin. She looks like a particularly astute Snow White. While all other newspapers paint her as a meddlesome woman getting her dues, The Daily Toot — even if their sole mission is making readers’ dicks hard — at least manages to restore some of her dignity by displaying her more glamorous side. I may be wildly off-base, but it reads to me like a mark of respect.
I keep the newspaper for myself. If I’m to become an investigative journalist in my life beyond these iceberg-like exams, then Nicola Miller is my role model, and that picture of her isfierce.
Dr. Moncrieff’s whole belief system ground to a halt because of this one case, so I try to evaluate his reaction the following day. He doesn’t give anything away during politics class, but at meal times he eats at the staff table in silence and his expression speaks of faraway thoughts.
As luck would have it, I bump into him later in the library while searching for a book to brush up on my knowledge of thermodynamics. We say nothing to each other, though I will myself not to turn scarlet, the last time we met in the library being a traumatic affair — for both of us, seemingly, as he too refuses to meet my eyes.
I get the stupidest thought in my head then, that Nicola Miller was never a coward when she wanted answers. So I take a deep breath and cross the aisle to the section on political theory he’s standing at.
Dr. Moncrieff finally turns his amber eyes on me, bewildered. “Yes?”
“Nicola Miller,” I murmur, and it’s enough for his head to twist, glancing around the hushed corners of the library in case anyone is listening.
He says nothing, but he walks slowly toward the empty wall, gazing sightlessly at titles in the biology section. He’s almost hidden between rows of towering bookshelves. Curious, I join him, standing by his side.
“You need to be careful,” he warns quietly with a cautious glance at our surroundings, his head angled away from me. No one is near us. That image of Nicola Miller in The Daily Toot is superimposed on my mind and my actions. It drives me now. I want tobeher.
“Maybe you’retoocareful.”
He breathes a heavy sigh. “I don’t know what you lot are playing at. I gave you a loan of my classroom, then Mr. Fraser mysteriously leaves, and now you’re concerning yourself with the Miller case.”
