not bulletproof? Was my room bulletproof? No one had given me a dossier.
I came up with a workaround.
“Where should I put it?” I asked, pushing the door wide and gesturing at the space, which was an avalanche of books and printed pages. Oxford prefers intimate, often one-on-one sessions with professors, rather than seminars. It sounds great, but there is nowhere to hide, and I was learning that the hard way. I’d promised myself I would return to the grind after The Glug, but naturally, I was too wasted to do anything but shuffle some papers around and then watch DVDs.
Nick strode confidently inside—etiquette problem solved—and put the trophy on my desk. “Are you actually studying after a Glug? That has to be a first.”
“It’s my special time with Hans Holbein,” I said, flopping dramatically onto my bed. “Which is a problem, because I just realized our discussion is supposed to be about Hans Holbein the Younger, so now I have to start over.”
“Just say this: ‘Hans Holbein the Younger is the man whose portraits of Nicholas’s corpulent great-great-great-something-or-other Henry the Eighth are routinely ignored by filmmakers who want him to be a chiseled Adonis,’” Nick offered. “And maybe these will help.”
He handed me the bag he’d been holding. I peered inside and saw a mélange of weird-yet-delicious American junk food: Cracker Jack, Twinkies, Chiken in a Biskit, a slightly crushed box of strawberry Pop-Tarts, and a crumbled bag of Bugles. It looked like someone ransacked a 7-Eleven.
“This is perfect,” I said. “This is unbelievable.”
Nick looked pleased. “It’s to combat homesickness,” he said. “When you talked about your sister, it was like your volume setting got turned down a bit. Not that it needed to be,” he amended. “You just seemed blue. So I looked up America’s most revolting-sounding snack food and had someone in my network of spies send me a package.”
“Ceres?” I asked around the foil Pop-Tart wrapping I was opening with my teeth.
“I would never reveal my sources,” Nick said. “More importantly, is that woman surfing on a coffin?”
He gestured toward my open laptop. I had forgotten to pause what I was watching on it.
“If that’s Holbein research, then I seriously underestimated him,” Nick said.
“Turns out you can’t watch a DVD and type at the same time, so obviously I prioritized,” I said. “And yes, she is. A coven buried her alive. Her vampire brothers blackmailed someone into breaking all magical bonds for five minutes, but that started a tsunami. She’s making the best of it.”
Nick stared at me. “Pause that,” he said, walking over and quietly shutting the door.
I obeyed, thinking of how Lacey would react to me watching Devour with a prince dressed more like one of the Royal Tenenbaums while I wore ratty pajama bottoms and a Cubs T-shirt with no bra. She would stroke out.
“Right,” Nick said, sinking onto my bed. “I need a complete account of what’s going on here. And not a word to Gaz or Clive, or I’ll never hear the end of it.”
I scooted back on the bed to put a little social distance between us.
“Lacey promised to send me every new episode of our favorite show, which is this crazy-bad supernatural soap opera. I think the writers make all their decisions by throwing darts at a bulletin board,” I said. “There are vampires, werewolves, witches, one shape-shifter, a private investigator who can smell the future, and two panthers who seem like they know too much. Actual panthers, not CGI.”
Nick blinked. “Oh no. Night Nick is about to become obsessed with this.”
“Is that your insomniac side?” I guessed.
“More like his evil twin,” he said. “Freddie and I have a running joke about how once it gets late enough, Night Nick takes over, and Night Nick is a total bastard to Day Nick. He does things like watch TV for hours, instead of going to bed. Night Nick once watched all three Lord of the Rings movies instead of resting up for an official appearance with Gran. Day Nick got his ears boxed for it.” He sighed. “At least those are good. Night Nick usually has the worst taste.”
This is true. He is the only person I know who has sought out every cut-rate sequel to every dance movie of the past twenty-odd years, and I once caught him voting in the finals of a web series called So You Wanna Be the Next Real Housewife? (“It will be a crime if Ashleigh doesn’t win this, Bex,” he’d told me seriously.