“Interesting. Do you, like, do research?”

A picture of the current state of my desk, littered in notes and photos relating to the case of JonBenét Ramsey’s murder, flashed before my eyes. “Uh . . . a little.”

JasperandSeth made it into the boys’ wing. Jasper’s room was exactly six doors down the hallway from mine; a simple fact, but one that made falling asleep impossible some nights.

“Maybe you should look into the question of who’s writing The Chitter Chatter then.” Jasper chuckled as he fished his keys out of his pocket and unlocked the door.

“I don’t think I would be the one who’d solve that if no one else has in two years.”

“Nonsense. I think if anyone would, it’d be you,” Jasper said.

With a sweeping gesture, he added, “Come in.”

I hesitantly stepped through the threshold and looked around the room while Jasper shut the door behind me. “Oh wow.”

“Don’t be bothered by the creative chaos,” Jasper said, as if he knew exactly what I was thinking.

“Is that what you call this?” I snorted.

Laughing, he threw his coat onto his bed. “I’ll be back in a second. Make yourself comfortable.”

I nodded and waited until the bathroom door fell shut behind him before I took in my surroundings.

While one half of the room was plain and organized, the other was swamped in the creative chaos Jasper had talked about. His desk was barely visible under the flood of papers, books, and magazines that were scattered across it, most of them covered with neon sticky notes that had Jasper’s writing scrawled across them.

The wall above his bed was covered in musical theater posters that ranged from Les Misérables to Be More Chill. Next to his bed was a pile of clothes that seemed bigger than all of my wardrobe and his drawer was covered in a bunch of knick-knacks: a tiny statue of the Eiffel tower, candles, various bottles of nail polish.

The thing that stoked my curiosity the most was a framed picture of him and two older girls standing in front of Seven Hills’

entrance. They had the same blue eyes and similarly prominent cheekbones, but a different hair color, a silky black that stood in stark contrast to Jasper’s silvery-white hair. For a moment I tried to imagine Jasper with his natural hair color, but it was almost impossible. Judging by the absence of his lip piercing and the shape of his face, still childish and round, the picture must have been taken during his first years at Seven Hills. Looking at their smiling faces—Jasper squished between the two girls, all three of them wearing matching grins—a pang of homesickness ran through me; even though I had talked to my sister only yesterday, I still missed her so much it hurt.

Jasper emerged from the bathroom before I had the chance to study his other pictures. He blinked rapidly as he crossed the room, almost running into his drawer, and let out a string of angry French. Reaching his desk, he grabbed something off it and turned to face me again, now wearing a pair of wide-rimmed black glasses.