I had lucked out on the roommate front. Jazza, with her wide eyes, her adorable caution, her relentless determination to do the nice thing. Jazza missed her dogs and taking long, hot baths, and she promised to take me home with her to where she lived, out in the wilds of Cornwall. She liked to go to bed at ten thirty and read Jane Austen with a cup of tea. She didn’t care if I sat up, screwing around on the Internet or desperately cramming English literature into my brain or fumbling my way through French essays until three in the morning. In fact, those new rules probably saved my academic life as well. There was nothing to do but study. On Friday and Saturday, we’d get mildly drunk on mugs full of cheap red wine (supplied by Gaenor and Angela, who managed to stash theirs so cleverly that no one could find it) and then run in circles around the building.

That’s how September went. By the end of it, everyone on my floor knew about Cousin Diane, Uncle Bick, Billy Mack. They had admired the pictures of my grandma in her negligee. I learned that Gaenor was deaf in one ear, that Eloise had once been attacked on the street in Paris, Angela had a skin condition that made her itchy all the time, Chloe down the hall wasn’t a horrible snob—her father had recently died. When a little tipsy, Jazza did complicated dance routines with props.

People got more and more bitter about these rules as we approached the twenty-ninth. In response to the police request that everyone stay either at home or in a group, it was now a city-wide party. Pubs were offering two-for-one drinks. Betting shops had odds on where bodies would be found. Regular programming on BBC One had been replaced by all-night news coverage, and the other stations were running every kind of Ripper or murder mystery show they had. People were throwing lock-in parties in their houses to watch. The Double Event night was bigger than New Year’s and we were not going to be a part of it.

On the morning of the twenty-ninth, there was an uncertain sky on the edge of rain. I trudged over to the refectory, limping a bit because of a brief romance my thigh had with a flying hockey ball during one of the rare moments I wasn’t guarding the goal in my head-to-toe padding. I guess I wasn’t overly concerned about the Ripper. In my mind, Jack the Ripper was a ridiculous creature that always lived in London. On that day, though, I saw the first signs of people really flaking out. I heard someone say that she didn’t even want to go outside. Two people left school entirely for a few days. I saw one of them pulling her bag along the cobblestones.

“People are being serious,” I said to Jazza.