With that, I splashed some water on my face, fixed on a smile, and stepped out. I would find Jerome. I would make him explain to me what I was missing. We would laugh, then we would kiss with tongue, and all would be well.

As I walked back through the galleries, I saw Boo on the phone, pacing. She never spoke to anyone that intently. Then she hung up and dodged around a group of tourists and headed toward the lobby. Little threads began to connect themselves in my head. I didn’t know what this all added up to, but something was coming together. A strange and sudden impulse came over me.

While we were technically in class, Mark wasn’t watching us—and when the class was over, we were free to leave on our own. And I couldn’t stay here anymore, anyway.

So I followed her.

She stood on Trafalgar Square, just under the museum steps, and made another phone call. I watched this from above, from the raised entrance of the museum. Then she hurried to the entrance of Charing Cross Tube. I went down the stairs after her, tapping my Oyster card on the turnstile, and followed her down the escalators to the tracks. She got on a Northern Line, the black line, and rode the train two stops. At Tottenham Court Road, she switched to the Central Line going east—that was the way back to school. Our stop was Liverpool Street. But at Bank, she switched again, to the District Line, still going east. To keep out of her sight, I had to stay at the far end of the cars and hope she wasn’t paying too much attention. Luckily for me, Boo was Boo, head down, looking at her phone, adjusting her music.

She got off at Whitechapel and stepped out onto the incredibly busy road full of market stalls and small restaurants of all kinds—Turkish, Ethiopian, Indian, American fried chicken. Across the street was the Royal London Hospital—a name I vaguely recognized from some news report. Whitechapel was Ripper central. I let her get a little bit ahead of me, but not too far or she’d be swallowed up in the crowd. I had to push my way along to keep her in my sights, weaving around the vendors who sold shopping bags and African masks and umbrellas. It was a busy Saturday afternoon, and the street was packed. The air was thick with the smells of shops selling grilled halal meat and spicy Caribbean chicken and goat. I got stuck several times behind people with bags or Styrofoam containers of food and had to use all the meager skills I had developed dodging hockey balls in the goal to get through. (Despite the fact that Claudia told me every day that dodging the balls was not the point of being in goal, it was the only lesson I learned.)