The conversation stalled. So did the traffic. The southbound motorway from London to Brighton was completely jammed. “Drive time is 3 hours and 22 minutes, despite the usual traffic”, said Google Maps.
“Where’d you go to school?”, Laura asked. If there was one thing that united Americans and Brits was their shared inability to deal with awkward silences, and Laura was filling the quiet humming car smalltalk.
“Cambridge”, Tom said, matter-of-factly, from behind the wheel. It was Laura’s car, but she’d thrown him the keys at the parking lot and without a word, the kid had accepted his new role as a driver.
Merida was impressed by Tom’s answer. Not that Cambridge was that special, but the kid was the first person to manage to give that particular answer to the question of one’s alma mater without sounding smug.
“Ooh, fancy”, Laura said. “And you?”
“Oxford”, Merida replied. She tried to keep her voice flat and free of pride, but failed. She bit her lower lip, hard, keeping her gaze fixed at Tom’s neck in the driver’s seat, not wanting to look at Laura. Crushing on somebody was the dumbest possible feeling: you wanted so badly for them to like you, yet you were completely unable to string together a passable sentence.
“Wow-wee. Oxbridge. I’m in the presence of greatness.”
“And where did you go?”, Merida fired the same question back at Laura.
“Castro Valley High School”, she replied.
“Oh.”
“College is for suckers. You can spend five years getting yourself into debt, or you can hop a few jobs and make some serious dough when you’re twenty-five.”
“If all you want is to make a lot of money…”, Merida muttered under her breath. As much as it sucked to say, Laura was right. Going to university had not earned her anything but crippling debt and regrets.
“What did you want?”
“I don’t know.”
“I mean, what did you study?”
“Philosophy.”
“And why did you do that?”
“I don’t know. Seemed like a noble thing to do.”
“How’s that working out for you?”
“…”
“It’s a fancy degree for an assistant.”
“Why do you… why does everyone keep assuming I’m an assistant. Just because I make the coffee? I’m a writer.”
“Ok, jesus! Chill out!”, Laura laughed. “You’re a writer, geeze.”
Merida was mortified. Another long silence ensued. She was so out of Laura’s league in every possible way. Taking Philosophy at Oxford might have tipped the scales, if it wasn’t for the fact that she had been kicked out of the program without much ceremony. This was a story she never told anyone, but the gorgeous girl sitting next to her in the back seat of the BMW scrambled her usual self-defence mechanisms and caused her to blurt out:
“I used to rob people’s houses.”
For the first time on the drive, Laura put her iPhone down and looked at her. “You what?”
“I — I, haha! I’m joking.”
“No, you aren’t”, Laura said and turned herself towards Merida. “That’s the first interesting thing I’ve heard all day. It’s a long drive. Entertain me?”
Merida felt the seat belt strap tighten around her chest. Suddenly, she felt very, very hot. “There isn’t that much to tell… I used to go into peoples’ houses when they were not at home and steal their stuff.”
“Why?”
Merida shrugged. “Money. I needed the money.”
“If all you want to do is to make a lot of money?” Laura retorted.
“Kinda. There’s more to the story.”
“I bet there is.”
Like many bad ideas, it started off as a drunken accident. Merida had moved to Oxford that spring, and fallen in with the party crowd. After a night of dancing, she came home only to discover she had left her purse behind at Adam’s house. She rang her own doorbell for what felt like hours, but could have been just minutes. Her house mates must have still been out. Hazily and with copious typing errors, she managed to message Adam who, last Merida had seen of him, was passed out on his own couch and was guaranteed not to respond.
So, out of desperation, or for whatever reason she had long ago forgotten (if there was a reason, she was so drunk she quite possibly did not have one), she decided it would be a good idea to climb up to the first floor balcony and force her way in through the flimsy door nobody ever locked.
The plan worked like a charm.
When she woke up in the morning, however, she was slightly confused, as the bed she had clambered into was not her own, nor was it one of her house mates. She had broken into a stranger’s flat, and without being detected, sneaked out into the warm summer morning without anybody noticing. The only thing she took from the house was the pillowcase she had soiled with her eye liner.
This made for a great story at parties, and would have remained that way, if it wasn’t for Eleanor. Later on, Merida could not understand how she had fallen so totally and completely for someone so destructive, but such was being young, horny and bipolar. By the end of the summer, Eleanor had moved in with her. By the middle of her third term at Oxford, they were taking hundred and twenty quid worth of heroin a day between them. By Christmas she had dropped out, and on New Year’s eve she broke into her first house. Or, technically, her second one, but the first she intended to rob.
She turned out to be quite the natural at the job, but eventually, everything had come to a crashing halt after she’d gone on a job while high and missed out on the house’s alarm system.
For two years, she had paid her debt to society behind bars. Now she still owed fifty thousand pounds to the bank for her incomplete degree, and her job to Wint Webster, who had hired her despite her failed background check. Being on probation, a single misstep could send Merida back to prison, and one of the conditions of her license was that she was supposed to notify her probation officer every time she left the city. The car just passed the London city limits, and she had most certainly not notified her probation officer.
“Cool story”, Laura said. Merida met Laura’s gaze. The words were ironic, but there was something different about the way she looked at her. It had felt good to get her story off her chest.
Tom pulled the car to the kerb and turned off the engine. They each climbed out of the car and walked closer to the abandoned Public Library. It was dark and the sun had gone down. but the evening felt unseasonably warm. It could have been global warming, but more likely, it was the glowing embers of Niceland, still releasing black smoke into the night.
“What the…?” Merida asked.
In front of her stood an empty shell of a building, black and sooty.
Tom was quiet. Merida looked at him. Up until this point, the kid had not betrayed a single emotion that might prove that he was not an android. But now, his eyes were flickering rapidly, and his jaw clenched open and shut, but no words came out.
Two policemen in bright yellow security jackets approached them.
“Hullo? Taking a stroll then?”, the shorter of the policemen asked in an Irish accent.
Tom kept mouthing words without speaking.
“Sir — what happened here? Did someone die?”, Merida asked.
“Well, it seems like a fire erupted here this morning and burned down the place. A real shame really, the city had just purchased back the plot and was planning on renovating the building to turn it to a shopping mall…”, the older, taller officer told them.
“Are you sure this was the place?”, Laura asked Tom.
Tom nodded his head while still running his jaw.
The Irish policeman turned on his flashlight and pointed the beam at Tom’s face. “Son, do you know what happened here?”
“Do you think it was arson?”, Laura interrogated the policeman, who wasn’t listening to her. Instead, the cop pointed his flashlight at each of their faces in turn. When the beam hit Merida’s eyes, she swung her arm up to cover her eyes.
The older policeman sprung to action and grabbed Merida’s hand, twisting her arm around her back. “I don’t know who you all are and whether you have something to do with this fire”, the policeman said, “but you’re coming with me to the station.”