The Boy in the Smoke Read Online Free

relieved, as this gave them the opportunity to work out their grief at a resort in Switzerland. Other people generally took it easy on him and the beaks were kind enough. Death, after all, was not a taboo subject at Eton—as long as it didn’t get too personal. Every Etonian was constantly reminded that most people who had attended the school were, in fact, dead. When your school is almost six hundred years old, this is inevitable. The dead were all over the place—in statues and in the hundreds of portraits that bore down their gazes from every wall. Their names were etched onto every possible surface.
    So for the first few weeks, there were allowances. The beaks tended to let it slip if he was a minute or two late. The Master and the Dame looked in on him, and he was always encouraged to go to the counsellor, and he always said he would think about it. One night he accidentally heard the Master say “how well Dene was getting on, after, you know, that awful business with his sister. Terrible for the family, but there’s always one, isn’t there? Luckily they have him.”
    Stephen didn’t know if he was doing well. For those first days, he wasn’t aware of much of anything. He opened books and closed them. He rowed. He ate some food. His body moved him around until term was over. When he returned home, Gina’s room was empty and had been turned into a small home exercise studio. He wandered the house, looking for anything he could find, but the culling had been complete. Her clothes, her bike, all her furniture  …  even the attic and the cellar had been cleared. The best he could do was recover several books that had wound up on the common shelves that he knew to be hers. His sister, for all her partying, loved to read. He gathered up her fantasy novels and romances and books of poetry and volumes of Shakespeare, and he put them in his closet, under a carefully constructed pile of clothes.
    It turned out it had happened at a party. Gina passed out on the far side of a bed. Whatever she had taken stopped her heart almost at once, and she lay there, between the bed and the wall, for eighteen hours before someone thought to look. Stephen learned this after hearing his father relaying the story over the phone to someone. This was weeks later, when he was home for one of the short breaks in the Lent term, and his father spoke casually, as if describing an investment that didn’t quite perform as hoped.
    It was an image he couldn’t get out of his head—Gina stuck between the bed and the wall while the party went on. He saw it when he closed his eyes at night. Sometimes he would dream about seeing a bed, hearing her voice calling to him from the space just beyond the bed, asking him for help, and he’d wake up with his heart pounding. He’d get up and open his window and stick out his head and breathe in as much cold air as he could and try to understand how there could be a world without Gina. How was it that the trees hadn’t died? How was it that anything continued on? How did he continue to live? It seemed wrong and unnatural, and it would take great effort to calm down and get himself back to bed, to refocus. There was no time for grief. No time to curl into a ball and remain motionless for days. No time to explain to everyone that the world was now broken.
    He often had the impulse to go and find the flat this had happened in and burn it to the ground.
    In many ways, he appreciated the gruelling schedule for keeping him sane. Eton would push him forward. Onward, onward, onward. The school that seemed so fanatically rooted in the past wanted him to just move on. He progressed through Eton, keeping his head down and his marks up. He became a member of Sixth Form Select and had silver buttons on his waistcoat. He took several prizes in Latin and History, and became a very good boatman—not good enough to be in the Eight, but the next tier down. He could tell that everyone regarded him as serious and sensible,