Read Online The Whole World by Emily Winslow - Free Book Online Page A

was looking at something far away.
    “You’d better go,” Liv said. “It must be pretty awful, missing a brother.”
    That’s all it takes to realize you have no right to be so precious about your feelings, your loss, your trauma. There’s always someone with more rights to it than you.
    Liv’s story made sense of the mention in the paper that Nick had been seen at a party at Magdalene in the days before he disappeared. Some person there had noticed that he’d been friendly with a girl, and it had been reported, I guess by someone making assumptions, that that girl had been me.
    Alexandra went to Perse Girls, like the Chander daughters. It’s not far from St. Peter’s Terrace, where she offered to meet me after school. She looked nothing like Nick, and much, much younger. She was about fourteen and dressed, as required by her school, entirely in navy and light blues.
    We couldn’t fit on the sidewalk with two umbrellas, so she ducked under mine. She was headed for town and we walked together. “I know this is going to sound stupid,” I said. “But, until last week, I didn’t know Nick’s family was in Cambridge.” I immediately regretted it. What a rude thing to say. “I mean, he talked about you. You especially. I know you play cello. I play cello. I just … I didn’t know you were here.”
    We stepped over the great gutter called Hobson’s Conduit and slipped through a break in traffic to cross the road. When we got to the other side, we continued up the street and she said, “When Nick started boarding at King’s, my family relocated. I was born a year later. Before that, Mum and Dad and Nick lived in London.”
    “Do you like it here?” I asked, stupidly, as if she’d been dragged here instead of born here. “I mean, do you ever wish your family had stayed in London?”
    She shrugged. “I’ll go to uni in London if I want,” she said simply. “I didn’t know about you either.”
    Okay, touché. Nick hadn’t mentioned me to his family.
    “I read about you in the newspaper …” she said.
    Of course she had, and in light of the latest it made me cringe. “Yes, well … Nick is my good friend. One of my best friends. I don’t think he was my boyfriend. It’s all gotten a little out of hand.” I didn’t want to talk about this. “Did your parents name you after the Romanovs?”
    She rolled her eyes. “You have no idea how many people ask me that.”
    How Cambridge. I doubt many people back home would have noticed.
    “Mum’s brother who died was Nicholas,” she explained. “Dad’s dad was Alexander. It just worked out that way.”
    Wait, what? “Your mother’s brother died?”
    She looked right at me. “He drowned when Mum was my age. He was ten. Now her second Nicholas is gone.”
    She looked so sad.
    “I know he’ll come back,” I said.
    “What do you mean? Do you know something?” She stopped walking and got right up in my face all of a sudden, my height, eye to eye.
    “No! No, I just …” I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything. “He’s got to,” I said. “He’s got to come back.”
    She backed down, started fiddling in her bag, digging around. “The last time I saw him I was really angry,” she confessed.
    At Nick? I didn’t think he could make anyone mad.
    Alexandra looked both ways. She turned off the main avenue onto a side street; I followed.
    “He’d hate that I’m doing this,” she said, putting a cigarette in her mouth. “Do you want one?”
    “No, thanks,” I said.
    Her lighter was made of purple plastic. She lit and sucked in. “He’s such an older brother,” she said, looking just straight ahead, leading the way.
    We turned again, onto Tennis Court Road, parallel to Trumpington but much more private.
    “What do you mean, ‘older brother’?”
    “You know what I mean. He just thinks he knows everything. If he were still here I’d still be angry. But because he’s gone, I don’t get to be angry anymore.” She raised her voice.