Wait a sec—what?
Don’t you feel the walls of this cab getting tighter? Isn’t it making your head pound? Why are you sweating so much, Dash? Don’t you think you need to get out of here right this minute?
It was like exams all over again. It felt like exams.
And I was failing.
I was failing because I didn’t want to be here in this car.
I was failing because I couldn’t stand Mark. Because he was, at heart, a jerk.
I was failing because Lily was here in London and I was sure I wasn’t responding the way she wanted me to.
I was failing because I had never seen her Instagram. Not once.
I was failing because I had no idea she was selling raincoats. Or was a darling of social media, if Azra’s reaction was any indication.
I was failing because I thought … she walked dogs. I hadn’t known she walked dogs so strangers would see her walk dogs and talk about her walking dogs and buy products related to her walking dogs.
I was failing because Azra and Olivier intimidated me, and that filled me with such resentment that it crowded out everything else when they were around.
I was failing because a reckoning with Keats should be exciting me, but in truth, thinking about Keats depressed me greatly.
I was failing because I couldn’t say any of these things out loud.
You’re the cat on a leash, my body said. And to prove its point, it made my collar tighter and tighter.
I moved to loosen my tie, unbutton my collar.
“What’s your problem?” Mark said, which was like being called a Grinch by Oscar the Grouch.
“Are you okay?” Gem asked, concern on her face.
And Lily—Lily looked confused again.
Another fail, Dash. You shouldn’t be here.
“I’m sorry,” I said. Which, after the fact, I understood was a strange answer to the question “Are you okay?”
“Dash?” Lily asked.
“You cold back there?” the taxi driver called back. “Here, I’ll give you more heat.”
This was the last thing I wanted. Suddenly it felt like we were caught in a cashmere cloud. I sweated some more. My underarms were becoming a lake district.
Gem started to ask Lily all of the questions I should have been asking—when had she gotten in? How had the flight been? How long was she staying? I registered the answers, but not as much as I was registering the sweat, the heat, the pressure on my head, the accelerated beat of my heart. Or maybe my heartbeat was fine. I tried to take my own pulse. Ridiculous.
The taxi arrived at Keats House, just off Hampstead Heath. I leapt for the door, and only when I’d pushed outside did I realize I’d left my grandmother to pay the fare. Not particularly gallant of me.
A white shape in a black night, the Keats museum seemed almost like the ghost of a house, lit by spirits within. I hadn’t expected it to be open so late, but strings must have been pulled, because I could see Azra and Olivier’s team already in the entrance hall ahead of us.
“Dash?”
It was Lily again, at my elbow. From the way she was looking at me, I could tell that I’d missed a sentence or two, staring at the house.
“Present,” I said.
“I hope this wasn’t a mistake. Coming here.”
“No!” I said.
Yes! my body added, turning up the chokehold a notch.
I pressed on, explaining to Lily, “It’s been the most soul-crushing, sleep-deprived week of my life, so if I seem out of it, that’s why. It’s like I have a hangover, in the sense that I’m hanging over a cliff and not sure I have the strength to pull myself back up.”
I should have left it there. But then I added:
“Plus, I had no idea you sold raincoats.”
Lily’s response was quickly lost to history as Mark, our Patron Devil of Perpetual Irritation, interrupted with a blunt “Are you coming in or what?” Behind us, Gem walked over as the taxi drove off.
“That driver asked for my number,” she announced. “I told him it was zero.”
“You’d better be careful,” Lily said. “He’ll think you’re an operator.”
“We’re LOSING!” Mark cried.
“I suppose we should go in, then,” Gem offered.
I wanted to stay outside in the night air for a moment. But I couldn’t find a way to ask for that, not with Gem steaming ahead, Mark just plain steaming, and Lily looking like she was running out of steam because my mood was sucking it out of her.
“Shall we share some Romanticism?” I mustered, offering Lily my hand.
“I think I like romance more,” Lily replied, taking my hand for the short distance to the door. Then we disengaged to go inside.
This house wasn’t where Keats had died—that was a room in Italy. But it might as well have been here, because his death at age twenty-five was in the air, on the walls, and in most every word to be read.
My heart started to pound again.
In the lobby there was a life mask of Keats’s face that visitors were encouraged to touch. Such a visage freaked me out. I didn’t want to touch it, or to have him staring at me. I turned away, only to come face-to-face with a life-size bust of the poet.
“We’re looking for the next clue, correct?” Gem asked Mark. He nodded.
The other team had already gone deeper into the house.
“Let’s divide and conquer,” Gem said. This time Lily nodded. Gem headed to the room to our left, Lily to the one on the right. Mark disappeared upstairs.
I walked deeper into the house. I knew I wasn’t here as a tourist—I was supposed to be on a quest—but the more I read about Keats, the more the clouds gathered around me. He watched his mother and his brother die of consumption. Then he himself died of it. Only six years older than me.
I looked at his handwritten poems and felt the words like a barrage.
Youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies.
And
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain …
And, in a letter he wrote to the woman he loved,
I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory—but I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember’d.
And, of course, his epitaph:
Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.
I could feel my body asking
What are you doing?
And it meant: What are you doing, going to Oxford?
And it meant: What are you doing, pretending you’re okay?
And it meant: What are you doing in this room as the walls close in?
The walls weren’t closing in. But it felt like they were, and that was enough. I went to loosen my collar again and found it already open. The sweat was legion now.
You have to get out.
I pictured my father. The righteous nod he’d give me when I came back with my tail between my legs, like he’d known all along that Oxford was a mistake, that believing in books was a mistake, that going my own way was a mistake. I was never going to be a Future Leader. I couldn’t even master Despondent Poet. I was a Once and Future Loser.
You can’t do this.
On the first day of our literature class, the professor had asked us to name our favorite author, and when I’d said Salinger, he’d laughed. “American boys who worship Salinger are as predictable as London rain,” he’d said.