Shall Not Sleep [bxb]

Chapter Fifteen

I woke up late for school, and then I just lay in bed thinking, fuck it. I had more important things to do than go to school.

Like draw up a battle plan.

I was going to find Alastair, no matter what.

But where to start? Google his name? Does that work for people who lived eighty years before the internet?

I stared hard at the ceiling. How would I find him? Would I end up backpacking a million miles through Europe, staring at every single grave marker, looking for his name? That could take years. It could take my whole life, and I might not even find him. What if he was one of those Unknown Soldiers, buried namelessly at a monument somewhere? Or blown to pieces, too small to ever identify?

Oh, God. I almost wanted to pull the blankets over my head. Go back to sleep. Forever. Give up.

And I was about to, but something popped into my head.

Alastair wasn't nobody. He wouldn't have been lost.

He was the son of an earl.

I grabbed my phone and typed Earl of Walsingham into Google.

With three clicks, I found out that the current Earl of Walsingham was a man named Lord Henry Dunham. And that the ancestral home of the Earls of Walsingham was in Yorkshire, and it was called Lansing Hall.

Lansing Hall. Alastair wrote those words. It was a place I'd already been.

If there was anywhere in the world that would have information about Alastair, I was betting it would be his home.

Before I could progress any further on the ideas that were changing my life, Mom cautiously knocked on my door.

"Max? School started twenty minutes ago... are you okay?"

I summoned all the snot I could, to make my voice sound thick. "I'm sick."

"Oh, honey, I'll go make you a nice lemon water with honey, okay? And then maybe you'll feel good enough to go to your afternoon classes?"

"Um..." I was scrolling through Google searches of cheap flights to England. "I dunno..."

"I wouldn't want you to fall behind," she said. "Not with report cards so near."

Oh God. Way to kill me. "Uh, Mom? Can you come in?"

She opened the door and sat on the edge of my bed. Her hands worried at the bottom of her t-shirt. "What's the matter, honey?" she asked.

"I'm failing basically all of my classes."

"What?" she whispered.

That whisper. That made it a hundred fucking times worse.

"I haven't been doing my homework for ages, and I haven't studied for any tests. Oh God, please just yell. I can't take the way you're looking at me."

Her hands covered her mouth. Finally she said, "I've been so stupid..."

"No, Mom, come on. I've been stupid, not you."

"Yes, I have. I should've opened my eyes. I knew your dad's death would affect you."

I didn't know what would hurt her most. Telling her that I don't feel sad about him, or lying about it.

"Mom... it's not Dad," I told her. "It's..."

Could I really tell her about all this?

Not yet.

Mom made it easier for me when she glances down at my laptop screen and saw the travel site.

"What are you looking up?" she asked.

"We have to go to Yorkshire," I told her. "We have to. To a village called Lansing. There's—there's a really nice old mansion there called Lansing Hall, and I just—"

Mom picked up my phone. She spent so long staring at the different airlines' prices that I wondered if she had been turned to stone. I pointed at one price and say, "This looks good, right? We'll want to fly into Manchester because it's a lot closer than London."

Mom said, "What can we get that leaves tomorrow?"

I hugged her tighter than I've ever hugged her before.

"I love you," I murmured against her neck. "Thank you for understanding."

"I don't understand," she laughed. "But I love you too, baby. But get up and get dressed. We have a lot of packing and planning and buying to do."