Castle on the Hill | Excerpt | Chapter One
Klaus arrived at the library with the bravado of a university graduate receiving their diploma. As he reached the table Georg had been holding for half the morning, he hurled his open bag onto its surface, spilling papers and pens across Georg’s notes.
“Well, I did it!” he announced proudly as he dropped into his seat. “I told you I would do it, and you didn’t believe me!
Georg shot daggers at his friend as he brushed Klaus’ belongings off his side of the table. There was no need to ask what Klaus had done; given enough silence, Klaus would spill his darkest secrets to fill the space.
True to form, before Georg could return to his notes, Klaus elaborated. “I’ve signed myself up as a tutor for the Philosophy department.”
“Didn’t you say you were just doing that to meet girls?” Georg wrinkled his nose at the thought.
“Don’t be ridiculous, I’m doing it for the good of the first years.” Klaus pressed a hand to his chest and tilted his chin as though he’d announced that he’d decided to singlehandedly confront the Soviets on their behalf, rather than review notes.
“Wouldn’t that involve staying as far away from them as possible?”
Klaus ignored the remark, choosing instead to shift his attention to organizing his supplies into a teetering pile on the edge of the table.
“Third year sucks,” he complained as a pencil rolled off his binder and clattered against the cold library floor. “You know, final exams aren’t until the end of next term, and yet Dr. Bandow is still insisting on loading us with papers before we’ve had a chance to finish moving in.”
“Klaus, you live in the city,” Georg retorted without looking up from his law textbook. “You’ve stayed in the same apartment for the past two straight years. What is there to move in?”
With a huff, Klaus pressed his chin into his palm and spun a pen in his free hand. “Well, sure, but plenty of other people are still moving in!”
“You’re ridiculous,” Georg snorted before leaning back over his textbook. His first class wasn’t for another hour, but they’d been given a case to study over the summer, and the only notes he had managed to take were covered in doodles and expletives.
Silence fell over the table as the boys turned to their work. The library was still relatively empty; it was too early in the semester for crowds of study groups and students preparing for panicked, last-minute attempts to revise for exams. A young man slid into a chair a few tables away, and a young woman was speaking in hushed tones with the man at the front desk, but otherwise, the only sound was the scribbling of pen against paper.
For several minutes, the young men could almost be mistaken for well-behaved students. Klaus leaned close to his paper, as though he were trying to inhale the words on the page. Every passing minute, his face crept closer to the tabletop, until, finally, he pitched forwards entirely.
Georg barely glanced at his friend’s face being pressed into the table.
“Tell me why I didn’t decide to work as a janitor,” Klaus groaned.
“You’d never succeed as a janitor; you never even had to clean your own messes growing up.”
One of Klaus’ arms snapped forwards, and a smack that was aiming for Georg’s shoulder instead slapped smartly against the wooden back of his chair. With a sharp intake of breath, Klaus drew himself upright.
As he rubbed at his knuckles, Klaus shot back, “As I seem to recall, the Aachen family also hired a housekeeper.”
The young man nearby hissed for the two to pipe down. Klaus, with his back to the other student, rolled his eyes, but they both returned to their work. Georg flipped the page in his notebook, only to discover that he had gone through all of his notes.
With an internal groan, he opened to a blank sheet and started to jot down what he could remember of the case.