Page 131 of All These Beautiful Strangers
I contemplated telling him everything—about the photographs Uncle Hank had found underneath the floorboards at the lake house, about the case file I had stolen from Peter Hindsberg’s office. Maybe everything my father said was true. In many ways, it all added up—everything clicked neatly into place. Maybe my mother really had left us, just as I’d believed all these years.
But I couldn’t get those suitcases I’d seen in Margot’s basement out of my mind. Maybe it was just a stupid coincidence. Maybe I was being crazy.
“No reason,” I said. “It’s just . . . the holidays. I always think about her more this time of year, I guess. Thanksgiving was her favorite.”
I paused.
“Do you ever . . . do you ever think about her?” I asked. It was the first time I had asked my father this since I was a little girl.
At first, he didn’t answer. He put the car into gear and pulled back onto the road. But after a while, he nodded, almost imperceptibly, and I knew he had heard me.
“I never stopped,” he said.
Thirty-Eight
Charlie Calloway
2017
My third and final ticket for the A’s was waiting in my mailbox when I returned to school. This time, the ticket was in a small white envelope. I opened it in the entrance to Rosewood Hall.
Item #3: Publish these pictures in the next edition of the Knollwood Chronicle
I turned the envelope upside down in my palm and slid out the photographs, but I knew what they were even before I saw them. They were the pictures Leo had taken of me with Mr. Andrews. I looked undistinguishable enough—clearly a student in the Knollwood Prep uniform, but the back of my head was to the camera. Mr. Andrews was clear and recognizable, though, and so was our inappropriate embrace.
What had Mr. Andrews done to incur the wrath of the A’s? I knew it was pointless of me to actually ask. The A’s were determined to take him down, and they were going to use me to do it.
I slid the photographs back into the envelope and tucked it into my trig textbook. The ticket to get the photographs had seemed like some stupid dare at the time. Something to test how far I was willing to go to prove to the A’s that I belonged, that I deserved to be one of them. But this, this seemed cruel. To destroy a man’s reputation. And if what was in the pictures was real, maybe Mr. Andrews would have deserved it. But what the pictures didn’t show was how I was the one to kiss him, and he was the one to pull away. The pictures were a lie.
I hugged the textbook to my chest as I set off across campus to class. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it there, the envelope tucked into the pages—holding the third and final ticket, the very last test that stood between me and becoming an A.
Leo leaned over my shoulder and plucked Plath’s Ariel out of my fingers. I grabbed for it, but he held it out of my reach and leaned back into the pillows stacked on my dorm room bed. He dramatically read aloud the last line of the poem and then laughed.
“God, I hate this poem,” Leo said. “I know Plath is supposed to be deep, but every time I read this, all I can take away from it is that Plath was fucking her dad.”
He tossed Ariel next to me on the bed and picked up his Xbox controller. I held the closed book in my hands, ran my fingers across the edge of the pages.
Since that conversation I’d had with my father during Thanksgiving break, I couldn’t stop thinking about what he and the A’s had done to Jake Griffin. Sure, they had thought he was dead at the time they tossed him over the Ledge. They hadn’t meant to hurt him. But then again, the A’s weren’t completely blameless. They had cared more about themselves—their futures, their own reputations—than they had cared about the well-being of their friend. Because if they had really put Jake first that night, they would have done everything they could to get him help. And at the very least, they could have been honest about what happened and not put Jake’s family and friends through the torment of thinking he had killed himself. Maybe the A’s weren’t murderers, but they were selfish, self-centered, and cruel.
If I was being honest with myself—painfully honest—I had to wonder, if I had been in my father’s shoes that night at the Ledge with Jake, would I have done anything differently? Because I had been in his shoes already, in a manner of speaking, and I had solidly played everything in my own self-interest. When Auden was framed for a prank he didn’t commit, I let him take the fall and deal with the punishment. Unmasking the A’s didn’t even cross my mind. But I could have done that, and it might have changed things.
I guess I hadn’t played everything just in my own self-interest. I had been loyal to the A’s. In a way, my father and his friends had done something similar. They had sacrificed Jake to save one another. It hadn’t been an easy choice, and it hadn’t been completely selfish. Maybe there was something noble in that type of loyalty.
“Say I did something bad,” I said. “Like really, really bad.”
“What type of bad?” Leo asked, eyes still trained on the TV screen, pursing his lips like he always did when he was concentrating really hard. “Like lie-to-your-dad-about-spending-Thanksgiving-with-your-boyfriend bad?”
“Ha ha,” I said. Leo was still giving me a hard time about that. He was a little pissed I had lied to him about where I was over Thanksgiving break, though he didn’t really have the moral high ground when it came to our being honest with each other.
“Say I killed someone,” I said. “By accident.”
“How?” Leo asked.
“I don’t know . . . specifics aren’t important,” I said.
“Specifics are important,” Leo said. “Are we talking, like, you accidentally hit someone with your car? Or is this a crime of passion? Like you got in a fight with Dalton and stabbed him to death with the heel of your Louis Vuitton?”
I sighed. “You choose.”
