Page 42 of All These Beautiful Strangers
“Sure,” I said. “An alliance sounds great.”
It was kind of a relief actually, not to be doing this alone, especially when I had this whole thing going on with my mom, and I was doing that alone. I didn’t have much of a choice on that front. I couldn’t exactly confide in Leo because I knew exactly how he felt about my mother; his was far from an unbiased ear.
I leaned back against my headboard and glanced over at Leo, who was lying on my pillow with his eyes closed. He must have drifted off to sleep.
When we were little, we used to sleep like this—side by side—every night. That was after the fallout with my uncle Hank, when Seraphina and I had gone to live with Uncle Teddy and Aunt Grier for a while. I had my own room on the second floor. It was a lovely room. They let me pick the color of the walls and filled the bookcase with all of my favorite books. But at night, lying there alone in my own bed in the dark, that room felt infinite and I felt infinitely alone. The house made noises I had never heard before—the furnace in the basement groaned and roared; I listened to the horrifying gurgle of the water flowing through the pipes when the upstairs toilet flushed. The darkness began to take on shapes—I was sure that there was something moving behind the mirror of my vanity, behind my bookcase, and I couldn’t sleep. Most nights, I would go into Leo’s room, crawl under his blue bedspread, and curl up behind him, sticking my cold, bare toes into the warm flesh of his calves, burying my nose in the nape of his neck, curling into him as far as I could get—away from the darkness, away from the noises I did not recognize, away from the terrifying fantasies of my mind. And he always let me. It was the only way I could fall asleep.
“Charlie?” Leo asked softly now, and I jumped. His eyes were still closed. “Can I ask you something?”
“Anything,” I said.
“What do you think of Royce Dalton?”
There was something strange about the way he said Dalton’s name—maybe it was the way he said his whole name instead of just his last.
“Why?” I asked, suspicious. Had he heard something? Had Dalton asked Leo about me, or told Leo he was interested?
“Just be careful,” Leo said. “He’s not very nice when it comes to girls. I mean, he’s very nice at the beginning—but not at the end. And there’s always an end.”
“I thought the two of you were friends,” I said.
“We are,” Leo said. “But that’s because we’ve never dated.”
“Ha,” I said.
“I’m serious though, Charlie,” Leo said, and he opened his eyes to look at me. He was being incredibly earnest, and Leo was rarely earnest. “Promise me you won’t date him.”
“I won’t date him,” I said. It was an easy promise to make because 1) I had gone seventeen years without a boyfriend, and it was a streak I didn’t intend to break any time soon, and 2) I would have been an idiot to date the womanizing Royce Dalton.
“Good,” Leo said, and he closed his eyes again.
We stayed like that for a long time, side by side on my bed, until long after I heard Leo’s breath deepen as he drifted off to sleep and I followed close behind him.
In Mrs. Morrison’s American Lit class the next afternoon, I was copying down the definitions of “assonance” and “dissonance” off the board when Ren came in with a yellow hall pass and handed it to Mrs. Morrison. Mrs. Morrison glanced at it and then at me.
“Charlie, you’re wanted in Headmaster Collins’s office,” she said.
I froze. My mind went immediately to Nancy’s diamond collar. I’d heard through the grapevine that Headmaster Collins had thrown a fit when he’d found out his beloved dog had been robbed. The gardener had torn their yard apart trying to find it, thinking perhaps the collar had merely come loose and fallen off somewhere. Had Headmaster Collins somehow figured out it was me? Had I unknowingly left behind some form of incriminating evidence? Or was Auden behind this? Was he throwing all of the A’s under the bus to get himself out of trouble?
“Did Headmaster Collins mention what this is in regard to?” I asked.
Mrs. Morrison glanced at the note, but the reason line must have been blank because she looked at Ren expectantly.
Ren just shrugged. “I just deliver the passes. Headmaster Collins doesn’t tell me anything; he doggedly preserves students’ privacy.” She shot me a warning look when she said this that I’m sure Mrs. Morrison didn’t notice because she had already returned her attention to the dry-erase board.
Fuck.
I gathered my books, slung my bag over my shoulder, and followed Ren out into the hallway. I was trying to concoct some plausible explanation in my mind for why I would have taken Nancy’s collar—preferably one that wouldn’t result in my expulsion—when I noticed Darcy leaning against a set of lockers just a few paces away, smiling at me.
“I was just fucking with you, Calloway,” Ren said, giving my shoulder a playful nudge. “Headmaster Collins is at a dentist appointment.”
“We’re breaking you free,” Darcy said. “Thought it was high time for a little R & R.”
Darcy put her arm around my shoulder as we exited the arts building and steered me left, toward Rosewood Hall.
Some upperclassmen had free periods. Sometimes they would use them as study halls and take up residence in the library; other times they’d serve as an assistant for a semester to one of the faculty. The third option for a free period was to be the runner for the headmaster’s office, which meant you got to run errands for the headmaster himself, or sit on the couch outside the headmaster’s office and do your homework if it was a particularly slow day. Being a runner was a very coveted position at Knollwood because you literally had a place inside the administration. You knew things that nobody else knew. You delivered the hall passes for students pulled into disciplinary meetings, you caught snippets of conversations with guidance counselors who popped in to air their grievances, and you overheard phone calls between the headmaster and disgruntled parents. Sometimes you’d be asked to pull a student’s personal file for the headmaster and of course you weren’t supposed to look but sometimes your eyes were bound to stray and stumble upon intimate details of another student’s life. Like the fact that Andrea Forrester had once been hospitalized for an eating disorder. Or that Frankie Lewandowski had a DUI. Things that might be useful or interesting to know. Great fodder for dining hall gossip. When you were the runner, you had your finger on the pulse of the school.
This semester, Ren was the runner. I remembered now the pack of stolen hall passes at the last A’s meeting, all stamped with Headmaster Collins’s signature. It had been one of the other initiates’ first ticket item. I guess I was finally starting to reap some of the fun.
