Page 7 of All These Beautiful Strangers
Leo and I both looked at her and she put the camera down and gave an exasperated sigh. “Listen, maybe this isn’t the best fit,” Ren said, her hand already on the door handle. “Not everyone is cut out for this.”
“Wait,” Leo and I both said at the same time.
Leo looked at me, and he didn’t say it but I could tell he was asking me all the same, whether it was okay, whether I was okay, and I gave him the slightest, almost imperceptible nod. He slid his hand gently along the side of my face, until he was cupping my chin, and he leaned in and kissed me so softly, his lips were just barely grazing mine.
When we were five, he had kissed me once behind our grandmother’s rosebushes. It had been Easter and my mother had made me wear this bright floral dress with ridiculously puffy sleeves that I hated and kept pulling at. We were at my grandparents’ house in Greenwich, and Leo had chased me through my grandmother’s garden and pinned me down beneath the roses when he caught me. His kiss had been light and quick on my lips, like a feather.
This kiss started like that one but shifted quickly. There was something underneath it that was different, darker, more dangerous. Leo’s tongue parted my lips; his arm slid around my waist, pulling me closer. I could feel his warm fingertips against the bare skin at the small of my back, under my shirt.
Leo had a reputation with the girls at Knollwood Prep for being somewhat of a player. More than a few times I had witnessed groups of girls, chatting animatedly to one another, fall silent when he passed in the hall, followed by blushes, hands cupped to shield whispers. That reputation was well earned, and not half as bad as what he deserved. Leo had even invented a secret game around his promiscuity that he played with the guys in his inner circle. He called it the Board of Conquests.
He had shown me the gridlike game board once with the bases along the top and a bunch of girls’ names in the boxes below. It looked sort of like a bingo board, but for oversexed teenage boys instead of senior citizens. Every semester, the guys made a new board with new names, and every semester, they raced each other to be the first to round the bases and get “four in a row.” Leo was always creative in the names he put on the board and in the way he arranged them. He included not just the pretty or easy girls, but the prudes, the freshmen, the awkward drama geeks. You couldn’t get four in a row without hooking up with someone you wouldn’t have been caught dead with, or coaxing some prudish sophomore across a line she’d never crossed before. Getting four in a row was a rare accomplishment. Leo himself had only done it once, in the spring semester of his sophomore year. The game was a huge hit among Leo’s friends. Crosby had even broken up with Ren one semester just so he could play. Basically, teenage boys were all pigs, which is why I had never had a boyfriend.
The peak of my experience was making out with Cedric Roth the previous summer at my father’s house on Martha’s Vineyard. Cedric was an older boy, a college boy, and he had taught me to drive his father’s Ferrari down quiet, abandoned streets at night. We had a habit of kissing—just kissing—in the library in my father’s summerhouse on a dusty couch surrounded by old and forgotten books. I knew I would rarely see him again when the summer was over. I knew I didn’t, could never, have real feelings for him. He had this gap between his front teeth that emitted a little whistling sound when he breathed with his mouth open, and he had a habit of saying “literally” all the time, which literally drove me crazy. But I relished these minor flaws, collected these annoyances like armor, and played them over and over in my mind until my skin crawled.
I wouldn’t have kissed Cedric if I had real feelings for him. It seemed dangerous—reckless even—to let someone get so close to you. To care that much. I had seen my own father’s heart broken by my mother. His love had blinded him, made him weak and vulnerable, when Alistair Calloway was a man who was anything but weak and vulnerable. I knew what my mother had done to him, to all of us, because we had been weak enough, stupid enough, to love her. It was a mistake I wouldn’t make again.
When Leo kissed me now, there was an urgency to it, a feeling that almost made me forget for a moment where we were. A feeling that almost—almost—silenced the quiet clicking of Ren’s camera.
Normally, I was not one to get drunk, mostly because I didn’t like letting my guard down, the feeling of not being fully in control of my actions. But when I got back to the clearing, I let Dalton uncap beer after beer for me, until I felt dizzy and gloriously numb. I felt empty and hollow and nauseous, and I wanted desperately to feel nothing at all.
“I have to pee,” Drew said after a while, pulling on my arm.
“All right, all right,” I said, trying not to slur my words. “I’ll go with you.”
“Here, take my flashlight,” Dalton said, handing it to me.
I took it and let Drew pull me behind her into the woods. I held Dalton’s flashlight and tried to illuminate a path for us as we went, but I was far from steady on my feet and kept slipping, pulling Drew down on top of me.
“Easy there, Calloway,” Drew said.
When we were far enough away from the clearing, Drew squatted and I turned my back to her. I aimed the flashlight blindly into the woods, turning it this way and that, and then I saw it—a white and translucent figure, in between the thick trees. I dropped the flashlight and the light went out.
“Shit,” I said.
“I can’t see anything,” Drew complained. “I don’t want to piss on myself.”
“All right, all right, hold on,” I said as I stumbled along the ground, searching for the flashlight. My hand caught along the cold, circular metal handle and I picked it up and turned it on, flashing the light back toward the spot in the trees where I had last seen the figure.
There was nothing there.
“I think I saw someone,” I said. “Someone moved over there. Did you see it?”
“We’re not the only ones out here,” Drew said.
“What?” I took a step away from her, toward the spot where I had seen the figure in the distance, scanning with my flashlight.
“Um, yeah,” Drew said. “It’s, like, nature . . . It was probably a squirrel or something.”
“Right,” I said.
I was just being paranoid, I told myself. I hadn’t seen the ghost—I hadn’t seen anything. I was just unsettled from everything that had happened earlier with Leo and Ren in the back of Ren’s car. The way Ren had winked at us when it was all over. “Secrets bind us to each other,” she had said. And even though I had felt sick to my stomach, I told myself that there was also something strangely comforting about the whole thing. Because, in a way, Ren was right: we all belonged to each other now. We held each other’s secrets. It was a bond that could make us, just as surely as it was a bond that could destroy us all.
Three
Charlie Calloway
2017
