Dedication
To Mom, Dad, Mark & Annie
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Part One One: Charlie Calloway
Two: Charlie Calloway
Three: Charlie Calloway
Four: Grace Calloway
Five: Charlie Calloway
Six: Grace Calloway
Seven: Charlie Calloway
Eight: Grace Calloway
Nine: Charlie Calloway
Part Two Ten: Alistair Calloway
Eleven: Charlie Calloway
Twelve: Grace Fairchild
Thirteen: Charlie Calloway
Fourteen: Alistair Calloway
Fifteen: Charlie Calloway
Sixteen: Grace Fairchild
Seventeen: Charlie Calloway
Eighteen: Alistair Calloway
Nineteen: Charlie Calloway
Twenty: Grace Fairchild
Twenty-One: Charlie Calloway
Twenty-Two: Alistair Calloway
Part Three Twenty-Three: Charlie Calloway
Twenty-Four: Alistair Calloway
Twenty-Five: Charlie Calloway
Twenty-Six: Grace Calloway
Twenty-Seven: Charlie Calloway
Twenty-Eight: Grace Calloway
Twenty-Nine: Charlie Calloway
Thirty: Grace Calloway
Thirty-One: Charlie Calloway
Thirty-Two: Alistair Calloway
Thirty-Three: Charlie Calloway
Thirty-Four: Grace Calloway
Thirty-Five: Charlie Calloway
Thirty-Six: Alistair Calloway
Part Four Thirty-Seven: Charlie Calloway
Thirty-Eight: Charlie Calloway
Thirty-Nine: Charlie Calloway
Forty: Grace Calloway
Forty-One: Charlie Calloway
Epilogue: Charlie Calloway
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
My father built the house on Langely Lake for my mother, in the town she grew up in. It was a hundred miles from the glassy skyscrapers my father built in the city, and a world away from the Calloway family name and money and penthouse on the Upper East Side.
The house on Langely Lake looked unlike any of the other houses in town, with their graying vinyl siding and slouching carports. No, the house on Langely Lake wasn’t a house at all. It was a fortress three stories tall, built of stone, with a thick fence and impenetrable hedges all the way around.
When I was a little girl, we spent our summers in that fortress. I remember slumber parties in a tent on the back lawn and afternoons spent sunning on the raft just offshore. I remember tall glasses of lemonade sweating on the patio and the sundresses my mother wore and her wide-brimmed hats.
Once I thought my father had built that house to keep everyone else out, but then my uncle Hank found the photographs. They were in a shoebox, hidden under a loose floorboard in my parents’ bedroom. They were taken that summer, 2007, a few weeks before my mother disappeared. I saw the photographs and I realized I had been wrong about everything.
Because my father hadn’t built the house on Langely Lake to keep everyone else out. He’d built it to keep us in.
Part One
One
Charlie Calloway
2017
It all started that morning with a note, printed on thick card stock, no bigger than a business card.
Good morning, good day, some say, “Salut.”
Herein lies a formal invitation, just for you.
Forgive the anonymity of the sender, but you know who we are.
And we’re big admirers of yours, from afar.
We’re the opposite of the Omega, the furthest from the end,
Follow this clue to find us; we’re eager to begin.
The note was balanced on top of Knollwood Augustus Prep’s “Welcome Back!” flyer, printed in the school’s royal blue and gold colors, which announced that Club Day would be held in Healy Quad on Friday afternoon and encouraged every student to attend. This was followed by a list of all of Knollwood Prep’s student clubs and organizations. At the bottom, in delicate gold lettering, was the school’s mission statement to “foster students whose exacting inquiry and independence of thought drive them to excellence both inside and outside of the classroom.”
I might have missed the card stock note altogether if it hadn’t fluttered to the ground as I removed the flyer from my mailbox in the entrance to Rosewood Hall, the girls’ dormitory for upperclassmen. My heart stopped when I saw the note, for the first part—the sender—wasn’t difficult to figure out. You know who we are . . . We’re the opposite of the Omega, the furthest from the end. It was the A’s—the only club not listed on Knollwood Prep’s flyer and, in my mind, the only club worth joining.
It was the second part of the note I puzzled over as I sat in Mr. Andrews’s Introduction to Photography class. Normally, I couldn’t have gotten away with zoning out in class like that. Every class at Knollwood Prep was supposed to follow the Harkness method, meaning we all sat around a table facing each other, and we were expected to participate in the discussion with minimal intervention from our instructor. Some instructors even kept a notebook with every student’s name, and they would put a little tally mark next to our names as we talked. If, at the end of class, your name didn’t have a satisfactory number of tally marks next to it, they would send you a little note saying something like, We missed your voice in class today. Or, When not everyone speaks up, we all lose. Or, my personal favorite, You miss one hundred percent of the discussions in which you don’t participate.
But Mr. Andrews was new, just out of college, and he was much more lax than the other teachers. His Introduction to Photography class had been the most sought-after arts elective this semester, not because of the subject matter, but because Mr. Andrews was, well, hot. He had that dark, rugged hipster thing going for him—flannel button-downs that he didn’t tuck in; beanies to hide dark, unwashed hair; liquid brown eyes rimmed with baby-doll lashes longer than my own. Also, he had a distinct edge over most Knollwood Prep boys—he could grow facial hair. He always had a perfect five o’clock shadow cloaking his well-defined cheekbones.
Today, Mr. Andrews hadn’t come in with thick packets of photography theory for us to parse; instead, he came in with a nice-looking camera with a very long lens, which he passed around to all of us.
“This is called a telephoto lens,” Mr. Andrews said. “It produces a unique optical effect, which can create the illusion that two subjects separated by a great distance are actually very close. It’s a powerful tool for capturing candid moments when you can’t get physically close to your subject.”
He clicked a button on his laptop and a photo of a lion lounging on an African savanna displayed on the projector screen in front of the class.
“One of the most obvious examples of this is in wildlife photography or sports photography,” Mr. Andrews went on. “The photographer would physically be in danger if he or she were close to, say, a lion, or a professional baseball player up to bat. However, another, less obvious use is street photography, where an artist needs distance not for safety but to preserve the candidness of the shot.”
He clicked another button on his laptop and this time a photograph of a young woman and her child on a busy New York street filled the screen.
As he spoke, I stared down at the camera in my lap and fiddled with the zoom. I puzzled over the second half of the A’s riddle.
I have a head but never weep.
I have a bed but
never sleep.
I can run but never walk.
Come meet me after dark.
The “when” was obvious enough—tonight after curfew. But the “where” was a giant question mark. What place had a head? Could it be a play on the headmaster’s office? Was the next line—I have a bed but never sleep—some riff on Headmaster Collins’s vigilance? Maybe, but I couldn’t make the next line fit with that. Okay, so what place had a bed? Like, bedrock? Could it be talking about the quarries?
Something hard nudged my shin underneath the table and I looked up to see Royce Dalton, the most popular boy in the senior class, giving me a look from across the table. I was slow to catch on, but then he cleared his throat and glanced at Mr. Andrews, and I realized the whole class was quietly and expectantly looking at me. I sat up in my seat and set down the camera.
“That’s an excellent question,” I said slowly and deliberately as I racked my brain for what Mr. Andrews could have possibly asked me, or a tangent I could lead him on to distract him from the fact that I hadn’t been paying attention.
My eye caught on the screen in front of the class, on the picture of the woman and her child. The child was upset, and the woman had stopped; she was bending down so that she was eye level with the little boy. She was reaching out, about to tuck a strand of the child’s hair behind his ear, to comfort him. I hadn’t noticed at first, but the woman appeared distraught as well. It made me wonder what had happened just before the picture had been snapped, and what had happened after. It was jarring to me that the photographer had captured this private, painful moment and put it on display for everyone to see. There was an illusion of being close, when the photographer was actually far away—not just physically, but emotionally as well. The photographer remained safe and protected, while displaying this vulnerable moment to the world for observation, for art.
“This may be a little off topic,” I said, “but your discussion of street photography got me thinking. I guess I understand the necessity of distance to capture the truth of a moment. But it seems ironic that in order to capture truth, you have to be duplicitous. Distance allows the subject to act naturally precisely because the subject doesn’t know they’re being watched. I guess, in the end, that raises an ethical question for me. Is that art—or an invasion of privacy? I’m curious to hear your take on that. I apologize if I’m jumping ahead.”
This was a defense mechanism I had learned a long time ago: 1) String enough buzzwords together to make it seem like you were paying attention. 2) Admit that your comment might be tangential to cover your bases. 3) Deflect with another question. With some teachers, the more tangential, the better, actually, because it made it seem like you were really considering the topic at hand. 4) End with a backhanded apology that hinted that your intellectual curiosity was leaps and bounds ahead of the pace of instruction. Suddenly, you weren’t the slacker zoning out in class; you were the deep thinker ahead of the game.
Mr. Andrews looked a little surprised by my deflection.
“Hmm . . . interesting question, Miss . . . ?” he said.
It was almost endearing that he hadn’t bothered to memorize our names from the course roster over the summer.
“Calloway,” I said. “Charlie Calloway.”
A flicker of recognition lit up his eyes at my name and there was a slight pause, just a hair longer than was appropriate. That was a common response when I met people. I could see the gears clicking in their brains. Not one of those Calloways, surely? She’s not the girl whose mother . . . well . . . Poor thing. I could tell they always wanted to ask, but they rarely did.
“Miss Calloway,” Mr. Andrews said, his hand stroking his bearded chin as he considered my question. “Ethics and art. That’s always an interesting discussion.”
As Mr. Andrews started off again, I looked across the table at Dalton, who subtly lifted his finger to his lips like a cocked gun and blew at the imaginary smoky tip of the barrel. Killed it.
Thanks, I mouthed silently to him, and he gave me a conspiratorial wink.
The sky outside the dining hall was beginning to darken. There were only three hours left until curfew and I still hadn’t figured out the A’s riddle for the meeting place. The closest I had come were the old quarries about half an hour from campus. They were abandoned and had flooded with rainwater years ago, and sometimes in the late spring or early fall, Knollwood Prep students would go up there on weekends. The brave ones would jump off the rocks and the lazy ones would drape themselves along the sides and sunbathe. I could easily imagine the quarry as a meeting place for the A’s, could even see some kind of initiation ritual that involved catapulting oneself off the highest rock in a pitch-black night when the lake was all but invisible below, but I couldn’t make all of the lines of the riddle fit.
As I turned the riddle over and over in my mind, I picked at the smoked salmon Alfredo on my plate and pretended that my mouth was full every time Stevie Sorantos asked me what her campaign slogan should be. She was running for treasurer of the student council—again—and she was harassing all of us into contributing a pithy line that would catapult her to the top of the polls.
“How about ‘Vote for me, or whatever,’” Drew offered, tossing her thick mane of dirty-blond corkscrew curls over her shoulder. “DGAF is today’s YOLO.”
“I like it,” Yael said. “Commanding yet disaffected. Playing hard to get.”
“It certainly works with the menfolk,” Drew said, wiggling her thick eyebrows at all of us.
“But I don’t want people to think I don’t care,” Stevie said, a hint of exasperation in her voice.
I rolled my eyes at Drew, who took a giant bite of her dinner roll to keep from laughing. As if anyone would ever think that Stevie Sorantos didn’t care.
Sometimes—okay, often—Stevie grated on my nerves because she just tried too damn hard. Treasurer of the student council. President of the Student Ethics Board. Always the first to shoot her hand into the air when an instructor asked a question. Once I caught her in the bathroom, eyes raw and puffy and wailing like her dog had just died because she had gotten a B+ on a lab report. More than once I had considered grinding Ambien into her water bottle just so she would be forced to chill the fuck out.
I knew why she was like that, of course. We all did. Stevie was a scholarship student, not that she ever told us this, and not that we ever talked about it. Knollwood Prep tried hard to eliminate socioeconomic distinctions with uniforms, and free tuition, MacBooks, and iPads for students who needed aid. But try as they might, Knollwood Prep couldn’t erase where we came from. Stevie didn’t wear the Cartier bracelets that we did; she didn’t have a YSL backpack or, well, brand-name anything. Her family never went on vacation. She didn’t have a car. But none of these things gave Stevie away quite so much as her blatant eagerness to prove that she belonged. It was exhausting, and it missed the mark altogether. Because the only thing that mattered to the people who mattered was acting like nothing really mattered. As paradoxical as that was.
“Come on, Charlie,” Stevie said as I took another bite that I pretended was too big to talk over. “You always have the best ideas.”
“Hey now,” Drew said, pointing the asparagus-loaded prongs of her fork at Stevie. “What about my idea? That shit is gold.”
Freshman year I had talked Stevie into doing a Sopranos-themed campaign. Yael took these great black-and-white photos of Stevie, one of her dressed up in a suit and sunglasses, another with Stevie in an upholstered armchair, a cigar hanging out of the side of her mouth and a cloud of smoke ballooning in the air. Drew and I blew the pictures up to poster-board size and put Tony Soprano quotes across the front:
“A wrong decision is better than indecision.”
“Well, seeing as you called me up here, I might as well tell you . . . I’m in charge now.”
“All due respect, you got no f***** idea what it’s like to be number one.”
In the bottom right-hand corner, in bold red letters that mimi
cked the title card of the show, we wrote: Vote Sorantos.
All of the other candidates had gone the serious route with posters spewing platitudes, or worse—making some pun off their name. Stevie won by a landslide.
“Fine,” I said, because I saw I had no other choice. “How about, ‘I’ve been doing this job for two years now. If you don’t think I’m qualified, go fuck yourself.’”
Yael pretended to consider it. “So much subtlety and finesse,” she said. “But is it too sophisticated?”
Stevie set her glass of milk down so hard on her tray that it sloshed over the sides of the glass. I looked down and saw white pearls of milk dotting my sleeve.
“I see even pretending to take this seriously is too much to ask,” Stevie said, slinging her cheap Target bag over her shoulder and standing up.
“Stevie—” Yael started.
“I’m going to the library,” Stevie said, and headed off toward the far end of the dining hall, her bag bouncing against her back with every purposeful stride she took.
Yael sighed and gathered her things, giving Drew and me an exasperated smile.
“DEFCON Three,” she said. “I’ll run damage control.”
“Now I feel bad,” Drew said when Yael was gone. “But I was serious about my DGAF idea.”
I shrugged and grabbed a napkin to dry my sleeve.
Stevie and Yael were my friends by default only—mainly because they were always around Drew, and Drew and I were always together. We ate our meals together, we sat next to one another in class, we spent long hours hanging out in the common room before curfew, and we shared a room. So, I made an effort with them—I went sailing with Yael’s family over the summer when our families were on Martha’s Vineyard at the same time. I invited Stevie to spend Thanksgiving with my family in Greenwich, since I knew the plane ticket to spend the holiday with her own family in Ohio was too expensive and she would have been stuck on an empty campus alone. I got along with them all right (most of the time, anyway), and I liked them okay, but we didn’t click the way Drew and I clicked. She and I just got each other.
All These Beautiful Strangers Page 1