All These Beautiful Strangers

by Elizabeth Klehfoth

  “And will you be providing the time machine?” I asked.

  Crosby laughed and clinked his beer bottle against mine. “Nice. Cheers.”

  Next to me, Dalton groaned. “Harsh, man,” he said. “Isn’t anyone going to defend my honor?”

  Dalton was sort of the “It” boy at Knollwood Prep. He was as old money as they come—his grandfather came from a family of British banking royalty. His father worked on Wall Street and his mother was an American, some big-time surgeon whom people flew from all over the world to see. So, he had a good pedigree. He was also very good-looking: tall, dark hair, dreamy eyes, that sort of thing. It wasn’t that surprising then that Dalton was always dating someone.

  “Sorry, Dalton. You’re kind of what we girls refer to as a man whore,” I said.

  “Speaking of which,” Crosby said, and he nodded across the clearing toward Harper Cartwright, who was talking with Darcy Flemming. “Dalton’s latest victim keeps giving us the stink eye. Has anyone noticed?”

  I glanced over at Harper and saw her glaring at us.

  “That’s just the way her face looks,” Dalton said. “What is it they call it? Resting Bitch Face? I assure you we had an amicable breakup.”

  “Sure, because what high school breakup isn’t amicable?” Crosby asked.

  “Yeah, Harper looks like she wants to amicably murder you right now,” I said. “Or me.”

  We drank our beers and laughed and talked about things that didn’t matter. No one talked about what was happening as Ren returned with one junior recruit and wandered off with another into the darkness. No one spoke about what they had done when they returned.

  When Ren came back with a sullen-looking Meryl, she called my name. Only, she didn’t call just my name.

  “Leo,” she said. “You too.”

  Leo handed his beer to Brighton Maverick and laughed at whatever Brighton had just said, as if this whole thing were no big deal, as if this were just another Monday night. Leo had always been like that. Arrogantly fearless.

  We followed Ren close at her heels as we made our way through the pitch-black woods until we reached a clearing that led out to the empty county road. There was a car parked along the side of the road—an Audi A8. Ren pressed a button on her remote and then held the back door open for us.

  “Step into my office,” she said, gesturing toward the backseat.

  I slid in first and Leo followed, closing the door behind him. Ren climbed in the front seat and turned on the ceiling light. I blinked and threw up a hand to shield my eyes. After the dark woods, it was blindingly bright.

  Ren took out her camera and looked through the lens at Leo and then me.

  “You two are close, aren’t you?” Ren asked, putting down the camera.

  “Thick as thieves,” I said, glancing sideways at Leo.

  “I thought so,” Ren said. “How nice to actually like somebody in your family. Everybody in my family is an asshole. I mean, I’m kind of an asshole too, but I’m a likeable asshole. At least, I like to think so.”

  She brought the camera to her face again and adjusted the lens.

  “Charlie, scoot to your right a little, you’re not in the frame.”

  I did as she said, until my bare arm was flush against Leo’s.

  “Great. Leo, put your arm around her. Uh-huh. Perfect. Now, Charlie, tilt your head a little. Good. Now lean in, closer, closer . . .”

  “Uh,” I said, “lean in to what exactly?”

  “Why, those lush Calloway lips,” Ren said with a smirk.

  I could feel my heart hammering in my chest. I glanced at Leo, who narrowed his eyes at Ren and gave her a wry smile.

  “I always knew you had a dark side, Montgomery,” he said.

  Ren smiled back at him. “Oh, you don’t know the half of it, Calloway.” She raised the camera to her eye again. “Now, you just told me you liked each other. Show me how much.”

  Something sour slid into the pit of my stomach.

  I was many things. I was a Calloway. I was the girl whose mother . . . well . . . Poor thing. Those things meant something to most people, but none of those were things I’d earned. I’d inherited them or they had been thrust upon me. But this—being part of the A’s—this was something I was determined to do on my own. I may have gotten a bid based on my name, but I would earn being there. I would become someone who wasn’t afraid of anything, someone powerful, who could bend others to her will. I would become someone who made the dean of arts flee the state when he so much as made me wake up early on a Saturday morning. Maybe no one else outside the A’s would ever know about the things I did, but I would know, and that was all that mattered.

  I turned to Leo and for one cold, emotionless minute, pressed my lips to his. Then I pulled back and leveled a stare at Ren.

  “Satisfied?” I asked.

  “Cute,” Ren said. “But cute isn’t exactly what we’re going for here.”

  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

  In second grade Miss Wilkes asked us to write about a superpower we wished we had. In my story there was a girl my age and she met a genie near the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park who offered to grant her one wish. The girl wished to be invisible and that wish came true.

  The girl went wherever she pleased and did whatever she wanted. She walked right into the Central Park Zoo without paying. She rode the carousel and climbed the turrets of Belvedere Castle and for a while everything was wonderful. But then the girl grew tired of this and she returned home and tried to get back into her old routine, but nothing was the same. Her parents didn’t come to tuck her in at night because they didn’t know she was there. Her teacher never called on her in class. She sat with her friends at lunch but their conversation and games never included her. The girl grew lonely and sad.

  She returned to the genie at the fountain, who was the only one who could still see her. She asked if she could make another wish. The genie solemnly shook his head and told her that that was impossible. Most kids never even got to make one wish; it was unthinkable for one girl to get to make two. The girl started to cry because she realized too late that being seen was more powerful than being invisible.

  If I had been any other seven-year-old in the class, I’m sure Miss Wilkes would have thought I was precocious and given me a check-plus for creativity, but this was after the summer that my mother disappeared. My father had hired a private investigator to find her, and the private investigator had told us what had happened to my mother, or, at least, all that he could know. So, the long and short of it was that Miss Wilkes was not amused or pleased by my story, but concerned. She told my father, and my father made me see a therapist.

  Her name was Dr. Malby, and she specialized in adolescents with especially traumatic pasts. One of the boys she treated was about my age, and he had seen his father, a stockbroker, kill himself with a handgun to the mouth over an investment that went south. He told me this in the waiting room while he played with a G.I. Joe action figure and I fiddled reluctantly with a puzzle at the kids’ table. Another, older girl who was sometimes there before me had bandages up and down her forearms. She never talked to me or played at the kids’ table. She always slouched in her chair and thumbed through magazines.

  The walls of the inside of Dr. Malby’s office were cotton-candy pink. We sat on the floor around a large coffee table on a fluffy rug and played Jenga as she probed my inner psyche.

  “You can say anything you want in here,” Dr. Malby said.

  “Are you going to tell my father?” I asked.

  She gingerly removed a wooden log from the bottom of the block structure and set it on top.

  “We’re all here so you can start to feel better,” Dr. Malby said, which didn’t answer my question. “Is there something you want to say?” she asked. “Something that maybe you feel you can’t say out there?” She motioned to the cotton-candy-colored walls.

  “Fuck,” I said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  It was what my uncle Teddy had said on the boat that summer when he had dropped his beer overboard while adjusting the jib, and I knew it wasn’t something I should repeat because Aunt Grier immediately said his name in that way that meant a lot more than just his name. It always amazed me how much Aunt Grier could say with just one word, or even just a look if she was feeling particularly economical. A stern glance could get Leo to wear his gray scratchy blazer to dinner; a raised eyebrow could silence my cousin Piper’s whine that I—and not she—had gotten to steer the boat. This time, Aunt Grier said, “Teddy,” but she meant, “Teddy-not-in-front-of-the-children.”

  I didn’t know what the word “fuck” meant, exactly. At least, I didn’t know the literal meaning. I just knew how it made me feel when I said it. Like it encapsulated this anger and shame and loneliness that there was no other way to give voice to. Those things never sounded the way they felt inside. But “fuck” somehow captured it. It was teeth against lip, bone against flesh to start. It was round and whole in the middle. And it was harsh and clawing at the end.

  “Does that make you feel better?” Dr. Malby asked.

  I nodded because yes, actually, it did. And so Dr. Malby sat there patiently and let me say it again and a
gain to the cotton-candy-colored walls of her office. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. I savored the word each time, the way my mouth felt when I formed it, how the hollows of my chest felt when I released it. It was like taking a breath of air when you’ve been holding your breath so long that your lungs are about to burst.

  In my mailbox the morning after the night in the woods with the A’s was a note, hastily written on a scrap of paper:

  Charlotte,

  MUST see you. Meet me at 9 p.m. at Rosie’s Diner. Very important.

  Hank

  My heart sank a little when I realized it was not my first ticket from the A’s.

  Hank? Who the hell was Hank? And why did he want to meet me in the local greasy spoon in Falls Church, the closest town to campus? My first thought was that it was some lovesick underclassman who had gotten up the nerve to arrange a face-to-face meeting and maybe was too embarrassed to do it on campus. There was something in the sloppiness of the handwriting that I couldn’t help but read as desperation.

  Then, all at once, my confusion morphed into white-hot anger and panic. Shit. I knew who Hank was—and it wasn’t some dopey freshman. It was Uncle Hank, my mother’s oldest brother.

  Which meant that he had been there, on campus, sometime in the last several hours. Was he still there—lingering, watching? I turned and glanced quickly over my shoulder at the rest of the mailroom, half expecting to see him standing there.

  I hadn’t seen Uncle Hank in years—since I was ten, and my father issued the restraining order.

  It had happened like this: Uncle Hank had picked me up from my elementary school one afternoon. I had been a bit surprised to see his rusted truck idling there in front of the sidewalk at the parent pickup spot in front of the school, but he had explained everything—how the nanny had gone home sick, and my sister was at a friend’s house, and my father would be late at work (my father was always late at work—he was president of the Calloway Group, which kept him very busy). Uncle Hank said he had come by to look after me and take me out for a bite to eat. So I said okay, and he held the passenger-side door of his truck open, and I slid in.