Teddy glared at me.
Shit. Doting older brother. I forgot.
“Would you care to dance?” I asked Grace.
Grace looked like I had taken her by surprise, but she recovered herself quickly. “Sure,” she said. “Of course.”
She slid out of Teddy’s arm and gave me her hand again. Something in my stomach tightened.
I led her out onto the dance floor, past several other couples, so we could no longer see Teddy or my mother.
Grace leaned her head close to my ear and whispered, “So, I’m going to tell you a secret, because you’re going to find out in just a moment anyway. But I don’t really know how to dance.”
I smiled and bent my lips close to her ear. “Your secret is safe with me. Don’t worry, just lean into me and I’ll lead you through it. No one will be any the wiser.”
I took her in my arms then, one hand at the small of her back, the other holding her palm in mine. I drew her close and we danced.
“This isn’t so bad,” Grace said after a moment. “Thanks for making me look good.”
“That’s hardly a challenge,” I said.
Heat bloomed in Grace’s cheeks, but she laughed to cover it. My eye caught on the crab pendant of her necklace, which rested against her throat. I wondered if Teddy had gotten that for her.
“Teddy told me the two of you met in a library,” I said. “That’s some extraordinarily bad luck you had. The library should have been the one place you’d be safe from a travesty like that.”
Grace laughed. “Well, I work there part-time, so I’m there a lot. Painting’s really more of a hobby than anything else. I just do it because it makes me happy—I don’t really expect it to ever pay the bills.”
“So, what’s next for you then, if not painting?” I asked.
“To tell you the truth, I’m still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up,” Grace said. “What about you? Did you always know you wanted to follow in your father’s footsteps and take over the family business?”
“I always knew I’d do it,” I said with a shrug.
“That’s not the same thing,” Grace said.
She looked at me, really looked at me, and there was something—unsettling? comforting?—in her gaze. She looked at me like she already knew me. Even the parts I hadn’t meant to show her, the parts I never showed anyone.
“You’re exactly the way he described you,” Grace said.
“Teddy?” I asked.
“No, not Teddy,” Grace said. “Jake Griffin.”
The name struck me, ran through me, like an electric shock. I stopped cold. It was a name I hadn’t heard in years.
“I’m sorry,” Grace said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. I debated not saying anything, but it seemed strange not to mention it.”
I realized I was standing still, so I started to move again, stiffly, with Grace in my arms.
“How did you know Jake?” I asked.
“We were dating when it happened,” Grace said. “Before that, we grew up together.”
“You’re that Grace,” I said. It clicked then. I knew why Grace seemed so familiar. I hadn’t met her before—but I had seen her.
“He talked about me?” Grace asked.
I nodded. “He had this picture of you on his desk in his dorm.”
I remembered that picture even now, almost six years later. Grace was sitting on some front porch steps in a pair of cutoffs and sneakers. It was summertime in the photo and Grace had a half-eaten ice-cream cone in one hand; the rest was smeared all over her nose, her chin, and she was leaning forward, mouth open in laughter. I remembered picking up the frame once, wondering what had made her laugh like that.
“It was this candid shot of you with this ice-cream cone, but there was more ice cream on your face than in the cone,” I said.
“Isn’t that how you’re supposed to do it?”
I wanted to ask her about the picture—about who had taken it and what she had been laughing at at the time—but when I looked up, I saw Teddy standing behind her.
“May I cut in?” he asked.
Grace looked up at me with those wide-set doe eyes.
“Yes,” Grace said. “Of course.”
I realized I was still holding her even though we had stopped dancing, my hand on the small of her back, my other hand clasping her palm. Reluctantly, I let her go.
I meandered over to the nearest waiter holding a tray of wineglasses and took one, turning my back to the dance floor. I didn’t want to watch them together.
Margot found me there.
“So, anything to worry about?” Margot asked.
“What?”
“Teddy and the total Virgin Mary with him?” Margot asked.
“Oh,” I said. “No. Just some stupid game he’s playing.”
“Hm,” Margot said. “Typical.”
“It’s the strangest thing, though,” I said.
“What is?”
“The girl—Grace. She used to date Jake Griffin.”
My gaze flickered to Margot and then away. I wanted to gauge her reaction.
“Who?” Margot asked. There wasn’t a hint of recognition in her eyes. She didn’t remember at all.
It was strange that a name that had haunted me for the past six years had such little effect on Margot. There were times when we were lying next to each other at night in the dark, and I’d want to speak that name into the void. I wanted to know if she was thinking about it, too. If it haunted her like it haunted me. If I wasn’t alone.
I thought I knew what Margot would say if I told her about the times I couldn’t drown out that whiny little voice in the back of my mind, and now, looking at her unaffected reaction to Jake’s name, I knew that I was right.
You let it get to you again, she would say disapprovingly.
How can you not let it get to you? I would ask. Because she knew. She had been there that night. How can you not feel the smallest bit of guilt?
Because I have nothing to gain from that, she would say.
And she’d be right.
It was weak of me to feel guilt or remorse. It was weak of me to think of it at all.
“You remember, Jake Griffin from Knollwood Prep,” I said finally, with a shrug that I hoped would appear indifferent. “The boy who killed himself.”
“Oh, Jake,” Margot said finally. “Small world, I guess.”
“Yeah,” I said, because she was right.
I turned and looked back out at the dance floor. I found them there in the middle of it—Teddy with Grace in his arms.
Most of the time the world felt big, boundless, full of possibilities—everything was there for the taking, everything was waiting to be conquered, and Margot and I were poised for the conquering. What was there to be afraid of? What was there holding us back? Nothing could touch us; we wouldn’t let it.
But tonight, for the first time in a long time, the world felt small, and I felt small in it.
Eleven
Charlie Calloway
2017
In trig, I fingered the plastic crab pendant that hung at the base of the necklace I wore around my neck and stared out the window at the trees, which were beginning to redden. Trig was supposed to be a senior class, but I’d always had a head for numbers, for tricky equations, for figuring things out.
That was all this was, I told myself. A tricky equation. My mother’s disappearance. The assumption (by some) that my father had killed her. It seemed intimidating when you first looked at it—all those complex differentials and variables. But if you broke it down, part by part, it always made sense in the end—the equation always led to a logical answer.
“Who has the answer?”
I jerked my head away from the window, back toward the dry-erase board at the front of the room. I was playing a dangerous game zoning out in trig. Old Mr. Franklin, or “sir,” as he had us address him, was ex-military. He had served in Nam. He believed in hierarchy, in reverence for authority,
and in torturing and humiliating any poor soul who couldn’t cross-multiply and divide fast enough to come up with the answer when he wanted it.
Trig was the only class at Knollwood Prep, besides Mr. Andrew’s Introduction to Photography class, that didn’t follow the Harkness method. It was easy to see why—sitting in a circle, teachers and students on the same footing, with students encouraged to speak their minds whenever they felt like it? That flew in the face of everything Mr. Franklin held dear. Instead, our desks were in neat rows, squarely facing the front of the room, and instead of an open discussion, Mr. Franklin spent every class lecturing at us from the dry-erase board, shouting out problems and demanding the correct answers when you’d barely had time to put pen to paper. Here, there was no getting away with thought-provoking, open-ended bullshit answers, because there was always only one answer. So, I shot my hand in the air, even though I hadn’t even heard what equation we were supposed to be working out, because the surest way not to get called on in Mr. Franklin’s class was to look like you knew the answer. Mr. Franklin always zeroed in on the kid who was feverishly still trying to work out the equation in his notebook, or the kid who was pointedly averting his gaze, praying to the gods that his time had not yet come.
“Mr. Kensington,” Mr. Franklin said. “You look like you have the right answer.”
Al Kensington didn’t look like he had the right answer at all. He looked like Mr. Franklin had just kicked his dog.
“Um, x equals thirty degrees?” Al said.
Mr. Franklin glared at him.
“Sir!” Al said, blushing down to the collar of his shirt. “Sorry, x equals thirty degrees, sir?”
Mr. Franklin held out his dry-erase marker. “Come up here and show us how you got to that answer.”
That, of course, meant that Al had gotten it wrong. Mr. Franklin was a firm believer in learning from others’ mistakes, so he made sure to make them as public as possible and to walk through the errors, line by line.
Al took his paper and stood, walking unsteadily toward the front of the room, shaking in terror. As he passed Auden Stein’s desk—he was the only other junior in the class—Auden brought his balled hand to his mouth and coughed discreetly into it.
“Forty-five,” he coughed.
Al stiffened and paused for a moment and then continued forward.
“What was that, Mr. Stein?” Mr. Franklin asked.
“What was what, sir?” Auden asked innocently.
“It sounded like you were trying to give Mr. Kensington a number as he passed by your desk,” Mr. Franklin said.
Behind him, at the board, Al was quickly scribbling his work onto the dry-erase board, trying to figure out where he had gone wrong in the equation and make out forty-five before Mr. Franklin returned his attention to him. If Mr. Franklin had been paying attention to Al, he would have seen that he’d started the equation from the end, with the answer, and was working backward.
“No, sir,” Auden said.
“I take cheating very seriously,” Mr. Franklin said. “I’m sure you’re aware of Knollwood Prep’s zero-tolerance policy?”
“Yes, sir,” Auden said.
“So what was that?”
“What was what, sir?”
At this point, the throbbing vein in Mr. Franklin’s forehead looked like it might burst. “What did you say to Mr. Kensington as he passed by your desk?”
“I didn’t say anything, sir,” Auden said. “I coughed. My mother’s always told me I have a funny-sounding cough, that it sounds like I’m saying—”
“Forty-five!” Al shouted, jumping away from the board and lifting his arms in triumph. “Forty-five. The answer is forty-five.” He pointed to his work on the board. “You can use a trig identity to get a quadratic in cosine.”
Mr. Franklin let out his breath slowly. “Another teachable moment—gone. Mr. Kensington, you may take your seat.”
“But I can explain it,” Al started, “I understand it now. What you have to do is—”
“Mr. Kensington, take your seat!” Mr. Franklin snapped, and Al drew back as if he had been slapped.
If Auden had been anyone else in the class, Mr. Franklin would have called him to the board and given him an impossible equation to solve in front of all of us. But Auden was too smart—he was some sort of math prodigy—and Mr. Franklin wasn’t about to provide Auden with a stage on which he would shine.
“Is this your idea of a practical joke, Mr. Stein?”
I glanced back up toward the front of the room, toward Mr. Franklin, who was squinting at the picture on the edge of his desk like he had never seen it before, when it’d sat there for as long as I could remember. It took me a moment to realize that was the picture—the picture one of the A initiates had stolen for their first ticket. The last time I remembered seeing it was at the Ledge a week ago. Had it been on Mr. Franklin’s desk this whole time, and if so, what was it doing there? Had the A’s returned it? And if they had, what had been the point of taking it in the first place?
“I asked, do you find this amusing, Mr. Stein?” Mr. Franklin repeated himself, a deep fury in his throat.
Everyone turned to look at Auden.
“Do I find what amusing, sir?” Auden asked.
“The defacement of my personal property,” Mr. Franklin said. “Is this your idea of a joke?”
Auden shifted in his seat. “I’m sorry, sir, but I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
Mr. Franklin turned the picture around so he could see it. At first, I didn’t notice anything different about the picture at all—there was Mr. Franklin in uniform in the Oval Office. There was President Nixon, shaking his hand. I leaned forward in my seat so I could see it better. And then I gasped.
Someone had photoshopped Auden’s grinning face onto Mr. Franklin’s body. The juxtaposition of those two things—Auden’s silly grinning face on Mr. Franklin’s stern, uniformed body—was so ridiculous I had to choke back a laugh. In the seat next to me, Sheila Andrews was losing the battle of being discreet, trying to cover her giggles with a coughing fit.
“Sir, I didn’t—” Auden said.
“To the headmaster’s office this instant, Mr. Stein,” Mr. Franklin said, his mouth so tight I barely saw his lips move.
“Sir, that wasn’t me,” Auden said. “I mean, that is me—in the picture. But I didn’t do that.”
“Mr. Stein!” Mr. Franklin growled, and the whole class fell silent.
For one long moment, Auden sat and stared at the back of Dalton’s head, as if willing him to turn around and look him in the eye. Dalton was sitting in the front row, staring nonchalantly forward, as if nothing interesting were happening at all. Finally, Auden gathered his things and marched out of the room, shutting the door so forcefully in his wake that the wall shuddered.
Mr. Franklin followed him without even bothering to dismiss us. When he was gone, Sheila collapsed forward on her desk, laughing and gulping for air.
“That—was—classic,” Sheila said to me.
I almost couldn’t hear her over the roar of the room. People were turning around in their desks to talk to one another. There was a buzz of energy, a sense of excitement, which felt foreign to Mr. Franklin’s trig class.
“How long do you think Auden’s been planning that one?” Sheila asked. “I mean, genius. I wish I had that kind of balls.”
I wanted to tell Sheila that she didn’t even know the half of it, that she had only gotten part of the joke, and only fourteen students in the whole school would get the full joke—that Auden had been framed, literally and figuratively.
I glanced over at Dalton, who was talking to Crosby. Crosby had a wicked grin on his face. I tried to make out what they were saying, but they were too far away.
The A’s had made their first move of the year—a prank that had simultaneously taken everyone’s least favorite teacher down a peg and reprimanded the one initiate who had failed to retrieve his first ticket—a prank that everyone on campus, from stu
dents to faculty, would be talking about for the next week, and I hadn’t been a part of it, hadn’t even known it was coming. Why? Why had I been left out? Were any of the initiates involved? After all, we—or at least one of us—had done the heavy lifting. Shouldn’t we, at the very least, have been allowed to know what we were stealing the ticket items for?
I tore out a sheet of paper from my notebook, balled it up, and chucked it at the back of Dalton’s head. It missed him by a mile. I called out his name but he didn’t hear me over the noise of the classroom. I crossed my arms, slouched in my chair, and stared in Dalton and Crosby’s direction, willing them to look my way, to give me some kind of clue as to what was going on, but they didn’t.
None of us moved from our desks until the bell rang. We were all too nervous to leave in case Mr. Franklin came back and found our desks empty while class was still supposed to be in session. But he didn’t return. I should have known then that my annoyance at Dalton and Crosby and the rest of the senior A’s was the least of my worries—that a bigger storm was brewing. But I didn’t. I spent the rest of class looking idly at the spot on Mr. Franklin’s desk where the picture had sat. I couldn’t help but wonder how long that picture had been there, waiting for Mr. Franklin to notice. I wondered if it had been there since the morning after the A’s meeting, just sitting there like a bomb waiting to explode.
“Knock, knock.”
I opened my eyes and craned my neck toward the open door of my dorm room. Leo was standing there, leaning against the door frame. He was still dressed in his football practice jersey, which hung off his tall, muscular frame, and he had his gym bag slung over one shoulder. His blond hair was slicked back with sweat, his cheeks red and heated.
My mind was still groggy with sleep. I must have dozed off while studying. My laptop was warm on my stomach, the screen glowing and the cursor blinking in the middle of a sentence deconstructing Plath’s poem “Daddy.” I had the USB drive that Dalton had given me with the A’s cache of old literature essays from Mrs. Morrison’s class. There were several on Plath’s Ariel, and reading through them and “borrowing” some ideas was definitely making my essay a whole lot easier to write.
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