“What time is it?” I asked, my voice scratchy. The sky outside was a soft pink, like sherbet.
“Almost five thirty,” Leo said, setting his bag down at the end of my bed and sitting.
I nudged him with one of my socked feet. “Don’t sit there,” I said. “You’re all sweaty.”
His response to this was to climb onto the bed and spread out next to me.
“Is that lavender I detect?” he asked, smelling my pillow. “‘Clean linen’ perhaps?”
“Not anymore, thanks,” I said, pushing him away.
“I’m so tired,” Leo said, yawning and laying his head on my pillow. “Coach had us running suicides for, like, an hour. I could sleep for days.”
I turned my head and glanced over at him, hogging the other side of my pillow. He had his eyes closed, and I could see his long, girlish lashes fluttering against his cheekbones as he took slow, measured breaths.
“Hey, don’t get too comfortable,” I said, giving him a little shove.
His eyelids fluttered open and I saw the bright turquoise of his eyes. He smiled and sat up, running a hand through his trademark Calloway blond hair.
“Did you hear about Auden?” Leo asked.
“I was there when it happened,” I said. “We have trig together.”
“No—I know that,” Leo said. “Did you hear what they found in his room?”
“No,” I said. “What?”
“What was left of Mr. Franklin’s original photograph,” Leo said. “They searched his locker in the field house, too. They found a set of the janitor’s keys, the ones that were reported missing last week.”
The janitor’s keys—another item from the Game. A sour sense of foreboding settled in my stomach.
“The school has him on charges of theft, trespassing, destruction of personal property, and harassment of an instructor,” Leo said. “They’re saying he’s going to be suspended. He’s meeting in front of the Student Ethics Board at the end of the week.”
I sat up. “Did you know about this?” I asked. The set of the janitor’s keys had been Leo’s ticket, after all. “Did you know the A’s were going to do this?”
“No,” Leo said. “They didn’t tell me a thing.”
“So they’re—what—punishing Auden for not showing up? For not playing the Game?” I asked.
Leo shrugged. “Looks like it.”
“I never knew that was part of it,” I said.
I knew the consequences of snitching on the A’s—of giving up their secrets—but I had never suspected that we would be punished for failing to get a ticket item or for quitting the Game. I didn’t even know if Auden had actually quit playing or if he had just not been able to get his item in time. Maybe to the A’s, it didn’t matter either way.
At first, the photograph in Mr. Franklin’s room had seemed like a harmless prank—a small slap on the wrist. Maybe Auden would get a few detentions. But the planted janitor’s keys? Suspension? The A’s were messing with Auden’s future, his academic record. And for what reason? It seemed strange, because just last week, Auden had played poker with Dalton and Crosby and me and Leo. He was one of us.
“It’s like they’re sending a message,” Leo said. “Not just to Auden, but to the rest of us.”
“Yeah,” I said. When it came to the Game, not only could we not get caught, but we couldn’t stop playing.
“So I was thinking,” Leo said, “that we could form an alliance. When we get our next item, I’ll help you with yours and you help me with mine. Double our chances. The first ticket was hard enough, and I have a feeling they’re not going to get any easier.”
“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.
The dormitory was empty since it was the middle of the day; the halls felt lonely and forlorn. I followed Ren and Darcy to the end of the hall on the first floor, where all the seniors’ rooms were. Ren slid her key card in and held the door open for me.
Ren’s room was messy. She was a senior, so she didn’t have to share. There was a single bed against the window, unmade, with a plain black Parachute duvet and linens in disarray. There were a chair and desk by the door, and literally every inch of the desk’s surface was covered—a clunky hair dryer with its cord snaking off the edge, a silver Miu Miu leather card case, a statistics and probability textbook, a half-drunk bottle of Diet Pepsi. And there were clothes everywhere—hanging from the chair, littering the floor so that it was impossible to walk without stepping on something.
“God, you’re such a slob,” Darcy said as if it were an endearing quality.
“There’s an order to my madness,” Ren said. She leaned down and removed what looked like a cosmetics case from underneath a pile of T-shirts. She sat on her bed and opened it; inside was a grinder, an eighth of weed in a little baggie, and a vape pen.
“Make yourself at home,” Darcy told me as she shut Ren’s door and took a seat on the other end of Ren’s bed.
I found a beanbag chair buried under some discarded blue jeans, so I cleared it off and sat. Darcy tossed me the latest issue of Cosmo from a stack of magazines on Ren’s nightstand and I absently thumbed through it, my eyes sliding over the glossy images and article titles: “Choosing the Perfect Lip Gloss for Your Skin Tone,” “5 Tricks to Try in Bed That Will Blow His Mind,” “The Absolute Must-Have Trends This Fall.”
I’d never had an easy time making girlfriends. I didn’t particularly like the things a lot of girls liked—I didn’t care for makeup or make a big deal about clothes and shopping; I’d never had a boyfriend. But, more than that, it was that girlfriends took a lot of work. When I hung out with boys like Leo, everything was refreshingly easy and transparent. You played video games or cards or whatever, and sure, boys could be crass or give each other a hard time, but you always knew exactly where you stood. With girls, so much happened beneath the surface; there was so much subtext that had to be read and analyzed, so many unspoken rules that you had to pay attention to. And there were feelings to account for. Part of the reason Drew and I got along so well is because we operated without all the BS. Yael and Stevie were part of the package deal, but even with them I often found myself saying or doing the wrong thing.
“So, find anything good?” Darcy asked Ren.
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Ren said as she focused on pouring the ground buds into the vaporizer. “She got a B minus on her physics test last week, which is bringing down her class average. And it looks like she hasn’t taken statistics yet, and you know Mr. Wong only gives out like two A’s a semester. You’ve already taken that, so you have a huge leg up next semester.”
I didn’t ask who they were talking about, but I knew enough to guess. It was common knowledge that Darcy Flemming and Stella Ng were neck and neck for valedictorian this year. Was Ren using her privileges as runner to keep an eye on Stella Ng’s academic record and give Darcy the inside scoop on her competition? I was a little surprised though that they would talk about it so openly in front of me. Did this mean they considered me part of their inner circle now, that they trusted me with their secrets?
Ren took a drag on her vape pen.
“I hope so,” Darcy said. “I wanted to compete in the Maclay Finals this year, but with things being as tight as they are, my mom was adamant I take a break from riding and focus on my studies.”
“Horses are stupid,” Ren said, exhaling.
“Do you ride?” Darcy asked me.
“No, but my sister does,” I said. “That’s why she chose to go to Reynolds actually. They have a stable and a competitive equestrian team.”
“Your family has a place on Martha’s Vineyard, right?” Ren asked me.
“Yeah,” I said. “In Edgartown.”
“I thought so,” Ren said. “I thought I saw you at L’Étoile this summer.”
“Yeah, we go there a lot.”
“My father has a place in Chilmark on the water,” Ren said. “We have a big party for the Fourth every year. You should stop by some time.”
The Montgomerys’ annual Fourth of July party was legendary. Guests dined on oysters and lobsters in hundred-foot-long white tents on the estate and danced under the stars to a live band. Last year, the Montgomery family had put on a fireworks show on the beach that was rumored to have cost over a hundred grand. My fling at the time, Cedric Roth, had attended. He’d told me all about it.
“Sounds fun,” I said.
“Here,” Ren said, tossing me the vape pen.
The first time I’d smoked was that past summer in the room over the boathouse with Cedric Roth, where he hid his bong far from the prying eyes of his parents.
“Breathe,” he’d instructed, and I’d leaned forward, putting my lips to the glass barrel.
He showed me how to inhale, how to hold the smoke in my lungs. My throat burned. It felt like it was on fire, and I instinctively coughed, but then I couldn’t stop coughing, harder and harder. I remembered the way my body loosened and my mind unraveled and everything around me felt different, how I could taste the air on my tongue for the first time.
Now, when I took a drag on Ren’s vape, the smoke tickled my throat but I held back the cough. My eyes started to water.
We weren’t allowed to have candles in our dorms, but Ren had an electric wax warmer plugged in on her desk. She got up and took a meltable wax square out of its packaging and placed
it on top.
“Harvest Apple,” she said.
I stared at Ren’s walls, which were white and bare. Most girls hung posters of their favorite bands or put up bulletin boards covered in ribbon and pinned with photographs, or strung up string lights, but Ren hadn’t bothered.
Maybe, I thought, things could be as easy with Ren and Darcy and the other A’s as they had always been with Drew.
I took another drag on the vape pen. I could feel the weed starting to take effect as I stared at Ren’s blank walls. They stretched open and bright white before me, full of possibilities.
Disciplinary hearings conducted by the Student Ethics Board were always open to the public. They were held in Bleeker Hall, in the largest lecture room that Knollwood Prep had—a room usually reserved for when important speakers came to campus or for large, school-wide meetings, because it was the only room besides the auditorium that could seat the whole school if everyone decided to show up. Usually, the only people who attended were the students on the ethics board themselves, the student facing punishment, and Headmaster Collins. But because of the public nature of Auden Stein’s offense, dozens of students and even some faculty were present on the day of his hearing.
Crosby, Dalton, and Ren sat in the row behind Drew and me. Crosby kept poking Drew in the back of her neck with his pencil, and Drew kept giggling and acting annoyed and turning around to swat him. I had my feet propped up on the back of the seat in front of me. My ankle itched and I was trying not to scratch it. I’d put more triple antibiotic ointment on Nancy’s bite mark last night and a fresh Band-Aid. Now I peeled back the edge of the bandage to sneak a peek. The bite had scabbed over; there would definitely be a scar.
“Some townies are having a bonfire tomorrow,” I heard Ren say to Dalton. She was talking about the high school kids from Falls Church, who would sometimes have parties in the woods between town and campus. Sometimes upperclassmen from Knollwood would go because there was always lots of beer and pot. “You going?” Ren asked Dalton.
All These Beautiful Strangers Page 13