All These Beautiful Strangers

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All These Beautiful Strangers Page 21

by Elizabeth Klehfoth


  “Sounds fascinating,” Harper said, nodding and jotting something down in her notebook. “There seems to be a lot to chew on there, so I’m going to pair you with Charlie.”

  “Me, Charlie?” I asked, both hoping and knowing it was useless to hope that there was another Charlie in the group.

  “Yes, you, Charlie,” Harper said. “The two of you can share a byline.”

  I had to share my first byline with a freshman? And I had to put my name next to some stupid article on stripes versus polka dots that the whole school would see? And UPenn was supposed to be impressed by this?

  Uh, hell no.

  “Actually,” I said, “I have a really great idea for a story.”

  “I’m sure you do,” Harper said, “and we’d all love to hear it—at the next pitch meeting. But, as of now, our pages are full.”

  Harper closed her notebook with a snap and smiled at the group.

  “Great job this week, everyone,” Harper said. “I’m really looking forward to reading your work. Don’t forget to get me your drafts by the end of the day on Friday.”

  As everyone shuffled away their notebooks and pens and laptops, Finn shifted in the seat next to me. “Do you want to go grab some coffee?” he asked. “Maybe we can sketch out an outline together for the article?”

  “I can’t right now,” I said. “I have somewhere I need to be.”

  As in, anywhere but here.

  “Okay,” he said. “Well, we should exchange numbers or emails so we can plan to meet up later.”

  Harper was headed toward the door. I had to talk to her before she left, sweet-talk her into letting me have my own article.

  “Sure,” I said. I ripped the corner off a loose piece of paper in my bag, scribbled down my school email address, and handed it to him as I stood. “Here, just email me yours.”

  I was across the room and out the door before he could respond or protest.

  “Harper,” I called out. Harper stopped halfway down the hallway and turned.

  “Hey, Charlie,” Harper said. “I’m so excited you decided to join the Chronicle. I had no idea you were interested in journalism.”

  Oh, I’m not, I wanted to say. I just wanted an excuse to spend more time with you. Maybe later we could paint our nails together and braid each other’s hair?

  But I bit my tongue. I had to play nice.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I was just thinking, maybe I could sit this round out and come back next week for the pitch meeting?”

  “Could you tell me exactly what your concerns are about doing this story with Finn?” Harper asked, shifting the strap of her bag from one shoulder to the other. She creased her brow as if she truly cared about my answer.

  “Come on, Harper,” I said. “School uniforms? It’s a stupid fluff piece. I couldn’t think of anything less interesting to write about if I tried.”

  Harper cleared her throat; her glance flicked to just beyond my left shoulder. I turned and saw Finn standing in the hall behind us. His ears were beet red.

  “Excuse me,” he said.

  I didn’t say anything; I just stepped out of the way so he could pass.

  Harper and I stood there silently, listening to his footsteps echo back to us as he turned the corner. In the distance, we heard a door open and close.

  Harper smiled. “I’m afraid this is the last week of Open Period,” she said. “So, if you want a spot on the paper, you’ll have to share this byline with Finn.”

  I sighed. “There’s really nothing else you can give me?”

  “I need a thousand words by Friday,” Harper said.

  Then she turned on her heel and left, and I watched any chance I had of making this extracurricular activity work disappear with her.

  The first thing we did was kill the lights in the fountain. It was a dark, moonless night, but when the Poseidon Fountain was lit up, we knew Old Man Riley—or anyone else strolling across campus at two in the morning—would be able to see us from hundreds of yards away.

  Leo had a set of the janitor’s keys, which opened every door on campus. The A’s had made a copy before planting the original set in Auden’s locker. So, he was able to get to the control switch in the theater and turn off the lights.

  Under the cover of darkness, I undressed and slid into the basin of the Poseidon Fountain in only my underwear. It was October now, and there was a cold bite in the air. Goose bumps erupted up and down my arms and legs as I waded to the middle of the fountain where the drain was at the base. With the fountain full, the water came up to my waist.

  I had never particularly liked being in the water. I was a late bloomer when it came to learning to swim, which had disappointed my mother, because she had been a natural swimmer.

  When I was four, my parents taught me to swim in the indoor swimming pool at my grandparents’ house in Greenwich. I remember my mother holding me as I lay on my belly, kicking and paddling, but as soon as she would let go, I would sink and cling to her in the water, and she would pull me up, gasping and screaming.

  “She’s never going to learn if you coddle her like that,” my father had said, sitting on the edge of the pool with his legs in the water.

  “She’ll get it when she’s ready,” my mother said, setting me on the edge of the pool next to my father. She climbed out and patted herself dry with a towel. “I learned to swim when I was barely out of diapers,” she said. “It’s in her genes. She’ll get it.”

  She reached out and ruffled my hair.

  “I need to call Hank back before dinner,” she said, tilting her head to one side to get the water out.

  “We’ll be here, won’t we?” my father said to me. “Looking at the pretty pool, thinking how nice it would be to swim.”

  “Don’t rush her, Alistair,” my mother said, ducking down to give my father a kiss on the cheek. “She’s just a late bloomer.”

  When she was gone, my father slid into the water. He took a few steps away from the edge of the pool and then turned to reach his arms out toward me.

  “Come on, Charlotte,” he said. “Swim to Daddy.”

  I stared at him for a moment, unsure.

  “Jump,” my father said. “Jump and I’ll catch you.”

  I stood on the edge and looked at his outstretched arms. They didn’t seem that far away. Surely, with a leap, I would reach them. So I did it. I jumped.

  I felt my feet break the surface of the pool and then my head went under and I waited, I waited for my father’s arms to reach down and pick me up, to rescue me, but they didn’t.

  My first reaction was to cry out for help, and so I did. I opened my mouth to call for my father, and it filled with pool water.

  My next reaction was to panic, and I started to kick and thrash in the water in a desperate attempt to swim as I sank instead. I opened my eyes and they burned with chlorine. I looked up through the water and saw the blurry figure of my father standing there, above me, just out of reach. I stretched out my arm toward him and he took a step back. I could hear his disembodied voice. It sounded like he was calling my name, but I couldn’t hear him clearly under the water.

  I could feel my heart—it was pounding, hot, in my ears. My lungs ached. I couldn’t breathe.

  And then something grabbed me from behind and pulled me to the surface.

  I was crying, screaming; I couldn’t see as I gulped at the air. It took me a moment to realize it was my mother who was holding me. She pulled me out of the pool and wrapped me in her towel, which was already wet, and cradled me in her arms.

  “Jesus, Alistair,” my mother said over my shoulder. “What the hell were you thinking?”

  “She would have swum,” my father said. I couldn’t see him because he was still behind me in the pool. “She would have figured it out, if you just let her. She would have been fine.”

  Now I felt around the bottom of the fountain with my feet until I found it—the plug. Then I took a deep breath and lowered myself to the bottom, and pulled the stopper out. />
  “It’s a nice night for a swim,” Leo said when I returned to the surface. He was beside me now in the water and we sat there together, waiting for the water to slowly drain around us.

  When the fountain was empty, we dismantled one of the fish sculptures. It took both of us to carry the sculpture, slow and waddling, to the theater, where we hid it in the old prop room, covered in a sheet.

  It was Thursday evening, and, not surprisingly, Finn had never emailed me about getting together to write our draft of the article. I couldn’t say I blamed him, really, but I also wasn’t about to let him write a story by himself that my name was going to go on, or worse, report to Harper that I hadn’t helped write the article and give her an excuse to drop me from the paper. Since Harper wasn’t going to let me write my own piece, my only recourse was to convince Finn to take the article in a different, less lame direction. So, when I spotted him across the dining hall at dinner, I grabbed a tray of pizza and soda and marched across the dining hall to his table.

  Drew caught my eye as I passed my usual table, where she was sitting with Yael and Stevie and a bunch of the guys—Leo, Dalton, the whole gang—and headed toward the south side of the dining hall, where the freshmen sat.

  “Where are you going?” she called out to me.

  To my social ruin and the pinnacle of humiliation, probably, I wanted to say, but instead I just shrugged my shoulders at her and rolled my eyes.

  I marched up to Finn’s table. He was sitting with some sweaty, pimple-faced freshman boys, who were talking animatedly but fell silent when they saw me standing there.

  “Hey, Finn,” I said.

  Finn looked up and his ears turned red again when he saw me. He looked back down at his tray, fiddled with some pasta at the end of his fork. “Hey,” he said.

  “Long time, no see,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said, still not looking at me, and I almost felt bad. Partly for him—for the things he had heard me say in the hallway—but also for myself, for having to put up with this. Because regardless of whether I had hurt his feelings, what I’d said was true.

  “Do you think we could meet up later?” I asked. I didn’t even say to work on the article—because, hey, I was throwing the kid a bone. Let his friends think we were meeting up for other reasons. Let them think he had some hot date with an upperclassman.

  But Finn only shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m kind of busy later.”

  Oh, hell no.

  I shrugged right back at him. “That’s okay,” I said. “Now works, too.”

  I took a step forward and set my tray down at the table across from him, and his friends scooted over to make room for me.

  “Hey, guys, I’m Charlie,” I said as I opened the tab on my soda.

  “Declan,” the kid sitting next to Finn said, giving his head a little shake to clear his long mop of hair out of his eyes.

  “Luke,” the boy sitting next to me said.

  “Finn and I are writing an article on uniforms for the Chronicle,” I said.

  I sucked on the tip of my thumb where some soda had sprayed on me and dug out my laptop from my shoulder bag.

  I decided it might actually be to my advantage that Finn’s friends were there. Maybe by discussing the article in front of them, Finn would come to see how silly it was and he would understand that we needed to find a new angle or a new topic with more meat.

  “We could use some quotes for the piece, actually,” I said as I opened my laptop. “How do you guys feel about the uniform? Are you pro-polyester or anti-polyester?”

  “Honestly,” Finn said, rolling his eyes, “this goes beyond how ludicrous it is to line a blazer with polyester. I wanted to take it a more political route.”

  “What exactly is political about blazers?” I asked.

  “Think about it,” Finn said. “At Knollwood, the point of uniforms is to eliminate the socioeconomic divide—but that’s such a narrow context focused on the microcosm of our campus. If we think of the larger communities we’re a part of, Falls Church, for example, or New Hampshire, or even the United States, the Knollwood uniform becomes not an equalizer but a status symbol.”

  Hmm. Not where I had thought he was going to go with it. I actually had never spent much time thinking about the uniform I wore, about how it might look to other people, what it meant. And how that meaning might change depending on where I was and who I was with.

  “That’s deep, bro,” Declan said.

  “It doesn’t suck as much as I thought it would,” I said. “Actually, it might not suck at all.”

  “I know,” Finn said. “It’s hardly a stupid fluff piece.”

  I cleared my throat and opened a new document in my word processor. “Yeah, definitely not fluff. Have you started an outline?”

  Finn took a sip from his water glass and then daintily patted the corners of his mouth with his napkin.

  “Yeah,” he said after a moment. “I was actually going to head to the library for a bit before it closes to finish up, if you want to come.”

  I glanced at my wristwatch. It was going on seven o’clock.

  “Sure,” I said, shutting my laptop and wrapping my slice of pizza in a napkin so I could eat it on the way. “Sure, let’s go. Nice to meet you, Declan, Luke.”

  “Likewise,” Declan said, and as I stood to pick up my tray, I swore I saw Luke give Finn some kind of wink.

  Finn and I walked our trays to the conveyor belt at the far side of the cafeteria, where we set our dishes down, and then headed out through the French doors that led to the cafeteria patio and the pathway on the back lawn that led to the library.

  “We should do some interviews with students on campus and people outside campus,” I said. “We could do some freeform-association thing, where we ask people to give us the first three words that pop into their minds when they think of Knollwood’s uniform. You know, dig into the subconscious perception a bit, see what connotations pop up.”

  I took a bite of my pizza and almost ran directly into Finn, who stopped suddenly in front of me and turned to face me.

  “Look,” he said. “I didn’t want to say this in front of my friends and look like a jerk, but I’m not sharing this byline with you. I wrote the article already, and your name isn’t going on it.”

  I almost choked on my bite of pizza. I swallowed the piece that was in my mouth only half-chewed, and it scraped at the back of my throat as it went down. My eyes watered.

  “Is this because I told Harper I thought your article was fluff?” I asked. “Because, that wasn’t really about you. I just wanted to write my own story, that’s all. I’m not good at the whole . . . collaboration thing.”

  “I wasn’t exactly looking forward to sharing my story and my first byline with someone else, either,” Finn said. “Especially someone who came in weeks after Open Period started and missed Hell Week. But I wasn’t a jerk about it.”

  “What’s Hell Week?” I asked.

  “They made all the newbies wear these stupid paper dunce hats. And not just in the newsroom, but everywhere. And we had to run a lap around the building any time we wrote in the passive voice and do the whole senior staff’s laundry. Stuff like that.”

  “Ew,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Finn said. “So for you to just march into the pitch meeting, all holier-than-thou, and demand your own story and then call my piece ‘fluff’ when I get stuck with you—well, it’s just a little rich, if you ask me. Even if I am a freshman and you’re—you.”

  “I’m—me?” I asked. “What does that mean?”

  “You know, you’re Charlie Calloway,” Finn said, and I could see the italics in the way he said my name, as if it meant something.

  “Look, let me help write this article and I’ll do something for you,” I said. “There has to be something you want. You can tell your friends we made out if you like.”

  “I’m gay,” Finn said.

  “Oh,” I said. “I just thought that your friends thought we were . . .
I don’t know. I’m pretty sure your friend Luke winked at you back there.”

  “Luke’s an idiot,” Finn said.

  “It’s just that I—I sort of need this,” I said. “If I don’t have this byline, Harper will kick me off the paper. And I need this paper to get into UPenn.”

  “I’m sorry,” Finn said.

  For a second I thought he was apologizing, that he had changed his mind about the article.

  “‘I’m sorry,’” he said again. “Two words. You should try using them sometime.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “It’s called an apology. Contrition. Feeling bad when you’ve done something bad.”

  “I know what ‘contrition’ means,” I said.

  “Do you? Because I didn’t hear any kind of apology. All I heard was you telling me what you need and what you want and how you might manipulate me to get it. And I’m sure that usually works for you. But this isn’t one of those times,” Finn said.

  “Finn,” I said. “Please.”

  He turned and started walking back up the path. “I’m sorry,” he called over his shoulder.

  But he didn’t sound sorry at all.

  Eighteen

  Alistair Calloway

  Spring 1997

  In the conference room, my father and our lead architect had the building plans for our latest development project in Murray Hill spread out on the table. They were going over the neighborhood planning codes. I’d just come from my walk-through of the shell of a tenement with my design consultant. It was the first official project that I was heading at the Calloway Group. I had found the building and helped broker the deal, and now I would oversee the extensive renovations that would turn that sad dilapidated mess into luxury rental apartments that rising young professionals would pay through the nose for.

  My father looked up as I entered the room.

  “Where’s Teddy?” he asked.

  “He’s not here?” I said, glancing at my watch. It was going on half past two. Teddy should have been there half an hour ago. He was in the city on spring break and my father had instructed him in no uncertain terms to stop by.

 

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