“Hey,” Charlotte cried out. She reached over and grabbed the camera. “You’re such a brat.”
Charlotte fiddled with the camera for a moment and then looked up at me.
“She broke it,” she whined.
I turned around in my seat to take the camera from her so I could examine it. The body of the camera and the screen looked fine, but it would no longer turn on.
“I’ll have to take it in when we get back to the city and get it fixed,” I said.
“But what about my art project?” Charlotte asked. “I have to take pictures this weekend.”
Charlotte was taking a weeklong summer art class at her school.
“We might have an old camera at the house that you can use,” I said. “We’ll look when we get there.”
“Read me those numbers again,” Alistair said in the seat next to me. “Hold on.”
He tapped a button on his headset to mute himself. Then he glanced at me—the first time he had looked at me since we left the city. “Grace, can you keep things at a reasonable volume? This is an important call.”
He didn’t wait for my response before he looked back at the road and tapped his headset again.
“My apologies, Fred,” Alistair said. “I’ve got the girls in the car.”
He laughed at something Fred said that I couldn’t hear.
I rolled my eyes so that the girls couldn’t see and then smiled at them and pressed my index finger to my lips in a friendly “shhh” gesture.
Then I turned back around and sighed into my seat.
I glanced at my husband sitting next to me and I thought about how I missed the electric charge of attraction that came when you didn’t know every facet of a person. When you didn’t sleep next to them every night, or share a bathroom, or clean up after them when they were sick. I missed the mystery—the not knowing what comes next. That point when the other person seemed perfect because you only knew the best parts of them—the parts they wanted you to see.
That was terrible, wasn’t it? Though, I wondered sometimes if Alistair felt similarly. Surely sometimes he imagined I was someone else when we made love. I knew he looked at other women—long-necked women with perfect skin that they liked to show off in low-backed evening gowns at charity events. I saw him look at them, and I saw them look back. I tried to see my husband through their eyes. I knew, to them, he was handsome: tall, piercing blue eyes, a distinguished forehead crowned with salted blond hair. It was more than that, though—it was the way Alistair carried himself, as if he owned the room. As if he didn’t give a damn what anyone thought of him. I’d look at my husband in these moments—the same man I lived my life next to every day—and for a glimmer of a moment, I’d actually see him. That was the thing. It’s not what you look at—it’s what you see. And when you’ve been with someone long enough, you stop really seeing each other.
Being together for ten years was like listening to your favorite song too many times on the radio. You knew all the words but you’d lost all the feelings the song used to give you—the things that made you love it in the first place. And it’s confusing, because the words are all the same and so are the beat and melody—nothing’s changed. Except that now when it plays, you sort of want to change the station.
At the house, I searched the kitchen first, pulling open drawers. I knew I had a spare disposable camera somewhere from one of the girls’ birthday parties. When the kitchen search proved fruitless, I moved on to the old storage closet in the front hall. Charlotte trailed after me through the house, and Seraphina followed her, bobbing along like a little duckling in her sister’s wake, pigeon-toed and wobbly.
I pulled down an unmarked cardboard box from the top shelf in the closet and set it on the floor.
“What’s that?” Charlotte asked.
“Odds and ends,” I said.
There were old videocassettes and photo albums. At the bottom of the box, something caught my eye.
“Aha,” I sang out.
“What is it?” Charlotte asked.
I held it up for her to see. It was a matte black thirty-five-millimeter film camera.
“This is a very old-school camera,” I said, checking to see if it was loaded with film—it was. “This is what your Daddy and I used to take pictures with when we were your age.”
I looked at the picture count at the top. There were twenty-five pictures left—practically a whole roll. I pressed the power button, which did nothing.
“It’s broken,” Charlotte said, disappointed.
“No, it just needs new batteries,” I said. “Wait here.”
I padded back to the kitchen and grabbed a pair of AA batteries from a drawer. I pressed the power button again, and this time, it sang to life. I ran back to the hall to show Charlotte.
“It’s all fired up for you,” I said, handing Charlotte the camera. “Be gentle with it, though, it’s very old.”
“Where’s the screen?” Charlotte asked.
“There is no screen,” I said. “You won’t be able to see the pictures until we get the film developed. You have to put your eye to the viewfinder to see what you’re taking the picture of.”
I pointed to the viewfinder on the camera, and Charlotte raised the camera to her eye.
“Like this?” she asked.
“Like that,” I said.
Her finger hovered over the button to snap a picture. I reached out a hand to stop her, but it was too late. The flash went off.
“Cool,” Charlotte sang out.
I laughed. “You’ll have to be selective in what pictures you take,” I told her. “You only have twenty-four shots left now for the whole weekend.”
Charlotte lifted the camera to her face again, but she didn’t take a picture. She looked one way down the hall through the camera’s lens, and then the other.
“Okay,” she said.
On Sunday, before we returned to the city, I stopped by the Walgreens on the corner of Third and Main in Hillsborough to pick up Charlotte’s pictures. There were two attendants in the back corner of the shop where the photo center was—an elderly man with glasses and a younger man who couldn’t have been more than twenty, who wore his pants low on his hips so you could see several inches of his boxers when he turned around. The older man came to the counter to assist me.
“I’m here to pick up some film I dropped off earlier,” I said, pulling out my wallet. “The name’s Grace Calloway.”
The younger guy who was sorting through rolls of film behind the counter dropped a canister and it clattered to the floor. He turned to look at me, and there was something like shock on his face.
“Uh, I can go grab that order, actually,” he said to the older man. “I remember developing it earlier. I’ll be right back.”
He disappeared into the back room and the older man assisting me smiled at me as we waited. The kid came back holding up an envelope.
“Got it right here,” he said. He slid up to the cash register to ring me up. He had long, greasy hair. His name tag read Randy.
“Let us know if you need anything else,” the older man said before he walked off to assist another customer.
“So, uh,” Randy said, glancing over his shoulder to ensure the older man wasn’t within earshot, “we don’t normally develop these types of shots. Actually, it’s kind of our policy not to develop this stuff. But, you know, being all ‘to each his own’ as I am, I can sometimes be persuaded to look the other way.”
“What?” I asked. What did he mean, “these types of shots”?
“You know,” he said, leaning over the counter toward me and lowering his voice. “For a price.”
I stared at him, confused.
He sighed. “You know, like a twenty-spot or something, and we’ll call it even,” he said.
“Um, are you sure you have the right person?” I asked, adjusting the strap of my purse on my shoulder. “They’re just a bunch of pictures my daughter took. She’s seven.”
Randy looked bac
k at the writing on the envelope. “Grace Calloway?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s me. But maybe the film got switched or something? Can I check just to be sure?”
Randy shrugged and handed me the envelope. “See for yourself,” he said. “But that’s definitely your film. You’re in some of the pictures.”
I opened the envelope. The first shot was of me—it was the one Charlotte had taken in the hallway when I had handed her the camera. The lens was pointed up, and I looked tall in the frame, my hand outstretched to block the shot. I flipped through a dozen others—some of Charlotte and Seraphina, one of Alistair and myself on the boat at sunset. And then I flipped to the next photograph, which clearly had not been taken by my daughter.
My eye caught on the image and I stopped.
There was a face I knew well but hadn’t seen in over a decade. It was Jake. Jake Griffin.
The picture was dark; it had been taken at night. There, in the bottom right-hand corner in red, was the digital time stamp. The picture had been taken in September of 1990, just a few months before Jake died.
In the picture, Jake’s shirt was unbuttoned at the collar; his tie was askew. In one hand, he held a half-drunk beer bottle. In the other, he pointed his middle finger at the camera, a sloppy smile on his face.
In the next picture, I could make out the ghostly white belly of a girl lying across the hood of a car, her shirt pulled up to expose her breasts. There was a powdery line of coke across her stomach. The camera caught Matthew York—one of Alistair’s friends—as he leaned forward, finger plugging one nostril, midsnort.
There were other pictures. And not just of Jake, but of other kids too. People I recognized, though they were older now. There were Freddy Heinz, and Margot, and Marissa Saunders, and Alistair.
In one picture, Margot was naked, her body marked up with red permanent marker—parts of her were circled or X’d out. Words had been written on her body in a dozen different scrawls, as if everyone had taken their turn. Fat, slut, whore, ugly, desperate, sad, bitch.
I didn’t want to look anymore. I didn’t want to know. They were terrible pictures. Why would anyone take them to begin with? Why would anyone keep them?
But I couldn’t help myself. I flipped to the last two pictures. There was Jake, with his arm slung around Alistair. Margot was on his other side, on her tiptoes, leaning forward to plant a kiss on Jake’s cheek. Matthew York was on Alistair’s other side, mouth open, howling with silent laughter. They were standing on the lip of a cliff. The time stamp on the bottom read, 9:32 p.m., December 21, 1990. The date stopped me cold. That was the night Jake died—just a few hours before Jake’s estimated time of death, according to the autopsy report. And behind him, there was the ledge where he had jumped. But here he was, not by himself, but surrounded by friends, his face split into a smile. He looked so full of life, so happy. How could this Jake—the one staring at me in the photograph—how could he be minutes away from jumping off that ledge?
“What happened to you?” I whispered to the photograph, forgetting myself, forgetting that I was in a public place. “What happened?”
My eyes slid over to my husband’s boyish face. Alistair had been there that night. He had never told me that. Even when I stood next to him in that art gallery years ago and told him how I blamed myself for Jake’s death. How I felt sick with guilt that I hadn’t known how much pain Jake must have been in to take his own life. I had shown him my deepest, darkest pathetic bits, and he had said nothing.
No, he hadn’t said nothing. That wasn’t true. He had held my hand, I remembered now. It was such a soft and unexpectedly tender gesture. And he had said that what had happened to Jake wasn’t my fault, but that he didn’t have any answers.
“Pretty gnarly,” Randy said.
I looked up. I had forgotten for a moment where I was. Randy was looking at me expectantly.
“Not exactly G-rated, you know?” he said. “Some of that stuff is hard to look at.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“So are they yours?” he asked. “I mean, you’re in some of the shots.”
“I’ll take them,” I said. I opened my purse and slid a twenty-dollar bill discreetly across the counter.
Randy pocketed the cash and then scanned the bar code on the envelope into the computer.
“That’ll be sixteen dollars and fifty cents,” he said, and I handed him my card. I tried to keep my hand from shaking.
There was only one thing I knew for certain. If I wanted the truth about what had really happened that night, I couldn’t ask Alistair. I would have to find it somewhere else.
Twenty-Nine
Charlie Calloway
2017
When I got back to my room, the light was on and Drew was there. I saw her from the branch of the elm outside our window, and when I knocked on the glass, she came over to let me in.
“I suppose you’ve heard?” she asked casually, extending an arm to help me. Behind her, I saw the suitcase open on her bed, half packed already.
“Just the CliffsNotes version,” I said as I climbed in. “Crosby filled me in. But he wasn’t really in a talkative mood.”
He’d been too angry, too upset, to tell me more than the barest details—Mr. Franklin had caught Drew trying to steal the trig exam this afternoon. She’d spent all evening in Headmaster Collins’s office. She was being expelled.
Drew returned to the mound of clothes on her bed. She picked up the hanger on the top of the stack and undressed it.
“Do you want this?” she asked, turning to show me the black Chloé dress I had always coveted. She had bought it in SoHo two summers ago when she was visiting me. “It looks better on you anyway.”
I didn’t answer her; I was still trying to process what was happening. Her wall had been stripped—the memory board, the photographs, the string lights were packed into a box open on her desk. The railing in her closet was bare.
“Shit,” I said. “Shit.”
“Yeah,” Drew said. “Pretty much.”
“I still don’t understand what happened,” I said. I cleared a spot on her bedspread next to her clothes and sat down, hugging my knees to my chest. “Just—tell me everything. From the beginning.”
“So, you know how Crosby is a TA for Mrs. Benson?” Drew asked. Mrs. Benson was the freshman geometry teacher. I nodded. “Well, he has a pass code to get into the teachers’ lounge in the math building, and he gave it to me. Anyway, since the trig exam is tomorrow, I figured Mr. Franklin would use the copier in the lounge this afternoon to make copies. I sort of hid and waited around until he came. I watched him put the exam into the copier, and then while it was printing copies, I was supposed to text Crosby to pull the fire alarm to lure Mr. Franklin out of the building. But I didn’t have to because Mr. Franklin went down the hall to the bathroom while the copier was going. Or at least, I thought he did. But he must have just gone to the vending machine because he was only gone for like, a minute. He sort of caught me red-handed as I was leaving.”
“There’s got to be something we can do,” I said, pressing my palms into my eyes, thinking, thinking. There had to be a way out of this. “I mean, you’re not even in trig. Is it really cheating if you’re not even taking the test?”
I looked up at Drew and she shrugged. She kept on folding clothes into her suitcase as if everything were fine. I reached out and grabbed her wrist.
“Stop,” I said. “Stop packing like you’re leaving, like this is a done deal. Maybe the A’s can help.”
“I talked to Crosby earlier,” Drew said. “He says he knows someone on the board of admissions at Wellesley who might be able to get them to overlook this whole thing next year when I apply.”
“I meant there’s got to be a way to keep you here at Knollwood,” I said. “Like maybe there’s a lesser charge or a loophole in the rules.”
“There isn’t,” Drew said.
I dug my phone out of my pocket. “Let me at least call Dalton. Maybe
he can help.”
“Don’t,” Drew said, grabbing for my phone.
I held it out of her reach. “I don’t understand why you’re not fighting this,” I said. “It’s like you don’t even care.”
Drew was quiet for a moment. “I haven’t been completely honest with you,” she said finally. She put down the hanger she was holding. I could hear the emotion, tight in her throat. “My mom lost her job a few months ago,” Drew said. “Her company is filing for bankruptcy.”
Her words hit me like a steel bat. My best friend had been dealing with a major family crisis all semester, and I’d been too preoccupied with the A’s and my own family drama to notice. “Drew, I’m so sorry,” I said. “I had no idea.”
“It was a little up in the air whether I could even come back this year,” Drew said. “But my parents were adamant they would make it work. I think my mom was optimistic she would find something else, but she hasn’t.”
Drew’s dad was a history professor at a small liberal arts school in Connecticut. He hardly made the kind of money that could shoulder the steep tuition of a place like Knollwood.
“I guess they had to sell the house,” Drew said. “And my tuition is next on the chopping block. They were going to pull me out midsemester. I found out a few days ago.”
“Is that why you’ve been giving me the runaround with spring enrollment?” I asked.
“I’m sorry,” Drew said. “I just . . . I didn’t know how to tell you what was really going on.”
“What about scholarships?” I asked.
“They give out all of the financial aid in the fall,” Drew said. “I couldn’t apply until next year. And anyway, it wouldn’t be the same.”
It hit me then. Drew had gotten caught on purpose to save face. She would rather have gone out with a bang—the whole school believing she was caught up in some big cheating scandal with the A’s—than with a whimper, the whole school knowing her family was financially ruined. She’d chosen infamy over ignominy.
“Does anyone else know?” I asked. I couldn’t help but wonder if she had at least confided in Stevie.
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