Drew shook her head. “Just you,” she said.
I reached out and fingered the soft strap of the Chloé dress. I remembered that day she’d bought it like it was yesterday. Drew and I had wandered in and out of boutiques in our sundresses and sandals, delirious with too much sleep and sunburns. Drew had pretended a French accent and hit on some thirty-year-old shop clerk in broken English. She’d gotten his number, just to prove that she could. Later, at some hole-in-the wall noodle place, we’d called him. Drew told him, in the elementary French we’d learned in Madame Le Fevre’s class, her favorite food (Je mange les noodles. J’adore les noodles), while across the table I bit my lip to stifle my giggles. I’d tried to go back to that noodle place last summer, but I’d been unable to find it again.
“You should keep the dress,” I said. “You’ve got the legs for it, not me.”
“Yeah, you are like, almost legally a midget,” Drew said.
I laughed and pushed her. “You’re such a brat for leaving me,” I said, swallowing the ball of emotion that had clawed its way up my throat.
“Puh-leeze,” Drew said. “You’re going to be big shit now. You’ll be the only junior living in a single. And you can push the beds together and have a queen.”
“Mega bed,” I said.
Drew laughed. “And mega closet if you want,” she said. She shook her head. “The things I do for you.”
The next day at lunch, our table was uncharacteristically somber. News had spread across campus overnight that Drew had been caught stealing Mr. Franklin’s trig exam. Her parents had already arrived on campus and Drew had been called away to Headmaster Collins’s office half an hour ago.
“Damn, who died?” Zachery asked as he set his lunch tray down and looked around at all of us.
“You’re such a dick,” I said.
“Sorry, just trying to lighten the mood,” he said as he sat down.
“Can’t be done,” Stevie said. “This whole thing royally sucks.”
“So, what are you going to do about it?” Crosby asked.
Crosby was usually the life of the party, but these were the first words he’d spoken all day.
“What do you mean?” Stevie asked.
“I mean, at the disciplinary hearing this afternoon, what are you going to say?”
Stevie grew red in the face. She looked down at her plate and moved her peas around with the prongs of her fork. “The rules are very clear on this,” Stevie said. “The disciplinary hearing is really just a formality at this point.”
“So basically you’re going to get up there and tell the headmaster to expel your best friend.”
“I’m going to follow the rules,” Stevie said, “which are always the same for everyone. Or, at least, they should be.”
“Maybe if you weren’t such a little priss, you’d have more friends,” Crosby said.
“Hey, cool it,” Yael said. “None of this is Stevie’s fault.”
Stevie looked like she might cry. “I’m going to go get some water,” she said so quietly I almost couldn’t hear her.
I got up and followed her over to the drink dispenser.
“Hey, you okay?” I asked.
“I don’t know why he thinks I’m in any position to do something about this,” Stevie said, pulling a cup from the stack with so much vigor the whole thing shook.
“He’s just upset,” I said. “We all are. But I’m sorry he’s taking it out on you.”
Stevie held her empty cup under the drink dispenser and pushed the tab for water. “If he’s looking for someone to blame, I’m not the person,” Stevie said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
Stevie slowly turned to face me and for the first time, I saw how angry she was. “Obviously Drew wasn’t stealing the exam for herself—she was stealing it for someone else,” she said.
“You don’t actually think—” I said, and then stopped and swallowed. “Are you really saying that you think I asked Drew to steal that exam for me?”
Stevie shrugged. “All I know is, I’ve heard a lot of talk from you lately about UPenn, and I know you’ve been distracted with your new boyfriend—”
“Dalton is not my boyfriend,” I said.
“Whatever,” Stevie said. “I just—I can’t think of a single reason why Drew would have been in that room if she weren’t doing it for what she saw as a very good reason—to save you.”
“Stevie, I would never ask her to do something like that for me,” I said.
“It’s either that,” Stevie said lowering her voice, “or she was there because someone else asked her to do it.”
“Someone else?”
Stevie crossed her arms over her chest. “Just tell me. Is Drew . . . is she in the A’s? Are you?”
“No,” I said. “Of course not.”
Stevie looked like she might cry. “That’s what Headmaster Collins is going to think,” Stevie said. “And I honestly don’t know which is worse—if you were selfish enough to ask Drew to do something so dumb, or if you guys were in that stupid, awful secret club together this whole time.”
“Stevie—”
“They’re horrible,” Stevie said. “The A’s. It’s a bunch of egotistical, self-entitled rich kids running around acting like gods. It’s a bunch of stupid pissing contests.”
“I don’t think it’s exactly like that,” I said.
“It is exactly like that,” Stevie said. “I don’t know why you can’t see that.”
Part of me wished I could tell Stevie what was really going on—that Drew wanted to leave. But I thought about the way Drew had covered for me with River when we were freshmen; we didn’t even know each other yet, and still, she had kept my secret. This secret wasn’t mine to tell.
She took a step away from me and then turned back. “You know, for someone so smart, you’re being a complete idiot,” Stevie said.
I opened my mouth to respond but just then, my phone vibrated.
I glanced down at the screen and did a double take. It was my father’s office. What now? I didn’t have time to deal with this, but I didn’t really have a choice.
“Rosie?” I asked as I picked up.
But it was my father’s voice that answered me. “Charlotte.”
“Dad?” I said, more than a little surprised. My father never called me. “Is everything okay?” I plugged my other ear with my finger so I could hear him over the noise of the dining hall.
“No, it’s not,” he said. “I thought it imperative that I call and talk to you about the company you’re choosing to keep.”
“Oh,” I said, taken aback. What did he know about the company I kept? Had he somehow found out about Drew? That she was about to be expelled for cheating? Then I stupidly remembered my dinner with Dalton and our parents the other night. “Are you talking about Dalton?” I asked, confused.
What the hell was going on? I turned toward the French doors on the far end of the dining hall, looking for a quiet place to talk.
“Yes, the boy you brought to dinner,” my father said. “I’m not sure what the nature of your relationship is, but whatever it is, it needs to stop.”
I pushed open the French doors and walked outside. It was cold out and the patio was nearly empty.
“I’m not sure I understand,” I said.
Was my father really calling to demand that I break up with a boy he had met once over dinner?
“He’s not right for you, Charlotte,” my father said. “His family—they’re not the right sort of people. And the apple usually doesn’t fall far from the tree. I don’t want you seeing him anymore.”
“His family?” I said. I’d never heard anything bad about the Daltons, and Margot had seemed perfectly nice. “But I thought you and his mother were friends.”
“Then you’ve been misled,” my father said. “Margot—I don’t want you around her. If she tries to contact you again, you are to let me know immediately and I will take care of it.”
“Ok
ay,” I said. As in Jeez, okay, why don’t we all just calm down. But I think my father took it as an acquiescence to his command.
“All right,” he said, and he sounded slightly placated, and a little tired. “This is for your own good, Charlotte. Trust me on that.”
“Okay,” I said again.
But I didn’t trust him. I didn’t trust him at all.
The disciplinary hearing was just as horrible as I had thought it would be. I sat with the rest of the A’s as we watched Headmaster Collins offer Drew the chance to save herself by giving us up, but she didn’t take it. He gave her until the end of the day to clear out her things and leave campus.
That evening after the nightly curfew check, I lay on Drew’s bare mattress and stared up at the ceiling alone in the dark. It was so quiet in our room without the sounds of her breathing, of her turning over on the bed.
It didn’t matter that Drew wanted to leave, that she had gotten caught on purpose. I still felt like I had just lost my best friend.
I got out my phone and texted Greyson.
I’m gonna need you to come over and hide all my razor blades, I wrote.
But he didn’t come back with a funny quip to take the edge off my anger.
Greyson: What’s wrong?
I started to type out a response and then erased it. I started again, then stopped again. Finally, I just wrote out the truth.
Everything, I said.
Thirty
Grace Calloway
June 2007
I checked my watch again. She was running late. I drummed my fingers on the table and glanced again at the menu.
I had picked this place because Alistair had mentioned bringing clients here, and it seemed like the type of place where she would be comfortable. The wine list was two pages long, the cheapest bottle over two hundred dollars. What I hadn’t anticipated was the attentive service. It was too attentive. Nearly every time I took a sip from my water glass, someone came by to refill it, and the waiter hovered nearby. Any accidental glance in his direction or inadvertent gesture brought him over, inquiring if there was anything he could get me.
I had chosen a dark booth toward the back of the restaurant, hoping for some privacy. I didn’t want us to be overheard.
At half past the hour, I looked up and saw her—dressed fashionably in a trench coat and heels, her arm bent at the elbow, carrying a Birkin bag. She had a cell phone clutched in one hand, though she wasn’t on it. Her pale, straw-colored hair fell just below her shoulders in a perfectly straight cut. She was the type of person who was so well put together and who carried herself with such confidence that you almost forgot she wasn’t pretty.
I got up to greet her but she waved away the gesture, so I sat back down.
“Margot,” I said. “Thanks so much for meeting me.”
“My surgery ran over,” she said by way of greeting me before turning her attention to the waiter, who had suddenly appeared at her side. She held up a finger to him, opened the menu, and quickly scanned the wine list.
“A glass of your house Merlot,” she said. “Grace?”
“Oh, I’m fine with just water, thanks,” I said.
“Make that two glasses of your house Merlot,” Margot said to the waiter, handing him the wine list. “Don’t make me drink alone,” she said to me in a not unfriendly tone as she removed her trench coat and laid it in the booth next to her. “Besides, red wine has antioxidants. It’s good for your heart.”
“Okay,” I said, giving the waiter a small smile to reassure him as I handed him my wine list. “Thanks.”
We probably looked like old friends to him—two women who met often for lunch, who were so familiar they didn’t need to say hello. Just two friends who cared about each other’s antioxidant intake and heart health.
When the waiter left, I turned to Margot, who was scanning the menu. I had been surprised that she had agreed to meet with me when I called her last week—probably just as surprised as she had been by the invitation. Part of me wondered if she would show up at all, but she was probably too intrigued by the call to stand me up.
“How’s Oliver?” I asked. To some extent, we traveled in the same circles. We saw Margot and her husband, Oliver, a wealthy banker, at functions occasionally. I knew they had a little boy around Charlotte’s age. “How’s your son?”
Margot glanced up from the menu. “I don’t have time for pleasantries,” she said. “But you could tell me the real reason you asked me here.”
“Okay,” I said. I had run through this conversation a hundred times in my head, but now, I didn’t know what the right words were, so instead I reached in my purse and laid the photographs out on the table.
Margot glanced at them. Her brow creased. She reached down and picked them up, flipped through them one by one.
“Where did you get these?” she asked.
“They were in an old camera in a box in the closet at the lake house,” I said. “I didn’t realize they were on there until I got the film developed.”
Our waiter came back with our wineglasses and Margot set the photographs facedown on the table.
“Are you ladies ready to order?” the waiter asked.
“We’ll need just a couple more minutes,” Margot said.
When he was gone, Margot took a sip from her wineglass.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“Some of these photographs were taken the night Jake died,” I said. “The red time stamp places the last photograph around the estimated time of Jake’s death. And you were there. I want to know what happened that night. What really happened.”
“Why don’t you ask Alistair?” Margot said. “He was there, too.”
“I don’t trust his answer,” I said. “This whole time, he could have told me. But he kept it from me. And I know if I ask him now, he’ll just twist the truth. That’s all I want—the truth. I need to know.”
“What does it matter what really happened that night?” Margot asked. “It won’t change anything. Jake’s dead. He’ll still be dead.”
“It matters to me,” I said.
Margot sighed and looked slightly bored. I knew she didn’t care one whit about what mattered to me. That had been the wrong angle to take with her. She tilted her head and ran a finger along the side of her wineglass, thinking.
“It was an accident,” Margot said, looking up at me.
“You mean he didn’t—he didn’t kill himself?” I asked.
“No,” Margot said.
She closed her menu and motioned the waiter over to our table. I fell silent. I could feel my heart drumming in my chest. This whole time I had blamed myself for not knowing the type of pain Jake had to be in to do something like that. I had carried that guilt with me for nearly seventeen years—half my life. And this whole time—it had all been a lie.
“Are there quail eggs in the chef salad?” Margot asked our waiter. She sounded faraway—muted somehow.
The waiter responded, but I wasn’t listening, wasn’t processing.
“Perfect,” Margot said, handing the waiter her menu. “And dressing on the side, please.” Margot looked at me expectantly. “Grace?”
“What?” I asked.
“Don’t be a goose and make me eat by myself,” she said. “Order something.”
I wasn’t hungry. I couldn’t imagine eating anything. But to satisfy her, I glanced down at my menu and picked the first thing I saw.
“Minestrone,” I said. I couldn’t even form a full sentence.
“Of course,” the waiter said, sliding my menu off the table.
When the waiter left, I leaned forward and asked Margot, “What do you mean it was an accident?”
Margot took a sip from her wineglass. She looked so poised, so calm, so collected, as if we were talking about our weekend plans rather than Jake’s death.
“We were in this club together at school,” Margot said. “Very secretive, very exclusive.” She waved her hand. “Jake and I were initiates and
we had gone through this whole thing to get in. I don’t much like to think of it, really, the things we did. They weren’t pleasant things. Anyway, we were out celebrating one night at this place off campus called the Ledge. We were drinking, and someone had brought Percocet and was passing it around. Jake had a bad reaction to the mixture. He went into respiratory arrest.”
“He stopped breathing?” I asked.
“Naturally, we all panicked,” Margot said. “I mean, we were just kids, and we were all drunk or high, so we weren’t exactly firing on all cylinders. We knew we couldn’t take him to the hospital, because then we would get in trouble too—suspended, expelled. We couldn’t risk our entire futures—and what was the point, really, when he was already dead?”
I stared blindly at her. I could picture it. A dark, cold, starless night. I remembered the chill in the air that evening, and how I hadn’t slept really, because I had been so anxious and excited to see Jake again. And while I was stirring listlessly in my bed at my parents’ house in Hillsborough, a couple hundred miles north at some place called the Ledge, Jake was taking his last breath, dying alone and afraid, surrounded by his so-called friends who were too selfish and stupid to help him.
“Thank god for Alistair,” Margot said. “Without him, I don’t know what we would have done. But Alistair, he always has a plan. He always takes charge. He was brilliant really.”
“Alistair?” I asked.
“Yes, it was all his idea—to make it look like a suicide,” Margot said. “He and one of the other senior boys tossed Jake over the Ledge into the ravine. Alistair forged this note and it was almost too perfect when the school authorities searched Jake’s room later and found the exam he had stolen as his last initiation task. The story basically wrote itself—a scholarship student who looks like this golden boy from the outside is secretly desperately insecure. He doesn’t feel he measures up. He cheats to get ahead, and then someone finds out and threatens to turn him in. He can’t take it. So he kills himself. Everyone loves a good pathetic tragedy. They ate it up—barely questioned it.”
All These Beautiful Strangers Page 30