Page 17 of All These Beautiful Strangers
None of my friends were fans of Leo’s. Drew, for obvious reasons, and Yael and Stevie out of solidarity. I knew they found him conceited and cruel, and I had to admit that Leo had some hard edges. But he was family, and at one point, he had been all I really had.
When I had gone to live with Uncle Teddy and Aunt Grier in Scarsdale when I was ten, Leo had taken me under his wing. That first day at Brentley Academy, he had invited me to sit at his lunch table, which was no small thing for a new kid at school in the middle of a school year. I sat between Leo and his friend Richie Masterson, who I remember thinking was cute with his dark hair and freckles. That was, until Richie Masterson put down his ham sandwich, turned to me, and asked, “Did you help your dad hide the body?”
Oh no, I thought. Not here. Not now. Not again.
I tried to breathe but couldn’t. The air scraped at my lungs.
“Charlotte’s mother was a whore,” Leo said.
I turned to look at him, my eyes wide and incredulous at his betrayal. We all sat in stunned silence. Richie’s taunting smile froze and faltered on his lips.
“You know, a woman who sleeps with a guy for his money?” Leo explained as if we were all idiots and didn’t know the meaning of the word, probably because we were gaping at him like we didn’t. He took a bite of his sandwich and said casually with his mouth full, “You should know, Richie, your mother is a whore, too.”
“Hey,” Richie said. Heat bloomed in his cheeks. “My mother is not a—”
“Didn’t she leave your father and take all his money?” Leo asked, but it was not a question, because Richie’s father was a patient of Aunt Grier, and Leo’s favorite pastime was to sit just out of sight but within earshot of the study when his mother was with a patient and collect secrets. “See? She was a whore. But nobody cares to talk about it because you’re not important enough. You’re just an unimportant nobody with a whore for a mother. Charlotte’s mother was a whore, but at least people care enough about her to talk about it, because she’s a Calloway. She matters.”
Richie bit his lip; I could see the tendon in his neck straining and I could see the war he was waging within himself—the war I had waged a hundred times with myself and lost—the war not to let the tears come, not to show any of us watching that he was about to break. I almost felt bad for him. Almost.
And that was the last time anybody at Brentley ever brought up my mother. That was the day that Leo saved me not just from the other kids, but from myself. Because he taught me to hate her. And that anger was a beautiful gift. Before, I had felt a lot of things. Dr. Malby had helped me to name them: Grief. Loss. Guilt. Shame. But never anger.
For the first time, I was in control. I had vowed to never give that up.
But now there was Uncle Hank, again, and those photographs. And that one photograph I had no memory of being taken, with one word on the back: STOP. Stop what?
“Come get waffles with me,” I said to Leo, pulling on my navy Knollwood blazer. “I’m hungry.”
“Fine,” Leo said, putting down the controller. “For you, cousin, anything.”
In my mailbox that morning, I found another note. It was my first ticket from the A’s, printed on thick card stock.
Item #1: Nancy Reagan’s collar
To be returned to its new owners on Friday night at midnight.
Although Headmaster Collins had three children, his pit bull, Nancy Reagan, was his pride and joy. The first time I learned of Nancy’s existence, we were in his office, and he had pointed to a picture of his family as he talked.
“They say they’re not supposed to be fully cognitively developed at that age, but I can just tell, my Nancy, she’s as smart as a whip. She can’t talk, of course, but when you look her in the eye, you can just tell she understands.”
I thought he was talking about his infant daughter.
“I have a cousin around that age, Clementine,” I’d said. I swear I said “cousin,” but Headmaster Collins must not have heard me.
“What do you find works best for her diet?” he asked.
It was an odd question, and it should have raised flags, but I’d only just met the man, and I figured he was a little eccentric.
“My aunt Grier is a real health nut,” I said. “Vegan and gluten free and all that. She’s doing this whole farm-to-table thing right now. Grows her own vegetables and purees them and everything. So I assume Clementine is subsisting on a diet of pureed homegrown organic carrots.”
“Farm-to-table,” Headmaster Collins said, scratching his chin. “Yes, yes. I will try that. I bet that makes her coat shine.”
It was about at that point that I caught on to my mistake, and I pretended from that point on in the conversation that Clementine was a dog. He still asked me about her, even two years later, and still, I continued to lie.
There were framed pictures of Nancy in the headmaster’s office; rumor had it that there was even a life-sized oil portrait of Nancy in a gilt frame over the mantel in his house. Marcus Lansbury had sworn he saw it when he was asked to tea with his uncle at the headmaster’s house last fall.
Of course, everyone knew about Nancy’s collar. It was encrusted with diamonds and it had been gifted to Nancy last Christmas. Mrs. Collins had raised hell when she opened her biggest present: a state-of-the-art vacuum cleaner.
In the evening, I went to the library with Stevie to study. We both had American Literature together and were working our way through Plath’s Ariel. I read aloud the first two stanzas of the poem “Daddy” and then set my book down.
