Page 2 of All These Beautiful Strangers
Come meet me after dark.
The “when” was obvious enough—tonight after curfew. But the “where” was a giant question mark. What place had a head? Could it be a play on the headmaster’s office? Was the next line—I have a bed but never sleep—some riff on Headmaster Collins’s vigilance? Maybe, but I couldn’t make the next line fit with that. Okay, so what place had a bed? Like, bedrock? Could it be talking about the quarries?
Something hard nudged my shin underneath the table and I looked up to see Royce Dalton, the most popular boy in the senior class, giving me a look from across the table. I was slow to catch on, but then he cleared his throat and glanced at Mr. Andrews, and I realized the whole class was quietly and expectantly looking at me. I sat up in my seat and set down the camera.
“That’s an excellent question,” I said slowly and deliberately as I racked my brain for what Mr. Andrews could have possibly asked me, or a tangent I could lead him on to distract him from the fact that I hadn’t been paying attention.
My eye caught on the screen in front of the class, on the picture of the woman and her child. The child was upset, and the woman had stopped; she was bending down so that she was eye level with the little boy. She was reaching out, about to tuck a strand of the child’s hair behind his ear, to comfort him. I hadn’t noticed at first, but the woman appeared distraught as well. It made me wonder what had happened just before the picture had been snapped, and what had happened after. It was jarring to me that the photographer had captured this private, painful moment and put it on display for everyone to see. There was an illusion of being close, when the photographer was actually far away—not just physically, but emotionally as well. The photographer remained safe and protected, while displaying this vulnerable moment to the world for observation, for art.
“This may be a little off topic,” I said, “but your discussion of street photography got me thinking. I guess I understand the necessity of distance to capture the truth of a moment. But it seems ironic that in order to capture truth, you have to be duplicitous. Distance allows the subject to act naturally precisely because the subject doesn’t know they’re being watched. I guess, in the end, that raises an ethical question for me. Is that art—or an invasion of privacy? I’m curious to hear your take on that. I apologize if I’m jumping ahead.”
This was a defense mechanism I had learned a long time ago: 1) String enough buzzwords together to make it seem like you were paying attention. 2) Admit that your comment might be tangential to cover your bases. 3) Deflect with another question. With some teachers, the more tangential, the better, actually, because it made it seem like you were really considering the topic at hand. 4) End with a backhanded apology that hinted that your intellectual curiosity was leaps and bounds ahead of the pace of instruction. Suddenly, you weren’t the slacker zoning out in class; you were the deep thinker ahead of the game.
Mr. Andrews looked a little surprised by my deflection.
“Hmm . . . interesting question, Miss . . . ?” he said.
It was almost endearing that he hadn’t bothered to memorize our names from the course roster over the summer.
“Calloway,” I said. “Charlie Calloway.”
A flicker of recognition lit up his eyes at my name and there was a slight pause, just a hair longer than was appropriate. That was a common response when I met people. I could see the gears clicking in their brains. Not one of those Calloways, surely? She’s not the girl whose mother . . . well . . . Poor thing. I could tell they always wanted to ask, but they rarely did.
“Miss Calloway,” Mr. Andrews said, his hand stroking his bearded chin as he considered my question. “Ethics and art. That’s always an interesting discussion.”
As Mr. Andrews started off again, I looked across the table at Dalton, who subtly lifted his finger to his lips like a cocked gun and blew at the imaginary smoky tip of the barrel. Killed it.
Thanks, I mouthed silently to him, and he gave me a conspiratorial wink.
The sky outside the dining hall was beginning to darken. There were only three hours left until curfew and I still hadn’t figured out the A’s riddle for the meeting place. The closest I had come were the old quarries about half an hour from campus. They were abandoned and had flooded with rainwater years ago, and sometimes in the late spring or early fall, Knollwood Prep students would go up there on weekends. The brave ones would jump off the rocks and the lazy ones would drape themselves along the sides and sunbathe. I could easily imagine the quarry as a meeting place for the A’s, could even see some kind of initiation ritual that involved catapulting oneself off the highest rock in a pitch-black night when the lake was all but invisible below, but I couldn’t make all of the lines of the riddle fit.
As I turned the riddle over and over in my mind, I picked at the smoked salmon Alfredo on my plate and pretended that my mouth was full every time Stevie Sorantos asked me what her campaign slogan should be. She was running for treasurer of the student council—again—and she was harassing all of us into contributing a pithy line that would catapult her to the top of the polls.
“How about ‘Vote for me, or whatever,’” Drew offered, tossing her thick mane of dirty-blond corkscrew curls over her shoulder. “DGAF is today’s YOLO.”
“I like it,” Yael said. “Commanding yet disaffected. Playing hard to get.”
“It certainly works with the menfolk,” Drew said, wiggling her thick eyebrows at all of us.
“But I don’t want people to think I don’t care,” Stevie said, a hint of exasperation in her voice.
I rolled my eyes at Drew, who took a giant bite of her dinner roll to keep from laughing. As if anyone would ever think that Stevie Sorantos didn’t care.
Sometimes—okay, often—Stevie grated on my nerves because she just tried too damn hard. Treasurer of the student council. President of the Student Ethics Board. Always the first to shoot her hand into the air when an instructor asked a question. Once I caught her in the bathroom, eyes raw and puffy and wailing like her dog had just died because she had gotten a B+ on a lab report. More than once I had considered grinding Ambien into her water bottle just so she would be forced to chill the fuck out.
I knew why she was like that, of course. We all did. Stevie was a scholarship student, not that she ever told us this, and not that we ever talked about it. Knollwood Prep tried hard to eliminate socioeconomic distinctions with uniforms, and free tuition, MacBooks, and iPads for students who needed aid. But try as they might, Knollwood Prep couldn’t erase where we came from. Stevie didn’t wear the Cartier bracelets that we did; she didn’t have a YSL backpack or, well, brand-name anything. Her family never went on vacation. She didn’t have a car. But none of these things gave Stevie away quite so much as her blatant eagerness to prove that she belonged. It was exhausting, and it missed the mark altogether. Because the only thing that mattered to the people who mattered was acting like nothing really mattered. As paradoxical as that was.
“Come on, Charlie,” Stevie said as I took another bite that I pretended was too big to talk over. “You always have the best ideas.”
“Hey now,” Drew said, pointing the asparagus-loaded prongs of her fork at Stevie. “What about my idea? That shit is gold.”
Freshman year I had talked Stevie into doing a Sopranos-themed campaign. Yael took these great black-and-white photos of Stevie, one of her dressed up in a suit and sunglasses, another with Stevie in an upholstered armchair, a cigar hanging out of the side of her mouth and a cloud of smoke ballooning in the air. Drew and I blew the pictures up to poster-board size and put Tony Soprano quotes across the front:
“A wrong decision is better than indecision.”
“Well, seeing as you called me up here, I might as well tell you . . . I’m in charge now.”
“All due respect, you got no f***** idea what it’s like to be number one.”
