Page 5 of All These Beautiful Strangers
There was a story on campus about a student who had died many years ago—so long ago that no one remembered anymore what his name was or how he had died exactly, but there were reports every now and again of a sighting of his ghost. Some said he’d hanged himself in the showers of the senior boys’ dormitory over a broken heart; others said he’d overdosed on pills and fallen into an eternal slumber in his dorm bed over a failing exam grade. It was bad luck if you saw him, a harbinger of terrible things to come. Bryce Langston had reported seeing the ghost on his way home from the library one night. The next morning, he got a rejection letter from Harvard. Everyone had thought he would be a shoo-in, and he hadn’t even gotten on the waiting list. The next year, Amanda King supposedly saw the ghost right before she got in a fatal car accident. I always thought about the ghost when I was walking around campus at night by myself. I imagined seeing a white smear in the corner of my vision, but every time I turned my head, there was nothing there.
I couldn’t help but think about the ghost now as I stood in the clearing above the Ledge. The A’s had lit a small bonfire, and we all stood close enough to be visible in its glow, but Dalton held a flashlight anyway. The way it hit the underside of his jaw as he talked, throwing his features into shadows, unsettled me. I crossed my ankles and leaned back against the cool metal hood of Drew’s BMW.
There was no need for introductions; everyone who was anyone at Knollwood Prep already knew one another. But we were all glancing around regardless, looking one another up and down like we’d never met. And, in a way, we hadn’t. Before, we were just kids who went to Knollwood. Some of us belonged to things—the soccer team, the student council. Some of us had reputations. Some of us were preceded by our family name. But here, now, there was one thing that united us: we were all A’s.
As I looked at the seniors spread around the campfire, some of the A’s seemed fairly predictable. There were Royce Dalton, an all-American, captain of the soccer and lacrosse teams; Crosby Pierce, the son of an A-list movie star and lead singer in a band called the Lady Killers, who performed at the coffee shop downtown sometimes and were actually kind of good; Wes Aldrich, whose mother was a senator and whose grandfather had been a majority whip for the House of Representatives; Ren Montgomery, a professional model who had worked for Calvin Klein and walked in New York Fashion Week; and Harper Cartwright, the features editor of the Knollwood Chronicle.
Darcy Flemming, however, was a bit of a surprise. She was president of the senior class, the daughter of a French diplomat, and an accomplished equestrian who spoke French and Portuguese fluently. She seemed like too much of a Goody Two-shoes to be an A. It was hard to imagine she had had a hand in the dean of arts’s smear campaign.
I glanced around the circle at the new junior recruits and found a similar mixture of naturals and oddballs. I had been right about Leo, of course. He stood across the circle from me, next to Dalton, who was one of his best friends. Then there was Meryl York. She was the daughter of one of my father’s friends, and our families had vacationed together when we were younger, but she had always struck me as kind of a wet blanket. Regardless, her family was practically an institution at Knollwood Prep. The observatory had been donated by her father and was named after her grandfather. Brighton Maverick seemed like another obvious choice with his floppy blond hair and eternal tan even in the harsh New Hampshire winters. He played on the soccer team and had grown up in Santa Barbara, where he surfed on soft white-sand beaches.
But the others I wouldn’t have immediately pegged as A’s: Imogen Reeves, who was a theater geek and had had a small part last summer in an off-Broadway play; Jude Bane, who was practically glued to his laptop and always had humongous headphones clamped over his ears; and Auden Stein, who, yes, was some kind of math prodigy, but was too pompous to really tolerate. I couldn’t help but wonder what the A’s would want with them.
Of course, I knew why I was there. Leo may have made it into the A’s just as he was, but I was there for no other reason than that I was Charlie Calloway, the oldest child of Alistair Calloway and the heir to the Calloway Group, one of the largest real estate dynasties in New York City. I’d grown up in a penthouse on the Upper East Side, and I summered on an estate on Martha’s Vineyard (the summer home my father bought when he could no longer bear to return to the house on Langely Lake). My family owned half the Upper East Side, and one day, it would all be mine. All of the laws of nepotism said so.
“You’re all here because we saw something in you,” Dalton was saying. “But if you want to stay, to be one of us, you’ll have to play the Game.
“In the coming months, you’ll find three tickets in your school mailbox. Each ticket will have an item. You must procure that item by any means necessary and bring it to the A’s meeting by the specified time and date. If you fail to procure the item in time, don’t bother showing up. You’re out.
“You may beg, borrow, lie, steal, or cheat to procure your item. In fact, we only have one rule to the Game: don’t get caught.”
Ren Montgomery stepped forward and took the flashlight from Dalton. She held it in her hands like a microphone. Ren was tall and rail thin, with a deceptively deep and husky voice that I’m sure guys found thrilling.
“To that end,” Ren said, “if you get caught, you’ve never heard of us. We don’t exist. Loyalty is the most prized trait of an A. Without it, we’re nothing. We chose you because we think you have this quality. But we’ve been wrong before and we need . . . assurances in case that happens.”
Ren stopped and picked a camera out of the purse that hung at her hip. She flashed a smile at us.
“Rest assured we’re not asking you to do anything we haven’t already done ourselves,” Ren said.
I understood what she was saying: they wanted us to provide the bullets and load the gun they could place to our own heads if we screwed up.
“Auden, you’re up first,” Ren said. She turned and headed off into the woods, the darkness quickly swallowing her up as she stepped out of the warm glow of the bonfire. And Auden followed her, his hands buried deep in his pockets.
When they were gone, Dalton fished a cooler out of his trunk, and Crosby turned on the stereo system in his car and propped open his doors so that I could feel the hum of the bass in the ground, coming up through the soles of my sneakers. Drew grabbed two IPAs and I uncapped them with the bottle opener on my key chain.
“Don’t worry about Ren,” Dalton said, and he gave me a smile as if to soften everything. “Her bark is worse than her bite.”
“I don’t know about that, man,” Crosby said, rubbing his chin. “As someone who’s been there—I can safely say her bite is nothing to sneeze at.”
Crosby and Ren were the most notorious on-again-off-again couple on campus.
“Tsk, tsk,” Drew clucked her tongue in mock disapproval. “A gentleman never kisses and tells.”
“Well, I never claimed to be a gentleman,” Crosby said.
“So, any hints about the types of things we’ll be asked to retrieve?” Drew asked, twirling her hair. The way the corner of her lips twitched up at the end, I could tell she was into him.
“Yes, actually,” Crosby said. “First on the list is Dalton’s virginity.”
“And will you be providing the time machine?” I asked.
Crosby laughed and clinked his beer bottle against mine. “Nice. Cheers.”
Next to me, Dalton groaned. “Harsh, man,” he said. “Isn’t anyone going to defend my honor?”
Dalton was sort of the “It” boy at Knollwood Prep. He was as old money as they come—his grandfather came from a family of British banking royalty. His father worked on Wall Street and his mother was an American, some big-time surgeon whom people flew from all over the world to see. So, he had a good pedigree. He was also very good-looking: tall, dark hair, dreamy eyes, that sort of thing. It wasn’t that surprising then that Dalton was always dating someone.
“Sorry, Dalton. You’re kind of what we girls refer to as a man whore,” I said.
