All These Beautiful Strangers

by Elizabeth Klehfoth

  Drew and I had been serendipitously placed together in the same dorm room freshman year with another girl we loathed named River, who never shaved and didn’t believe in deodorant, table salt, or listening to her folk music at a courteous volume. Apparently, she didn’t believe in studying either, because she was gone by the next semester. Living with River was like being hazed, and Drew and I had gone through it together. It had created an unbreakable bond.

  Now I eyed Drew as she chewed animatedly and talked about the upcoming volleyball meet against our rival, Xavier. I tried to ask her without asking her: Did you get one too? Did the A’s pick you? Because I couldn’t, well, just ask.

  “What?” she said, and I realized too late that my attempts at telepathy had resulted in creepy hard-core staring. “Do I have something on my face?”

  “Yeah, some sauce, just here,” I lied, pointing to a spot on my own chin for reference.

  “Thanks,” Drew said, dabbing the corresponding spot on her chin with her napkin.

  It was hopeless. Drew had an impenetrable poker face. So, I scanned the dining hall for my cousin Leo instead. Leo was two months my junior, but you’d never have guessed it by the way he loomed over me at six foot two. You also wouldn’t know we were cousins based solely off appearance. Leo had the traditional Calloway good looks; he was all bright turquoise eyes, golden-blond hair, and distinguished cheekbones. I, on the other hand, looked like my mother. I got her dark brown hair and wide gray eyes and pale, translucent skin, her short stature. This was a ring of hell that Dante had not imagined: looking in the mirror every day and seeing the one person you wanted most desperately to forget.

  I spotted Leo two tables away, sitting next to Dalton and a mix of other popular junior and senior boys. His hair was still wet from his post-football-practice shower and it hung down into his eyes slightly as he leaned forward to say something to his friends. I knew just by looking at him that he had been tapped by the A’s—I didn’t even have to ask. I saw it in the way he smiled that cocky, lopsided smile of his, the one that made the dimples peek out of his left cheek. Leo and I had always had an uncanny ability to read one another, a result of his seeing me through the hellfire that was my childhood. Leo had been the one to save me in the end, or at least, he had been the one to show me how to save myself.

  “Shit,” Drew said. She had knocked over her water glass. The water spilled everywhere, running off the side of the table. I picked up my napkin and started to dab at the mess as Drew righted her glass.

  “Your bag,” Drew said, and I pulled it off the table just before the spill reached it.

  And then, it clicked. That was it. I knew where the A’s were meeting that night.

  “I’m sorry,” Drew said. “I’m such a klutz.”

  “No, thank you,” I said, without really thinking.

  “What?”

  “Uh, nothing,” I said. “I meant, it’s no big deal.”

  Curfew at Knollwood Prep was nine o’clock on weeknights. Normally Drew and I hung out in the common room until as late as possible, and then we’d sit up for hours at our desks finishing our readings or assignments and talking. But tonight, we both turned in early. I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling in the dark, trying to tell from Drew’s breathing if she had fallen asleep across the room and wondering how I would sneak out our window without waking her.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about the A’s.

  Knollwood Prep had four types of clubs: the athletic, the academic, the special interest, and the, well, ridiculous (see the Cheese Club, where they sat around and, you guessed it, ate cheese). Being in these clubs meant silly rituals, or sweaty practices in the gymnasium doing suicides across the court in some primitive drive to prove your physical prowess, or meetings where you sat around a buzzer and answered questions while an elected secretary kept inanely detailed minutes. These clubs had meets with other schools and held events like bake sales or car washes to raise money for the local women’s shelter. At Knollwood Prep, you were expected to collect these clubs like trinkets on a charm bracelet so that on your college application, you could say that not only did you get a rigorous academic education at one of the top preparatory schools in the country, but you were also a contributing member of your community, and were—that buzzword college admissions officers salivated over—“well-rounded.”

  But being in the A’s wasn’t something you could put on your college application. It wasn’t even something you could, well, tell anyone about. The A’s didn’t do bake sales or car washes; they didn’t involve cleats or sweating; and they most certainly didn’t have a secretary keeping minutes.

  Last year, when the new dean of arts tried to make a Saturday morning cultural enrichment class mandatory, the A’s unleashed a smear campaign so vicious that the dean was gone by the end of fall semester. In the end, no one “knew” how the dean’s scandalous emails with a fifteen-year-old girl with daddy issues from Maine had leaked to every student, administrator, and faculty member on Knollwood Prep’s LISTSERV, but everyone “knew” that the A’s were somehow behind it. While the headmaster had launched an investigation into this breach of school security, in the end, he could do little but applaud that this indecent man was exposed and send him packing, effectively putting an end to those dreaded classes and preserving our precious Saturday mornings for the sacred act of sleeping in.

  The A’s were the reason we had No-Uniform Fridays, single-room dorms for seniors, and a prom so decadent it was sometimes mentioned on Page Six. No one knew what dark form of blackmail, bribery, or manipulation went into acquiring these beloved rights and traditions, but everyone knew the A’s were behind them. The A’s could also get you out of some sticky situations. My freshman year, Celeste Lee, a supposed A, got in a fight with Stephanie Matthews in the girls’ restroom on the second floor of the science building and gave her a bloody nose. Celeste would have gotten suspended if Stephanie reported her to the administration. No one knows for sure what sort of arm twisting the A’s did behind closed doors, but when the headmaster called Stephanie into his office later that afternoon, she kept her mouth shut.

  The A’s reach went beyond Knollwood Prep. It was rumored they had key players on the admissions boards of all the Ivy Leagues and Seven Sisters, and that their influence could get you in the door at the Fortune 500 company of your choosing after college graduation.

  The A’s were something everyone knew about without really knowing anything about them. There was no way of even knowing who the A’s were, really, unless you were one of them. Because unlike all of the other clubs at Knollwood Prep, you didn’t choose to be in the A’s. The A’s chose you.

  Drew called out my name softly in the dark, just loud enough for me to hear if I was awake but not loud enough to wake me if I was asleep.

  I debated answering but eventually said, “Yeah?”

  She sat up and flicked on the light. “Just say it already,” she said.

  “Say what?”

  “Do you have somewhere to be tonight?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Thank god,” Drew said. She climbed out of bed and crossed the room to her closet. “I’ve been watching you all day to see if you had gotten one too, because I couldn’t just ask,” she said as she pulled on a pair of thick black leggings and boots.

  “Who else do you think got in?” I asked as I dragged myself out of bed and started to rummage through my own closet. What did one wear to a late-night rendezvous with the most notorious secret society on campus? I decided on a pair of dark skinny jeans, my Keds, a black tank with oversized armholes, and a hoodie.

  “I’ll throw myself off the Ledge if Marissa Wentworth got in,” Drew said.

  So she had figured out the riddle. What has a head but never weeps? What has a bed but never sleeps? What runs but never walks? A river, of course. The A’s were meeting at the Ledge above Spalding River. People called it the Ledge because that’s what it was—a clearing in the woods off the county road that lo
oked over a steep ravine and the river below.

  “Marissa Wentworth is not A material,” I said. “They want someone with an edge. Someone who isn’t afraid to get their hands dirty.”

  “Do you think Leo got in?” Drew asked.

  “Of course Leo got in.”

  “He told you?”

  “Not in so many words,” I said. “But come on, what world do we live in that Leo wouldn’t get in?”

  “True,” Drew said, rolling her eyes.

  Drew and Leo had dated for two seconds during our freshman year, which was about twice as long as Leo had been with anyone. It had ended how all of Leo’s trysts ended: badly. Still, even though Drew wasn’t Leo’s biggest fan, she had to admit that Leo was an obvious choice for the A’s.

  Leo put an unconscionable amount of thought into everything he did, so it wouldn’t be right to say he was “effortlessly” cool—though something about the way he carried himself did evoke that word. Leo wore his hair slicked back from his forehead. He always dressed nicely—tailored jeans and V-neck tees that were fashionably distressed and sleek leather jackets. Leo exuded a confidence that made whatever he did seem cool. It would have been pointless to tease him about anything, because Leo thought more of himself than anyone I’d ever met, besides perhaps my grandfather.

  One after the other, Drew and I slipped out our second-floor dormitory window into the thick arms of the elm that towered over Rosewood Hall dormitory. We lowered ourselves into the deep V of its trunk. Neither of us were strangers to forbidden late-night excursions.

  In the Rosewood Hall parking lot, Drew turned her headlights off and shifted her BMW into neutral. Together we pushed the car to the road, only jumping in when we were sure we weren’t in danger of waking Ms. Stanfeld, our housemother, who lived in an apartment on the ground floor of the dormitories.

  When we were far enough down the road, Drew opened her sunroof and howled at the moon. I laughed and put my arm out the window, fanning my fingers to catch the damp night air as it slid past.

  We didn’t talk about what was happening or what was to come. We didn’t speculate about what the A’s would make us do to become one of them, even though we both knew that whatever it was, it would not be easy. Instead, we exuded an attitude of cool nonchalance and pretended we were neither excited nor terrified, when we were both.

  Two

  Charlie Calloway

  2017

  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.”