All These Beautiful Strangers

by Elizabeth Klehfoth

  “What do you say we get an Eskimo Pie?” he asked.

  “Okay,” I said.

  He carried me downstairs to the kitchen and dug two Eskimo Pies out of the freezer. We sat on the steps of the back patio as we ate them, looking out at the lake.

  “Won’t she be mad we’re eating these?” I asked, licking a piece of melted chocolate off my finger. My mother never let me and Seraphina have ice cream this late in the afternoon. She always said it would ruin our dinner.

  “Charlotte, I need you to be a big girl and look after your mother while I’m away,” my father said. “Do you think you can do that?”

  “You’re going back already?” I asked.

  “I have an early meeting in the morning,” he said.

  “Don’t go,” I said. “You promised you’d take me out on the boat again tomorrow.”

  “Next weekend, okay?” he said.

  “Can I come with you?” I asked.

  He was silent for a moment.

  “I need you to stay here and look after your mother,” he said. “Can you do that for me?”

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want him to leave me there with her, but I knew there was nothing I could do to stop it.

  He got up and went inside to finish packing and I stayed out on the back porch. I didn’t want to watch him leave. When I heard the front door open and close and the sound of his car backing out of the front drive, I went and sat on the tire swing he had built me two summers ago.

  I sat there for a while, until the sun started to dull in the sky, waiting for someone to come looking for me, but no one did.

  I heard a sound in the bushes. I turned and I saw him standing there—a man. He was dressed in jeans and a dark jacket and he was holding a camera to his eye so I couldn’t see his face.

  I stopped swinging.

  He came closer.

  He was tall. I squinted at him. He seemed both familiar and unfamiliar.

  I opened my mouth to ask him who he was, what he wanted, but nothing came out.

  He came closer, stood over me, so close I could reach out and touch him if I wanted. I looked up into the lens of his camera.

  Click.

  He took a picture.

  Who are you who are you who are you?

  The words reverberated in my mind.

  Suddenly, the man stopped as if he had heard me, as if he could read my thoughts as plainly as if they were written on my forehead. Slowly, he lowered the camera and I saw his face.

  Or, I saw where his face should have been, when really, there was no face at all.

  Where his skin should have been was red, raw flesh, as if it had been boiled and stripped. There were two gaping black pits where his eyes should have gone, and the seam of his lips had been stitched together. He tried to move them, his lips straining at the stitches as if he desperately wanted to tell me something, but all that came out was a terrible, painful groan.

  I sucked in my breath in horror.

  He reached out to grab me and I screamed. I closed my eyes and thrashed against it, the hand on my shoulder, whose grip only tightened and shook me harder.

  “Charlie,” a voice said. “Charlie, it’s okay. It’s me.”

  I woke with a start. There was a hand on my shoulder. I looked up and saw Leo standing over me, shaking me slightly. I screamed again.

  “Easy there, cousin,” Leo said. “It’s just me.”

  “I would say that’s a perfectly normal reaction for a girl to have when your face is the first thing she sees when she wakes up,” Drew said. “Don’t act like this is the first time this has happened to you, Leo.”

  “Drew, always a pleasure,” Leo said, turning to look at her. “Especially this bright and early in the morning.”

  “Bite me,” Drew said.

  “Been there, done that,” Leo said.

  “Oh, fuck off.”

  I sat up in my bed and rubbed my eyes. I glanced at the clock on my bedside table. Six thirty a.m.

  Drew was standing in the doorway in a robe, her wet hair tied up in a towel. Her shower caddy was slung over one arm.

  “How’d you even get in here?” Drew asked.

  “You left the door open when you went to shower,” Leo said, shrugging.

  “Well, that’s the last time I do that,” Drew said. She set her shower caddy down on the top of her dresser.

  “What’s up, Leo?” I asked. My mind felt muddled as I tried to grasp on to the remnants of my dream, which were quickly slipping away. I had dreamed of the house on Langely Lake, of the fight my mother and father had had the day my mother disappeared, of a faceless man with a camera who was trying to tell me something.

  Leo sat next to me on the bed. “My first class was canceled,” he said. He reached for the remote on my bedside table and flicked on my TV. Well, technically, it was Leo’s TV. Aunt Grier had refused to let him keep a TV in his room because she thought it would interfere with his studies, so he kept it in my room instead, along with his Xbox. “Wanted to get some Call of Duty in.”

  “Get out,” Drew said. “I have to get dressed.”

  “By all means,” Leo said. “Go right ahead. Nothing I haven’t seen before.”

  Drew threw her hairbrush at him. Leo ducked, and the brush clanked against my headboard and fell to the floor.

  I held up my hands. “Hey, watch it,” I said. “I don’t want to get hit by friendly fire here.”

  “Sorry,” Drew said.

  “Can’t you do this later?” I asked Leo.

  “Duty, Charlie,” Leo said, holding his controller up and shrugging as if he were powerless. “It calls.”

  “Whatever,” Drew said, ripping open the top drawer of her dresser and pulling out a bra and a pair of underwear. “I’ll just get dressed in the bathroom.”

  “Oh, wear the black lacy one,” Leo said. “I always liked that one.”

  I climbed out of bed before Drew chucked a bottle of hair spray at him on her way out the door.

  “Do you have to do that?” I asked Leo as I sorted through my closet for something clean to wear.

  “If it were thirty percent less fun, I would try to abstain,” Leo said, his eyes on the TV screen and his fingers working the controller.

  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.

  “Well, I have no idea what it means, but at least it rhymes, sort of,” I said.

  “She’s talking about how repressed she feels,” Stevie said. “Like she’s living in this little box where she can barely breathe.”

  “Then why can’t she just say that?” I asked.

  “Because, sometimes the words we have aren’t enough,” Stevie said. “You need things like metaphor and sound and rhyme to get at the full weight of it.”

  “I guess,” I grumbled, turning the page.

  “I’m going to go dig up Plath’s unabridged journals,” Stevie said, getting up from the table. “Maybe they’ll give us a good historical context that we can use to analyze the poems.”

  “Sounds thrilling,” I said.

  I kept reading. Suddenly, I got the distinct feeling that someone was watching me, and I glanced up to see Dalton standing there, across the table from me.

  “Coming to pay me homage for my ungodly poker skills?” I asked, raising an eyebrow at him.

  “Something like that,” Dalton said. He fished an envelope out of the pocket of his blazer and slid it across the table toward me. Then, to my surprise, he sat down.

  “You know,” he said, “if someone—not mentioning any names here or anything—but if someone had been playing by the rules last night, things might have turned out differently.”

  “Yes, well, someone regrets nothing,” I said, opening the envelope and sorting through the cash.

  Dalton laughed. “Are you really going to count it in front of me? Don’t you trust me, Calloway?”

  “I trust you about as far as I can throw you,” I said, tucking the envelope into my American Literature textbook. “And I probably wouldn’t even be able to lift you.”

  “Is this distrust specific to me or to all guys in general?”

  “Oh, all of you,” I said. “Don’t flatter yourself.”

  Dalton laughed again. “How did we get such a bad rap?”

  “Have you met my cousin Leo?”

  “I sincerely hope that your whole perception of the male populace is not based on Leo,” Dalton said.

  I laughed. “Unfortunately for you, I have firsthand knowledge of the inner workings of the male teenage mind, and it doesn’t bode well for any of you. You’re all gross.”

  Dalton leaned forward and tapped on my textbook. “Doing a bit of light reading?” he asked.

  I held up the textbook so he could see. “American Lit,” I said. “We’re deconstructing poems from Plath’s Ariel. I can’t make heads or tails of it, but we have to write some big paper.”

  “Who do you have?”

  “Mrs. Morrison,” I said.

  Dalton nodded. “I could help you with that.”

  “Oh yeah?” I said. “You a big Plath junkie?”

  He laughed. “Hardly,” he said. “Literature’s probably my worst subject.”

  “Well, with that ringing endorsement, I might just fend for myself,” I said.

  Dalton looked stealthily side to side, as if checking to make sure no one was close enough to hear. He leaned forward again and lowered his voice. “I was talking about the A’s cache,” he said.

  “The A’s cache?” I repeated, as quietly as I could.

  “Yeah, we have sort of a . . . repository of essays, exams, et cetera, for every teacher, every class, going back, like, decades. Every A contributes to it and every A is free to use it at their discretion. It’s what got me through Mrs. Morrison’s American Literature class last year with a solid A minus. Mom and Dad were so proud, they sprung for new rims for my Porsche.”

  “But aren’t you afraid you’ll get caught?” I asked.

  Knollwood’s zero-tolerance policy when it came to cheating meant automatic expulsion. Plus, Mrs. Morrison and a lot of other teachers had recently started running every paper that was turned in through an online service that automatically checked the essay for plagiarism, analyzing the paper against material on the web and other papers previously turned in to its database.

  “We’re working on a way around that,” Dalton said. “It’s just software, and you can beat it if you know what you’re doing.”

  My mind instantly went to Jude Bane—the computer ner
d who was one of my fellow A initiates. Was that why the A’s had included him? Were they looking for him to hack the system?

  “But in the meantime, as long as you use papers from far enough back, you should be fine. They’re too old to be in the database, and it’s not like Mrs. Morrison is going to remember every paper on Plath that she’s ever read.”

  “True,” I said.

  Dalton leaned back in his chair. “Any plans for homecoming?”

  “My whole family is coming in for the game against Xavier,” I said. “My dad is an alum. My uncle Teddy is too—well, sort of. I think Uncle Teddy technically got expelled before he graduated, but my grandmother Eugenia doesn’t like to talk about it. But anyways, my cousin Piper is checking out Knollwood because she might go here next year, so her whole family is coming. What about you?”

  I spotted Stevie out of the corner of my eye, coming around the nearest bookshelf. She stopped short when she saw Dalton at our table and did an excited happy dance, bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet. I discreetly shook my head at her, and she busied herself pretending to look for a book in the stacks while she very obviously eavesdropped on our conversation.

  “My mom’s an alum, too,” Dalton said. “But she won’t be able to make it, probably. Work keeps her pretty busy.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad,” I said.

  Dalton shrugged. “Actually, though, when I was asking about your plans for homecoming, I was referring to the dance, not the game.”

  I heard Stevie squeal and then try to cover it up with a coughing fit. I ignored her.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Are you going with anyone?”

  “Well, I always go stag with the girls,” I said. I pointedly turned my head a fraction so I couldn’t see the frantic gestures Stevie was making in my direction, like she was trying to land a plane.

  “The girls?” Dalton asked.

  “Yeah—Drew, Stevie, Yael. It’s always kinda been our thing,” I said.

  Freshman and sophomore year, the four of us had gone to homecoming together. We’d gotten ready together, we’d danced together, and when the dance was over, Stevie and Yael had dragged their mattresses into my and Drew’s room and slept on our floor. Not that any of us got much sleep. Mostly, those nights consisted of our staying up until dawn laughing and drinking cooking sherry that Drew had co-opted from the dormitory’s kitchen.