All These Beautiful Strangers

by Elizabeth Klehfoth

  I glanced behind me and saw that Ren was picking at her nails. She looked bored, as if someone had dragged her there against her will.

  “Maybe,” Dalton said. “Could be a good time.”

  “Hardly,” Ren said. “What do I have to do for a little excitement around here, slit my wrists?”

  “Jesus, Ren,” Dalton said.

  “I’m just saying . . . did they have to build this school in the middle of fucking nowhere? Nothing interesting ever happens here.”

  Crosby reached forward to poke Drew again and Ren smacked his hand away.

  “Stop that,” she said. “We’re not five. Or apes.”

  In the front of the room, Stevie, the president of the Student Ethics Board for two years running, stood up to read the board’s verdict for Auden’s punishment. The legs of her chair squealed against the wooden floorboards of the lecture hall as she stood. She read the charges against Auden: Theft and destruction of personal property. Harassment of a faculty member. It was enough to suspend him for two weeks. Or, at least, that’s what the Knollwood Augustus Prep Student Book of Conduct demanded, but the official punishment was always recommended by the Student Ethics Board and then carried out by Headmaster Collins. Always, always, the Student Ethics Board handed down the harshest sentence possible, because they wanted the faculty to take them seriously. They didn’t want to look like a group of weak-willed kids giving preferential treatment to their peers. And also, because only total Goody Two-shoes nerds were on the Student Ethics Board.

  “The board recommends that Mr. Stein be suspended for two weeks for indecent conduct unbefitting of a student at Knollwood Augustus Prep,” Stevie read. “Furthermore, we recommend that, at the conclusion of Mr. Stein’s suspension, he be required to meet with a guidance counselor, who will assess Mr. Stein’s readiness to reenter this institution.”

  I rolled my eyes. Mr. Franklin, who was seated on the lecture stage across from the Student Ethics Board’s table, crossed his arms and coughed, clearly feeling that the punishment was not harsh enough. I’m sure he had pushed for Auden’s expulsion.

  “Thank you, Miss Sorantos,” Headmaster Collins stated. He sat behind a large wooden table that had been set up in the middle of the room, squarely facing the stadium-style seats of the lecture hall. He scratched his chin, looked down at the folder open on the table before him, and gave a little flick of his hand to Auden, who promptly stood up.

  Headmaster Collins paused for a moment and then looked out at the audience of students and faculty.

  “For the first time in my tenure here at this fine institution, I find myself in disagreement with the Student Ethics Board’s decision,” Headmaster Collins said.

  Stevie gasped and dropped her pencil, which rolled loudly across the table and clattered to the floor.

  “I’m afraid there’s a larger issue at stake here than the disappointing ways in which Mr. Stein has chosen to conduct himself, which the board has failed to address. And I must take part of the blame on myself,” Headmaster Collins said. “There’s been a weed we’ve allowed to grow among us for many years. And if we don’t commit ourselves to rooting it out now, eventually it will spoil the whole garden.

  “Tradition. What is tradition? We have a great many traditions here at Knollwood Augustus Prep. We have a tradition of graduating some of the best and brightest young minds in this country, who go on to the best schools in this country, and become part of the best institutions in this country. We have a tradition of fostering excellence, integrity, and innovation. But for many years now, we’ve also fostered a tradition of catering and cowering to a select few students who take it upon themselves to facelessly harass and bully students and faculty into letting them have their way or merely for the purpose of their own entertainment. These self-proclaimed vigilantes fly in the face of what this institution values—they champion crude and selfish aims, like the cancellation of Saturday morning cultural enrichment classes, often at the expense of something much more dear, like a man’s reputation.

  “Tradition. That has been a word many alumni—and even faculty and students, at times—have used to protect this group, and for a long time, too long now, I have stood silently by. But when this tradition threatens the traditions that are essential to this institution, I will bear it no more.”

  Headmaster Collins looked at Auden now.

  “Mr. Stein, while you are bearing the blame for the disgraceful events that occurred in Mr. Franklin’s classroom, I do not believe you acted alone. And so, while I believe two weeks’ suspension is the proper punishment for these offenses, I do not believe we have the math quite right yet. For it is not two weeks for one person, but two weeks for each person who took part. And since tradition suggests that there are at least a dozen members of this illicit group, then the full term of this punishment is two weeks for each of these twelve students, or, if you choose to be their scapegoat, twenty-four weeks’ suspension for one.”

  I sucked in my breath. A murmur of heated whispers filled the room.

  “Did he just say twenty-four weeks?” Drew asked me.

  I didn’t answer her. I was looking at Auden. His eyes were wide as he absorbed the full weight of what Headmaster Collins was saying. Two weeks’ suspension was bad enough—a black mark that would go on his permanent academic record. None of the top schools would want him now. But twenty-four weeks’ suspension? He would have to repeat the year. He would be held back.

  “So I will ask you again, Mr. Stein, but this is the last time I will ask,” Headmaster Collins said. “Give me the names of the students who acted along with you, and have the punishment evenly divided amongst you, or take the full weight of the punishment on your own head. The choice is yours, Mr. Stein, but you must make it now.”

  Drew stiffened and went still beside me. I knew what she was thinking of: Wellesley, and how being named for this sort of misconduct would cost her her admission. She was thinking about her parents, George and Fern, whom she was always waging some form of emotional warfare against to get their attention, but how this would get her the worst kind of attention, the kind she didn’t want.

  But I wasn’t thinking about college or about how my father would react. I was thinking how the whole tradition of the A’s—which had been in existence for nearly as long as Knollwood itself—hung tenuously in the balance. I hadn’t had a chance to be a part of it yet, hadn’t had a chance to leave my mark. It couldn’t be over yet. It hadn’t even started.

  Auden opened his mouth and then closed it again like a fish sucking at air.

  I remembered that first night at the Ledge so clearly—Auden following Ren into the dark woods, head bowed, hands buried deep in his pockets. What did the A’s have against him? And was it enough?

  “I—” Auden started. He looked out at the auditorium. For a moment, his eyes rested on me. Then he looked away.

  “It was just me,” he said. “I acted alone.”

  Drew exhaled loudly next to me.

  Headmaster Collins sighed. He looked disappointed. “Very well,” he said. “Mr. Stein, you are hereby suspended from Knollwood Augustus Prep for a period of twenty-four weeks, effectively immediately. And you—” Headmaster Collins pointed a meaty finger out at us in the audience. He had an uncanny ability to make you feel like he was looking directly at you while staring at everyone at once. “You know who you are. Take this under advisement: in the past, this has been an administration with a bark and no bite, but no more. There will be no more warnings, no more preferential treatment given to those who threaten the traditions of this institution. Put a stop to your illicit constructions, or I will make it my mission to put a stop to you myself.”

  “How’s that for a little excitement, Ren?” I heard Dalton whisper behind me.

  I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I heard Ren bark softly in reply.

  Twelve

  Grace Fairchild

  Fall 1996

  When I graduated from high school, I got a small swimmin
g scholarship to attend Trenton State College in New Jersey. No one in my family had ever gone to college, so it was no small thing for me to pack up the Oldsmobile my mom had passed down to me and drive the two hundred miles south to my dorm room in Travers Hall.

  The thing was, nobody ever left Hillsborough. People were born there, they grew up there, and then they married their high school sweetheart, bought a house down the street from their parents, and repeated the cycle. But that was never going to be me. I had always wanted something more out of life. I could feel it tugging at me from the inside, almost like some sort of physical force pulling me out of Hillsborough’s orbit.

  Jake was like that too, which was one reason we got along so well. He was just different from most of the people that I knew. He had big dreams, and he was really smart and driven. In high school, he got a full ride to a fancy boarding school in New Hampshire. We had an unspoken understanding between us that he would go, and that even though he was no longer living in the house down the street, the distance wouldn’t change anything between us, and it didn’t.

  Jake and I were like two jigsaw pieces that fit together—alike in some ways, different in others, but our differences always complemented one another. Jake had grown up with two younger sisters, so he was sensitive in a way most guys weren’t. I’d grown up with three older brothers, so I had a toughness beneath the surface that I think took most people by surprise. Jake was book smart, while I was artsy, always sporting paint smudges on my baby-doll dresses and Doc Martens, my fingers perpetually stained with clay. And while I was quiet and reserved, Jake was the type who put you instantly at ease. He was my best friend and I loved him, more than I had ever loved anybody, but then he died.

  Only, he didn’t just die, he killed himself. That was maybe the hardest part—that Jake’s being dead was not some tragic accident, but his own choice.

  The other hard part was that I hadn’t even seen it coming. It happened near the end of the fall semester of my sophomore year, his junior year—right before he was supposed to come home for winter break. We had talked for the last time two nights before it happened and he had sounded so normal, so happy. I didn’t know then that that was the last conversation we would ever have or I would have paid more attention to it. I had just gotten out of the shower when he called and I was preoccupied with some fight my friend Claire and I were having; I let him go earlier than I normally would have to finish an art project that was due in the morning.

  Later, when I found out that Jake was dead, I played that conversation over and over in my mind trying to figure out what I had missed. He’d seemed excited to come home; we’d made plans for how we would spend our days—sledding down Martha’s Hill, ice-skating on Langely Lake, drinking root beer floats at the old A&W. Where, in all that, was a cry for help? Where, in all that, was Jake’s goodbye?

  I questioned a lot at first. I wanted to see the suicide note they’d found in the typewriter in Jake’s dorm room. I pored over it, trying to poke holes. The night after the funeral, I called Jake’s mom, and I asked her, what did Jake mean when he admitted in the note to stealing that exam? Jake had always been a straight-A student; why would he have needed to cheat? It didn’t make any sense.

  My mother took me aside the next morning.

  “I know you’re hurting,” she said, “but you have to have some compassion for poor Mrs. Griffin. She’s lost her child. You’re picking at a wound that’s trying to heal.”

  I realized that part of what my mother was saying was true. My questions, they were coming from a selfish place. A part of me was angry with Jake for what he’d done, but a bigger part of me was angry with myself. Because Jake knew me better than anyone—I had confided in him my smallest triumphs and my greatest defeats. He had patiently listened and built me back up again when I was down. But somehow, I hadn’t done the same for him. He had been hurting, he had desperately needed me, and I wasn’t listening hard enough to know. I had failed him in the most profound way a person can fail anyone. And as long as I questioned things, as long as Jake hadn’t really killed himself, as long as there was some other explanation, I wouldn’t have failed him as profoundly as I thought I had.

  But the other part of what my mother said was wrong—I wasn’t picking at a wound that was trying to heal over, because the grief I felt would be with me always. Jake had been a part of me, and now a part of me was gone. I was never going to get it back; I was never going to be whole again. I understood that somehow, even at sixteen. And I understood it at nineteen, when I dropped out of college to focus on my art. And I understood it at twenty-two, when I’d been living in Trenton for three years and I met the next man I would fall in love with.

  His name was Teddy Calloway. I was shelving returns at my part-time job at the local library (my art didn’t really pay the bills), and I had my headphones on so I could listen to my mix tape in my Walkman. As I pushed my cart forward, I felt it hit something, and then I heard a muffled cry of pain. I looked up to see a young man wincing at the other end of my cart. Several books fell off the cart and made a loud clatter as they hit the floor.

  “Shit,” I said.

  The man looked up at me, startled, and chuckled. I didn’t know what he found so funny; I was a little preoccupied with how attractive he was. He had beautiful, piercing blue eyes and he was tall—at least a foot and a half taller than me. He put a finger to his lips in a “shh” gesture, and I realized with horror that I still had my headphones on and I must have just yelled “shit” in the quiet library, or at the very least, spoken it at an inappropriate volume.

  Sure enough, an elderly woman poked her head into our aisle and said pointedly, “Please keep your voice down.”

  When she was gone, I had to bite back a laugh. I looked back at the amused young man on the other side of my cart, took my headphones off, and silently mouthed, “Shit.”

  He laughed.

  I made my way around the cart and knelt to start picking up the books that had spilled. The man leaned down to help me.

  “You’re kind of a mess, aren’t you?” he whispered.

  “You’re kind of direct, aren’t you?” I whispered back.

  He smiled at me.

  “I’m sorry about your foot,” I said. “I wasn’t paying attention.”

  “It’s okay. I wasn’t really using that foot anyway,” he said with an easy smile. “What were you listening to?”

  “A little bit of everything,” I said as I stacked the fallen books in my arms. “Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins.”

  “Smashing Pumpkins,” the guy said, nodding in approval. “I saw them the other year at Lollapalooza. You listening to stuff from their last album?”

  I nodded.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Grace Fairchild,” I said. “Yours?”

  “Teddy,” he answered. “Teddy Calloway.”

  And my first thought was of Jake.

  The thing was, I recognized Teddy’s last name. Jake had been good friends with a Calloway at his boarding school. He had talked about him all the time and I had seen pictures. I remembered fragments of those photographs: tall, blond, ice-blue eyes, a smug smile. The boy I had seen in the pictures looked like the boy kneeling next to me now, in between the dusty stacks in the library.

  “You went to Knollwood Prep,” I said.

  Teddy looked surprised. “Yeah, actually, I did. I’m sorry, do we know each other? Did you go there?”

  “No,” I said. “A friend of mine used to. Jake Griffin. Did you know him?”

  “No,” Teddy said. “But I was only there a few months my freshman year. I spent most of my time at Andover, actually.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “But maybe you’re thinking of my older brother, Alistair?” Teddy asked. “He spent all four years there.”

  Alistair. Yes, now I remembered. That was his name.

  “Oh, yeah, I think you’re right,” I said.

  “So, what overpriced prep schoo
l did you go to?” he asked.

  “Me? None of them. I just went to public school.”

  “Lucky,” he said.

  I shrugged.

  “Do you go to Princeton?” he asked. Princeton was only about twelve miles up the road from Trenton.

  “No, I’m just a local,” I said.

  His face lit up. “Really?”

  “What other perfectly ordinary things about myself can I impress you with?” I asked.

  “No, it’s just refreshing, that’s all,” he said. “Here, let me get those for you.”

  I passed him the books I was holding and as I did, my hand grazed the bare skin of his forearm, and I felt a little buzz of electricity where we touched.

  “What are you doing tonight, Grace?” he asked as he stacked the books back on the cart and I stood.

  I fingered the pendant that hung at the end of my necklace. It was the necklace Jake had bought me off a vendor’s cart on the boardwalk in West Haven the last summer that we were together. The pendant was his zodiac sign and birthstone: a ruby crab clutching two diamonds in its claws.

  I brushed my hands on the thighs of my jeans and looked up at Teddy, biting my lip.

  “I don’t know,” I said brazenly. “What are we doing tonight?”

  Teddy picked me up at my apartment at eight, and he took me to an old mom-and-pop shop in town. He did old-fashioned things like hold the door open for me, and pull out my chair at the dinner table, and put his jacket around my shoulders when I was cold.

  Two weeks after we went on our first date, he took me to his family’s charity ball at the Carlyle Hotel in New York City.

  This was my first foray into Teddy’s world. In Trenton, we mostly hung out in my world—Teddy would come by the library, or he would hang out at my apartment, or we would go see a movie. I never met him on campus, never went by his eating club, never met his friends.

  I had always known that Teddy and I were different, that we came from different worlds. But it wasn’t until that night at the Carlyle Hotel that I felt it. When I walked into that ballroom for the first time, it was like nothing I had ever seen before. The crisp suits and the glittering evening gowns and the crystal wineglasses and the seven-course dinner. And there I was, in my simple gown that I had found while sifting through racks at the thrift store down the street from my apartment. People kissed one another on the cheek in greeting like fancy Parisians in a movie, and they talked about restaurants and chefs and designers and hotels and cities I had never been to before, like they were speaking some foreign tongue. And all the while I just stood there, trying to smile, and wondering what to do with my hands.