Page 106 of All These Beautiful Strangers

Randy pocketed the cash and then scanned the bar code on the envelope into the computer.

“That’ll be sixteen dollars and fifty cents,” he said, and I handed him my card. I tried to keep my hand from shaking.

There was only one thing I knew for certain. If I wanted the truth about what had really happened that night, I couldn’t ask Alistair. I would have to find it somewhere else.

Twenty-Nine

Charlie Calloway

2017

When I got back to my room, the light was on and Drew was there. I saw her from the branch of the elm outside our window, and when I knocked on the glass, she came over to let me in.

“I suppose you’ve heard?” she asked casually, extending an arm to help me. Behind her, I saw the suitcase open on her bed, half packed already.

“Just the CliffsNotes version,” I said as I climbed in. “Crosby filled me in. But he wasn’t really in a talkative mood.”

He’d been too angry, too upset, to tell me more than the barest details—Mr. Franklin had caught Drew trying to steal the trig exam this afternoon. She’d spent all evening in Headmaster Collins’s office. She was being expelled.

Drew returned to the mound of clothes on her bed. She picked up the hanger on the top of the stack and undressed it.

“Do you want this?” she asked, turning to show me the black Chloé dress I had always coveted. She had bought it in SoHo two summers ago when she was visiting me. “It looks better on you anyway.”

I didn’t answer her; I was still trying to process what was happening. Her wall had been stripped—the memory board, the photographs, the string lights were packed into a box open on her desk. The railing in her closet was bare.

“Shit,” I said. “Shit.”

“Yeah,” Drew said. “Pretty much.”

“I still don’t understand what happened,” I said. I cleared a spot on her bedspread next to her clothes and sat down, hugging my knees to my chest. “Just—tell me everything. From the beginning.”

“So, you know how Crosby is a TA for Mrs. Benson?” Drew asked. Mrs. Benson was the freshman geometry teacher. I nodded. “Well, he has a pass code to get into the teachers’ lounge in the math building, and he gave it to me. Anyway, since the trig exam is tomorrow, I figured Mr. Franklin would use the copier in the lounge this afternoon to make copies. I sort of hid and waited around until he came. I watched him put the exam into the copier, and then while it was printing copies, I was supposed to text Crosby to pull the fire alarm to lure Mr. Franklin out of the building. But I didn’t have to because Mr. Franklin went down the hall to the bathroom while the copier was going. Or at least, I thought he did. But he must have just gone to the vending machine because he was only gone for like, a minute. He sort of caught me red-handed as I was leaving.”

“There’s got to be something we can do,” I said, pressing my palms into my eyes, thinking, thinking. There had to be a way out of this. “I mean, you’re not even in trig. Is it really cheating if you’re not even taking the test?”

I looked up at Drew and she shrugged. She kept on folding clothes into her suitcase as if everything were fine. I reached out and grabbed her wrist.

“Stop,” I said. “Stop packing like you’re leaving, like this is a done deal. Maybe the A’s can help.”

“I talked to Crosby earlier,” Drew said. “He says he knows someone on the board of admissions at Wellesley who might be able to get them to overlook this whole thing next year when I apply.”

“I meant there’s got to be a way to keep you here at Knollwood,” I said. “Like maybe there’s a lesser charge or a loophole in the rules.”

“There isn’t,” Drew said.

I dug my phone out of my pocket. “Let me at least call Dalton. Maybe he can help.”

“Don’t,” Drew said, grabbing for my phone.

I held it out of her reach. “I don’t understand why you’re not fighting this,” I said. “It’s like you don’t even care.”

Drew was quiet for a moment. “I haven’t been completely honest with you,” she said finally. She put down the hanger she was holding. I could hear the emotion, tight in her throat. “My mom lost her job a few months ago,” Drew said. “Her company is filing for bankruptcy.”

Her words hit me like a steel bat. My best friend had been dealing with a major family crisis all semester, and I’d been too preoccupied with the A’s and my own family drama to notice. “Drew, I’m so sorry,” I said. “I had no idea.”

“It was a little up in the air whether I could even come back this year,” Drew said. “But my parents were adamant they would make it work. I think my mom was optimistic she would find something else, but she hasn’t.”

Drew’s dad was a history professor at a small liberal arts school in Connecticut. He hardly made the kind of money that could shoulder the steep tuition of a place like Knollwood.