Page 11 of All These Beautiful Strangers

“I did have some reservations about coming,” I said as I sat on Dalton’s bed and folded my legs underneath me to get comfortable. “Number one: will they still like me when I beat them to kingdom come and take all their money? Number two: what if they cry? I’ve never seen a whole room of boys cry before.”

“She certainly talks a big game,” Crosby said, shuffling the cards.

“Pride cometh before a fall, Calloway,” Dalton said, taking a seat on his trunk.

Auden pulled out a large pencil case and started divvying up the “chips.” We couldn’t play with real poker chips, for the same reason none of us had brought any money to the game. Gambling was an automatic suspension at Knollwood. Instead, we played with Post-it notes ($10), pencils ($5), erasers ($2), and Skittles ($1), so that we had plausible deniability in the event we were caught around a card table. The money was real enough, and the losers would square away with the winners by the end of the week.

Dalton dealt first and I picked up my hand with an almost giddy glee. It was a strong hand: a pair of queens and an ace. But I was less focused on my cards than on watching the other players, noting when they limped or raised, how many cards they exchanged, whether they folded early or called the hand.

I’d always loved poker because it was a game of reading people. Everyone had a tell—a quickening of the breath, a facial tic, a knot of muscles tensing in the neck. It almost wasn’t fair to Leo that I was playing, because I knew him so well. His tell for a good hand was the same as when he was talking to a pretty girl: a practically imperceptible twitch of the right corner of his mouth that gave him an almost arrogant smirk. You had to really know him to catch it.

Sometimes a person’s tell wasn’t so much a physiological response as a behavior. I quickly learned that Auden was a cautious player; he almost always limped from round to round and folded early, so you knew if he raised the bet or stayed in after the second round he had a winning hand. Crosby played like he lived: with a practiced nonchalance, raising when he should fold, rarely bowing out until the last draw. Dalton was the most difficult to read; the whole game, I couldn’t get a handle on him.

It was nearly two in the morning, and we were down to our last hand. It was the final round of betting. We had all gone big this round; there was nearly $65 in the pot. Leo was out and Auden had just folded. Dalton was up. He could put another $20 in to limp, or raise, or fold. We all knew why he was hesitating: at this point, he was up $100, the most of all of us. But if he put in another $20 to stay in and lost and I took the pot, I would best him at $95 to $80. If he folded right now, he’d still be in first, regardless of whether I won the pot or not.

I put my cards facedown and pushed them forward, like I thought it was my turn and I had decided to fold.

“It’s not your turn,” Auden whispered.

“Oh, sorry,” I said. I made a show of scooping my cards up and acting all embarrassed. If I could have blushed on command I would have.

“I’m in for twenty dollars,” Dalton said, putting two Post-its from his large stack into the middle of the table.

As soon as he laid his Post-its down, I scooped my cards back up and moved two Post-it notes of my own into the middle of the card table.

“I’ll see your twenty dollars,” I said, “and raise you another ten dollars.”

I pushed two pencils into the middle of the card table.

“You angler,” Dalton said. He had a smile on his face but there was a hardness to his eyes. He was trying to play it cool but I could tell I had upset him.

“That’s cheating,” Auden said.

“Morally ambiguous,” I corrected him. “If I did it on purpose. Maybe I didn’t mean to go out of turn.”

“Did you?” Auden asked.

“Would you believe me if I said no?” I asked.

“I like her,” Crosby said to the room. “I like you,” he said to me, clapping his hand on my back. “I hope you did do it on purpose.”

Auden looked to Leo for support, but that was useless. Leo laughed and leaned back in his swivel chair. He shook his head. “I told you guys not to let her play,” he said.

“I’ll see your ten dollars,” Crosby said, moving two of the pencils from his stack into the middle of the table. Dalton reluctantly did the same.

Then, all together, we turned over our hands. Dalton had three jacks. Crosby had two pairs. I had a flush.

Crosby did a doleful slow clap. Dalton let out a heavy sigh. Auden cursed under his breath.

“Well done, cousin,” Leo said.

“Lovely playing you all,” I said as I leaned forward and scooped all of the pencils, Post-its, erasers, and Skittles to my end of the table. “And I wasn’t kidding earlier. I really will freak out if you start to cry.”

The campus felt eerily quiet that early in the morning as I made my way back from the boys’ dormitory to Rosewood Hall. I shrugged deeper into my jacket and quickened my pace. Out there alone at night in the dark, I couldn’t help but think of the ghost—that dead boy wandering around campus, looking for someone to curse.

When I reached the abandoned field, which was all that separated me now from the dormitories, I got the distinct feeling in the pit of my stomach that I was being watched.

Don’t be stupid, Charlie, I told myself. There’s no ghost. No one is watching you.