Page 133 of All These Beautiful Strangers

“How?” Leo asked, putting down his controller. “Remember when the A’s framed Auden for messing with Mr. Franklin’s photograph? You were all pissed at first because they had left you out of it. We basically got him expelled.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s true,” I said.

“We’ve lied, cheated, stolen, vandalized, et cetera,” Leo said. “How is this any different?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “This just feels different to me.”

But maybe Leo was right and it wasn’t different. Maybe, somehow, I was different.

“Do you ever think about not doing what they want?” I asked. “Like, just quitting the Game and walking away? Not being an A?”

“Not really,” Leo said. “I mean, especially at this point. We’ve put up with a lot of shit, but we’re almost through it. Soon it’ll be our turn.”

Our turn. Our turn to do what had been done to us to a fresh group of initiates. Our turn to concoct and carry out our own revenge schemes and wage war against Headmaster Collins and the other faculty.

“Besides,” Leo said, “trying to quit hasn’t worked out so well for others in the past, in case you hadn’t noticed. Remember Auden?”

“But what if there weren’t consequences?” I asked.

“There will be consequences,” Leo said. “You know what they have against us. Do you really want everyone to see those pictures? I mean, forget about what everyone at school will think. What if those pictures got leaked to our parents?”

I was silent. It wasn’t just my fate that I was deciding; it was Leo’s too.

“Tell me you’re not planning on doing something stupid,” Leo said.

I just looked at him.

“Charlie?”

This was Leo—Leo—I would be hurting. Sure, Leo hadn’t been the most loyal person to me lately, but was I any better if I turned around and did the same to him? Loyalty to the people you love, to your family, is a moral code. If you don’t have loyalty, what do you have?

“Of course not,” I said. “Don’t be so dramatic. I was just speaking hypothetically.”

“Okay, good,” Leo said, picking his controller back up and returning his attention to his game.

I couldn’t help but think that what Ren had said that first night at the Ledge was true—secrets bound us to one another. Not just me and Leo and the current A’s, but all the A’s. Now we were all inextricably linked. Either we were all going to get away with everything together, or we were all going to have to go down together in some respect—a collective crash and burn—because we were all guilty, in one way or another, of something.

But then, who wasn’t?

Somehow, despite my best efforts not to be helpful, I found myself in the dining hall on Wednesday afternoon sitting at a table with Dalton, Crosby, and Leo, cataloging donations for the Trustee Benefit Gala’s silent auction.

“Here’s another vacation home,” Crosby said, handing me a one-page printout description and accompanying photographs of someone’s ski lodge in Jackson Hole.

Apparently, everyone’s favorite thing to donate to the silent auction was a weeklong getaway to their vacation home (or luxury condo at Lake Tahoe, or chateau in the south of France, or Tuscan villa, or winery in Napa). It required the least amount of effort while simultaneously allowing people to flaunt just how rich they were, and all in the name of charity. It was the ultimate #humblebrag.

“‘Rustic lodge allows you to commune with nature,’” I read from the printout. “What exactly do you think screamed ‘rustic’ to this guy?” I asked. “Was it the fourteen-person jetted marble-slab Jacuzzi? Or the in-home personal theater in the basement?”

I angled the paper with the pictures so Crosby could see.

“People think that just because they’re in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere, they’re automatically camping or something,” Crosby said.

“Once, we got stuck in Atlanta in a layover and had to stay at a Hilton by the airport,” Dalton said. “My mother actually used the words ‘roughing it.’”

Dalton laughed and put his arm around the back of my chair. I felt his fingertips graze my shoulder, and I tried not to stiffen at his touch. The truth was, I’d felt odd being around Dalton ever since I had spotted those suitcases in his basement. And the hardest part was, I couldn’t exactly tell him what was up with me, because either I was being completely insane and the suitcases were just coincidentally the same type that my mother had owned, or they were actually her suitcases and Margot was weirdly tied up in her disappearance. I knew I had to get back in that basement and open them up, but I had no idea how I was going to do that.

Part of me had been trying really hard not to think about those suitcases. Because if they did belong to my mother, what did that mean? I had never really allowed myself to believe that my mother hadn’t left us of her own free will. The alternative was just too horrible to imagine—that my father might have played some part in her disappearance, that he might have hurt her in some way. But if my mother hadn’t left us, then that meant that I had been wrong about a lot of things. All of this remoteness I carried around inside me was unfounded and misdirected. These walls I put up, the coldness and distance I cultivated like a shield—they were unnecessary. Because I hadn’t been betrayed and abandoned; I had been wanted and loved.

That thought disarmed me.