Page 144 of All These Beautiful Strangers

“You don’t look well,” he said. “Maybe you should come back with me to the city. I can get you in to see Dr. Carmichael first thing tomorrow morning.”

“I have finals next week,” I said. “I can’t miss them.”

“Your health is more important,” my father said. “I’ll have Dr. Carmichael write you a note. You can take your finals when you’re feeling better.”

I forced my eyes up from my cereal bowl to my father’s face. He looked so concerned, so protective, so fatherly. It pained me to look him in the eyes after what I’d done, how I’d betrayed him. And for him to act so kindly toward me, precisely because he didn’t know yet. But he would understand, wouldn’t he? In the end, he’d forgive me. Right?

I should tell him the truth, I thought. I knew that I should tell him, because he would find out soon enough. I opened my mouth, but before I could say anything, Dalton materialized behind him, breakfast tray in hand.

“Where’d you disappear to last night?” Dalton asked.

He rounded the table and sat down next to me. To my discomfort, I saw Margot was right behind him. She sat down across the table from me, next to my father.

“Alistair,” she greeted my father with a smile, and he acknowledged her with a curt nod.

“Migraine,” I said.

Dalton rubbed my back. “You doing okay now?” he asked.

“I’m fine, thanks,” I said.

“Maybe Mom could take a look at you and prescribe something?” Dalton asked, looking at Margot.

“That’s very generous,” my father said quickly. “But I’d prefer if Charlotte saw our family doctor.”

“That’s probably best,” Margot said. “So, Alistair, how’d you fare at the auction?”

As their conversation turned from me to vacation home rentals, I noticed a sophomore girl at the next table over gawking at me. She looked away quickly when I met her eyes. And then I saw it—spread out on the table in front of her was that day’s issue of the Knollwood Chronicle.

I glanced around the dining hall, and I saw it wasn’t just her—most people were starting to stare. I felt it gathering around us like a storm about to break. The collective gasps, the gawking silences. That old familiar weight of being held up for speculation. As I scanned the room, my eyes locked with Leo, who was standing in the entrance to the dining hall. His face was white as a sheet. My cool, confident cousin looked terrified.

Just then, I saw something out of the corner of my eye, and I turned just in time to see Ren Montgomery barreling toward me. She tackled me, pushing me off my chair and onto the table. My glass of orange juice went flying, its pulpy contents landing in Margot’s lap; my elbow landed hard in my bowl of cereal; my tailbone sang with pain as it met the hard wood of the table behind me.

“What the hell, Ren?” Dalton said, yanking her off of me and then putting himself between us. “What’s your problem?”

“What’s my problem?” Ren spat. “Why don’t you ask your backstabbing bitch of a girlfriend who just fucking outed us to the entire fucking world.”

“What are you talking about?” Dalton asked, looking from me, still splayed out on my back on the table, to Ren, and then back at me.

“I’m talking about all of our dirty little secrets that Charlie just made front-page news,” Ren said. She was hysterical. She turned around and plucked the issue of the Knollwood Chronicle from the sophomore sitting at the table next to us and shoved the paper into Dalton’s chest. “Extra, extra. Read all about it!”

I sat up and pulled my elbow out of my cereal bowl. The sleeve of my sweater was drenched.

“You’re done,” Ren said, pointing her finger at me. “You’re over.”

As I sat there, holding my throbbing, milk-soaked elbow—a disheveled mess on display for the whole school to see—I knew that she was right. Because the gun I’d loaded for the A’s at the beginning of the year, I’d just pulled the trigger.

“What’s this?” my father asked, taking the paper from Dalton.

“The truth,” I said. I looked at Margot, her stare hardening as her suspicion of what I’d done crystallized on her face. “All of it.”

My father looked down at the paper in his hands, and he started to read.

It was the story I’d written, and the photographs. I’d published them after all. Not the ones of Mr. Andrews, as I’d originally planned, but the ones of the A’s at the Ledge the night that Jake died.

I’d decided, finally, what type of person I wanted to be.

Haunting Truths