Page 148 of All These Beautiful Strangers

“How’s NYU?” Claire asks me.

“It’s great,” I say.

“Meet any cute boys?” Claire teases.

Greyson puts his arm around me and pulls me close as I laugh. “Hey now, none of that,” he says, planting a kiss in my hair.

After my article about the A’s came out at Knollwood, I spent the remainder of my junior year at Reynolds with my sister, and when I graduated the following year, I decided to take some time off to do Outward Bound. While my friends were starting college (Drew at Wellesley, Stevie at Berkeley, and Yael at Columbia), I was backpacking across the border lakes region of Minnesota and Canada and kayaking Lake Superior. It wasn’t something I had ever imagined myself doing, but it taught me to harness a strength I had only just begun to realize I had. When I came back, I turned down the Wharton School at UPenn and enrolled in the documentary film program at NYU. Again, not a path I could have imagined for myself only a year before, but the right one. With everything that had happened with my mother, I realized how important the stories that we tell about one another are. The stories we tell can change the way we see one another, can even change the way we see the world. I wanted to tell those stories; I needed to tell them.

I started classes a few weeks ago. I’m renting an apartment in Greenwich Village with Greyson.

After my father’s testimony regarding Jake’s death, he and the other A’s who had been there that night were convicted of negligent homicide in a suit brought against them by the state. Afterward, Jake’s family brought a civil case against them, which was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount. My father served one year at the state penitentiary and is currently serving his probation. He was forced to step down as president of the Calloway Group, but I know he’s been in negotiations with Uncle Teddy and my grandfather about coming back in some way, serving as a consultant, perhaps, though I doubt they’ll let him have a seat on the board. Seraphina and I made a few trips up to the state penitentiary to see him while he was there. We talk occasionally, but building a new relationship with my father on the foundation of all that has happened in the last two years, all that I now know, is going to be a long and slow process. I’m still not sure what it will look like in the end.

Margot’s case regarding my mother’s murder garnered a lot of media attention. Seraphina and I both had to endure the reporters and the tabloids on campus until the verdict came out. In the end, Margot was convicted of first-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

I grab a plate of food from the kitchen and make my way into the den to watch the game. I spot Uncle Hank on the couch, sitting next to my cousin Patrick, and I give him a little wave. Uncle Hank nods back at me.

As dusk falls, my grandma brings out the frosted cake for my mother. She would be turning forty-six this year. We all gather around the table in the kitchen and sing. Then I lean forward and blow out the candles.

Later, as Greyson and I head back toward the city after dropping my sister off at the train station, we take the long way out of town, out toward Langely Lake. From the road, I look out at the house my father built for my mother, all those years ago. It sits empty, its doors locked, the windows boarded, looking blindly and forlornly out at the water. My father put it on the market over a year ago, but so far, there haven’t been any buyers. He’s stopped paying to keep up the grounds. Creeping Jenny fills the yard, wool grass grows knee-high, even a handful of dogwood saplings appear here and there. The stone on the house has started to weather, and I can imagine it one day, many years from now, swallowed up by vines and weeds, reclaimed by the woods.