Page 39 of All These Beautiful Strangers

I turned and looked back out at the dance floor. I found them there in the middle of it—Teddy with Grace in his arms.

Most of the time the world felt big, boundless, full of possibilities—everything was there for the taking, everything was waiting to be conquered, and Margot and I were poised for the conquering. What was there to be afraid of? What was there holding us back? Nothing could touch us; we wouldn’t let it.

But tonight, for the first time in a long time, the world felt small, and I felt small in it.

Eleven

Charlie Calloway

2017

In trig, I fingered the plastic crab pendant that hung at the base of the necklace I wore around my neck and stared out the window at the trees, which were beginning to redden. Trig was supposed to be a senior class, but I’d always had a head for numbers, for tricky equations, for figuring things out.

That was all this was, I told myself. A tricky equation. My mother’s disappearance. The assumption (by some) that my father had killed her. It seemed intimidating when you first looked at it—all those complex differentials and variables. But if you broke it down, part by part, it always made sense in the end—the equation always led to a logical answer.

“Who has the answer?”

I jerked my head away from the window, back toward the dry-erase board at the front of the room. I was playing a dangerous game zoning out in trig. Old Mr. Franklin, or “sir,” as he had us address him, was ex-military. He had served in Nam. He believed in hierarchy, in reverence for authority, and in torturing and humiliating any poor soul who couldn’t cross-multiply and divide fast enough to come up with the answer when he wanted it.

Trig was the only class at Knollwood Prep, besides Mr. Andrew’s Introduction to Photography class, that didn’t follow the Harkness method. It was easy to see why—sitting in a circle, teachers and students on the same footing, with students encouraged to speak their minds whenever they felt like it? That flew in the face of everything Mr. Franklin held dear. Instead, our desks were in neat rows, squarely facing the front of the room, and instead of an open discussion, Mr. Franklin spent every class lecturing at us from the dry-erase board, shouting out problems and demanding the correct answers when you’d barely had time to put pen to paper. Here, there was no getting away with thought-provoking, open-ended bullshit answers, because there was always only one answer. So, I shot my hand in the air, even though I hadn’t even heard what equation we were supposed to be working out, because the surest way not to get called on in Mr. Franklin’s class was to look like you knew the answer. Mr. Franklin always zeroed in on the kid who was feverishly still trying to work out the equation in his notebook, or the kid who was pointedly averting his gaze, praying to the gods that his time had not yet come.

“Mr. Kensington,” Mr. Franklin said. “You look like you have the right answer.”

Al Kensington didn’t look like he had the right answer at all. He looked like Mr. Franklin had just kicked his dog.

“Um, x equals thirty degrees?” Al said.

Mr. Franklin glared at him.

“Sir!” Al said, blushing down to the collar of his shirt. “Sorry, x equals thirty degrees, sir?”

Mr. Franklin held out his dry-erase marker. “Come up here and show us how you got to that answer.”

That, of course, meant that Al had gotten it wrong. Mr. Franklin was a firm believer in learning from others’ mistakes, so he made sure to make them as public as possible and to walk through the errors, line by line.

Al took his paper and stood, walking unsteadily toward the front of the room, shaking in terror. As he passed Auden Stein’s desk—he was the only other junior in the class—Auden brought his balled hand to his mouth and coughed discreetly into it.

“Forty-five,” he coughed.

Al stiffened and paused for a moment and then continued forward.

“What was that, Mr. Stein?” Mr. Franklin asked.

“What was what, sir?” Auden asked innocently.

“It sounded like you were trying to give Mr. Kensington a number as he passed by your desk,” Mr. Franklin said.

Behind him, at the board, Al was quickly scribbling his work onto the dry-erase board, trying to figure out where he had gone wrong in the equation and make out forty-five before Mr. Franklin returned his attention to him. If Mr. Franklin had been paying attention to Al, he would have seen that he’d started the equation from the end, with the answer, and was working backward.

“No, sir,” Auden said.

“I take cheating very seriously,” Mr. Franklin said. “I’m sure you’re aware of Knollwood Prep’s zero-tolerance policy?”

“Yes, sir,” Auden said.

“So what was that?”

“What was what, sir?”