Page 72 of All These Beautiful Strangers

“Jesus, Alistair,” my mother said over my shoulder. “What the hell were you thinking?”

“She would have swum,” my father said. I couldn’t see him because he was still behind me in the pool. “She would have figured it out, if you just let her. She would have been fine.”

Now I felt around the bottom of the fountain with my feet until I found it—the plug. Then I took a deep breath and lowered myself to the bottom, and pulled the stopper out.

“It’s a nice night for a swim,” Leo said when I returned to the surface. He was beside me now in the water and we sat there together, waiting for the water to slowly drain around us.

When the fountain was empty, we dismantled one of the fish sculptures. It took both of us to carry the sculpture, slow and waddling, to the theater, where we hid it in the old prop room, covered in a sheet.

It was Thursday evening, and, not surprisingly, Finn had never emailed me about getting together to write our draft of the article. I couldn’t say I blamed him, really, but I also wasn’t about to let him write a story by himself that my name was going to go on, or worse, report to Harper that I hadn’t helped write the article and give her an excuse to drop me from the paper. Since Harper wasn’t going to let me write my own piece, my only recourse was to convince Finn to take the article in a different, less lame direction. So, when I spotted him across the dining hall at dinner, I grabbed a tray of pizza and soda and marched across the dining hall to his table.

Drew caught my eye as I passed my usual table, where she was sitting with Yael and Stevie and a bunch of the guys—Leo, Dalton, the whole gang—and headed toward the south side of the dining hall, where the freshmen sat.

“Where are you going?” she called out to me.

To my social ruin and the pinnacle of humiliation, probably, I wanted to say, but instead I just shrugged my shoulders at her and rolled my eyes.

I marched up to Finn’s table. He was sitting with some sweaty, pimple-faced freshman boys, who were talking animatedly but fell silent when they saw me standing there.

“Hey, Finn,” I said.

Finn looked up and his ears turned red again when he saw me. He looked back down at his tray, fiddled with some pasta at the end of his fork. “Hey,” he said.

“Long time, no see,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, still not looking at me, and I almost felt bad. Partly for him—for the things he had heard me say in the hallway—but also for myself, for having to put up with this. Because regardless of whether I had hurt his feelings, what I’d said was true.

“Do you think we could meet up later?” I asked. I didn’t even say to work on the article—because, hey, I was throwing the kid a bone. Let his friends think we were meeting up for other reasons. Let them think he had some hot date with an upperclassman.

But Finn only shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m kind of busy later.”

Oh, hell no.

I shrugged right back at him. “That’s okay,” I said. “Now works, too.”

I took a step forward and set my tray down at the table across from him, and his friends scooted over to make room for me.

“Hey, guys, I’m Charlie,” I said as I opened the tab on my soda.

“Declan,” the kid sitting next to Finn said, giving his head a little shake to clear his long mop of hair out of his eyes.

“Luke,” the boy sitting next to me said.

“Finn and I are writing an article on uniforms for the Chronicle,” I said.

I sucked on the tip of my thumb where some soda had sprayed on me and dug out my laptop from my shoulder bag.

I decided it might actually be to my advantage that Finn’s friends were there. Maybe by discussing the article in front of them, Finn would come to see how silly it was and he would understand that we needed to find a new angle or a new topic with more meat.

“We could use some quotes for the piece, actually,” I said as I opened my laptop. “How do you guys feel about the uniform? Are you pro-polyester or anti-polyester?”

“Honestly,” Finn said, rolling his eyes, “this goes beyond how ludicrous it is to line a blazer with polyester. I wanted to take it a more political route.”

“What exactly is political about blazers?” I asked.

“Think about it,” Finn said. “At Knollwood, the point of uniforms is to eliminate the socioeconomic divide—but that’s such a narrow context focused on the microcosm of our campus. If we think of the larger communities we’re a part of, Falls Church, for example, or New Hampshire, or even the United States, the Knollwood uniform becomes not an equalizer but a status symbol.”

Hmm. Not where I had thought he was going to go with it. I actually had never spent much time thinking about the uniform I wore, about how it might look to other people, what it meant. And how that meaning might change depending on where I was and who I was with.