Page 9 of All These Beautiful Strangers

He didn’t get to open the door though, because my father caught him just as he was rounding the hood of his truck, and my father took Uncle Hank by the lapels of his jacket and pushed him up against the hood. I couldn’t hear what he was saying through the glass and my screams.

Later, when Uncle Hank and the police officers were gone, my father asked me where Uncle Hank had taken me, what we had done, was there anything we’d talked about? And I recounted the trip in the rusted truck, and the soda at the pizza parlor, and the questions Uncle Hank had asked about my mother. About him.

Later that week, during math lessons, when our teacher left us to quietly work out equations at our desks while she took the attendance forms down to the office, I heard it mounting in the room behind me, like it was a real, physical thing filling the room, pressing up against me, stealing the breath from my lungs—the whispers, the snickering. I got that old familiar feeling in my chest—the one that had suffocated me the year after my mother disappeared—the feeling of being looked at, talked about, held up for speculation. It hollowed me out inside, made me want to hold my breath and close my eyes and disappear.

“Ask her,” someone whispered loud enough for me to hear, and finally Tommy Hartman leaned forward in his desk and poked me hard in between my shoulder blades with his pencil.

“Hey, Charlotte,” he said, his voice loud and unkind.

I debated whether I should answer him, but finally I half-turned in my desk to face him. Whatever was coming, it was best to just rip it off quick, like a Band-Aid.

“What?” I asked. I could feel heat rushing into my cheeks, the hot panic in my chest. And I hated that they could see it on my face, hear it in my voice—that I was afraid.

“How’d he do it?” he asked.

“How’d who do what?” I asked.

“You know,” he said, irritated, as if I were playing games with him, as if I knew exactly what he was talking about.

Everyone had abandoned the work in front of them; I could feel all my classmates’ eyes on me.

“I don’t know,” I said. My palms were sweaty and I wiped them on the thighs of my pants, hoping nobody could see.

And then he said it.

“How’d your dad kill your mom?” Tommy Hartman asked.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and I couldn’t breathe. I opened my mouth to say something, but nothing came out. My mouth hung open stupidly and I just gaped at him like a fish caught on dry land, gasping for air.

“I bet he strangled her,” Monica Petrosky, the prettiest and cruelest girl in the class, said.

They all started in then, as if this were some sanctioned event.

“Where’d he put her body?”

“Aren’t you scared your dad is gonna murder you?”

“Shut up,” I said. “Shut up!”

It came out louder than I expected, that silent rage inside me. They were quiet, shocked, but only for a second.

“Ooooohhhh,” somebody in the back of the class crowed. “Watch out, or Charlotte Calloway is gonna murder you.”

Tommy Hartman howled with laughter; Monica Petrosky laughed so hard she snorted.

I bit my lip and tried with everything that was in me to stop it, but I couldn’t. I could feel them coming, the hot tears filling my eyes. I looked up and saw our teacher, Mrs. Holiday, standing in the doorway.

She put her hands on her hips and glared at all of us. “And just what is going on here?” she asked.

Everyone got really quiet really quickly and once again, everyone’s eyes fell on me. I wanted desperately for everyone to Just. Stop. Looking. At. Me. I couldn’t cry in front of them—I wouldn’t.

“Charlotte?” Mrs. Holiday asked. And her voice was not kind or comforting, but demanding, as if I were responsible for stirring up the class in her absence. And a part of me was thankful for her cruelty, because I knew one gesture of kindness would have undone me.

“My stomach hurts,” I said. “Can I go to the nurse?”

I hid in the nurse’s office until recess, and it was Heather Frank, a quiet girl who wore thick-lensed glasses, who finally showed me what had started the whole thing. Sitting on the empty bleachers, she pulled the thin tabloid from her bag.

real estate billionaire murders wife, wife’s brother tells all, the title said in large, blood-red letters. Below it was a picture of my father, dressed sharply in a suit, ducking into a limo, his arm around the back of some faceless blonde in a halter dress. He looked handsome and haughty in that picture, but he had a wrathful sneer on his face. It made him look dangerous. Predatory.