Page 17 of Love All
***
Indie’s at the kitchen counter when I come in, hair wet, eating cereal standing up the way she does when she’s running late — and she looks so completely herself, soft and unguarded and entirely unaware that two people spent last evening plotting the rearrangement of her heart, that the guilt comes back up my throat like coffee.
“You were out early,” she says. “Even for you.”
“Couldn’t sleep.”
“The bet?” She points her spoon at me, sympathetic. “How’s the war effort? Margo says you made the children’s fund refuse your own family. She told the whole team. She’s deeply proud and slightly worried about you.”
“No, I didn’t refuse,” I admit. “I just asked them not to attach Astor to the donation. The foundation gets the money but nothing tied to my contributions.”
“Respecting the bet. Nice. But also I can’t help but notice your lack of transparency for the war effort,” she says, narrowing her eyes.
I shrug.
“The war effort is going badly, and I refuse to discuss it before nine.” I steal a piece of cereal directly from her bowl — a thing she permits from me and nobody else — and she lets me. The small ordinary permission of it makes the column-three sentence flare hot under my ribs. “How’s — anything? How are you? What’s your day?.”
She gives me a look, becausehow are youis not a sentence I deploy at six-fifty in the morning. Then she decides to let it go, because that’s the other thing Indie does, the thing the entire world should be required to study under her: she lets you off the hook you climbed onto yourself. “Bio, then meet prep, then I’m watching you and Hawthorne pretend not to be a power couple at four. The whole team’s coming. We’re bringing a sign.”
“You are not bringing a sign.”
“We are absolutely bringing a sign. Margo’s already laminating.”
She sets her spoon down. “Cole’s in the lineup, did you know. They’ve got him at three for the men’s side.” She says it to the middle distance, far too evenly, the way you set down a name you’ve been carrying all morning. “He’s been working on his second serve. I heard. Somebody mentioned it.”
“Somebody mentioned it,” I repeat.
“It came up.” Pink now, at the tips of her ears. She catches me watching and rolls her eyes at herself. “Don’t. I know. Shut up.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You did the face.” But she’s smiling — helpless, a little wretched with it — and that, if I’m being honest, is the moment the column-three guilt finally loses its case. Because I can keep my tidy little promise and watch her carry his name around this kitchen like a stone for another four months. Or I can break it, quietly, and hand her the one thing she’s too brave-scared to reach for herself. Standing there watching Indie go soft over a boy’s second serve, I know exactly which Astor I’m about to become. I make my peace with her in advance, while she still has every reason to trust me.
She rinses her bowl, blows me a kiss — she always does it, and it always makes me laugh a little — and says, “Be nice to him today. You’re scary when you’re losing a bet.”
And there it is, handed over free with breakfast:be nice to him today.She has no idea what she’s authorizing. I almost tell her right then. The whole thing is balanced on my tongue, and I could set it on the counter between us and let her decide, the way I lectured Benedict she deserved to.
I don’t. I tell myself it’s because she’d be late for Bio.
It is not because she’d be late for Bio.
***
We meet that night in the back booth of a diner two blocks off campus. Neutral ground, chosen by me, precisely because it’s loud and ugly and impossible to mistake for anything. Benedict is already there when I arrive, the second time he’s beaten me somewhere, and I’m starting to take it personally — and he has a milkshake with two straws in it, which he slides to the center of the table without comment. A provocation I decline to acknowledge, and then drink from for the next two hours.
“I brought a plan,” I say, and set it on the table.
It’s four pages. It’s tabbed. It has a Gantt chart, because if I’m going to betray my best friend’s confidence, I’m going to do itrigorously.Benedict picks it up and reads the first page with an expression of slowly dawning delight that I find unbearable and cannot look away from.
“You named it,” he says.
“It needed a name. A project without a name is a wish.”
“You named itOperation Hero.” He looks up. “Shakespeare?”
“Hero’s the girl in the play. The one everyone schemes to get together with the man she—” I stop, because he’s grinning at me like I’ve confessed to something, and I have not confessed to anything. I’ve made a literary allusion. That is a different thing. “It’s efficient. It encodes the objective.”
“It’s romantic is what it is. You’re a romantic. It’s in thepaperworknow. I have it in writing—”
