Page 32 of Love All
“Mm.” She eats a spoonful, watching me, and there it is — the look. The soft, terrible, perceptive one she promised me at the party, the one I hoped she’d forget. Indie forgets nothing about the people she loves. It’s the other thing I love most about her, and it is, occasionally, a catastrophe. “How is he?”
“How is who?”
“Charlotte.”
“There’s nohe.There’s a fundraiser I’m losing, a class project that’s concluded, and a man I am now contractually free of, thank God.” I pour coffee I don’t want, to have something to do with my hands — a tactic I have apparently caught from him, which I note, and resent. “How’s Cole? How’s the great romance? Are you going to keep doing the hand-holding thing in front of me? Because I’m lodging a formal complaint with the dean.”
She lets me change the subject. She always lets me, for exactly as long as she’s decided to. Then she sets the spoon down, and that’s how you know the reprieve is over.
“At the party,” she says. “When you and Benedict were — teaching me. The thing on the island.”
“Pedagogy.”
“You can call it whatever you want.” She comes around the counter and leans against it next to me, shoulder to shoulder, the way she does when she’s about to say something she knows I won’t want to hear and wants me to know she’s on my side whileshe says it. “I watched you, Charlotte. I wasn’t even watching the part you were teaching me. I was watching your face. And I have known your face since freshman year — through every match, every three a.m., every boy who turned out to be boring — and I have never once, in all of it, seen it do the thing it did when he had his hand on your back.”
“It was a demonstration. I was acting.”
“You don’t act. It’s why you’re terrifying and it’s why I trust you — you have never once successfully faked a feeling in your life. You can hide one. You’re a vault. But you can’t fake one, and you weren’t faking that.” She nudges me, gentle. “You looked like I feel. When Cole walks into a room. That’s the only way I know how to describe it, and I cried about it a little afterward. In a good way. In the bathroom. While Margo held my drink.”
“That’s the cereal talking. You’re high on Cole. Everyone in love thinks everyone else is in love too — it’s a documented cognitive distortion. Look it up.”
“I did look it up, actually, because I knew you’d reach for it.” She smiles, infuriating, serene. “It’s not in there. There is nothing in the literature about how being happy makes you hallucinate your best friend’s face doing things you have personally never seen it do in like…ever.” She bumps my shoulder again. “I’m not high on Cole, Charlotte. I’m just finally fluent in the language. You taught it to me. And the thing about teaching someone to read is that you don’t get to be illegible to them afterward.”
I have no return for that. I, who have a return for everything, who was once described in a campus publication asunsettlingly quick— stand in my own kitchen holding coffee I don’t want, with absolutely nothing. Because the one weapon that has never failed me is words, and she’s walked in underneath all of them and put her hand directly on the thing.
“It’s not the same,” I manage. “You and Cole — that’s real. That’s a good, kind boy who looks at you like you hung the moon. Benedict and I are a — we’re a collision. Two people who are very good at the same cruel game. That’s not compatibility, Indie. That’s a tied score.”
“Okay.” She doesn’t argue. That’s the devastating thing about Indie: she never argues. She waits, and lets you hear yourself. “But can I say the thing? The thing you said to me?”
“Please don’t.”
“You’re allowed to be wanted, Charlotte.” She says it exactly the way I said it to her, eight feet from a lacrosse player, an instructor’s certainty in it — except she means it about me, which is so much worse. “You’ve spent four years teaching me that everyone’s allowed the good thing except you. That you’re the one who arranges it for other people. That you do the wantingforus — the planning, the fixing — and you never get to be the one in the middle of the room with somebody’s hand on your back. And I let you believe it, because it was useful to me. Because you fixed my whole life with it.” Her voice goes thick. “But it was never true. You’re allowed it too. You taught it to me well enough that I get to hand it back now. You’re allowed towant.You don’t have to earn it first, and you don’t have to be in control of it, and it’s not going to kill you. I promise. I checked.”
I look at the floor. I am not a crier, I don’t do it, I never have — and in that kitchen I come the closest I’ve come in years.
“I have it under control,” I say. It is the single least convincing sentence I have ever produced. We both hear it. And she has the grace — the Indie grace, the rarest kind there is — to let it stand.
“Sure,” she says softly, and hugs me gently from behind. She takes her buzzing phone and her honest face and her brand-new happiness off to class — leaving me alone in the kitchen withthe truth she’s set down on the counter between us. Still warm. Refusing to be anything else.
***
I spend the rest of the day being aggressively normal, which is what I do when something true has been said to me and I refuse to metabolize it.
I go to class. I take notes I don’t need. And on the way to the library I see Cole and Indie on the quad, they don’t see me, which is the only way you ever catch the real thing — just walking. Cole carrying both their bags, because of course he is. Indie telling some story with her hands, and at some point she stops walking to finish it, and he stops too, automatically, orbiting, and waits, smiling down at her like she is the only thing on the entire quad worth standing still for.
I stand behind a planter like a lunatic and watch my best friend be loved correctly, in daylight, by a kind boy, with no scheme left holding any of it up. And what I feel is not the clean satisfaction of a plan that worked.
It’s envy. Plain, ugly, specific envy of the one person on earth I’d set fire to this campus for. I want what she has. I built it for her, brick by careful brick, and stood out in the cold of it, and I am so suddenly, bottomlessly tired of being the one who arranges the warm thing for everyone but herself. I’ve built a whole identity out of being the architect.
And architects, it turns out, sleep alone in the houses they design.
So I go work on the bet, because the bet is a problem I can attack with a spreadsheet, and a spreadsheet has never once made me feel anything.
Except the spreadsheet stopped working weeks ago. I’ve raised, to date, a humiliating fraction of what Benedict conjured out of thin air and a borrowed card reader, and I finallyunderstand why. I keep trying to fundraise the Astor way with the Astor name surgically removed, the big ask, the formal letter, the whole structure of obligation — and obligation is precisely the tool the rules took away. He raises money by beingliked.At volume. One stranger at a time. And I have spent twenty-one years being respected, feared, admired, and obeyed, and not one single hour of any of it learning to be liked, because liked was soft. Liked was for people who needed something.
I was raised to need nothing.
So I open a blank document, and I sit with it a long time, and then I do the most frightening thing I’ve done all month. More frightening than the kitchen. More frightening than the porch. I stop appealing to anyone’s duty. I write down the true reason a children’s cancer ward is worth a Tuesday, plainly, with not one Astor anywhere in it — and I let myself, for once in my life, simply ask people tocare,with nothing to compel them but the asking.
