Page 54 of Love All
The fence is empty. I want to be clear that I do not look at it. I do not, on the third morning, find my eyes going to the exact spot where a boy in a wrinkled shirt once stood clutching twocoffees and heckling my toss, declaring it the finest morning of his life. I do not notice the spot is empty. I am a professional, and the spot is empty, and I notice nothing, four hundred times, with a clean steady toss.
He stopped coming, obviously. I told him to. More than told him, I carved it into him in a doorway with the one tool I’m a genius with. Made certain he’d never come back. Sealed every exit so thoroughly that the absence of him at a chain-link fence at dawn is not a loss but aresult.A thing I achieved. On purpose. With skill.
You don’t get to grieve a result. That’s the rule. I made the rule. I follow my own rules to the letter; it’s the only inheritance I kept.
***
I see him on the fourth day, across the dining hall, and he’s fine.
He’s better than fine. He’sgolden, leaned back at a long table with Reyes and two others, telling some story with his hands. The whole table is laughing, and a girl I don’t know is laughing a half-second longer than the rest, leaning in. Ben gives her the grin. The full one. The one I used to think he aimed only at people he was about to dismantle. And I understand, in one cold swallow of dining-hall coffee, that I was wrong about the grin. He aims it at everyone. He aimed a different thing at me, the undefended face, the terrible flowers, theplease— and I took that thing and broke it. Now he’s back to the grin. The public gold. The easy unbothered surface that costs him nothing and means nothing and lands on everyone equally.
There is no version of being proven right that has ever felt so much like being buried alive.
See,says the cold-house voice, the one that runs my disasters.Four days. You told him he’d coast off, and look. Four days and he’s coasting. You were right. You’re always right.
And I sit there with my rightness like a stone in my mouth. Because here’s the thing the voice doesn’t mention while it’s busy being right: I know exactly why he’s golden again. I watched the gold drain out of his face in my doorway. I watched the reaching version of him, the brave, inconvenient one, the one who crossed a city — get put down in a hallway by a girl who’d learned precisely where to aim. He isn’t coasting because that’s who he is. He’s coasting because I taught him, in one efficient evening, that reaching gets you gutted. He’s a fast learner. The golden boy laughing across the dining hall is a thing I personally restored to factory settings.
I didn’t find proof of my theory. I manufactured it. And then I sat down across the room to admire the data.
He doesn’t see me. Or he sees me and gives me nothing, which is its own kind of fluency, and which I’d respect enormously in anyone but the one person I taught it to. I leave before I finish my coffee. The wall holds the whole way out.
The wall is very good. I built it myself.
I tell myself, on the walk back, that this is the natural order reasserting itself. He’ll go back to being the golden boy the whole campus adores. I’ll go back to being the unmeltable Astor who scares people in elevators. And the four months in the middle, the bet, the lake house, the eight hours of sleep — will compress, over time, into a thing that simply happened. A season. A footnote in two otherwise unrelated lives. That’s the story I was raised to tell about every loss: it was always going to end this way; the wanting was the aberration and the cold is the baseline; the smartest thing a person can do is get back to the baseline fast and stop bleeding. I’m very good at telling myself that story. I’ve been telling versions of it since I was nine.
The only flaw in it, the hairline fracture I keep stepping around, is that the baseline has never once, in twenty-one years, felt likepeace.It feels like this. It feels like leaving a dininghall with a full coffee and a held wall and a stone in my mouth, having won an argument I would give anything to lose.
***
Indie, meanwhile, is incandescent.
That’s the part I need myself to understand, because the two things are happening at once, and the whole horror of the week lives in the gap between them: while I’m out hitting four hundred balls at a spot on a fence I refuse to look at, Indie Roy is falling, in real time, into the happiest stretch of her entire life. She’s doing it because of a thing I built for her. It is the one unqualified good I have ever made. And I would not trade it for my own recovery if you offered me the swap on a plate.
She comes into my apartment Wednesday night without knocking — she has rights here; she earned them on this kitchen floor — and she isglowing,and she sits up on my counter the way she does and says, “Okay. I need to tell you a thing, and you have to promise not to make the face.”
“I don’t make a face.”
“You make the most face of anyone alive. You’re making a face right now, having this conversation. Promise.”
“I promise to make a normal amount of face.”
“Cole’s going to ask me to make it official. Saturday. At the formal.” She presses both hands over her mouth, then takes them away, because she physically cannot keep the smile contained. It keeps getting out. “I know because he is the worst liar in North America, and he’s been ‘just wondering’ what color I’m wearing, and whether I like being surprised in front of people or in private, and Margo overheard him asking Tess what my favorite flower is — which, Lotte,he’s planning a thing.He’s planning a whole thing. And I’m going to say yes before he finishes the sentence. I’m not even going to let him finish it. I’ve decided.”
And I look at her, lit up on my kitchen counter, swinging her feet, undone with happiness over a boy she couldn’t speak a full sentence to six weeks ago — and I feel two things in the exact same instant, stacked, the way you only feel things when your own life is in pieces.
The first is joy. Real, clean, unmixed joy, the kind I almost never get, because mine usually arrives with a tax attached, and this one doesn’t, because it isn’t mine. It’s hers. She earned it, and she got it, and nothing about my own wreckage can touch the fact of Indie Roy lit up on a counter. I did that. Me and, I did that. The play worked. The thing I built out of staged conversations and a boy’s overheard truth and a hundred small invisible nudges has grown past its scaffolding into a real, self-standing thing that doesn’t need me anymore, a thing about to put on a dress and get asked a question in front of the whole school and say yes before the sentence finishes. It is the proudest I have ever been of anything. I will never be able to tell a living soul I did it.
And that is exactly as it should be. The whole point was that it’shers.
The second thing, stacked right under the joy, is the cold. Because I know, sitting there making a normal amount of face for my best friend — that I will never have what she’s about to have. Not can’t.Won’t.I had it. Eight hours of sleep on a chest. A laugh given away in public. A boy with terrible flowers in a doorway. The whole impossible thing, handed to me. And I looked at it and chose the cold house, on schedule, flawlessly, the way I was raised. Indie is going to say yes before the sentence finishes. I saidyou were a projectand watched a door shut from the inside. We are both, in our ways, exactly who we decided to be on a kitchen floor a long time ago. She decided to risk it. I decided to survive it.
And I am looking, right now, at the difference the two decisions make.
“You’re making the face,” Indie says softly.
“I’m not.”
“Lotte.” She’s stopped swinging her feet. The glow doesn’t go anywhere — Indie can be happy and see you at the same time; it’s one of the unfair things about her — but it sharpens. Turns toward me. “What happened with Ben?”
