Page 56 of Love All
The room is beautiful, the athletic department does a formal the way it does everything, with money it pretends it doesn’t have, string lights and a parquet floor and three hundred people in their best clothes — and in the middle of all that gold and warmth stands my best friend, alone by a pillar, holding a drink he isn’t drinking, looking like someone reached into his chest and unplugged him. I have known Cole Whitman since we were eighteen. I’ve seen him nervous, seen him heartbroken, seen him so happy he couldn’t make words. I have never seen him look like this, gray, and very still, andyoung.Like a kid who’s just been told a thing about the world that he can’t put back.
And ten feet away, against the far wall, with a drink he also isn’t drinking, stands Jack. Watching his work the way a man watches a building he’s wired. He looks at me when I come in. He doesn’t smile. He just tips his head a quarter-inch,you’re late, and goes back to watching, and I feel the whole floor of the night drop out from under the suit and the plan and the rehearsed gentle words.
I cross to Cole fast. “Hey. Hey — I need to talk to you, right now, before—”
“Was it real?”
He doesn’t look at me. He’s looking across the room, and I follow his eyes, and there’s Indie, radiant, in a deep green dress, laughing at something Margo said. Not yet knowing. The last person in our whole world who doesn’t yet know that the night has already ended.
“Indie. Was it real, Ben. Or did you and Charlotte make it up?” His voice is so quiet and so level it scares me more thanshouting would. “Jack says you arranged it. He says the whole thing — the night I heard her talking, the thing where she said she’d liked me since September, all of it — he says that was staged. By you and Charlotte. That you set it up so I’d overhear. That none of it justhappened.” Finally he looks at me, and his eyes are doing something terrible — hoping and dreading the same thing. “Tell me he’s lying. Just tell me he’s lying and I’ll believe you over him, I swear to God. Just say it.”
And I can’t.
That’s the trap Jack built. The perfect trap. The cruelest part of it istrue.We did stage it. I cannot look my best friend in the face and tell him the thing he’s begging to hear, because the bones of it are real, and Cole would know, Cole always knows when I’m smoothing something, and the one chance I have to keep him is the truth, the whole shaped truth, delivered in the next four seconds, before the lie underneath it finishes setting like concrete.
“It’s not what he made it sound like,” I say.
Which is the worst possible way to begin. Which is the exact sentence I texted Charlotte a hundred times. The loser’s opening. And I watch it land on Cole as a confirmation.
“Cole — yes. We nudged you two together. But thething she saidwas real. She did like you. She’d have gotten there on her own. We just — you were both too scared, we gave it a push, it was never a—”
“A push.” He laughs, and it’s awful, because Cole’s laugh is one of the great sounds in the world and this one has nothing in it. “You gave it apush.So none of it would’ve happened. Without you and your — yourproject.Six weeks of the best — I thought I—” He stops. Puts a hand over his mouth. Takes it away. “Jack says it was a pity thing. He says you two felt sorry for me. The sad kid who couldn’t talk to a girl, so the rich kids ran a little charity. He says Indie was in on it. That she—”
“Indie wasnotin on it. Indie doesn’t know any of this. Indie fell for you forreal—”
“But you don’t actually know that, do you?” And there it is — the place Jack pressed his thumb. The oldest bruise Cole owns, the one I’ve watched him carry since freshman year:I am not enough, and someone like her could only ever choose me by accident or by trick.“Because you made it up. So how does anybody ever know what she’d have done if you hadn’t? How doIknow? How do I stand up in front of all these people tonight and ask her to make it real, when I can’t even—” His voice breaks clean in half. “When the realest thing I’ve ever felt turns out to have astage manager.”
***
And then Indie finds us.
She comes across the floor glowing — green dress, the smile she’s been carrying all week — and slides in next to Cole and puts her hand on his arm, easy, like she has every right. Which she does. “There you are, I’ve been — hey. Hey, what’s wrong, your face is doing a thing, what’s—”
And Cole steps back from her hand.
It’s a small thing. He just moves his arm out from under her fingers. Half a step back. The smallest motion in that whole enormous bright room, and the loudest thing I have ever seen. Indie’s hand stays in the air for a second, where his arm was. Her smile doesn’t go all at once. It goes in stages, the way a building comes down, the confusion first, then the dawning, then the thing underneath — while three hundred people keep laughing and the string lights keep being beautiful.
“Cole?” Very small.
“Did you know,” Cole says, and his voice is wrecked now, no level left in it, “that Charlotte and Ben set us up? That the night Iheard you — that theystagedthat? That you and me, the whole — that it was a thing theydid.To us. A project.”
I watch her face. Indie Roy, who had no idea. Who spent the week incandescent over a dress and a question. Who genuinely did not know the love she’s standing in ever had scaffolding, taking the full weight of it in front of three hundred people. Her relationship was engineered. Her best friend built it and never told her. And the boy she was going to say yes-before-the-sentence-finished to is steppingbackfrom her hand because of it. Two betrayals at once. The boy pulling away and the best friend who lied, landing in the same half-second, in a borrowed green dress, under the lights.
“That’s not—” Indie looks around. Finds me. “Ben. What is he—”
And then she looks past me, and I turn, and Charlotte is there.
Of course Charlotte is there. It’s Indie’s night; she’d never have missed it. She came across the room when she saw our faces, the way she comes when something’s wrong with Indie, fast and certain, captain to the last — and she has walked straight into the worst moment of all our lives without knowing it. I watch her read the room in about one second, the way she reads everything. Watch her understand that it’s out. That the thing she kept from Indie for four months to protect her, the one promise,her best friend, never— is lying on the parquet floor in front of everyone. And that I’m standing in the middle of it. And that the only way it could have traveled from a court in September to a ballroom in front of three hundred people is through one of the two people who knew.
She looks at me. Just for a second.
I have spent my whole life being looked at kindly. I would give back every kind look I have ever received to never again belooked at the way Charlotte Astor looks at me in the half-second when she does the math and gets my name.
“Indie,” Charlotte says, turning from me like I’ve stopped existing, reaching for her. “Indie, look at me—”
“Youpromised.” Indie’s voice cracks all the way open. She backs up a step, out of Charlotte’s reach — the same half-step Cole took from her, the whole circle of us coming apart in matching small retreats. “Iaskedyou. Do you remember? September. My kitchen. I begged you — I said whatever you do, donotmeddle, do not turn this into one of your operations, let me have this one thing asmine— and you promised me. You looked me in the face and youpromised.” Her hands come up, helpless. Fall again. “And then you did it anyway. And you’ve beenlyingto me. For four months. I was sitting on your counter lastweektelling you about the dress, telling you I was going to say yes before he finished the sentence, and you sat there and let me, and youknew.You knew the whole start of it was a thing you did to me after I told you not to—”
“No.” Charlotte’s voice does a thing I’ve never heard it do — cracks at the edge, the wall coming down at the exact wrong moment, for the exact wrong reason. “No — Indie, the lying, yes. That’s mine. I’ll own every day of it. But you’d have found each other. That part wasreal—”
