Page 60 of Love All
He leaves. The door does the soft click it always does. The one you never notice until it’s the only sound in the place.
***
I don’t sleep. Around two I end up on the floor of the living room with my back against the couch, looking at the shelf where Cole keeps, kept, his stuff, and there’s a photo still up there that he forgot. Doubles, sophomore year. Me and Jack, both of us squinting, a little trophy between us that meant nothing. Someregional thing. Jack’s arm is around my neck. He’s laughing at something off-camera.
I look at that photo now and I can’t find the guy in it. The one Jack’s laughing next to. I’ve spent a lot of energy making sure I couldn’t.
So I make myself find him.
Here is the week I have never let myself walk through in order. Conference finals, sophomore spring. Jack and I are the two seed. His whole deal at this school runs on it, his scholarship is a year-to-year thing, results-based, and a strong conference showing is how he keeps it. I know that. He’s told me a hundred times, half-joking the way you joke about a thing that’s actually your throat.Win or I’m bagging groceries in Ohio, partner.
The night before the semi, there’s a party at the lake house. I go. Of course I go; I go to everything. Going has never cost me anything. I tell Jack to come and he says no, he wants to sleep, he wants to be right for the morning. I tell him he’s being dramatic. I remember saying that word.Dramatic.I stay till three. I show up to the match on four hours and a headache and my usual belief that it will sort itself out, because it always sorts itself out, because I’m good enough half-asleep to beat most people awake.
We lose. Not because of one thing, tennis is never one thing, but I’m a step slow all afternoon, and I miss two returns I make in my sleep, and at four-all in the third I hit a lazy first serve and get it jammed down my throat.
And I laugh.
I laugh. At four-all. In the third. At the match that is Jack’s whole life. I’m not laughing at him, I’m laughing because that’s what I do when something slips. I make it small so it can’t touch me. I look over to share it, and Jack is staring at me like he’s never seen me before. Like he’s doing math on every hour of the last three years.
We lose the next two games. His ranking slides. The scholarship committee meets that summer and it’s gone, and then he’s gone off the team, and the whole time I keep telling him it’ll be fine, he’ll land somewhere, these things work out.
There was one afternoon he tried to make me understand. I’d forgotten it until tonight. He caught me outside the courts, right after the committee’s letter, and he wasn’t yelling. He was worse than yelling. He was steady.
“Do you get what happened,” he said. “Say it back to me. I want to hear you say what happened.”
“You had a bad conference. It’s one result, Jack, you’ll—”
“You were out till three the night before my life.” Still steady. “And you laughed. At four-all. I’ve been trying for a week to think of the version where that’s okay, and I can’t build it. There isn’t one.” He waited. He was actually giving me the chance, right there, to be a person about it. “Tell me you know that.”
And I said,come on, man, don’t make it a whole thing.
Those words. To that face. Because a whole thing was heavy, and heavy was for other people, and I honestly believed that if I kept it light, he’d catch up to me and we’d be fine.
He didn’t make it a whole thing. He just stopped. Stopped calling, stopped sitting at our table, stopped being someone I had. And I let him. And told myself he’d gotten dramatic. And never once said the true sentence, which was:I did that to you, and I could have not.
I brought a case of good beer to his place a week later and gave him the grin and saidwe’re good, right?And he looked at me for a long time. And he said yeah.
And he meant no. And I took the yeah, because the yeah was easier, and I went back to my life, which was still, somehow, completely intact.
That’s the guy in the photo. That’s who Jack’s laughing next to. A guy who could stand in the exact center of someone else’s catastrophe and feel a light breeze.
***
The part I really can’t sit with comes after, and it has Cole in it, which is why I think I finally let myself look.
Those weeks, Jack freezing me out, the friendship going down without my consent or, honestly, my full attention — I decided I was the one being wronged. Jack had gotten weird. Jack had gotten cold and dropped me over a tennis match, which seemed, from inside my sealed little life, like an overreaction. Poor me. And you know who showed up for poor me? Cole. Every match that spring, there was Cole in the second row with two coffees and a bad joke, holding the line for a version of me that didn’t deserve one square inch of it. He thought he was helping his friend through a rough patch.
He didn’t know his friendwasthe rough patch.
So I’ve now done it to both of them. I let Jack pay for me sophomore year and called him dramatic. I let Cole pick me up, and then, two years later, I lit a match in front of the one good thing Cole ever got, and handed it to the guy I’d already ruined once. Same move, twice. Somebody stands close to me. Somebody pays. I walk out the other side with my hair still perfect.
Julian finds me still on the floor in the morning. He doesn’t ask why I’m down there. He sits on the couch above me and puts a coffee by my hand and lets me get to it.
“I can’t fix it by being charming,” I say. It comes out flat. “That’s the whole — every tool I have makes it worse. If I go to Cole and I’m smooth, he hates me more, and he’s right to. Jack’s had my number for three years. The only thing I’ve ever been good at is the exact thing that did this.”
“So don’t be charming,” Julian says.
“I don’t know what’s under it.” That’s the true one. The one I’ve been circling all night. “I’ve never had to find out. I’m twenty-two and I genuinely do not know what Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne is once you turn the lights off the good side of his face.”
