Page 72 of Love All
I’ll take honest over golden for the rest of my life.
We warm up. Charlotte at the net, me at the baseline, and she glances back at me the way she does now, not checking whether I’ll hold up my end; she stopped worrying about that months ago. Just looking. Pleased to find me still there. Still hers. Still inconvenient. I used to think that look was the most efficient lie in my arsenal, back when I was the one giving it. Getting it aimed at me is a different thing entirely. It’s the least efficient thing in the world. It doesn’t get her anything.
She just does it because she means it.
The other team warms up across the net, a good pair from the state school, and Charlotte and I fall into the thing without discussing it, the way we do now. A ball comes back low and wide to my side and I stretch for it and shank it, and before it’s even off my strings she’s already shifted to cover the hole I left, because she reads my mistakes half a second before I make them, and I read hers, and the two of us cover a court like one slightly argumentative organism. The first time we played, a year ago, we spent the whole session in each other’s way, two people who’d only ever played singles, both certain the smart move was to take every ball themselves. Now she takes her side and trustsme with mine, and the trust is the entire game, and neither of us can quite believe we ever tried to do it alone.
“You’re crowding the middle,” she says, not turning around.
“I’m anticipating.”
“You’re crowding. If they lob you, I’m not saving you.”
“You’d save me. You can’t help it”
“I’mstrategic.There’s a difference.” A ball comes at her and she puts it away, crisp, and adds, over her shoulder: “There’s nothing and no one getting past this net today, Hawthorne. Try to be worth standing next to.”
It’s the same trash talk she fed me the first time we won a doubles match together, back when winning next to her was the most confusing thing that had ever happened to me. It’s a bit now, like everything good. But she means the last part, theworth standing next topart.
I’ve spent a year making sure the answer is yes.
***
Then my phone goes off in my bag by the fence. Loud. Mid-warmup. In front of the whole stand.
“You are very handsome and the smartest boy in the world!”
Her voice, ringing out over the court, mortified and magnificent, eleven months old, the forfeit she paid me at a gala, the fourteen-cent loss, the recording she ordered me to delete and I’d sooner have deleted my own hands. It’s still her ringtone. It will always be her ringtone. The whole front row loses it. Tess screams. Somebody’s kid asks why the phone is yelling.
And Charlotte, at the net, does not threaten to end me.
That’s how you’d know, if you’d been there at the start and came back for the finish. A year ago, that recording playing in public would have cost me a limb. She’d have marched over promising murder, and meant it, and I’d have loved every furious second. Now she just turns around, and finds my eyesacross the court, and, this is the part, she smiles. Not the private one she saves. The public one. The one she used to ration like it came out of her own blood. She lets a whole stand of people watch her be delighted that a boy kept a recording of her being soft. Because it’s ours now, the whole ridiculous thing.
She has stopped being ashamed of the evidence that she loves me.
“You could change it,” she calls over, grinning.
“I’d sooner delete my own hands,” I call back. Same line as always. It’s a bit now. Every good thing we have started as a fight and turned into a bit. That’s the whole language of us.
“Good,” she says, and turns back to the net, and I stand there in a full stadium having my heart handed to me by a woman who a year ago wouldn’t let me buy her a coffee, and I think:this is what earning something feels like.Nobody ever told me. You have to pay for it, and it has to be able to hurt, or it’s just a thing you were handed.
And a thing you’re handed, you can never really feel.
She calls me most days now, and every time, that recording plays, and every time I let it play all the way through before I answer, because eleven seconds of Charlotte Astor calling me the smartest boy in the world and failing to keep from laughing is the best thing I own, and because she knows I do it, and she calls anyway. That’s the whole trust, in a ringtone. She handed me the most embarrassing recording of her life, and I refused to delete it, and instead of that being a threat between us, it became a promise. She could take it back any day.
She never does. Every call is her deciding, one more time, to let me keep the evidence.
***
We make a bet before the first serve. Of course we do. It’s how we started; it holds the whole thing up now, in the good way, the one thread that runs the entire length of us.
But the stakes are the opposite of the first ones. The first bet was a war: her pride against my court hours, no family money, earn every dollar, loser humiliated in front of the school. This one, she leans in at the net and says, low, just for me: “Loser makes breakfast for a month. Winner picks the movie every Friday. And whoever double-faults first has to say the ringtone line out loud, right now, to my face, and mean it.”
“Those aren’t real stakes. We both win all of those.”
“I know,” she says. “That’s the point, Hawthorne. Try to keep up.”
And that’s the whole distance we’ve come, packed into a bet at a net. The first one was a duel, and we meant it, both of us, because back then everything between us was a thing one of us had to lose. We didn’t know how to want something together. We only knew how to compete for it. This bet has no loser anywhere in it. You could search it top to bottom and not find the thing to be afraid of, because we finally figured out that the person across the net was never the one you were playing against.
