Page 1 of Love All
CHAPTER ONE
Charlotte
MATCH POINT TAKES four strokes. Serve wide, backhand cross, forehand up the line behind her. Done. Marist’s number one dives like there’s a version of this story where she reaches it.
There isn’t. Six-two, six-love.
Love.Tennis’s word for zero. I just took a whole set off this girl, and the official record will say she scoredlove.It’s the funniest joke in organized sports. Nobody but me ever laughs at it.
We shake at the net. “You serve beautifully,” I tell her, warm as a handwritten note. My mother taught me that a compliment aimed right does more damage than any insult. She says a half-hearted thanks and walks off the court; a gaggle of friends waiting for her at the sidelines.
Exactly.
I collect my bag. I don’t look at my box. I already know what’s in it: nobody. My father is in Geneva, allegedly. My mother thinks showing up is a service you hire. That stopped being sad around tenth grade and it’s hard to miss what you never really had. I play better without an audience anyway.
The scoreboard claps loudest.
My phone buzzes while I zip the racquet in.
Indie writes:six and love?? CHARLOTTE. you’re disgusting. i love you. dinner?
Four exclamation points and a heart come back.‘Definitely,’ Irespond,‘and you’re the disgusting one. i have standards.’
That will be the warmest conversation I have all day, and I’m at peace with it. Indira Roy is my roommate, my confidant, and the one person alive I don’t keep score with. Everyone needs exactly one. More is a liability.
The locker rooms sit beyond the show courts, where the men's team is practicing this afternoon. Same as every afternoon. The schedule was apparently carved into stone sometime in 1962, and they defend it like a border. To get anywhere, I have to walk through them.
I wasn’t trespassing, per se. I was in transit through hostile territory.
You hear Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne before you see him. That’s the truest thing anyone will ever say about the man. A group of boys makes a specific noise when it’s arranged around him, a low rumble, an audience deciding in advance to laugh. I come around the windscreen and there it is. The semicircle. Him in the middle of it. Racquet dangling off one hand like he forgot he owns it. Not one drop of sweat on him. Telling a story with his hands.
Cole Whitman spots me first and does his little wave. I nod back. Cole has done nothing to deserve my contempt, and I try to be economical with it.
Then Benedict turns around.
Fine. Since we’re here. The boy is offensively good-looking, and I mean that as a formal complaint. Tall and loose, built like he’s never had to make room for anybody, Large shoulders. A team shirt that fits snug across a wide chest. Dark hair with the sun picking gold out of it, shoved back by a hand that considers product beneath it. And the mouth, always a half-second froma joke at your expense, because nobody has ever told it no. He looks like a trust fund that learned to walk. He looks like the reason legacy admissions exist. I noticed all of this exactly once, in September of last year. I’ve renewed my objection weekly ever since.
“Astor.” Warm, delighted, like I’m room service. “You’re glowing. Steal candy from a baby? Burn down an orphanage?”
“Six and love,” Cole supplies. Helpfully. Traitorously.
“Six and love.” Benedict puts a hand to his chest, wounded. “Charlotte, that’s art. Did she cry?”
“Winners don’t ask about crying. It’s a tell. It means you’ve thought about it.”
The semicircle rumbles, tips toward the laugh. I can pull that sound as easily as he can. I’d just never admit to wanting it.
“See,” he says. “No mercy.”
“No time.”
“You could have taken the other path,” he supplies, unhelpfully. “Or flown by on your broomstick.”
There isn’t another path and he knows it.“And miss the chance to run you over?”
“So you have been looking for me.”
“No one looks for misfortune, it’s…gravity.”
