Page 3 of Love All
I almost laugh at him. “You want to race me atfundraising.I could out-raise your entire roster from my bed. Before coffee.”
“Sure you could. One call to Mommy and Daddy Astor and the kids have a new roof by Friday.” He tilts his head, and there it is — the trap, wearing excellent manners. “So that’s the rule. No family money. No writing your own check, no dialing the name, no foundation, no trust, not one cent you share a bloodline with. You raise it with your own two hands, out of whatever’s actuallyyours.” He scoops a ball off the court and bounces it once, watching me. “Unless that’s the part that scares you.”
And, here is the part I will never say out loud, not under oath — it does. A little. Which is the only reason I say yes. This unemployed grin of a human being has just looked at the richest girl on campus and bet her that she can’t earn one single dollar nobody handed her. And for half a second, half of one second, I’m not certain he’s wrong.
Unforgivable.
“Fine. No family money. Both of us from zero. Most raised by the gala.”
“Most raised by the gala.”
“And when I win, what do I get?”
He opens his hands:name it.
I think about my alarm going off in the dark. About the women’s team running drills at six a.m. in the cold all season while these boys stroll onto sunlit show courts every afternoon, because that’s how the schedule has always, so mysteriously, shaken out.
“Court hours. When I win, the men’s team forfeits the afternoon blocks for the rest of the season. You take the six a.m.s. The whole roster, out there in the frost. And I want a chair, so I can watch.”
“Collective punishment.” Hand to chest, scandalized and thrilled at once. “That’s dark, Astor. The other boys didn’t do anything.”
“The other boys benefit from a system. It’ll do.”
“You are going to be aterrifyinglawyer.” He puts his hand out. “Done. And when you lose—”
“Which I won’t—”
“You say, out loud, in public, meaning every word: that I am the most handsome, smartest boy in the world.”
“In theworld.”
“I’ve grown ambitious in my old age. Take the terms — or tell everyone here you’re scared of a little honest work.”
And it’s a good deal. It’s an extraordinarily good deal, which is exactly the thing I should stop and examine. Strip off the names and the whole bet is effort against ease, and I have never met the human being who can out-work me. In the impossible event I lose, it costs one sentence I’d rather swallow glass than mean.
I am the most careful person I know. I measure sleep in fifteen-minute blocks. And I don’t hear the trap close, because he built it from the one material I’d never think to inspect: my certainty that I’m right about him.
“Fine,” I say.
Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne smiles like I’ve handed him something he’s wanted for a year and was too well-mannered to steal.
“Fine,” he agrees.
Julian whistles, low. A freshman whispersoh, it’s onand gets shoved quiet. The whole semicircle resettles like an audience buckling in for a long and bloody season, because every one of them understands the thing I’m too pleased with myself to see. A bet only feels easy to the player who hasn’t noticed she agreed to play.
He doesn’t shake my hand. He holds my eyes a second too long instead, like a door he has no intention of letting close.
“Easiest wager of my life,” I tell him, already walking, taking my exit like a professional. “Enjoy the season, Hawthorne. I’ll enjoy the silence after it.”
“Astor.”
I look back. Second mistake of the afternoon.
He has the racquet up on his shoulder and the whole gold afternoon behind him and an expression I don’t have a category for. Patient. Certain.
“Fifteen-love,” he says. “We’re keeping score now.”
I don’t dignify it. I push through the door and let it slam on the sound of boys laughing, and the whole length of the corridor I tell myself the obvious: the score is nothing. Love means nothing. I’ve just been handed the easiest win of my life.
