Page 25 of Love All
Charlotte hates the plan. Not because it’s bad — because it’s good, and it requires trusting me to improvise, and trusting me to improvise is, in her words, “like handing a toddler a flare gun and hoping he aims at the sky.”
“You’ll oversell it,” she says, the night before, in the bad-light corner of the library. “You’ll get up there and do thething,the Hawthorne thing, you’ll make it a performance. One false note and she’ll know the whole month was staged, and it’ll break her heart, and it’ll be your fault, and I’ll have to kill you. Which I’d hate. I’ve gotten used to you. It’d be like losing a particularly annoying limb.”
“I’m touched.”
“Don’t be. A dead partner is a forfeit, and I do not forfeit.” She pulls the four pages of Operation Hero toward her. The crown I drew on it in the diner has since been joined by a whole constellation of my other vandalism — a mustache on the wordProximity,a tiny stick figure weeping besidePhase 3.She’s kept every mark. She thinks I haven’t noticed that she’s kept every mark. “I mean it, Hawthorne. This is the one that can actually wound her. Cole’s was easy — you can’t hurt a man by telling him he’s loved. But Indie has spent her whole life guarding against exactly this. If she catches one breath of stage management, she won’t just stop believing Cole likes her. She’ll stop believing any of it was ever real — all of it, every kind thing anyone’s ever done for her. That’s a specific and permanent damage, and I will not be its author.”
“I know,” I say. And I mean it, and I don’t make a joke of it, which she notices, and which makes her look at me a half-second too long.
“Don’t sell it. That’s the only note. Whatever you’d normally do — do less. Be boring. Be true and boring. Can you do boring?”
“I have never once in my life done boring.”
“I know. That’s why I haven’t slept.”
Here’s the thing she doesn’t know, because telling her would mean explaining how I know it: I don’t have to perform sincerity about Cole. I have it on tap. I’ve watched that man ache over Indie Roy for a month, quietly, decently, expecting nothing. The truth is so close to the surface that the hard part isn’t selling it. The hard part isnotselling it. The hard part is keeping a thing that real from coming out so big it tips over into a lie.
***
We do it in the training room, the day before the second exhibition.
Charlotte gets Indie there on a pretext so clean I almost applaud, a second opinion on a wrist wrap, a thing Indie cannot refuse, because Indie cannot refuse being needed by Charlotte. That’s the one lever in the world that moves her. And it’s the cruelest, most loving thing about Charlotte’s whole method: she doesn’t lie to Indie, not once, not even here. She just deploys the truest fact she owns about her best friend, that Indie would walk into traffic if Charlotte said she needed help crossing the street. A wrist that doesn’t hurt. A second opinion she doesn’t need. And watching it work, I finally understand exactly what Charlotte is so terrified of becoming. Because I’ve just watched her be devastating at it. And I’ve watched it cost her something to do it that well. And she did it anyway, for love, which is precisely the sentence her mother would use.
She parks Indie on a treatment table with an ice pack and a magazine, says something about grabbing tape, and leaves. Ten feet away, on the other side of a half-wall, where the acoustics do the thing acoustics do, Julian and I come in mid-conversation, and do not stop, and never once look over.
I’d like to tell you it was easy. It is the hardest forty seconds of acting I’ve ever done, and I’ve been acting my whole life. I act delighted. I act bored. I act like things don’t land that landlike artillery. But I have never had to actnaturalwhile every cell in my body wanted to crane around and check whether it was working. The trick to a staged overheard scene, it turns out, is the trick to a drop shot: total commitment to the lie that you’re doing something else entirely. So I look at Julian. Only Julian. And I pour a month of watching Cole ache into a voice pitched for a man who’s certain nobody’s listening, and I let the truth do the carrying. At the end of the day, the truth, said plainly, where a girl who’s spent her whole life sure she isn’t allowed to have it can catch it by accident, hits harder than anything you could invent.
“—he’s not going todoanything, though, that’s the thing,” Julian is saying, pitched at a man who believes the conversation is private. “He just keeps it in. It’s killing him and he keeps it in.”
“He told you?”
“He didn’t have to tell me. You’ve seen him.” A shrug, perfectly bored, perfectly real. “He learned her coffee order off a girl on her team. He’s got the bus schedule for her away meets memorized and he’s not even on that bus. Cole.Cole.It’s like he’stoomuch of a gentleman. It’s so frustrating.”
And then I say the only line I scripted. The one I argued with Charlotte about. The one I made true-and-boring on purpose, flat, a little frustrated, the way you talk about a friend you love who won’t help himself:
“It’s Indie. He’s been head over heels since September. It’s like he’d rather lose her slow than risk her fast. And I can’t watch it much longer.”
The magazine stops moving.
That’s the whole tell with a person pretending to read. The page stops. I don’t look. Julian doesn’t look. We complain about Cole’s stubbornness for another forty seconds the way men do, affection dressed as exasperation, every word of it true — and then we wander out toward the courts without looking back,and behind us a girl sits very still on a treatment table, holding an ice pack to a wrist that doesn’t hurt, redoing math she’s had backwards for a month.
Charlotte is waiting around the corner, out of sight, vibrating.
“Well?”
“Page stopped. She heard it. All of it. Clean.”
And Charlotte Astor, who spent the entire setup certain I’d ruin it, who trusts approximately four people and a ball machine — looks at me for one second with something I have never been on the receiving end of from her. Not a verdict. Not a barb. Not a wall. Something in the neighborhood ofthank you.
Then she ruins it immediately, because she’s her. “You did boring. I genuinely did not think you had it in you.”
“I contain multitudes.”
“You contain one, and it’sshow-off.” But she bumps her shoulder into mine as we walk. Once. On purpose. A thing she’d have died before doing in week one.
“Huh,” I reply, not precisely to her, “Julian said something very similar.”
“Your captain is a wise and handsome man.”
