Page 4 of Love All
I’m very good at lying to exactly one person, and I never let myself do it.
In that corridor, I make the exception. I don’t even feel it go.
CHAPTER TWO
Benedict
I WIN MY match in straight sets, and I couldn’t tell you a thing about how.
That’s not modesty. Modesty is something you do on purpose, in front of people, like a serve. I mean I walk off the court with a six-two, six-three next to my name and no memory of earning either number. Forehands happened. People clapped. A kid in the third row cupped his hands and yelled that he loves me, and I pointed at him, because that kind of thing can make a Tuesday.
I sign his hat on the way out. Ask his name, use it twice, watch him light up. That’s the trick, the only one I’ve ever really owned. Make somebody feel like the most interesting person at the fence for ten seconds and they’ll give you their whole afternoon. It costs me nothing.
Which is the problem. As of an hour ago, it’s also the entire war chest I’m bringing to a fight with Charlotte Astor.
Coach meets me at the gate with the sigh of a man who stopped expecting me to be hungry around my sophomore year. “Clean match,” he says, which from him is a sonnet. “You’d have closed the second set twenty minutes sooner if you’d cared to.”
“I like to give the fans their money’s worth.”
“The fans get in free.”
Three years, same loop, both of us comfortable in it. He walks off. I stand there holding a racquet a sportswriter once called, in print,a gift to the sport,and feel the usual nothing about it. There’s a shelf of trophies in a house in Connecticut I couldn’t pick out of a lineup. You can’t treasure what you didn’t pay for. I worked that out early, and I keep it where I keep the true things: under a joke, in a back pocket, out of the light.
“You’re smiling like you got away with something,” Julian says, falling into step beside me, towel around his neck, doing the captain thing where he looks relaxed and misses nothing.
“I’m in a good mood. It’s allowed. People do it.”
“You bet Charlotte Astor you could out-fundraise her. Without the trust.” He says it slowly, like he’s reading me my own charges. “Ben. That woman has been beating people at things since the womb. Professionally. For sport.”
“So have I.”
“You’ve beenwinningsince the womb. Different animal, and you know it, which is why you’re grinning. Some sick part of you finally found a fight you might lose.” He shakes his head at the sky. “You know what you two are? Same disease, opposite symptoms. One of you works for everything and can’t enjoy a second of it. The other enjoys everything and never worked a second for any of it.”
“Which one am I in this flattering theory?”
“You know which one.” He claps my shoulder, not unkindly. “You’re going to fix each other or bring the whole athletic department down on top of us. I haven’t decided which one I’m rooting for. Both have upside.” He nods toward the locker room. “Go check on Cole. He’s been holding one shoe for ten minutes. I’m worried.”
Here’s what I know about Charlotte Astor, since we’re now legally at war.
She’s the only person on this campus who can take me in a fair fight. Not tennis, the other thing, the fast mean one that happens in the half-second between somebody’s setup and somebody’s punchline. Everyone else hands me the room. Charlotte makes me earn every inch and then charges rent on it.
And the part that doesn’t add up: she doesn’tlooklike any of that. She looks sweet. Dark hair pulled back tight, no loose ends, no mercy. Big brown eyes you’d swear were gentle, right up until the half-second they cut you in half. You could spot her across the quad, thinkwhat a nice girl,sit down expecting small talk, and stand up forty seconds later wondering who authorized the execution. What that does to me I decline, daily, to investigate.
She thinks she hates me. She’s probably right. On a campus where everyone’s nice to me for free, a girl who finds me genuinely insufferable is the only honest mirror I own.
So when she saidyou’ve earned nothing, flat, certain, the whole court hearing the difference between a joke and a diagnosis — the smart move was to laugh and let it slide off with everything else.
Instead I looked at the one person alive who won’t hand me anything, and thought:fine. Then I’ll go earn something the hard way, in front of you.Not a normal response. But I watched my own rule scare her for half a breath, the same half-breath it scared me, and I want to know which of us is right about me.
Cole is, in fact, at his locker holding one shoe.
Cole Whitman is the best of us, which on a men’s tennis team is a low bar he clears by a country mile anyway. He has the face of a golden retriever who’s just been told he’s a good boy and can’t believe his luck. Right now he’s staring through the wall like it owes him money, and through that wall, give or take a hallway, the women’s team is finishing up. Somewhere in it is Indira Roy.
I know the symptoms. I’ve been running my own trial.
“Cole.”
Nothing.
