Page 61 of Love All
Julian drinks his coffee. He’s known me since we were fourteen. He doesn’t rush to tell me I’m wrong, which is how I know he’s wondered the same thing.
“You want to know what’s under it,” he says. “I’ll tell you what I’ve seen. It comes out maybe twice a year, for about ten minutes, and then you paint over it. It came out sophomore year for exactly one week, and you’ve spent the two years since making sure it never happened again. It came out at that fundraiser, when you built the whole thing yourself and beat her by fourteen cents and didn’t gloat once.” He shrugs. “There’s a guy in there who tries. He’s just never been allowed to lose anything, so you keep him in a drawer. That’s the tragedy of you, Ben. Not that there’s nothing under the charm. That there’s a decent man under it you’ve been too comfortable to let out.”
I don’t say anything. He lets me not say anything.
“Then find out fast,” he says finally. “Because Indie’s the one wearing this, and she didn’t do anything. Cole’s a mess, and he’ll grovel his way back eventually — that’s a Cole problem and a Cole solution. But Indie got called a liar in front of three hundred people for a thing that was true and clean andhers,and right now the whole school thinks she ran some cruel little con on a nice boy. That doesn’t fix itself. That needs somebody to stand up and say what actually happened. Out loud. With their name on it. At a cost.” He looks down at me. “You’re good at names. You just usually put them on trophies.”
***
I sit with that all day. I’d have sat with it longer if I hadn’t gone out for food and run straight into what it looks like from the outside.
Two girls I half-know are ahead of me in the sandwich line, and they’re talking about it, the way you talk about a thing that isn’t yours to be hurt by. One of them calls itthe tennis thing.The other says she heard the whole relationship was a bet, that Indie and the Astor girl picked out the shy guy and ran a number on him for fun, and isn’t that dark, and God, imagine being that guy. They aren’t cruel about it. That’s the sick part. They’re enjoying it, lightly, the way I have enjoyed a thousand things lightly. And the story they’re passing back and forth has Indie Roy cast as the villain, cold, calculating — and it is the exact reverse of the truth, and it is already the official version.
Then I actually see her.
Indie. Across the dining hall. Alone, eating fast, the way you eat when you just want to be done being visible. She has her hood up. Indie Roy, who lights up a bus at six in the morning, sitting under a hood, trying to take up less space. Somebody at a far table laughs, and she flinches and checks whether it’s aimed at her. It isn’t. She couldn’t have known that. So she flinched anyway.
She used to be the warmest room in any building. Now she’s checking exits.
I don’t go over. I’d make it worse; I’m radioactive to her by now, and rightly. I put my sandwich back and leave. But I carry her out with me, the hood, the flinch, the checking — and it does what two years of nothing failed to do. It makes the bill real. Not an idea about carelessness. A person. Eating under a hood. Paying for me.
The thing I keep running into isn’t whether I can do it. It’s that I can’t see a version where it worksandgets me anything. If I stand up and tell the truth, I confirm, in public, that I’m the guywho schemes and ruins things. That Jack was right. That I float and other people drown. Charlotte will hear it and it’ll just be the last brick in the case she’s already closed on me. Cole won’t come back to me for it. Indie owes me nothing. There is no ending where I do the hard thing and get to keep my face.
And somewhere in the afternoon, I understand that this is the point. That’s what a bill is. You don’t pay it to get something.
You pay it because you owe it.
I have spent my whole life on the other math. I only ever put in effort where there was a trophy at the end, a match, a grade, a girl who said no long enough to be interesting. Everything without a prize attached, I called not worth it. I was proud of that. I thought it made me easy to be around. The not-worth-it pile is where I put Jack. It’s where I’d have put this, six months ago.
It turns out the not-worth-it pile is just the pile of people who were counting on me and learned not to.
I keep thinking about a thing Julian’s said for years, that I enjoy everything and earned none of it. He means it fond. It’s not fond. It’s a diagnosis. You can’t value a thing you didn’t pay for, and I have never paid for anything, so I’ve never valued anything, so it has never hurt to lose. Until her. Until this. Until a girl under a hood in a dining hall.
The hurt is the receipt. I’m holding my first one.
I don’t have a plan. That’s her department, not mine. But I know the shape of the thing I have to do, and for the first time in my life it has no upside, no trophy, no clean face at the end, maybe not even a thank-you — and I want to do it anyway. I sit with how new that is.
It feels like the first honest muscle I’ve ever used.
I’m still sitting with it when someone knocks on the door. Not Cole’s knock. I know every knock that door gets, and I don’t know this one. It’s light and even and it comes exactly twice, aknock with no wasted motion in it, and I get up to answer it with my heart doing something stupid before my head has caught up to why.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Charlotte
I STAND OUTSIDE his door for six minutes before I knock. I time it, because timing things is what my hands do when the rest of me is scared.
I came with a plan. Of course I came with a plan. Old habits don’t die because you’ve had a bad week; they get quieter, and wait. On the drive over I built the whole approach, the order I’d say things in, the concession I’d open with, the point where I’d let my voice go soft to move him. I optimized it at three red lights. And standing in his hallway, I make myself take the plan out of my hands and set it down. Because the plan is the disease. And I did not drive across town to run one more play on one more person I love.
Which leaves me with nothing to hold, which is the state I have spent my whole life avoiding. I nearly turn around twice. The second time, I get as far as the top of the stairs. What stops me isn’t courage. It’s the picture of Indie under a hood in the dining hall, Margo described it to me, gently, the way you tell someone a thing they need but won’t like — a girl who used to fill a room, now trying to disappear from one. I put that picture in front of the part of me that wants to leave, and it holds me still long enough to walk back.
So when he opens the door, I don’t have my first line ready. That’s the point. I want to find out what I say when I’m not performing.
He looks terrible. I mean that kindly. He looks like a man who hasn’t slept and has stopped trying to hide it, which I have never once seen on him. No grin comes up to meet me. He just stands there holding the door, and something crosses his face when he sees it’s me, hope, quickly put away, because he’s learned better than to show me that one.
“Charlotte,” he says.
“I need to ask you for something.” My voice comes out steadier than I am. “And I need to say some things first. And I’d rather do it inside, if that’s — if you’ll let me in.”
