Page 64 of Love All
“She told me to come. She didn’t tell me what to say.” I take a breath. “And that’s not the whole of why I’m here, so I’m going to be straight about the rest I need your help. I’ve got nothing to make you give it. And I’m going to ask anyway.”
He laughs once. Not warmly. “There it is.”
***
“Indie Roy didn’t do anything,” I say. “You know that better than anybody, because you built the version where she did. You told Cole it was a pity scheme. That she was in on it. That the whole thing was a con some rich kids ran on the sad guy. And now the whole school has that story, and she’s eating lunch under a hood, and Cole thinks the best thing that ever happened to him was charity.” I keep my voice level. Not smooth. Level. “The pity part was yours, Jack. You made it up to hurt me, and I get why. I earned it. But it didn’t land on me. It landed on a girl who never once wronged you, and a guy who used to bring me coffee when you stopped. You want to make me pay? I’m right here. I’ll stand still for it. But they’re not responsible. Let them off it.”
“Why would I do that.” He says it flat, but he’s listening. “Give me the actual reason. Not the guilt one.”
“Because you’re not me.”
That stops him.
“You never were. That was always the difference between us, and it’s the thing I was too dumb to see. I’m the one who lets other people pay. You’re the one who got stuck paying. You know exactly what it feels like to be blamed for a thing that wasn’t yours — because I did it to you. So you’re the one person in this entire mess who knows precisely what you’d be sparing her. I’m asking you to be the guy I wasn’t.”
He looks at me for a long time. I let him. I don’t fill it. That alone is new, a month ago I’d have greased the silence with a joke and ruined it.
“You’d have to say it too,” he says finally. “Not me alone. You don’t get to send me in to clean it and keep your nice face. If we fix this, you stand up and you say it was you. You set it up. Publicly. The golden boy did the scheming, not the girl. You lose the face.”
“I already decided to lose the face.” I mean it, and he hears that I mean it. “That was the price before I walked in here. I’m not trading you my reputation for your help. I’m spending it whether you help or not. I just can’t clear her by myself — because I’m the guilty one, so me saying it sounds like spin. You saying it is the thing that lands.”
Something in him shifts. Not to warmth. To a kind of tired, surprised respect, the look of a man who came ready to fight a coward and found somebody standing there with his hands open instead.
“Huh,” he says. “You actually changed. I told myself you couldn’t.”
***
That’s when Coach Leon walks in, because the universe has no sense of occasion.
“Devereaux, you locking up or not, I got the lights on a — Prescott-Hawthorne.” He squints at me. “You lost? Practice was this morning. You missed it, by the way. Second time this week. You dead? You look half dead.”
“Rough week, Coach.”
“Mm.” He’s already scanning the room for whatever he came in for. Coach Leon has exactly one gear, and it iswhat needs doing.He does not read rooms. He has never once read a room. I have watched him miss a marriage proposal happening ten feetaway because a net was sagging. “Somebody moved my good hopper. Devereaux, where’s the—” He spots it. Grabs it. And then, because Jack and I are both standing there not moving in a way that even he registers, adds: “You two look like a funeral. What.”
And I don’t know what makes me do it, except that he’s a neutral party and the truth needs a witness without a stake. “Coach. Straight question. Indie Roy. How long has she been into Cole Whitman?”
He looks at me like I asked whether water is wet.
“Roy? Whitman?” He snorts. “Since forever. Preseason, at least. Girl used to run drills with her whole head turned, watching him do sprints. Nearly took a ball off the face twice. I moved her court so she’d stop rubbernecking, and she rubbernecked from the new one.” He shakes his head, already losing interest. “Why’s everyone suddenly— I told her at the start of the semester. I said, Roy, either say something to the kid or hit the ball. You can’t do both. Whole team knew. You’d have to be blind.” He hoists the hopper. “Which, apparently so. Lock up, Devereaux.”
And he leaves. He has no idea, to this day, what he did. He walked into a room where a girl’s whole name was on the line, set it right on his way to a ball hopper, and walked back out thinking about the ball hopper.
The room goes quiet again. Jack is staring at the door Coach went through.
“Preseason,” he says slowly. “Before you and Astor ran anything.”
“Before we ran anything.” I let it sit. “She loved him first. On her own. All we did was knock on a door that was already there. The pity thing you told Cole — there’s the proof it was never true, and it came out of the mouth of a guy who wouldn’t lie tohelp me if his life depended on it. Cole will believe Coach. Coach doesn’t have a side.”
Jack sits down on the stool behind the desk. He rubs his face with both hands. When he takes them away, he looks younger and older at once.
“She really used to watch him do sprints,” he says. Almost to himself.
And I understand that Jack, who built the con story, maybe half-believed it himself. Needed it to be a con, because a con had a villain, and a villain gave the whole rotten two years a shape. Coach just took the shape away. Underneath it there’s only what was actually there: a girl who liked a boy. Two idiots who meddled out of love. And one guy who got hurt a long time ago, by someone who is finally, badly, saying sorry.
***
“I’ll talk to Cole,” Jack says. He doesn’t look up when he says it. “Not for you. Get that straight right now — this doesn’t make us anything. I’ll tell him the pity thing was mine, and it was a lie, and that Indie never knew a thing. Because Coach is right, and I’m not going to be the reason she eats lunch under a hood.'
