Page 65 of Love All
“Thank you.”
“He’s not going to make it easy on me.” Jack says it plainly, working it out. “I walk up to Whitman and go, hey, remember when I blew up your life at that dance? Turns out I was lying. He’s going to want to hit me. Or he won’t believe me — because why would the guy who told him the con story suddenly un-tell it?”
“Tell him about Coach.” I thought about this the whole drive over — the one part I did get to plan. “Don’t lead with you. Lead with Leon. Cole knows Coach doesn’t have a dog in this and couldn’t spin his way out of a paper bag. You say: ask Leon how long Indie watched you do sprints. Then let Cole go askhim himself. Coach will tell him the same clueless thing he told us, and it won’t sound like anybody’s angle, because it isn’t one. That’s what turns it. Not you. Not me. A guy who moved her court so she’d stop staring at Cole a year before either of us did anything.”
Jack thinks about it. “That’s actually good,” he admits, like it hurts.
“I have my moments. They’re rare and I waste most of them.” I almost smile. “The other thing — when you tell Cole the pity part was yours, don’t protect me in it. Say I set the scheme up. Say I’m the one owning it publicly. He’s going to need somebody real to be angry at, and it should be the person who earned it. That’s me. Not her.”
“You keep doing that,” Jack says. “Handing me the version where you take the worst of it. It’s weird on you. I don’t trust it yet.”
“Fair. Watch me tomorrow. Then decide.”
“And you say your part. Public. I hear you softened it, I take mine back.”
“Tomorrow. In front of whoever’s around. I’ll own the scheme, I’ll own that Indie didn’t know, I’ll take the hit.” I hesitate, because there’s one more true thing, and I promised myself no more soft edges. “And Jack — this part’s separate. It’s not part of the deal. You don’t owe me anything back for it. The sorry stands whether or not you ever talk to me again.”
He doesn’t answer that. He picks the clipboard back up, which is a man’s way of sayinggo now, before one of us says something we can’t walk back.
I go.
I get outside into the cold and stand there, and I wait to feel like I won something, because that’s the feeling I’ve organized my whole life around.
It doesn’t come. There’s no trophy. Indie’s name gets cleaned tomorrow and mine gets dirtier. Jack still isn’t my friend. Charlotte still isn’t mine. I did a hard thing, and there is nothing at the end of it but the fact of having done it.
I think about his face when Coach saidpreseason.The way the con story came apart in his hands and left him holding nothing to hate. I expected that to feel like a win, I took his weapon, disproved his lie, got what I came for. It doesn’t feel like a win. It feels like watching a man realize the thing he’s been carrying to stay upright is made of paper. Whatever’s between Jack and me, it didn’t finish tonight. You don’t close two years with one apology in a supply room, no matter how true it is. I handed him the sorry. What he does with it, whether it ever becomes something either of us can stand in, that’s his, on his clock. And I have finally learned enough not to go reaching for it.
That turns out to be enough to stand up straight under. Barely. For the first time.
I go to call Charlotte and tell her it’s done, and then I don’t, because there’s no result to report that isn’t hers to feel secondhand. This one I did alone. Exactly like she asked. I text two words instead.He’s in. Coach helped.She writes back one word, after a minute,Good, and I look at it longer than four letters deserve, and then I put the phone away, because it isn’t the time, and we both know it isn’t the time.
I go home to the empty apartment to figure out how a person says sorry to a whole school at once. There’s no script for it. You can’t charm a confession. The charm is the thing you’re confessing. I sit at the kitchen counter where Cole used to sit, and I don’t write anything clever. I just decide the true sentences and put them in an order,I set it up. She didn’t know. The pity story was never real. I’m the one who lied to you all. Be angry at me, and I say them out loud to the empty room until they stop shaking.
Same as I did with the mirror before the formal. Except this time I’m not one hour early to a thing I’ll fumble. This time I’m going to walk out and mean it in front of people, and lose the only thing I never had to work for, on purpose.
And I find that I can’t wait. That’s the part I’d never have believed a month ago.
I can’t wait to pay.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Charlotte
THE TRUTH GETS out the way Ben does everything, which is to say in front of as many people as possible.
I’m not there for it. That was the deal, his mess, his podium, no note cards from me. But a thing like that travels, and by evening I’ve heard it from four people who were in the athletic center when he did it. He waited until the after-practice crowd was thick, and then he said it plainly, no charm on it: that he and I set up Cole and Indie. That Indie never knew a thing. That her feelings were always her own. That the con story going around was a lie somebody told to hurt him, and it landed on her instead. He named himself the one who schemed. He named himself the liar. He stood in a room that has adored him his whole life and handed it every reason to stop, on purpose, and then he walked out without waiting to see what it did to his face.
I hear it and I have to sit down. Not because it surprises me. Because I asked him to do it, and he did it exactly as asked, and better, he took more of the weight than the deal required, shaved off every edge that might have fallen on me, and he did it knowing there was no version where it won him anything back. I spent a year certain a man like that would always find the door.
He found the podium instead.
I don’t call him. I want to. But it isn’t the time, and I am learning, slowly, the difference between the things I want to do and the things that are mine to do.
I see him Wednesday, though, from across the quad, see what it cost him, and I have to make myself keep walking.
He’s alone. That’s the thing. Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne has not been alone in a public space in the three years I’ve known of him. There is always a knot of people around him, drawn in by the shine; he moves through campus like a small warm event. Not today. He crosses the quad by himself, and two guys from the men’s team see him coming and find somewhere else to look, and a girl who’d have died for his attention a month ago pulls her friend the other way and stage-whispers something. He recognizes all of it. He doesn’t turn on the grin to win any of them back. He just takes it. He told a room full of people who loved him to stop, and they did, and now he’s learning what the days feel like on the other side of that, and he’s carrying it upright, without complaint, without spin, like a man paying an invoice he’s decided is fair.
I stand at the edge of the walk and watch the whole campus discover it can do without him, and something turns over in my chest that I am in no position to feel, and have no right to, and feel anyway. Because I know that walk. I have made that walk my entire life, the cold solo crossing, the people finding somewhere else to look. It’s the walk of a person who has decided that being right about the hard thing is worth more than being liked. Until about eleven days ago, I’d have told you Ben was constitutionally incapable of it. He’s doing it like he’s been doing it for years. He’s doing it because of a mess I made half of.
