Page 67 of Love All
***
She waits until I can look at her again. Then she says, in the light voice she uses right before she says something that isn’t light at all:
“So. You heard what he did. In the athletic center.”
“I heard.”
“He stood up in front of everyone who’s ever loved him and told them to stop, so my name would get clean.” She watches me. “He had no angle, Lotte. There was no version where it got him you.” She squeezes my hand once and lets it go. “I’m going to say one thing, and then I’ll leave it. You spent a year sure that boy would leave you the second it got hard. He just set himself on fire in public for a mess that was half yours, and asked you for nothing. At some point, you’re going to have to decide whether the story you’re scared of is the one that’s actually happening.”
She gets up to make tea. I sit there on the floor.
“You’re doing the thing where you go quiet and build a case for why it’s not that simple,” she says, running the tap to fill the pot, her back to me. “I can hear you doing it from here.Don’t. For once in your life, let a thing be as simple as it is. He took accountability. You like him so much you invented a whole personality to survive it. Two scared people who could stop being scared if one of them went first.”
She sets it on the stove and leaves me on the floor with it, and does not wait around to see if it worked.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Benedict
BEING UN-GOLDEN is quieter than I expected, and I don’t hate it as much as I thought I would.
A month ago I’d have told you the shine was the best thing about me, that if you took away the easy warmth, the way rooms tilt toward me, there’d be nothing underneath worth keeping. I built my whole life on that fear without once looking at it straight. Turns out the shine was mostly a thing other people didtome, and I mistook it for a thing I was.
The week after I stand up in the athletic center and tell everyone the truth, the campus does what campuses do. It decides I’m a jerk. Then it gets bored of deciding anything. Mostly, it just stops saving me a seat. People I floated past for four years find out I’m a guy who schemed and lied, and a few of them have clearly been waiting a long time to get to think that about me, and they enjoy it, and I let them. The grin doesn’t come out to fix it. I’ve retired the grin from that particular job.
It turns out you can walk across a quad with nobody’s eyes on you and not die. Nobody ever told me. I built a whole life around not finding out.
What I feel, mostly, is lighter. Which makes no sense, I’ve lost the thing I was handed at birth, the easy warmth of every room, and I should be grieving it. Instead I keep catching myselfstanding straighter. I think it’s because for twenty-two years I carried the low background hum of a man who suspects he’s a fraud, and I finally did a thing a fraud couldn’t do, and the hum went quiet.
You can’t feel like a phony about a bill you actually paid.
Practice is the clearest place to feel it. I walk into the men’s session Monday and the temperature drops a couple of degrees. It happens when people have been discussing you and stop. A couple of the guys nod, careful. One doesn’t. Coach Leon watches me hit for a while and then wanders over during water and says, “Heard you made a whole speech.”
“I did.”
“Long overdue, some of it,” he says, and leaves it there — which, from Coach, is a eulogy and an absolution in one breath — and goes back to worrying about a sagging net, because a sagging net is the only kind of drama he acknowledges.
The old me would spend the rest of the session winning the room back, one joke at a time, until everybody remembered why they liked me. I hit my baskets and go home. It’s a strange muscle, letting people think a true thing about you and not rushing to soften it.
I’m still sore from using it.
***
Cole comes back on a Thursday.
I hear the key and I don’t get up too fast this time. I just wait, and he comes in, and he stands in the living room where his shelves are still half empty, and he looks at me for a second.
“You told a whole building it was you,” he says. “That I didn’t get pitied. That she never knew.”
“Because it’s true.”
“You made yourself the bad guy in front of everyone so my name and hers would come clean.” He sets his bag down. Notto leave. To stay. “Jack found me. Told me to go ask Coach how long Indie watched me do sprints. So I did. And Coach looked at me like I was stupid and said,preseason, kid. Everybody knew. I moved her court.” His voice does something. “She liked me before anybody schemed anything. She’d have liked me anyway. All you two did was get me to open a door I was too scared to knock on.”
“That’s all it ever was, Cole.”
“I know that now.” He rubs the back of his neck, the way he does. “I’m sorry I called it the meanest thing anyone ever did to me. I was hurt. Which is — that’s kind of your whole lesson, isn’t it. I did the thing you did to Jack. Aimed a bill at the guy who happened to be close.” He almost laughs. “Small school.”
I don’t smooth it over. A month ago I’d have made a joke to skate us past the feeling. I let it sit there instead. “You get to be angry that we meddled. That part’s fair. We should’ve told you both a long time ago and let you decide what to do with it. The scheming wasn’t the crime. The keeping it from you was.”
