Page 6 of Love All
Some things you don’t poke at.
Cole wants exactly that from the girl getting her hair fixed. Charlotte would walk through fire for that girl. Two weeks. A bet. The four of us knotted into all of it together.
Loose threads, pulling taut.
I pick up my bag, grinning like a man with a concussion. For once, I earned it.
CHAPTER THREE
Charlotte
THE COURT AT six in the morning belongs to me, because nobody else is willing to pay for it.
That’s the whole secret. It isn’t even a secret, it’s a bill. You want the thing? Get up in the dark. Lace up while every muscle you own votes against it. Walk onto frost-stiff hardcourt with your breath hanging in the air, and hit, and hit, and hit, until the sun comes up and finds you already two hours better than yesterday. I’ve done it every morning since I was eleven. It’s the closest thing I have to religion, and like most religions it demands everything and promises nothing. I prefer a deal where I can see the catch.
I serve a basket into the deuce corner until eighteen of twenty catch the line. Again from the ad side. The light comes up gray, then gold, over seven empty courts, and somewhere around the third basket I let myself have the picture I’ve been saving: this exact hour, eight weeks from now, the entire men’s roster shivering in it. Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne, who has never met a six a.m. that wasn’t the tail end of the night before, standing right here, learning what the cold costs.
I hit the next serve harder. It’s good to have goals.
People love the tragic version of this. Poor little rich girl, alone in the cold, playing to empty bleachers. They have itbackwards. Everywhere else on earth I’m a last name with a girl attached. Out here there’s no donor wall, no trust, nothing to inherit, just me and the ball and the line and the honest question of whether I’m good enough this morning. It’s the only room I’ve ever been in that doesn’t care who my father is.
I’d live out here. I’ve priced it.
By seven-fifteen Indie is beside me on court three, and the morning stops being church and starts being the one part of my life I’d describe, under oath, as happy.
“You’re doing the face,” she says, feeding me a backhand.
“I don’t have a face.”
“You have one face. It’s this—” and she does an impression that is, infuriatingly, just me: flat mouth, murderer’s eyes “—and it means you’ve decided to ruin someone. I lived through the whole story last night. Twice. You made me reenact his expression.”
“You should be grateful. It’s a gift, watching a Prescott-Hawthorne discover that money can’t buy him out of a six a.m.” I send the backhand back, deep and mean. “Eight weeks. I out-raise that boy by a margin that humiliates him into the sea, I stand on a chair at the gala and accept his apology, and then he runs dawn lines until June.”
“You’re so romantic.” She catches the ball, holds it. “What’s the charity again?”
“Children’s wing. Pediatric oncology.” I keep my voice light, the way you have to carry the things that aren’t. I looked it up at two in the morning and didn’t sleep much after. “Which is the one part of this that isn’t a joke. So we win it like it isn’t one.”
She smiles at me — the real one, the one I’d burn this complex down to protect. “There she is.”
Margo and Tess find us at the net during water. Margo has the team’s coffee order written on her hand, because she refuses to trust her phone with anything important; Tess is narratinga story before she’s in earshot, which is the only way Tess tells stories. They’re the rest of it. The fortress. Four years of two-a-days and bad bus food and one unspoken deal: whatever the world decided we were, the heiress, the scholarship kid, the loud one, the one who peaked — we got to decide what we were to each other.
“Okay, the gala,” Margo says, dropping onto the bench. “Are we doing it as a thing? Because if Charlotte’s at war, I want assignments.”
“Charlotte’s at war,” Tess confirms. “Look at the face.”
“It’s a good face,” Indie says loyally. Then, less loyally: “She made me do impressions.”
“Assignments,” Margo repeats, uncapping a pen against her forearm like the coffee order needs company. “I can build a spreadsheet, I can guilt my whole sorority into their parents’ wallets, and I have the one advantage nobody can teach, which is a complete absence of shame.”
“She really doesn’t have any,” Tess says. “I watched her ask a stranger for his jacket once. He gave it to her. Hethankedher.”
“It was cold and he was wildly overdressed. I did him a kindness.” Margo levels the pen at me. “The point, Lotte, is you don’t get to do this one alone. You do everything alone. It’s your single worst quality, and it only beats the murder face by a nose.”
I let them have it. That’s the trade with the fortress: you let them see you want something, you let them make it a project, and in exchange you get the one thing the Astor name never bought me, people who’d show up at six a.m. for a war that isn’t theirs.
Then practice ends, I go start the war, and discover I have no idea how to fight it.
Here’s what nobody tells you about being an Astor: the name is a key, and you’re not allowed to notice the doors it opens, because noticing is vulgar. I’ve spent twenty-one years not-noticing. So when I sit down to do the obvious thing, raise an obscene number, fast, the way I would for any committee I’ve ever chaired — I open my contacts and hit a stair that isn’t there.
