Chapter Two - Benedict
CHAPTER TWO
Benedict
I WIN MY match in straight sets, and I couldn’t tell you a thing about how.
That’s not modesty. Modesty is something you do on purpose, in front of people, like a serve.
I mean I walk off the court with a six-two, six-three next to my name and no memory of earning either number.
Forehands happened. People clapped. A kid in the third row cupped his hands and yelled that he loves me, and I pointed at him, because that kind of thing can make a Tuesday.
I sign his hat on the way out. Ask his name, use it twice, watch him light up. That’s the trick, the only one I’ve ever really owned. Make somebody feel like the most interesting person at the fence for ten seconds and they’ll give you their whole afternoon. It costs me nothing.
Which is the problem. As of an hour ago, it’s also the entire war chest I’m bringing to a fight with Charlotte Astor.
Coach meets me at the gate with the sigh of a man who stopped expecting me to be hungry around my sophomore year. “Clean match,” he says, which from him is a sonnet. “You’d have closed the second set twenty minutes sooner if you’d cared to.”
“I like to give the fans their money’s worth.”
“The fans get in free.”
Three years, same loop, both of us comfortable in it.
He walks off. I stand there holding a racquet a sportswriter once called, in print, a gift to the sport, and feel the usual nothing about it.
There’s a shelf of trophies in a house in Connecticut I couldn’t pick out of a lineup.
You can’t treasure what you didn’t pay for.
I worked that out early, and I keep it where I keep the true things: under a joke, in a back pocket, out of the light.
“You’re smiling like you got away with something,” Julian says, falling into step beside me, towel around his neck, doing the captain thing where he looks relaxed and misses nothing.
“I’m in a good mood. It’s allowed. People do it.”
“You bet Charlotte Astor you could out-fundraise her. Without the trust.” He says it slowly, like he’s reading me my own charges. “Ben. That woman has been beating people at things since the womb. Professionally. For sport.”
“So have I.”
“You’ve been winning since the womb. Different animal, and you know it, which is why you’re grinning.
Some sick part of you finally found a fight you might lose.
” He shakes his head at the sky. “You know what you two are? Same disease, opposite symptoms. One of you works for everything and can’t enjoy a second of it.
The other enjoys everything and never worked a second for any of it. ”
“Which one am I in this flattering theory?”
“You know which one.” He claps my shoulder, not unkindly.
“You’re going to fix each other or bring the whole athletic department down on top of us.
I haven’t decided which one I’m rooting for.
Both have upside.” He nods toward the locker room.
“Go check on Cole. He’s been holding one shoe for ten minutes. I’m worried.”
Here’s what I know about Charlotte Astor, since we’re now legally at war.
She’s the only person on this campus who can take me in a fair fight. Not tennis, the other thing, the fast mean one that happens in the half-second between somebody’s setup and somebody’s punchline. Everyone else hands me the room. Charlotte makes me earn every inch and then charges rent on it.
And the part that doesn’t add up: she doesn’t look like any of that.
She looks sweet. Dark hair pulled back tight, no loose ends, no mercy.
Big brown eyes you’d swear were gentle, right up until the half-second they cut you in half.
You could spot her across the quad, think what a nice girl, sit down expecting small talk, and stand up forty seconds later wondering who authorized the execution.
What that does to me I decline, daily, to investigate.
She thinks she hates me. She’s probably right. On a campus where everyone’s nice to me for free, a girl who finds me genuinely insufferable is the only honest mirror I own.
So when she said you’ve earned nothing, flat, certain, the whole court hearing the difference between a joke and a diagnosis — the smart move was to laugh and let it slide off with everything else.
Instead I looked at the one person alive who won’t hand me anything, and thought: fine.
Then I’ll go earn something the hard way, in front of you.
Not a normal response. But I watched my own rule scare her for half a breath, the same half-breath it scared me, and I want to know which of us is right about me.
Cole is, in fact, at his locker holding one shoe.
Cole Whitman is the best of us, which on a men’s tennis team is a low bar he clears by a country mile anyway.
He has the face of a golden retriever who’s just been told he’s a good boy and can’t believe his luck.
Right now he’s staring through the wall like it owes him money, and through that wall, give or take a hallway, the women’s team is finishing up. Somewhere in it is Indira Roy.
I know the symptoms. I’ve been running my own trial.
“Cole.”
Nothing.
“Cole. Buddy. The shoe.”
He surfaces, looks at the shoe like they’ve never met, sets it down with the careful guilt of a man hiding evidence. “I was thinking.”
“You were transmitting. On every frequency. It’s Indie. Don’t bother denying it — your face just confessed and lawyered up at the same time.”
“It’s not—” He stops, because Cole can’t finish a lie. Two words in, his conscience tackles him. “She’s friends with all those people. Astor. The whole—” He gestures at a category that apparently includes me. “She’s out of my—”
“If you say league, I’ll make you run lines.”
“She’s a full ride and a perfect GPA and she reads books for fun, Ben. And I’m—” he spreads his hands at the whole earnest six-foot expanse of himself “—this.”
“Right. Tragic. She’d never go for a kind, loyal, top-twenty doubles player with a face like a cereal mascot. Hopeless. Pack it in.”
“You’re not funny.”
“I’m extremely funny. Have you talked to her? Words, out loud, in a row?”
“We talked.” He says it to his lap. “At the mixer. About the bus schedule.” A pause. “It was a really good conversation about the bus schedule.” He looks wrecked. “She laughed. I think she was being nice.”
“What was the joke?”
He goes red to the ears. “I said the early bus is for people who hate themselves. Because it leaves at six.” He puts his face in his hands. “It’s barely a joke.”
“And she laughed.”
“She was being—”
“Cole.” I let it sit. “That crowd is the toughest room on campus. I’ve watched grown men break themselves trying to get a real laugh out of Charlotte Astor and walk away with nothing.
Those girls don’t hand it out. And Indie Roy spent some of it on your sad little bus joke. They don’t do that for just anybody.”
“She wouldn’t—”
“She might. People do.” Something pulls in my chest, the way it does around him. The tax on being the guy everything comes easy to is watching it come hard to the people you love. “You won’t know unless somebody finds out for you.”
He goes still, hopeful and terrified at once. “What does that mean. Finds out for you.”
It means nothing. Yet. It’s a loose thread, Indira Roy, the one person Charlotte Astor would walk through fire for. And Charlotte and I are about to spend two weeks locked in each other’s orbit anyway.
“Nothing,” I say. Which is true, and won’t stay true. “Get dressed. You’re holding the shoe again.”
He is, too.
I change slow, after everyone clears out, and let myself have the empty locker room and the thing I’ve been keeping off my face since the courts.
Here’s what I didn’t tell Julian, or Cole, or anyone: I have no idea how to win this.
Charlotte thinks the rule I invented is a cage I built for her.
It is. I also locked myself inside it, and at least she showed up with tools.
She’s spent twenty-one years learning how to make things happen, run a committee, write a grant, scare a room of donors into their checkbooks.
Me, I have a good swing and a smile. I’ve never organized anything that wasn’t a party or earned a dollar without my grandfather’s fingerprints on it.
So naturally I built something heavy on purpose, in front of the one person who’ll clock the exact half-second I start faking.
Brilliant. No notes, Hawthorne.
And the deranged part, the part I’ll admit in this locker room and nowhere else, is that I wouldn’t take it back. It scares me. It also feels like the first real thing in years. An actual opponent across the net, after a lifetime of hitting against a wall and calling the quiet a win.
I go out the back, which is how I see them.
The women’s team is done, but Charlotte and Indie are still on court four in the long gold light.
Not drilling. Just standing close, Indie talking fast with both hands, Charlotte listening.
And here’s the thing I’ll take to my grave: Charlotte is smiling.
Not the sharp one. A real one, loose and unguarded, aimed at her best friend and some story I’ll never get to hear.
She reaches out and tucks a picks a piece of lint off Indie without pausing the conversation, the gesture of a person with exactly one place on earth she’s allowed to be gentle, who decided this is it.
I stand in the doorway like an idiot and feel the whole bet rearrange itself in my chest.
I want to beat her. But for half a second, long enough to spook me, I think I’d hand her the win just to stand close enough to earn that smile once. The thought wanders in, has a look around, and leaves before I can ask it anything.
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.