Chapter Four - Benedict
CHAPTER FOUR
Benedict
THE EXHIBITION PAIRINGS go up on the corkboard outside the locker room on a single sheet of paper, and I know which line is mine before I can read it, because six guys are already standing in front of it making the noise.
It’s a specific noise. Somewhere between a stadium ooooh and the hiss of air leaving a slashed tire. You learn it early as an athlete. It means something has happened to somebody, and the somebody is about to find out it happened to them.
“Dead man walking,” Reyes says, parting the crowd like an honor guard at a funeral. “Hawthorne. Buddy. Did you do something to God personally?”
I look at the sheet.
MIXED DOUBLES — FOUNDERS’ EXHIBITION
And there, second line down, in Coach Leon’s flat block capitals, like a verdict, like a dare, like the single best piece of news I’ve gotten all year, an opinion I am determined to keep to myself:
ASTOR / PRESCOTT-HAWTHORNE.
“Two weeks,” Reyes says, with relish. “Two weeks of practices. With her. She’s going to bury you in a shallow grave on court four and the boosters are going to clap.”
“She might,” I agree, because agreeing is the fastest way to take the air out of a roomful of men enjoying themselves. “She’ll look incredible doing it. I’ll sell tickets to my own funeral. It’s for the children.”
“He’s into it,” Reyes announces to the room, scandalized. “Look at him. He’s pleased.”
“He’s not pleased, he’s planning,” Julian says from the next stall, not looking up from his laces, because Julian reads me the way other people read a scoreboard. “Which is worse. Pleased wears off.”
“I’m standing right here.”
“We know. We’re discussing you anyway. Builds team chemistry.”
“I’m always pleased. It’s my brand.” I clap his shoulder and head for my locker, and I do not let one single member of this roster see my face do the thing it wants to do, which is something undignified involving my whole chest.
Because here’s the truth I’m not handing out for free: I’ve just been chained to the most interesting person on campus for fourteen days.
By official athletic-department decree. With a paying audience, Coach Leon’s blessing, and no way for Charlotte Astor to claim she chose it.
She can’t run; the scheduling won’t let her.
For two weeks the most relentless avoider I’ve ever met has to stand four feet from me and learn my rhythm, and her only option is to show up furious, which happens to be one of my favorite things in the world to watch her be.
And then there’s the doubles of it, which occurred to me approximately one second after the her part did.
Charlotte doesn’t play with people. She plays at them.
She’s the best singles player I’ve ever shared a facility with for exactly one reason: she decided, sometime around age eleven, that a partner is just a second person standing close enough to lose your match for you.
Now she has to put half a court in my hands and trust me not to drop it. Twice a day. Two weeks. Paying crowd.
I have no idea whether she can do it. I am deeply, unwisely curious to find out.
So that’s engine one, idling nicely.
Engine two starts up about ten seconds later, when Cole comes around the lockers, sees the sheet, and lights up like the Fourth of July before he can stop himself.
“You’re paired with Charlotte,” he says.
“I’m aware. Reyes is drafting the eulogy.”
“No, but—” He catches himself, but I’ve already seen it — the leap his whole openhearted face made before his brain could finish the paperwork — and now I get to watch him try to walk it back and fail, because Cole couldn’t hide a feeling in a hurricane.
“It’s just. The exhibition. The women’s team will be there.
For the doubles they pair everybody, so. Everyone’s there. Indie’ll—”
He stops.
“Indie’ll be there,” I finish for him, gently, because watching Cole attempt her name is like watching a man defuse a bomb in oven mitts. “At the exhibition. Watching.”
“Watching the tennis,” Cole says, fast. “She likes tennis. It’s a tennis thing. She’ll be watching the tennis.”
“Sure.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m not doing anything. I’m putting on a shoe.
” I put on the shoe. “I’m only observing that if a person wanted, hypothetically, to end up standing near another person at a crowded charity event, an exhibition is a very forgiving environment.
Lots of milling. Lots of accidental proximity. Nobody keeping score.”
Cole looks at me with the slow dawning horror of a man who has watched me operate. “No.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You have the face. The scheming one.” He drops to a hiss. “Ben. I swear to God. Do not manage this. Do not make me a project. Last time you made my life a project, I gave a toast at a wedding.”
“And they’re radiantly happy.”
“They send you a card every year, Ben.”
“Because I’m a humanitarian.” I stand, knock my shoulder into his. “Go shower. You smell like longing and you’ve got drills.”
He goes, throwing one last suspicious look over his shoulder, and I sit back down on the bench and feel the whole thing arrange itself in front of me like a play diagrammed on a whiteboard, every arrow suddenly obvious.
Cole has it bad for Indie, spottable-from-orbit bad.
Indie, and I’d put my ranking on this, is at minimum interested back, because nobody on that side of the facility laughs at a six a.m. bus joke out of charity.
They are two decent, terrified people standing in separate rooms waiting for the other one to knock, and they will keep standing there, politely, until graduation, because that’s what decent terrified people do.
And the one human being on earth holding a master key to Indira Roy, the person whose blessing would tell Indie it’s safe to want the thing she wants — is Charlotte Astor.
Who I’m about to spend two weeks standing four feet away from. By decree. With nowhere for either of us to run.
I have, on occasion, been accused of coasting.
Of letting things land in my lap and calling it talent.
Fair, all of it. But the second I see a way to get my best friend the thing he’s too scared to reach for, and a reason to stand next to Charlotte that has nothing to do with a bet — my brain comes online in a way it hasn’t in years.
All cylinders. Every light on the dashboard.
I’m going to get Cole and Indie together.
And I’m going to need Charlotte to do it.
The trouble with that plan, the only trouble, but it’s a big one.
Charlotte Astor would saw off her own serving arm before she’d help me with anything, on principle, for free.
She’ll assume it’s a trap. She’ll be right to; everything I’ve ever offered her has been one.
So I can’t pitch it as help me. I have to pitch it as help Indie.
And I have to mean it, because she’ll smell the exact moment I don’t.
The deranged part, the part I keep turning over all afternoon, through drills, through dinner is that I do mean it.
I want Cole to have the good thing. I want Charlotte to want to help me hand it to him.
I want, if I’m being honest, which I try very hard never to be, a project the two of us share that isn’t a war.
I make the mistake of saying some of this to Julian on the walk back to the dorms. Not all of it. The Cole-and-Indie part.
“Let me make sure I have the shape of this,” he says.
“Your plan — to win a fundraiser you don’t know how to run, while playing a sport you refuse to take seriously, next to a partner who would pay cash to watch you drown — your plan is to add a covert matchmaking operation.
On behalf of Cole. Requiring the active cooperation of Charlotte Astor. Who hates you.”
“When you line them all up like that, it sounds like a lot.”
“It sounds like a man building his own gallows and asking to borrow rope.” He walks a few paces, hands in his pockets. “Want to know what I think this actually is?”
“Not even slightly.”
“I think you’d find a reason on God’s green earth to spend two more hours a day near that girl, and Cole’s sad little heart is the noblest one currently in stock, so you’re requisitioning it.”
“That is an ugly thing to say about a man performing a selfless act of friendship.”
“It’s an honest thing to say about a man performing a selfless act of friendship for three reasons and copping to one.
” He claps me on the back, hard, the way he does right before he’s correct at me.
“For what it’s worth: go get Cole his girl.
He deserves it, and you’ll be insufferable until you’ve fixed somebody.
Just don’t lie to yourself about whose idea you’re actually running. ”
I tell him he’s seeing things that aren’t there. He smiles and lets me have the point, which is the most ruinous thing he does, because we both know what it costs him: nothing. He’s not conceding. He’s filing the win for later.
Just another Tuesday. I go deal with the other impossible thing, which is money.
Here is my complete knowledge of fundraising on day one: nothing.
Here is my asset column: a forehand, and the ability to make strangers like me.
There’s only one experiment worth running, can the second thing be converted into actual dollars, so at the dinner rush I plant myself outside the dining hall with a borrowed card reader and a hand-lettered sign that says: ASK ME WHY I’M SMILING.
For the first four minutes, nothing. A river of students parts around me the way crowds part around anyone holding a sign, which is a humbling thing to learn about signs.
Then a girl in a chem-lab hoodie stops, reads it, looks at me, and says, flatly, “Why are you smiling?”
“The pediatric oncology ward downtown is twelve beds short, and I’m trying to fix it before a girl I know out-raises me and I die of public shame. Five dollars?”
She blinks. “That’s weirdly specific.”
“I’m a weirdly specific guy. Five dollars and I’ll tell you one true thing about yourself.”