Chapter Four - Benedict #2
She taps her card for ten and tells me to keep the true thing, so I give it to her anyway, that she has the look of the smartest person to walk out of that hall all night, which is accurate, you can see it in how she reads before she reacts — and she heads off into the cold standing about an inch taller than she arrived.
And that, right there, is the entire machine. Not the money. The inch. People will pay for the inch. They’ll line up for it.
They line up for it.
A guy stops who lost his grandmother to it — doesn’t say so in words, just “my grandma,” and taps his card and grips my shoulder once, hard, and leaves before either of us has to do anything about our faces.
Three girls from my econ lecture make me guess their names as the price of admission; I get two right and lie with tremendous confidence about the third, and the third one knows it, and pays anyway, laughing.
“You’re such a fraud,” she says, delighted.
“I’m a fraud for the children,” I say, and she puts in another five.
A professor donates twenty and informs me, while the reader chews his card, that my paper on the Marshall Plan was “structurally optimistic” and that I should decide for myself whether that’s a strength or a diagnosis.
I tell him I’ll take it under advisement.
He says that’s exactly what a structurally optimistic person would say, and leaves looking very pleased with himself, and honestly? Fair.
A kid, maybe nine, gets hauled over by his dad. He looks up at me with the unblinking audit of the very young and asks if I’m famous.
“Only to people with excellent taste.”
The kid considers this. “I have excellent taste.”
“Then I’m extremely famous.”
His dad laughs and gives fifty, and the kid makes me sign a napkin, and I ask his name and use it twice, and he leaves lit up like a scoreboard, and I stand there in the cold having a feeling I decline to name in a dinner line.
It works better than it has any right to.
Not the way Charlotte’s world works, no checks with commas, no boardrooms, no famous syllable doing the lifting.
Just people. A lot of people, who’ll give five dollars to a guy they half-recognize from the sports page because he made them laugh in a line they were standing in anyway, and then text their roommate, who comes and finds me.
By close I’ve raised four hundred and twelve dollars and eighty cents, one cheerful conversation at a time, and somewhere around dollar two hundred I finally see the shape of the only game I can win.
Charlotte’s going to go big. Obviously. She’ll build something architectural, a committee, a marquee event, a small number of enormous gifts extracted from people who can afford a wing, the whole thing run in clean vertical lines off a spreadsheet. That’s her game, and nobody alive plays it better.
I can’t play it at all. No rooms, no rolodex, no patience.
What I have is the one thing I’ve spent my whole life being faintly embarrassed by, the asset that never felt like mine because it never cost me anything: I can make an enormous number of ordinary people feel, for ten seconds, like the most interesting person at the fence.
So that’s the strategy. Volume. Reach. A thousand small yeses against her ten enormous ones.
Being liked, finally bolted to something that matters.
Standing there with eighty cents in change and a line still forming, it occurs to me that this might be the first plan I’ve ever made entirely by myself.
Nobody handed it over. I had to lose something to find it, had to sit in the specific humiliation of opening my own contacts and finding nothing I built, nobody who owes me, not one door my own two hands ever opened — and on the far side of that there was this.
A guy, a card reader, a sign, and a city’s worth of strangers who could not care less about my last name.
I’d take that humiliation a hundred more times to get to the part where something is finally mine.
Which leaves the genuinely hard problem. The one no card reader solves.
Charlotte.
I’ve been rehearsing between donations, under my breath, like a man losing his mind in a dinner line.
The pitch. How do you walk up to a girl who has publicly ruled that you’ve never earned anything and ask her to trust you with the happiness of the person she loves most on this earth?
Hey, Astor, I know you’d rather eat the net, but, no.
Astor, hear me out before you say the thing that ends my career, worse.
Every version that starts with me sounds like exactly what it is: a trap with good manners.
She’s spent a year learning to smell those off me from across a quad.
The only version that doesn’t curdle on the way out is the one that isn’t about me at all.
Indie’s in love with Cole. Cole’s in love with Indie.
You and I are the only two people standing close enough to fix it.
Every word true. No angle anywhere in it.
And that’s the whole impossible trick: with Charlotte, the scheme cannot be a scheme.
I’ll have to mean it, out loud, to her face, nothing up my sleeve — which I have never once attempted on Charlotte Astor, and I genuinely don’t know if I’ll survive the attempt.
Four o’clock tomorrow. Court four. I make a note to find out.
I pack up the card reader a little after nine, four hundred and twelve dollars heavier and stupidly, disproportionately happy.
Tomorrow the two weeks start. Two weeks chained to the only person who ever made me work for anything, with a fundraiser to lose, a best friend’s whole future to smuggle into position, and no plan whatsoever for how to convince the girl who diagnosed me with earning nothing that I’m worth standing next to.
I should go home and sleep.
Instead I sit on the dining-hall steps in the cold, counting fives into stacks, grinning at nothing, more awake than I’ve been in years.
I wanted something I’d have to earn.
I’m getting a great deal more than I bargained for, and I cannot, for the life of me, stop looking forward to it.