Chapter Seven - Charlotte
CHAPTER SEVEN
Charlotte
I TELL BENEDICT Prescott-Hawthorne I’ll think about it, which we both understand to be a yes, and then I go home and lie awake until three in the morning being a hypocrite about it.
Here’s the problem, laid out the way I lay everything out, in clean columns, so I can look at it and hate it properly.
Column one: two weeks ago, in our own lounge, Indie took my wrist and said don’t and leave it and it’s a nothing, and I squeezed her hand and let her believe I would.
That is the closest thing Indira Roy has ever given me to a direct instruction.
I do not break my word to Indie. It’s the one clause in my entire life with no exceptions printed underneath.
Column two: I am now, as of approximately four o’clock this afternoon, in a confirmed conspiracy to do the precise thing she asked me not to do.
And column three, the one I keep trying not to read, is a single sentence in my mother’s handwriting, metaphorically speaking.
The family motto I flung at Benedict on the court like it proved I was different: deciding what’s best for someone and calling it love, so they’re not allowed to argue.
I said it like an accusation. I said it like a thing I would never.
And within the hour, I’d agreed to manage the romantic life of the person I love most on earth.
Behind her back. Against her stated wishes.
Because I have privately decided I know better than she does what will make her happy.
That is not a different thing from what my mother does. That is the identical thing, in a younger coat. I lie in the dark and look at it from every angle, and I cannot make it be anything else.
The only defense I can mount, and I mount it all night, is that Indie’s don’t wasn’t a real no.
It was the reflexive flinch of a girl who decided in advance that the good thing isn’t available to her, and is protecting herself from the humiliation of reaching.
I know that flinch. I watched it cross her face in the lounge, aimed at a boy laughing on court two, and I recognized it instantly, because I have one of my own.
Shaped differently. Pointed at different things. Same animal underneath.
Don’t, when Indie says it about Cole, does not mean I don’t want this. It means I’m too afraid to want it out loud.
Which is, of course, exactly the rationalization my mother would use. They always have a reason. The reason is always that they can see what you can’t. The reason is always love.
I get up at five-forty, because lying there has stopped being rest and started being penance, and I hit serves into the empty deuce court until the sky goes gray and I’ve made myself a deal I can live with.
I’ll do this. But I’ll do it inside Indie’s own grain, never against it.
I will not invent a single feeling. I will not forge a word.
I’ll clear obstacles and engineer proximity and otherwise keep my hands where she could see them, and the second, the second, it costs her more than it gives her, I burn the whole operation down, tell her everything, and take whatever she hands me for it.
It’s a coward’s compromise, the kind you make at dawn to get yourself out of bed.
It gets me out of bed.
***
Indie’s at the kitchen counter when I come in, hair wet, eating cereal standing up the way she does when she’s running late — and she looks so completely herself, soft and unguarded and entirely unaware that two people spent last evening plotting the rearrangement of her heart, that the guilt comes back up my throat like coffee.
“You were out early,” she says. “Even for you.”
“Couldn’t sleep.”
“The bet?” She points her spoon at me, sympathetic. “How’s the war effort? Margo says you made the children’s fund refuse your own family. She told the whole team. She’s deeply proud and slightly worried about you.”
“No, I didn’t refuse,” I admit. “I just asked them not to attach Astor to the donation. The foundation gets the money but nothing tied to my contributions.”
“Respecting the bet. Nice. But also I can’t help but notice your lack of transparency for the war effort,” she says, narrowing her eyes.
I shrug.
“The war effort is going badly, and I refuse to discuss it before nine.” I steal a piece of cereal directly from her bowl — a thing she permits from me and nobody else — and she lets me.
The small ordinary permission of it makes the column-three sentence flare hot under my ribs.
“How’s — anything? How are you? What’s your day? .”
She gives me a look, because how are you is not a sentence I deploy at six-fifty in the morning.
Then she decides to let it go, because that’s the other thing Indie does, the thing the entire world should be required to study under her: she lets you off the hook you climbed onto yourself.
“Bio, then meet prep, then I’m watching you and Hawthorne pretend not to be a power couple at four.
The whole team’s coming. We’re bringing a sign. ”
“You are not bringing a sign.”
“We are absolutely bringing a sign. Margo’s already laminating.”
She sets her spoon down. “Cole’s in the lineup, did you know. They’ve got him at three for the men’s side.” She says it to the middle distance, far too evenly, the way you set down a name you’ve been carrying all morning. “He’s been working on his second serve. I heard. Somebody mentioned it.”
“Somebody mentioned it,” I repeat.
“It came up.” Pink now, at the tips of her ears. She catches me watching and rolls her eyes at herself. “Don’t. I know. Shut up.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You did the face.” But she’s smiling — helpless, a little wretched with it — and that, if I’m being honest, is the moment the column-three guilt finally loses its case.
Because I can keep my tidy little promise and watch her carry his name around this kitchen like a stone for another four months.
Or I can break it, quietly, and hand her the one thing she’s too brave-scared to reach for herself.
Standing there watching Indie go soft over a boy’s second serve, I know exactly which Astor I’m about to become.
I make my peace with her in advance, while she still has every reason to trust me.
She rinses her bowl, blows me a kiss — she always does it, and it always makes me laugh a little — and says, “Be nice to him today. You’re scary when you’re losing a bet.”
And there it is, handed over free with breakfast: be nice to him today. She has no idea what she’s authorizing. I almost tell her right then. The whole thing is balanced on my tongue, and I could set it on the counter between us and let her decide, the way I lectured Benedict she deserved to.
I don’t. I tell myself it’s because she’d be late for Bio.
It is not because she’d be late for Bio.
***
We meet that night in the back booth of a diner two blocks off campus.
Neutral ground, chosen by me, precisely because it’s loud and ugly and impossible to mistake for anything.
Benedict is already there when I arrive, the second time he’s beaten me somewhere, and I’m starting to take it personally — and he has a milkshake with two straws in it, which he slides to the center of the table without comment.
A provocation I decline to acknowledge, and then drink from for the next two hours.
“I brought a plan,” I say, and set it on the table.
It’s four pages. It’s tabbed. It has a Gantt chart, because if I’m going to betray my best friend’s confidence, I’m going to do it rigorously. Benedict picks it up and reads the first page with an expression of slowly dawning delight that I find unbearable and cannot look away from.
“You named it,” he says.
“It needed a name. A project without a name is a wish.”
“You named it Operation Hero.” He looks up. “Shakespeare?”
“Hero’s the girl in the play. The one everyone schemes to get together with the man she—” I stop, because he’s grinning at me like I’ve confessed to something, and I have not confessed to anything. I’ve made a literary allusion. That is a different thing. “It’s efficient. It encodes the objective.”
“It’s romantic is what it is. You’re a romantic. It’s in the paperwork now. I have it in writing—”
“It is a code name. Do you have a plan, or did you bring vibes?”
He produces, from his jacket pocket, a single index card. On it, in handwriting far better than a man like him has any right to, are three words:
Make her brave.
I look at it longer than I mean to.
“That’s not a plan,” I say. “That’s a fortune cookie.”
“It’s the whole plan. Everything in your four pages is in service of that — you just buried it under a Gantt chart.
” He taps the card. “Cole doesn’t need a strategy.
Cole needs to find out, before he loses his nerve, that the worst thing won’t happen.
That if he reaches, she reaches back. Same for Indie.
They’re both standing in the dark with their hands behind their backs, waiting for proof.
So we don’t manufacture anything. We don’t lie.
We just keep arranging it so the proof is unavoidable.
Make her brave. Make him brave. Get out of the way. ”
And the genuinely infuriating thing, the thing I’ll be choking on for the rest of the season, is that his fortune cookie is better than my four pages.
It’s kinder, for one. My plan is a machine for producing an outcome.
His is a plan for giving two people back to themselves.
Mine would work. His would work and let them keep their dignity, which is the part I skipped, because skipping the dignity is the family specialty, and apparently I’ve absorbed more of the house style than I like to admit.