Chapter Eight - Benedict
CHAPTER EIGHT
Benedict
THERE’S A MOMENT in a match, you don’t pick it— where the thing you’ve been doing turns into a different thing without anybody calling it.
You’re rallying, trading, feeling each other out, and then one ball comes through that you both know is the real start, and everything before it was just two people deciding whether to play.
I’ve had that moment a thousand times across a net from Charlotte Astor.
I get it again the morning after the diner. Except this time we’re on the same side, and I can’t find the net anywhere.
She texts me at 6:01 a.m. — I know the time because I lie there looking at it like a man who has never received a text before, and it says, in full: Brief Julian today. He hears NOTHING about phase 2B. If he asks your motives, lie. You’re good at that.
No greeting. No punctuation she doesn’t mean. I grin at my ceiling for a full minute, because it’s the most romantic thing anyone has said to me in a year, and she would rather die than know I read it that way.
This is the new normal, and it arrived so fast I keep missing its edges.
A week ago, a text from Charlotte meant something had gone catastrophically wrong.
Now she sends me logistics at dawn, signs nothing, and assumes, correctly, that I’m already awake worrying the same problem from the other end.
As of the diner, we’re a two-person organization with a mission and an enemy, the enemy being the cowardice of our own best friends.
And I have never in my life belonged to a single thing I wasn’t handed the membership to. This one I talked my way into.
It sits different in the hand. Heavier. Mine.
So. Julian.
I catch him in the dining hall, because some conversations you have over institutional eggs so the other person can’t make them a big deal, and I lay it out: the operation, his role, the part where the most trusted mouth on the men’s team needs to let one true sentence fall within Cole’s hearing at exactly the right moment, Indie Roy can’t stop asking about him, delivered like a man who has no idea he’s holding a lit match.
Julian listens the whole way through without touching his food, which is how you know he’s taking something seriously. The man treats breakfast like a sacrament.
“No,” he says.
“You haven’t heard the—”
“I heard all of it. The answer’s still no, and then it’s going to be yes, but you have to sit through the part in between.
” He sets his fork down. “You spent two years telling me Charlotte Astor was the most exhausting human being on this campus. You once described her, verbatim, as ‘a beautiful migraine in tennis whites.’ I have it written down. I write the good ones down.”
“That’s flattering, actually. She’d like ‘beautiful migraine.’ Don’t tell her. She’ll use it.”
“And now.” He spreads his hands at me, all of me, like an exhibit.
“Now you’ve built a two-week covert operation that requires you to spend every spare hour at her side, planning a wedding for two other people, and you’re sitting here at seven in the morning glowing.
You’re doing the glow, Ben. I’ve known you a long time.
I’ve seen the glow exactly twice, and both times it ended in a spectacular romantic wreck that somehow became my problem at two in the morning. ”
“It’s for Cole.”
“It’s partly for Cole. Which is exactly what’s going to get you in trouble — that it’s genuinely, beautifully, partly for Cole, and you’re going to hide everything else behind him, because Cole’s a good enough reason that nobody will look further.
Including you.” He picks the fork back up.
“That’s the lecture. Eat your eggs. I’m in. ”
“You’re in.”
“Cole’s my friend too. And I’ve wanted those two to stop circling each other since the bus to the Stanford meet, where they sat one seat apart for nine hours and discussed the air conditioning.
” He shakes his head at the memory. “I’ll drop the sentence.
I’ll drop it so clean he’ll think God put it there. ”
“When?”
“The mixer. By the drinks, where every true thing gets said.” He thinks.
“And I’m not going to tell him. You can’t tell Cole he’s wanted — he’ll decide you’re being nice and hand it right back.
He has to overhear it. In the wild, off people who don’t know he’s standing there.
So I get a conversation going next to him and let the truth land where he is, and I don’t look at him once while it does. ”
“Overheard off who? It can’t be you or me, he’d smell us a mile out—”
“Reyes.” He smiles, slow. “That’s the whole beauty of it.
I don’t tell Reyes anything. Reyes can’t keep a secret because he never knows he’s holding one.
I just get him going on the single most obvious fact in the building — that Indie Roy’s been mooning at Cole for a month — and he does what he does, which is announce it tipsy and with feeling.
Cole hears his own best evidence off a man who has no idea he’s delivering it.
There is no cleaner plant on earth.” He points the fork.
“You just keep everyone else off that patch of carpet for ninety seconds. The girls especially. Margo gets within earshot, the whole thing’s a press release by sunrise. ”
“Sheepdog. I’m already on herding duty for the night. I contain multitudes.”
“You contain one multitude and it is want. Eat your eggs.” Then he looks at me, and the teasing goes out of it, which is the only thing about Julian that ever scares me.
“But Ben. When this is over — when Cole’s got his girl and the bet’s settled and there’s no operation left to hide inside — you’re going to be standing in a room with Charlotte Astor and no reason on the books to be there.
And you’re going to have to figure out what you actually want.
I just want you to know that day’s coming. So it doesn’t bite you in the ass.”
I tell him he’s been reading too much. He lets me. That’s the whole machine of Julian and me: he says the true thing once, plainly, then lets me pretend I didn’t hear it, and never charges me the difference. I’d die for him. I’d just rather not discuss it over eggs.
***
I check on Cole that night, the way you check on a man whose future you’re secretly building and can’t tell him about.
He’s in the common room not studying, which for Cole is a four-alarm emergency, staring at the same page of a kinesiology textbook he was staring at two hours ago.
“The exhibition,” he says, before I’ve even sat down. “Indie’s coming. To watch. The whole team’s coming, but she’ll — she’ll be there.”
“I’m aware. There’s a sign. Margo’s laminating.”
“There’s a mixer after.” He lays the textbook over his face, briefly, a man taking shelter under the only roof available.
“What do I say to her at a mixer, Ben? ‘Nice match’? I’m not even playing a real match.
I’m at number three. I’ll play one set against a sophomore and shake hands.
I have no material. I have no material.”
And here’s the thing about being the guy who always has material: you forget it isn’t something you earned.
It’s just there, the way the forehand’s there, issued in the crib with everything else.
Cole has to build his from nothing, in real time, terrified.
And the unfairness of it, the best man I know walking into that room dead certain he has nothing to offer a girl who has already, quietly, picked him — sits in my chest like a swallowed stone.
I can’t tell him it’s handled. That’s the brutal architecture of the whole thing. So I give him the only piece the rules allow.
“You don’t need material. You need to ask her one true question and actually listen to the answer.
That’s the entire trick, and you already do it better than any man on this roster, because you’re the only one of us who genuinely wants to know what people say back.
” I knock the textbook off his face. “Ask her something real. She’ll do the rest. I promise. ”
“Why would I trust you? You lie for sport.”
“I lie recreationally. About this, never.” Which is itself a lie — I am deceiving him with my whole chest in this exact moment — but only about the means. The end is the truest thing I’ve held in years, and I’d sign it in blood. “Trust me on this one, Cole. Just this one.”
He looks at me a second, then nods, because Cole trusts people.
It’s the best and most dangerous thing about him.
I go up to bed carrying the swallowed stone and the absolute certainty that if I get this wrong, if any of us get it wrong, it lands on the one person at this whole school who never once deserved it.
***
Nobody warns you how quiet it is on the other side of a rivalry.
For a year, Charlotte Astor was a sound I made.
A bit I performed. A war I showed up for.
Now she’s a partner in a crime, and partners don’t perform at each other.
They work. We work. We meet in the corner of the library nobody uses, behind the bound periodicals where the light’s bad and the chairs are worse, and we build the thing out piece by piece, and somewhere in the second session, she stops guarding every sentence.
She still insults me. God, constantly. But the insults have changed register.
They’re not keeping me out anymore. They’re just how she talks to someone she’s decided to let in.
She doesn’t know she’s started doing it, and I would walk into traffic before pointing it out.