Chapter Nine - Charlotte
CHAPTER NINE
Charlotte
THE SIGN SAYS ENEMIES TO TEAMMATES: A LOVE STORY, in Margo’s best laminated capitals, with a glitter-pen asterisk after LOVE leading to a footnote at the bottom: terms and conditions apply.
Tess is holding one end. Indie is holding the other.
They made me a sign. I told them, explicitly, in writing, not to make me a sign.
The whole fortress has turned out. Margo has a second sign in reserve, rolled up, which she will not let me see and which I can only assume is worse.
Tess has done something to her face that reads, from any distance, as war paint in school colors.
And the alumni hall is strung with enough banners and bunting that the children’s wing could probably be funded by recycling the cardboard, which is the point, I keep reminding myself.
This absurd, glittering, overlit machine exists to move money toward sick kids.
The fact that it has also become a public referendum on whether Charlotte Astor and Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne are finally going to kill each other or kiss is, the boosters clearly feel, a bonus feature.
Tickets sold out in a day. Coach Leon has stopped bothering to hide how pleased he is.
The narrative is printing money exactly as promised.
The narrative, God help me, is me.
“It’s for the gate,” Tess calls, when I glare. “Boosters love a narrative. You’re a narrative now. Smile.”
I do not smile. I walk onto the show court in front of four hundred paying strangers, beside the most distracting human being I have ever shared a baseline with, and discover, over the next forty minutes, the genuinely alarming truth I’ve been outrunning since the first practice.
I’m happy.
Not pleased. Not satisfied — satisfaction I know.
Satisfaction is the cool clean feeling of a thing done correctly.
This is the other one. The loud one. The one I don’t get and don’t trust. It arrives somewhere in the first set, when Benedict poaches a ball I’d have sworn was gone, flicks it cross-court for a winner, and turns to me with his whole stupid face lit up, expecting — what, applause, acknowledgment, the thing everyone gives him for free — and instead I say, “Lucky,” and he says, “Teach me your ways, O great one,” and the crowd laughs, and something in my chest comes loose that I have spent a great deal of energy keeping bolted down.
We’re good. We are show-court good. His serve sets up my net, my net sets up his put-away, and the rhythm we stole in practice holds up under four hundred pairs of eyes and a glitter sign.
The other pair — a perfectly nice mixed duo out of the alumni pool — never has a prayer, because they are two people sharing a court, and we are, increasingly, alarmingly, one thing wearing two shirts.
The nice alumni man tries, once, to get into our heads. A little gamesmanship: how cute it is, the matched set, did we coordinate the whole thing? I feel Benedict draw the breath to be charming about it.
I get there first.
“We didn’t coordinate,” I tell the man, pleasantly, lining up my return. “He’s just very easy to carry.”
The alumni woman laughs before she can stop herself — the single cruelest thing one opponent can do to another — and Benedict puts a hand over his heart and says, “She doesn’t mean it,” and I say, “I mean it precisely,” and we break them across the next four points, because nothing on earth dismantles a doubles team faster than watching the other one enjoy each other.
That’s the variable I never ran, drawing my diagrams. I planned for tolerating him.
I did not plan for the specific, disqualifying pleasure of a partner at the net who gets the joke before I’ve landed it.
Who sets me up without being asked. Who takes the ugly ball so I can have the pretty one and never once waits around for a thank-you.
Out here, with him, I don’t have to carry the whole thing myself.
Eleven years of every coach I’ve ever had calling that a strength, Astor does it all, Astor needs no one — and not one of them ever mentioned how heavy it was.
Nobody had ever picked up the other end long enough for me to feel the difference.
“Match point,” Benedict murmurs at the baseline, low, just for me. “Want it down the T, or do you want to be fancy?”
“I’m always fancy. Down the line. I’ll close.”
“God, you’re terrifying. Marry me.”
“Serve the ball, Hawthorne.”
He serves. They float it back. I close the way I close and put it away into the open court, and the crowd comes up off the benches, and Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne picks me up, picks me up, one arm, off the ground, a thing I have not permitted since I was approximately nine — and I let him, for exactly as long as it takes the photographer to get it.
Then I inform him that if he ever does it again I’ll end his career, and he sets me down grinning.
“Worth it. Front page. You’re going to hate the caption.”
I already do. I don’t. Both are true.
That’s the trouble with the loud feeling. It doesn’t ask permission. It just shows up, in front of four hundred people and a laminated sign, and makes a liar out of every conclusion you’ve ever drawn.
Cole plays his set after ours, number three, one set against a sophomore, exactly as advertised — and wins it, unspectacularly, kindly, the way Cole does everything.
I don’t watch the tennis. I watch Indie watch the tennis.
She’s gone still in the way that costs a person something: leaning forward, chin in her hand, her whole face turned up toward a boy hitting a perfectly ordinary second serve like he personally invented the concept.
And I think: there it is. That’s the thing I’m not allowed to leave alone.
Whatever I promised myself at dawn, whatever furniture I’m about to become, the alternative is letting her sit in the dark wanting that for four more months out of sheer politeness. I can’t do it. I already decided. I just get to decide it again, watching her, and it gets easier every time.
Which is precisely the sentence my mother would say. I drink my club soda and choose not to hear her.
***
The mixer is the actual work. The match was just the cover.
They hold it in the alumni hall, bad carpet, good lighting, a cash bar the boosters pretend not to use — and it is, structurally, the best matchmaking environment ever devised.
Loud enough that two people have to lean in to hear each other.
Crowded enough that proximity reads as accident.
Lubricated enough that the terrified become briefly, fatally brave.
I drew the whole thing as a diagram. I memorized the diagram.
And now I stand at the edge of it with a club soda I have drained, running my operation like a tipsy air-traffic controller of other people’s hearts, which is a thing I swore to my own reflection at dawn I’d never become, and became anyway by approximately 9:15 p.m.
The irony is not lost on me. It’s never lost on me.
I built my entire self in opposition to exactly this, the smooth invisible management, the warm hand on the elbow — and here I am running the play with my mother’s own hands, for reasons I’ve ruled nobler and therefore exempt.
They’re always exempt, when they’re yours.
I tell myself the difference is that I’ll burn it down the instant it turns on Indie, and I hold onto that like the one true thing in a pocket full of rationalizations.
Phase one: proximity. I have Indie by the elbow within twenty minutes, steering her in a loose, chatty, entirely natural-looking arc that happens to terminate eight feet from where Cole Whitman stands failing to drink a beer.
I do it the way my mother would, smoothly, invisibly, with a warmth that costs nothing because it isn’t entirely real — and then I do the one thing my mother never would, the only thing that lets me sleep.
I let go of her elbow. I step back. I leave her there, with her own two feet and her own free will and no further help from me. Because the whole point, the entire fragile point, is that the next eight feet have to be hers.
“Where are you going?” Indie says, a little panicked, a girl who has just noticed the water getting deep.
“Bar. You’re fine. You’re great. You’re the most interesting person in this room and everyone here is lucky to breathe near you.” I mean that part completely. “Go be terrifying.”
Across the hall, Benedict catches my eye over the heads of forty boosters and gives me a look, go?
, and I give him the one back, go, and it occurs to me, mid-signal, that we’ve developed a private language.
An entire grammar of eyebrows and chin-tilts, the kind couples spend years assembling, thrown together by accident over seating charts.
I can now hold a complete conversation with this man across a crowded room without either of us making a sound.
By any sane measure, a catastrophe.
He peels Reyes off toward the food. He steers two stray teammates clear of the strike zone.
He works the room like the room is his, it is; it always is — and for the first time I watch him do the effortless thing and don’t resent it, because tonight it has a target.
He’s a sheepdog, he had told me. He’s my sheepdog.
I have several thoughts about the word my in that sentence and put each one down where I found it.
Phase two: the proof. This is the part I am, against my better judgment, proud of, because we are not going to tell Cole anything.
You can’t tell a man like Cole he’s wanted.
He’ll decide on the spot that you’re being kind and discount it to zero.
He has to catch it himself, in the wild, unsupervised, off a mouth that has no idea he’s listening.