Chapter Ten - Benedict
CHAPTER TEN
Benedict
BY THE SECOND week of being chained to Charlotte Astor, we’ve stopped being two players and started being a problem.
That’s the technical term, in doubles, for a team nobody wants to draw.
They’re a problem. You say it low, the way you’d talk about a bad knee, something to plan around.
And we’re getting there fast. Fast enough that Coach Leon has started importing actual ranked pairs to practice against us, just to see.
Fast enough that we’ve beaten two of them, which should be impossible for a team two weeks old held together by a charity bet and a private matchmaking conspiracy, and isn’t, because the thing that makes a doubles team isn’t talent.
It’s knowing, without looking, where the other person is going to be.
I always know where she’s going to be.
That’s the trouble. That has become the trouble with my entire life.
It’s a strange skill, knowing where a person will land.
On a court, it wins matches. Off one, it just means you’ve started tracking somebody without anyone’s permission.
I know she takes the deuce side because her backhand is a guillotine.
I know she goes silent for exactly one point after missing an easy ball and comes back meaner.
I know she touches her strings twice before a big serve, like a guitarist checking the tune of their instrument.
I know her tells now the way I know my own.
I learned her in two weeks the way I’ve never bothered learning anything, because everything else in my life arrived without the learning.
She’s the first thing I’ve ever had to actually pay attention to just to keep up with.
I’d pay more. That’s the part I’m not telling anyone, least of all her. I’d pay whatever they asked.
“You’re poaching too early,” she says, mid-drill, in the tone of a woman who has caught you committing a small federal crime.
“I’m poaching at the perfect time. I’m poaching with vision.”
“You’re poaching with optimism, which is different, and it leaves the whole alley open behind you, which is where a competent team puts the ball, which is where I then have to be, which is across the entire court. Because you got excited.”
“I got excited because we were winning.”
“We were winning because I was covering your optimism.”
“See, this is teamwork. You complete me.”
“You’re dumb,” she says.
I stop. Put a hand to my hip. “What are we, five? You’re dumb? That’s the comeback? Charlotte Astor. Pre-law. Four-point-oh. Dismantler of grown men. You’re dumb?”
“You’re extra dumb,” she says, with enormous dignity, “and now you’re dumb and talking,” and she serves a ball directly at my stomach, which I have to fold around like a deck chair. Behind us, Reyes makes the noise a man trying not to laugh and failing. Utterly.
That’s the level of discourse we’ve reached by week two: two of the most verbally lethal people on this campus reduced to you’re dumb / no, you’re dumb.
Because somewhere under the strategy and the insults, the thing has gotten, and I want to be precise here — fun.
Not charming-fun. Not performance-fun, not the kind I do for a room.
The other kind. The kind you can’t fake, can’t schedule, and can’t, it turns out, walk back.
We win the drill. She tells me my footwork is a hate crime. I tell her I love her too. She throws a towel at my head. Standard.
Reyes has started keeping a tally on the locker-room whiteboard — INSULTS TRADED, with our initials and little hash marks, like we’re a nature documentary he’s appointed himself to narrate.
He’s up over forty and has stopped pretending to find it annoying.
“I used to think you two would kill each other,” he tells me, surveying his work with pride.
“Now I think you’ll get married, and the best-man toast is going to be ninety straight minutes of this, and I’ll have to sit through all of it. ”
I tell him there’s nothing to it. It’s a class project with a deadline.
He draws one more hash mark and labels it, in careful capitals, DENIAL.
The man is a menace. He isn’t wrong about much.
***
The harder job that week is Indie.
Cole had the easy disease. It lives all over your face, sometimes you catch it in the wild off a loud teammate at a drinks table.
Indie’s is quieter and meaner and buried deeper, because Indie decided, sometime before any of us met her, that the good things are for other people.
She’s built a whole gentle life around not reaching.
You don’t undo that with one overheard sentence.
She needs proof that holds. She needs to catch Cole’s feelings the way Cole caught hers, sideways, unsupervised, off a mouth that doesn’t know she’s there.
And there is exactly one mouth on earth that can deliver the truth about Cole Whitman’s heart with total authority and zero suspicion.
Unfortunately, it’s mine.
Charlotte hates the plan. Not because it’s bad — because it’s good, and it requires trusting me to improvise, and trusting me to improvise is, in her words, “like handing a toddler a flare gun and hoping he aims at the sky.”
“You’ll oversell it,” she says, the night before, in the bad-light corner of the library.
“You’ll get up there and do the thing, the Hawthorne thing, you’ll make it a performance.
One false note and she’ll know the whole month was staged, and it’ll break her heart, and it’ll be your fault, and I’ll have to kill you.
Which I’d hate. I’ve gotten used to you.
It’d be like losing a particularly annoying limb. ”
“I’m touched.”
“Don’t be. A dead partner is a forfeit, and I do not forfeit.
” She pulls the four pages of Operation Hero toward her.
The crown I drew on it in the diner has since been joined by a whole constellation of my other vandalism — a mustache on the word Proximity, a tiny stick figure weeping beside Phase 3.
She’s kept every mark. She thinks I haven’t noticed that she’s kept every mark.
“I mean it, Hawthorne. This is the one that can actually wound her. Cole’s was easy — you can’t hurt a man by telling him he’s loved.
But Indie has spent her whole life guarding against exactly this.
If she catches one breath of stage management, she won’t just stop believing Cole likes her.
She’ll stop believing any of it was ever real — all of it, every kind thing anyone’s ever done for her.
That’s a specific and permanent damage, and I will not be its author. ”
“I know,” I say. And I mean it, and I don’t make a joke of it, which she notices, and which makes her look at me a half-second too long.
“Don’t sell it. That’s the only note. Whatever you’d normally do — do less. Be boring. Be true and boring. Can you do boring?”
“I have never once in my life done boring.”
“I know. That’s why I haven’t slept.”
Here’s the thing she doesn’t know, because telling her would mean explaining how I know it: I don’t have to perform sincerity about Cole.
I have it on tap. I’ve watched that man ache over Indie Roy for a month, quietly, decently, expecting nothing.
The truth is so close to the surface that the hard part isn’t selling it.
The hard part is not selling it. The hard part is keeping a thing that real from coming out so big it tips over into a lie.
***
We do it in the training room, the day before the second exhibition.
Charlotte gets Indie there on a pretext so clean I almost applaud, a second opinion on a wrist wrap, a thing Indie cannot refuse, because Indie cannot refuse being needed by Charlotte.
That’s the one lever in the world that moves her.
And it’s the cruelest, most loving thing about Charlotte’s whole method: she doesn’t lie to Indie, not once, not even here.
She just deploys the truest fact she owns about her best friend, that Indie would walk into traffic if Charlotte said she needed help crossing the street.
A wrist that doesn’t hurt. A second opinion she doesn’t need.
And watching it work, I finally understand exactly what Charlotte is so terrified of becoming.
Because I’ve just watched her be devastating at it.
And I’ve watched it cost her something to do it that well.
And she did it anyway, for love, which is precisely the sentence her mother would use.
She parks Indie on a treatment table with an ice pack and a magazine, says something about grabbing tape, and leaves. Ten feet away, on the other side of a half-wall, where the acoustics do the thing acoustics do, Julian and I come in mid-conversation, and do not stop, and never once look over.
I’d like to tell you it was easy. It is the hardest forty seconds of acting I’ve ever done, and I’ve been acting my whole life.
I act delighted. I act bored. I act like things don’t land that land like artillery.
But I have never had to act natural while every cell in my body wanted to crane around and check whether it was working.
The trick to a staged overheard scene, it turns out, is the trick to a drop shot: total commitment to the lie that you’re doing something else entirely.
So I look at Julian. Only Julian. And I pour a month of watching Cole ache into a voice pitched for a man who’s certain nobody’s listening, and I let the truth do the carrying.
At the end of the day, the truth, said plainly, where a girl who’s spent her whole life sure she isn’t allowed to have it can catch it by accident, hits harder than anything you could invent.
“—he’s not going to do anything, though, that’s the thing,” Julian is saying, pitched at a man who believes the conversation is private. “He just keeps it in. It’s killing him and he keeps it in.”
“He told you?”