Chapter Eleven - Charlotte #2
“See?” I say. “Easy.”
For a second he just looks at me. The grin is gone — scrubbed clean off — and what’s underneath is something I put there and won’t take accountability for: a man who came up to the front to teach the class and got himself failed in front of it.
“Astor,” he says, low, rough, the lecture nowhere in it. “I—”
“Lesson’s over.” I slide down off the island before my knees can be polled on the matter. “Write it down, Indie. There may be a quiz.”
And he lets me have it. Lets me keep the lie, the way he lets me keep the important things to myself, the way he keeps letting me walk off with things I have no right to, because that is the cruelest thing about Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne, the thing I keep failing to brace for: he is gentleman enough to lose on purpose.
But the thing about a demonstration is that it works on everybody in the room.
And when I finally look back at the real student, at Indie, who I forgot, who we both forgot, which is its own kind of confession — she isn’t watching us with the embarrassment of a girl who’s just seen two friends nearly combust. She saw it, of course she saw it; Indie misses nothing about the people she loves, and there will be a conversation later, a soft one, with the look she gets.
But right now she has a job to do. And she has apparently decided, while we weren’t looking, to do it.
Because Ryan has arrived.
He’s finally crossed the room, terrible shoes, lovely jaw, a full hour of courage spent in the assembling — and he’s standing in front of Indie saying something. And Indie, my soft, shrinking, traffic-fleeing best friend, is not shrinking.
“Oh,” says Benedict beside me, the way you say it at a fireworks show. “Oh, she’s using it.”
She is. God help me, she’s using it. She holds Ryan’s eyes.
She lets herself get caught, once, glancing at his mouth, I watch her do it, the exact move, lifted clean off the master — and Ryan, club lacrosse, walks straight into it like a man stepping on a rake.
She laughs at something. Not too eager. A little.
Kind of cute. When he leans in over the music, she tips her head and laughs again and puts two fingers, briefly, on his forearm.
Something small. Just enough to tell him it’s allowed.
“She nailed it,” Benedict breathes, and turns to me with the open, delighted reverence of a man watching a protégée blow past her teacher. “Astor. She’s better than you. We’ve made a monster. I have never been prouder of anything in my life.”
“Keep your voice down. You’ll spook her.”
“I will not keep my voice down, this is the single greatest thing I have ever witnessed—” and then he stops, and his whole face changes — lit, gleeful, wicked — and he doesn’t even need to point. “Oh. Oh, he’s looking.”
I follow his eyes.
“Sweet Cole,” Benedict says, savoring every syllable, “is fuming.”
He is. Cole Whitman, who has never to my knowledge had an unkind thought about another living soul — stands across the room with a beer he’s forgotten he’s holding and a face like a betrayed thundercloud, watching a lacrosse player make Indie Roy laugh.
And the thundercloud is coming in fast and low.
“Oh,” I say, and I am not proud of how much I’m enjoying this, “and look — now he’s gone and gotten mad at himself for being mad at Ryan.
” Because he has. I can read it off his face like a stock ticker.
“He’s doing the whole audit. He’s decided he has no right to be jealous.
That is so completely Cole it hurts — he’s a decent man, and decent men examine their feelings for fairness.
What claim does he have on her, he never said a word, Ryan’s allowed to talk to whoever he likes, this is nobody’s fault but Cole’s own for never—”
“He’s going to talk himself out of it,” Benedict says, genuinely alarmed. “He’s being reasonable. We’re going to lose him to reason.”
“In good news,” I say, tipping my chin at the cup in Cole’s hand, “alcohol is a powerful, judgment-impairing drug. And thank God for that.”
And right on cue, as Ryan says something that puts Indie’s whole hand flat against his arm — the last of Cole’s reasonableness drowns somewhere in the bottom of a red plastic cup.
The decent man finally loses the argument with himself.
A full semester of courage he could never locate arrives all at once, chemically assisted and gloriously overdue.
He sets the beer down. He crosses the floor.
I’ve watched Cole Whitman play tennis with more apology than aggression for two years.
I have never once seen him take the net like he means to own it.
He takes the room like that now, cuts clean in between Indie and poor blameless Ryan, who looks at the new arrival’s size.
The years worth of feeling on his face, and wisely, quietly evaporates.
A man who correctly read the room and elected to find a kinder party.
He got there in the end. We built him a clock and a rival both, and at long, long last, he heard the thing ticking.
I stand in the wreckage of my own demonstration with the ghost of a hand still warm on my spine, and watch my best friend turn from poor doomed Ryan to find Cole Whitman in front of her.
His whole heart in his hands, no script for any of it — and I think, with the last working corner of my brain: it worked. Phase two-B worked. We did it.
I don’t stay to watch.
That’s the tell, if you’re keeping a chart on me, and I keep one on everyone, myself included.
I spent two weeks curating this exact moment, and when it arrives, I cannot be in the room for it.
I need a wall between me and a kitchen where a boy lifted me onto the marble, put his hand at the small of my back, and told me, no joke anywhere in it, that I looked gorgeous.
Where I very nearly kissed him before remembering, at the last possible second, who I’m supposed to be.
So I walk out onto the lacrosse player’s regrettable back porch, grip the cold railing, and breathe like I’ve come up from underwater.
Through the window I can see them. Cole and Indie, close together in the yellow light, both talking at once and then both stopping.
He says something. She laughs, the real one, and puts her hand on his arm.
No coaching. No clipboard. No demonstration required.
We did that, and they’ll never know it, and that’s the whole point.
And under the clean satisfaction of it, rising, refusing every order I give it — is the loud thing.
The one with no phase and no diagram and a cedar smell.
The one that just spent an entire evening with its palm flat against my spine, teaching me, against my will and my whole life’s training, the one lesson I somehow reached twenty-one without ever learning.
I grip the railing and order it, in my mother’s own crisp voice, to sit down and behave.
It does not sit down.
And I think, with all the rest of me, in a voice I don’t recognize and can’t shut up: but who’s going to demonstrate the part where I’m the one who can’t step away?