Chapter Thirteen - Charlotte
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Charlotte
THE MORNING AFTER the last exhibition, I wake up to nothing on my calendar at five o’clock, and lie there, and feel the absence of it like a missing tooth.
This is exactly what I wanted. For two weeks I was chained to a charity event and a man I diagnosed in September, dragged out of my clean solitary mornings into doubles and donor galas and the relentless gravitational nuisance of Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne.
Now it’s over. The marquee run has run. The department has its obscene number.
Cole and Indie are a closed, triumphant, profoundly disgusting case, they held hands at breakfast, in front of me, repeatedly, like animals.
The operation is complete. The mandate has expired.
There is no longer one single line item on the entire ledger of my life that requires me to stand within four feet of that boy ever again.
I have won back my five a.m.
I lie there in the dark not wanting it, which is the most alarming thing I have ever had to admit about myself.
We haven’t spoken since the match. Not one word.
No 6:48 text, no wear the white, no logistics, because there are no logistics left.
The entire apparatus that was manufacturing reasons for us to speak got quietly dismantled overnight by a fundraiser running its course.
The silence is the loudest thing in my phone.
I keep not looking at it. I look at it constantly.
I have become, in three weeks, a person who checks her phone, which is a degradation I’d have charged a lesser woman rent for.
So I do what I do. I get up. I go to the empty court and serve into the deuce corner until the sun comes up, alone, the way I’ve done it for eleven years, before he came along and ruined the quiet, and I wait for the old clean feeling to come back.
Just me, just the ball, just the honest question of whether I’m good enough this morning.
It doesn’t come back. The court feels enormous.
Half of it keeps being a space where somebody is supposed to be.
I serve, and some animal part of me is already moving to cover a poach nobody is going to make, and I catch myself, and stop, and stand there in the gray light feeling like a fool in front of an audience of zero.
You get used to playing doubles. It came without preamble, the thing I’d have sneered at three weeks ago.
You spend your whole life certain you’re a singles player, certain the only person you can trust on your court is you, and then somebody covers your alley twice without being asked.
Takes the ugly ball so you can have the pretty one.
Stands between you and a word a sweating nobody wanted to call you.
And one morning you wake up and the court is too big and too quiet and there’s a person-shaped hole in it, and you understand that you’ve been ruined, quietly, for the only game you ever knew how to win alone.
I serve the rest of the basket badly and go find my best friend, because I need to be reminded who I am, and Indie has always been the only reliable mirror I own.
I should know better. Mirrors show you things.
***
She’s in the kitchen, of course, eating cereal standing up, except now she does it with the lit-from-inside glow of a woman whose phone keeps buzzing on the counter with texts she reads sideways, smiling, trying to hide the smiling and failing the way she fails at all concealment.
Indie has the world’s most honest face. It’s the thing I love most about her, the thing that makes her useless at poker, and the thing that is, this morning, about to be turned on me.
“You were out early,” she says. “Even for you.”
“It’s over. The exhibition. I have my mornings back.”
“Mm.” She eats a spoonful, watching me, and there it is — the look.
The soft, terrible, perceptive one she promised me at the party, the one I hoped she’d forget.
Indie forgets nothing about the people she loves.
It’s the other thing I love most about her, and it is, occasionally, a catastrophe. “How is he?”
“How is who?”
“Charlotte.”
“There’s no he. There’s a fundraiser I’m losing, a class project that’s concluded, and a man I am now contractually free of, thank God.
” I pour coffee I don’t want, to have something to do with my hands — a tactic I have apparently caught from him, which I note, and resent.
“How’s Cole? How’s the great romance? Are you going to keep doing the hand-holding thing in front of me?
Because I’m lodging a formal complaint with the dean. ”
She lets me change the subject. She always lets me, for exactly as long as she’s decided to. Then she sets the spoon down, and that’s how you know the reprieve is over.
“At the party,” she says. “When you and Benedict were — teaching me. The thing on the island.”
“Pedagogy.”
“You can call it whatever you want.” She comes around the counter and leans against it next to me, shoulder to shoulder, the way she does when she’s about to say something she knows I won’t want to hear and wants me to know she’s on my side while she says it.
“I watched you, Charlotte. I wasn’t even watching the part you were teaching me.
I was watching your face. And I have known your face since freshman year — through every match, every three a.m., every boy who turned out to be boring — and I have never once, in all of it, seen it do the thing it did when he had his hand on your back. ”
“It was a demonstration. I was acting.”
“You don’t act. It’s why you’re terrifying and it’s why I trust you — you have never once successfully faked a feeling in your life.
You can hide one. You’re a vault. But you can’t fake one, and you weren’t faking that.
” She nudges me, gentle. “You looked like I feel. When Cole walks into a room. That’s the only way I know how to describe it, and I cried about it a little afterward.
In a good way. In the bathroom. While Margo held my drink. ”
“That’s the cereal talking. You’re high on Cole. Everyone in love thinks everyone else is in love too — it’s a documented cognitive distortion. Look it up.”
“I did look it up, actually, because I knew you’d reach for it.
” She smiles, infuriating, serene. “It’s not in there.
There is nothing in the literature about how being happy makes you hallucinate your best friend’s face doing things you have personally never seen it do in like…
ever.” She bumps my shoulder again. “I’m not high on Cole, Charlotte.
I’m just finally fluent in the language.
You taught it to me. And the thing about teaching someone to read is that you don’t get to be illegible to them afterward. ”
I have no return for that. I, who have a return for everything, who was once described in a campus publication as unsettlingly quick — stand in my own kitchen holding coffee I don’t want, with absolutely nothing.
Because the one weapon that has never failed me is words, and she’s walked in underneath all of them and put her hand directly on the thing.
“It’s not the same,” I manage. “You and Cole — that’s real. That’s a good, kind boy who looks at you like you hung the moon. Benedict and I are a — we’re a collision. Two people who are very good at the same cruel game. That’s not compatibility, Indie. That’s a tied score.”
“Okay.” She doesn’t argue. That’s the devastating thing about Indie: she never argues. She waits, and lets you hear yourself. “But can I say the thing? The thing you said to me?”
“Please don’t.”
“You’re allowed to be wanted, Charlotte.
” She says it exactly the way I said it to her, eight feet from a lacrosse player, an instructor’s certainty in it — except she means it about me, which is so much worse.
“You’ve spent four years teaching me that everyone’s allowed the good thing except you.
That you’re the one who arranges it for other people.
That you do the wanting for us — the planning, the fixing — and you never get to be the one in the middle of the room with somebody’s hand on your back.
And I let you believe it, because it was useful to me.
Because you fixed my whole life with it.
” Her voice goes thick. “But it was never true. You’re allowed it too.
You taught it to me well enough that I get to hand it back now.
You’re allowed to want. You don’t have to earn it first, and you don’t have to be in control of it, and it’s not going to kill you. I promise. I checked.”
I look at the floor. I am not a crier, I don’t do it, I never have — and in that kitchen I come the closest I’ve come in years.
“I have it under control,” I say. It is the single least convincing sentence I have ever produced. We both hear it. And she has the grace — the Indie grace, the rarest kind there is — to let it stand.
“Sure,” she says softly, and hugs me gently from behind. She takes her buzzing phone and her honest face and her brand-new happiness off to class — leaving me alone in the kitchen with the truth she’s set down on the counter between us. Still warm. Refusing to be anything else.
***
I spend the rest of the day being aggressively normal, which is what I do when something true has been said to me and I refuse to metabolize it.
I go to class. I take notes I don’t need.
And on the way to the library I see Cole and Indie on the quad, they don’t see me, which is the only way you ever catch the real thing — just walking.
Cole carrying both their bags, because of course he is.
Indie telling some story with her hands, and at some point she stops walking to finish it, and he stops too, automatically, orbiting, and waits, smiling down at her like she is the only thing on the entire quad worth standing still for.