Chapter Thirteen - Charlotte #2
I stand behind a planter like a lunatic and watch my best friend be loved correctly, in daylight, by a kind boy, with no scheme left holding any of it up. And what I feel is not the clean satisfaction of a plan that worked.
It’s envy. Plain, ugly, specific envy of the one person on earth I’d set fire to this campus for.
I want what she has. I built it for her, brick by careful brick, and stood out in the cold of it, and I am so suddenly, bottomlessly tired of being the one who arranges the warm thing for everyone but herself.
I’ve built a whole identity out of being the architect.
And architects, it turns out, sleep alone in the houses they design.
So I go work on the bet, because the bet is a problem I can attack with a spreadsheet, and a spreadsheet has never once made me feel anything.
Except the spreadsheet stopped working weeks ago.
I’ve raised, to date, a humiliating fraction of what Benedict conjured out of thin air and a borrowed card reader, and I finally understand why.
I keep trying to fundraise the Astor way with the Astor name surgically removed, the big ask, the formal letter, the whole structure of obligation — and obligation is precisely the tool the rules took away.
He raises money by being liked. At volume.
One stranger at a time. And I have spent twenty-one years being respected, feared, admired, and obeyed, and not one single hour of any of it learning to be liked, because liked was soft.
Liked was for people who needed something.
I was raised to need nothing.
So I open a blank document, and I sit with it a long time, and then I do the most frightening thing I’ve done all month.
More frightening than the kitchen. More frightening than the porch.
I stop appealing to anyone’s duty. I write down the true reason a children’s cancer ward is worth a Tuesday, plainly, with not one Astor anywhere in it — and I let myself, for once in my life, simply ask people to care, with nothing to compel them but the asking.
It feels like standing in a doorway with my hands open and nothing in them. It feels like something he taught me without either of us noticing there was a lesson running.
I hate how much better it works.
***
Here is what I do with all of it, the most me thing I have ever done.
I make a plan.
If I am, and I’m not, but if — feeling something inconvenient about Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne, the correct response is not to indulge it.
The correct response is containment. The exhibition is over: good, that removes the proximity.
The scheme is done: better, that removes the collaboration.
All I have to do now is the simplest thing in the world, the thing I am best at, the thing eleven years of dawn courts trained into my marrow.
I stop seeing him. No more reasons means no more occasions. I lose the bet by email, like he said. I send the man a polite concession at the gala. And I let the whole inconvenient business starve quietly to death for lack of oxygen, the way you’re supposed to. The way grown-ups do.
It’s a flawless plan. No soft edges. I’m rather proud of it.
I even draft the protocol, not the feelings, I don’t write down feelings, but the rules of disengagement, drawn up like a brief.
No initiating contact. Concede the bet in writing.
Decline any invitation that isn’t strictly necessary.
Be cordial, at distance. Let it starve. I read it over twice.
Airtight. Exactly the kind of plan I’d have bet my ranking on three weeks ago.
The single hairline flaw is that it assumes I am still a person who does what her plans tell her to.
I have been, my whole life. I am the most disciplined person I know.
I simply failed to account for the possibility that somewhere in the last three weeks I quietly became someone who, handed a flawless plan in one hand and a text from Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne in the other, would choose the text.
It lasts, if we’re being precise, until approximately four o’clock in the afternoon. My phone buzzes. It’s him.
the courtyard. 20 min. bring nothing, expect nothing, it’s not about the bet. just come.
I stand there inside my flawless containment strategy, looking at the screen, and feel the loud thing sit up, bright, awake, entirely beyond my jurisdiction — and I know, the way you know a serve is an ace before it clears the box, that I’m going to go.
Here’s the truth, the one I couldn’t say to Indie and can barely say to myself: I don’t go because I’m weak, and I don’t go because I’ve lost control, though I’d swear to both under oath.
I go because somewhere underneath the protocol and the spreadsheet and the eleven years of dawn courts, a quieter and far more honest part of me has been waiting all day, all month, for exactly this.
For him to make it easy. To hand me one small reason and let me close the rest of the distance myself.
‘You give him one small reason, and you let him close the rest of it himself.’
I taught that move to Indie. I half-taught it to him. And here it is, turned all the way around on me. And it works, because the best lessons always do.
I text back: this better be good, Hawthorne.
And I go.