Chapter Twenty-Two - Benedict
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Benedict
YOU WANT TO know the most useless thing about being good at recovering from things?
It works.
I’m on a court the next morning at a reasonable hour, not her court, not dawn, I’m not a masochist — hitting with Reyes, and I’m fine.
I’m charming. I make the jokes. I win the points I want and throw away the ones I don’t, the way I’ve always played, the way I’ve always lived, and Reyes laughs and Coach nods and nobody watching would know that the night before, a girl in a doorway took the most precise weapon on earth and put it clean through the middle of me.
That’s the thing about the gift, the gold, the charm I was handed instead of a personality: it’s also a sealant.
It closes over a wound so fast and so smooth that even you can’t find the seam.
I’ve been doing it my whole life. Bad grade, dead grandfather, friendship I torched in a conference final, smile, shrug, move on, because moving on is free and I have always, always had the money.
By noon the day after Charlotte ends us, I have reassembled the entire golden surface of myself. Gleaming. Unbothered. Intact.
You could watch me for a week and see nothing.
I go to practice. I sign the thank-you cards the department needs for the gala donors, handwriting steady, the little notes charming.
I let Reyes drag me to a thing at the house.
I hold a drink and tell the story about the kid and the fistful of change and the fourteen cents, and I tell it well, and people laugh, and a girl I’ve never met laughs a little longer than the joke earns, and three months ago that would have meant something to me.
Now it lands on the sealed surface and rolls off, because the only person whose laugh I want aimed her last one at me across a gala and then walked out into the coats.
I smile at the girl anyway. That’s the horror of the glide. It doesn’t even require you to be present. It runs on its own, the whole gleaming machine, while the actual you sits somewhere underneath it in the dark, gutted, watching your own mouth make charming shapes.
It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done, and I do it on autopilot, and it takes Julian about four minutes to want to put me through a wall.
***
“Stop it,” he says. We’re walking back from the courts. He hasn’t asked what happened; he doesn’t need to. The whole campus had the broad strokes by breakfast. “Whatever you’re doing right now. Stop.”
“I’m not doing anything. I’m great. Did you see that backhand? I’m in midseason form.”
“You’re doing the thing. The glide.” He stops walking and makes me stop too.
“I have watched you do it every day since we met, Ben. Something gets in past the gold and you don’t deal with it.
You just — reseal. Smile and coast and pretend the hole isn’t there, because dealing with it would mean trying, and trying means you could fail, and you’ve spent twenty-two years making sure you never find out what happens when Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne actually tries and loses.
” He looks at me, and there’s no teasing in it, which is the only thing about Julian that scares me.
“She hurt you. I can see it from here, under the shine. And instead of fighting for her — instead of doing the one brave thing you’ve been preaching at Cole and me for two months — you’re going to glide.
You’re going to charm your way past it and call it healing and lose her for good.
Because gliding is the thing you know how to do, and fighting is the thing you don’t. ”
“She told me I was a project, Julian.” It comes out flatter than I mean it to.
“She told me I was a conquest she got bored of. She used everything — every soft thing I ever showed her — and put it through me like a skewer. On purpose. With her whole heart. So forgive me if I’m not racing back for the encore. ”
“She told you the cruelest possible lie because she’s terrified, and you know that. You told me about the cold house. You told me she runs—”
“She made her choice.”
“She made the choice a scared person makes. There’s a difference, and you of all people know it, because you’ve been making the coward’s version of that exact choice your whole life.
You just call yours chill.” He shakes his head.
“She built a wall out of fear. You’re building one out of charm.
You’re the same disease, Ben. You always were.
The truth is sometimes we show up for the people we love even when they’ve hurt us.
Sometimes especially when they’ve hurt us. ”
I don’t have anything for that. I have a joke, I have a joke for everything, and for once I let it die, because he’s right, and being right is the most annoying thing Julian does.
“I can’t,” I say finally. Quiet. The truest thing I’ve managed all day.
“Julian. I reached. I actually reached, for the first time in my life. I went to her place with terrible flowers. I tried to be honest and she pushed me away. Hard. And the thing I learned — the thing the floor of me learned — is that this is what happens when I try. This is the cost of trying. I spent my whole life not reaching because I knew, somewhere, that this was waiting. Now I know for sure. So no. I’m not going over the wall. I’m going to do the thing I’m good at.
“I’m going to be fine.”
Julian looks at me for a long moment, sad in a way I can’t stand.
“Okay,” he says. “But you should know that ‘fine’ is the loneliest word you own. And you should know that the version of you who reached — the one she rejected — was the best one. Don’t let her be the last time you used him.”
And then he goes to class, and I stand there being fine. Gleaming. Sealed. Absolutely alone.
***
Cole finds me at lunch, which under normal conditions I’d welcome, because Cole Whitman happy is one of the great renewable resources of the natural world, and Cole Whitman happy about Indie Roy is a thing I helped build. On any other day I’d sit in the warmth of it like a cat in a window.
He drops into the seat across from me glowing. There’s no other word. The boy has a glow.
“I’m going to ask her to make it official,” he says, before his tray even touches the table.
“Like — official official. Saturday. The formal. I’ve been thinking about it for a week and I keep waiting to get nervous and I don’t, Ben.
That’s the thing. I’m not nervous. I’m just — sure.
I’ve never been sure of anything in my life and I’m sure of her.
” He looks at me like I personally hung the moon.
Which, in a manner of speaking. “I don’t even know how it happened.
Six weeks ago I couldn’t get a sentence out around her.
And now it’s like — it’s like somebody set the whole thing up so I couldn’t lose.
Like the universe wanted it. You ever feel like something was just meant? ”
And there it is. The thing nobody set up.
Except two people did, on an empty court, in September, with a plan and a hand-drawn map of his entire heart.
Somebody set the whole thing up. He means it as a figure of speech.
It goes through me like cold water, because I know the somebody.
The somebody had her hand on the back of my chair for a month.
The somebody made me swear we’d never let it touch this exact glowing boy.
The decent thing, the thing the reaching version of me would do, is to tell him.
Right here. Cole. Sit down. There’s a thing you should hear from me and Charlotte before you hear it from anyone else, and it doesn’t change a single true thing about you and Indie, but you should know it.
Get out ahead of it. Hand him the secret gently, in daylight, framed by the people who built it out of love, before it can reach him in the dark, framed by someone who hates me.
I don’t. Because telling him means saying her name, and saying her name means feeling the whole thing again, and I’m busy being fine, and being fine is a full-time occupation that does not permit brave, inconvenient errands.
So I glide. I grin at my best friend and say, “She’d be an idiot to say no, and Indie Roy is the least idiotic person I know.
Do it. Saturday. I’ll be in the front row weeping into a pocket square. ”
He laughs, delighted, and goes off to plan the most important question of his life. And I sit there having had the chance to protect him, and let it slide off the sealed surface like everything else.
I had the chance. That’s the part I’ll keep coming back to. The cost of being a man who handles everything gracefully is that you handle the wrong things gracefully too. I handled Cole’s happiness like it was safe.
It was not safe. I was about to make it the least safe thing on campus. Within the hour. To a man who had just told me he finally believed something good could happen to him on purpose.
***
Jack Devereaux finds me twenty minutes after Cole leaves. A coasting man is a careless man, and I have never once been careless without somebody else paying for it.
He’s at the equipment desk. I have to return a ball hopper, and there he is, and a smarter version of me — a less gutted version — sets the hopper down and leaves.
But I’m not that version. I’m the gleaming, sealed, coasting one, the one with nothing left to protect because I already lost the only thing worth protecting.
And when Jack looks up and says, “Heard she dumped you,” with the smallest, most satisfied curl of his mouth, I do the careless thing.
I engage.
“You must be thrilled. Mission accomplished. You got in her ear, you handed her the worst version of me, and she ran with it. Hope it was worth whatever you think I owe you.”