Chapter Twenty-Eight - Benedict
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Benedict
JACK CLOSES THE equipment room at six. I get there at five of, so he can’t tell me to make an appointment.
He looks up when I come in, and his face does the thing it always does around me now — goes smooth and ready, a man setting his feet. “We’re closing,” he says. “Return anything?”
“No.” My mouth is dry. I practiced this in the car, and every version sounded like a guy performing an apology, which is its own kind of lie. So I throw the practiced ones out and just start. “I came to say the thing I owed you two years ago.”
That gets him. Not much. A flicker.
“I was out till three the night before the semi,” I say.
“You told me not to go, and I told you that you were being dramatic. I showed up wrecked and I played wrecked, and at four-all in the third I hit a garbage serve and I laughed. At your whole life. And then I spent the summer telling you it’d work out while the committee took your scholarship, and when you stopped talking to me, I decided you were the one being unreasonable.
I made myself the guy it happened to because I didn’t want to own what I did.
I was too comfortable to try the one week you needed me to, and it cost you the thing it never once cost me.
I have known that on some level for two years, but saying it was heavy, and I don’t do heavy.
” I make myself hold his eyes through the whole thing.
“I’m sorry. I made your life very difficult and called it a rough patch and went back to my life. I’m sorry.”
The room is very quiet. Somewhere, a fluorescent light buzzes.
Jack sets down the clipboard he’s been holding like a prop. For a second he doesn’t look smooth or ready. He looks twenty years old, standing in a conference final, watching his doubles partner laugh.
“You know how long I waited for you to say that.” His voice isn’t steady the way it usually is with me.
It’s steady the way a thing is when a person is holding it very hard.
“Two years. I used to script it. What you’d say, what I’d say back.
I had a whole speech. And you’re not doing the smile now… so thanks.”
He picks at the edge of the desk. When he talks again it comes out lower, like it isn’t fully meant for me.
“You want to know what the last year has been? I hand out towels to guys I used to beat. I sign out hoppers for a team I was the two seed on. I watched you walk through here twice a week for three years — still golden, still late to everything and forgiven for it — and every single time, I did the math again on how the exact same season ended my whole thing and didn’t leave a mark on you.
That’s what it was. Not the scholarship.
I could’ve swallowed the scholarship. It was watching it cost me everything and cost you nothing.
Over and over. At the equipment desk.” He looks up.
“So when the chance came to make it cost you something, I took it. I’m not going to stand here and pretend I feel clean about how — now that I know the Roy girl was real.
But you asked why I did it. That’s why. I wanted you to feel a consequence. Just one.”
I don’t defend myself. There’s nothing to defend. “You’re allowed to have wanted that. I’d have wanted it too.”
“Yeah, well.” He wipes his face with the back of his hand, once, rough. “Why now? Somebody put you up to this? The Astor girl?”
“She told me to come. She didn’t tell me what to say.” I take a breath. “And that’s not the whole of why I’m here, so I’m going to be straight about the rest I need your help. I’ve got nothing to make you give it. And I’m going to ask anyway.”
He laughs once. Not warmly. “There it is.”
***
“Indie Roy didn’t do anything,” I say. “You know that better than anybody, because you built the version where she did. You told Cole it was a pity scheme. That she was in on it. That the whole thing was a con some rich kids ran on the sad guy. And now the whole school has that story, and she’s eating lunch under a hood, and Cole thinks the best thing that ever happened to him was charity.
” I keep my voice level. Not smooth. Level.
“The pity part was yours, Jack. You made it up to hurt me, and I get why. I earned it. But it didn’t land on me.
It landed on a girl who never once wronged you, and a guy who used to bring me coffee when you stopped.
You want to make me pay? I’m right here.
I’ll stand still for it. But they’re not responsible. Let them off it.”
“Why would I do that.” He says it flat, but he’s listening. “Give me the actual reason. Not the guilt one.”
“Because you’re not me.”
That stops him.
“You never were. That was always the difference between us, and it’s the thing I was too dumb to see.
I’m the one who lets other people pay. You’re the one who got stuck paying.
You know exactly what it feels like to be blamed for a thing that wasn’t yours — because I did it to you.
So you’re the one person in this entire mess who knows precisely what you’d be sparing her. I’m asking you to be the guy I wasn’t.”
He looks at me for a long time. I let him. I don’t fill it. That alone is new, a month ago I’d have greased the silence with a joke and ruined it.
“You’d have to say it too,” he says finally. “Not me alone. You don’t get to send me in to clean it and keep your nice face. If we fix this, you stand up and you say it was you. You set it up. Publicly. The golden boy did the scheming, not the girl. You lose the face.”
“I already decided to lose the face.” I mean it, and he hears that I mean it.
“That was the price before I walked in here. I’m not trading you my reputation for your help.
I’m spending it whether you help or not.
I just can’t clear her by myself — because I’m the guilty one, so me saying it sounds like spin. You saying it is the thing that lands.”
Something in him shifts. Not to warmth. To a kind of tired, surprised respect, the look of a man who came ready to fight a coward and found somebody standing there with his hands open instead.
“Huh,” he says. “You actually changed. I told myself you couldn’t.”
***
That’s when Coach Leon walks in, because the universe has no sense of occasion.
“Devereaux, you locking up or not, I got the lights on a — Prescott-Hawthorne.” He squints at me. “You lost? Practice was this morning. You missed it, by the way. Second time this week. You dead? You look half dead.”
“Rough week, Coach.”
“Mm.” He’s already scanning the room for whatever he came in for.
Coach Leon has exactly one gear, and it is what needs doing.
He does not read rooms. He has never once read a room.
I have watched him miss a marriage proposal happening ten feet away because a net was sagging.
“Somebody moved my good hopper. Devereaux, where’s the—” He spots it.
Grabs it. And then, because Jack and I are both standing there not moving in a way that even he registers, adds: “You two look like a funeral. What.”
And I don’t know what makes me do it, except that he’s a neutral party and the truth needs a witness without a stake. “Coach. Straight question. Indie Roy. How long has she been into Cole Whitman?”
He looks at me like I asked whether water is wet.
“Roy? Whitman?” He snorts. “Since forever. Preseason, at least. Girl used to run drills with her whole head turned, watching him do sprints. Nearly took a ball off the face twice. I moved her court so she’d stop rubbernecking, and she rubbernecked from the new one.
” He shakes his head, already losing interest. “Why’s everyone suddenly— I told her at the start of the semester.
I said, Roy, either say something to the kid or hit the ball.
You can’t do both. Whole team knew. You’d have to be blind.
” He hoists the hopper. “Which, apparently so. Lock up, Devereaux.”
And he leaves. He has no idea, to this day, what he did. He walked into a room where a girl’s whole name was on the line, set it right on his way to a ball hopper, and walked back out thinking about the ball hopper.
The room goes quiet again. Jack is staring at the door Coach went through.
“Preseason,” he says slowly. “Before you and Astor ran anything.”
“Before we ran anything.” I let it sit. “She loved him first. On her own. All we did was knock on a door that was already there. The pity thing you told Cole — there’s the proof it was never true, and it came out of the mouth of a guy who wouldn’t lie to help me if his life depended on it.
Cole will believe Coach. Coach doesn’t have a side. ”
Jack sits down on the stool behind the desk. He rubs his face with both hands. When he takes them away, he looks younger and older at once.
“She really used to watch him do sprints,” he says. Almost to himself.
And I understand that Jack, who built the con story, maybe half-believed it himself.
Needed it to be a con, because a con had a villain, and a villain gave the whole rotten two years a shape.
Coach just took the shape away. Underneath it there’s only what was actually there: a girl who liked a boy.
Two idiots who meddled out of love. And one guy who got hurt a long time ago, by someone who is finally, badly, saying sorry.
***
“I’ll talk to Cole,” Jack says. He doesn’t look up when he says it.
“Not for you. Get that straight right now — this doesn’t make us anything.
I’ll tell him the pity thing was mine, and it was a lie, and that Indie never knew a thing.
Because Coach is right, and I’m not going to be the reason she eats lunch under a hood. '
“Thank you.”
“He’s not going to make it easy on me.” Jack says it plainly, working it out.
“I walk up to Whitman and go, hey, remember when I blew up your life at that dance? Turns out I was lying. He’s going to want to hit me.
Or he won’t believe me — because why would the guy who told him the con story suddenly un-tell it? ”
“Tell him about Coach.” I thought about this the whole drive over — the one part I did get to plan.
“Don’t lead with you. Lead with Leon. Cole knows Coach doesn’t have a dog in this and couldn’t spin his way out of a paper bag.
You say: ask Leon how long Indie watched you do sprints.
Then let Cole go ask him himself. Coach will tell him the same clueless thing he told us, and it won’t sound like anybody’s angle, because it isn’t one.
That’s what turns it. Not you. Not me. A guy who moved her court so she’d stop staring at Cole a year before either of us did anything. ”
Jack thinks about it. “That’s actually good,” he admits, like it hurts.
“I have my moments. They’re rare and I waste most of them.
” I almost smile. “The other thing — when you tell Cole the pity part was yours, don’t protect me in it.
Say I set the scheme up. Say I’m the one owning it publicly.
He’s going to need somebody real to be angry at, and it should be the person who earned it. That’s me. Not her.”
“You keep doing that,” Jack says. “Handing me the version where you take the worst of it. It’s weird on you. I don’t trust it yet.”
“Fair. Watch me tomorrow. Then decide.”
“And you say your part. Public. I hear you softened it, I take mine back.”
“Tomorrow. In front of whoever’s around.
I’ll own the scheme, I’ll own that Indie didn’t know, I’ll take the hit.
” I hesitate, because there’s one more true thing, and I promised myself no more soft edges.
“And Jack — this part’s separate. It’s not part of the deal.
You don’t owe me anything back for it. The sorry stands whether or not you ever talk to me again. ”
He doesn’t answer that. He picks the clipboard back up, which is a man’s way of saying go now, before one of us says something we can’t walk back.
I go.
I get outside into the cold and stand there, and I wait to feel like I won something, because that’s the feeling I’ve organized my whole life around.
It doesn’t come. There’s no trophy. Indie’s name gets cleaned tomorrow and mine gets dirtier. Jack still isn’t my friend. Charlotte still isn’t mine. I did a hard thing, and there is nothing at the end of it but the fact of having done it.
I think about his face when Coach said preseason.
The way the con story came apart in his hands and left him holding nothing to hate.
I expected that to feel like a win, I took his weapon, disproved his lie, got what I came for.
It doesn’t feel like a win. It feels like watching a man realize the thing he’s been carrying to stay upright is made of paper.
Whatever’s between Jack and me, it didn’t finish tonight.
You don’t close two years with one apology in a supply room, no matter how true it is.
I handed him the sorry. What he does with it, whether it ever becomes something either of us can stand in, that’s his, on his clock.
And I have finally learned enough not to go reaching for it.
That turns out to be enough to stand up straight under. Barely. For the first time.
I go to call Charlotte and tell her it’s done, and then I don’t, because there’s no result to report that isn’t hers to feel secondhand.
This one I did alone. Exactly like she asked.
I text two words instead. He’s in. Coach helped.
She writes back one word, after a minute, Good, and I look at it longer than four letters deserve, and then I put the phone away, because it isn’t the time, and we both know it isn’t the time.
I go home to the empty apartment to figure out how a person says sorry to a whole school at once.
There’s no script for it. You can’t charm a confession.
The charm is the thing you’re confessing.
I sit at the kitchen counter where Cole used to sit, and I don’t write anything clever.
I just decide the true sentences and put them in an order, I set it up.
She didn’t know. The pity story was never real.
I’m the one who lied to you all. Be angry at me, and I say them out loud to the empty room until they stop shaking.
Same as I did with the mirror before the formal. Except this time I’m not one hour early to a thing I’ll fumble. This time I’m going to walk out and mean it in front of people, and lose the only thing I never had to work for, on purpose.
And I find that I can’t wait. That’s the part I’d never have believed a month ago.
I can’t wait to pay.