Chapter Thirty - Benedict
CHAPTER THIRTY
Benedict
BEING UN-GOLDEN is quieter than I expected, and I don’t hate it as much as I thought I would.
A month ago I’d have told you the shine was the best thing about me, that if you took away the easy warmth, the way rooms tilt toward me, there’d be nothing underneath worth keeping.
I built my whole life on that fear without once looking at it straight.
Turns out the shine was mostly a thing other people did to me, and I mistook it for a thing I was.
The week after I stand up in the athletic center and tell everyone the truth, the campus does what campuses do.
It decides I’m a jerk. Then it gets bored of deciding anything.
Mostly, it just stops saving me a seat. People I floated past for four years find out I’m a guy who schemed and lied, and a few of them have clearly been waiting a long time to get to think that about me, and they enjoy it, and I let them.
The grin doesn’t come out to fix it. I’ve retired the grin from that particular job.
It turns out you can walk across a quad with nobody’s eyes on you and not die. Nobody ever told me. I built a whole life around not finding out.
What I feel, mostly, is lighter. Which makes no sense, I’ve lost the thing I was handed at birth, the easy warmth of every room, and I should be grieving it.
Instead I keep catching myself standing straighter.
I think it’s because for twenty-two years I carried the low background hum of a man who suspects he’s a fraud, and I finally did a thing a fraud couldn’t do, and the hum went quiet.
You can’t feel like a phony about a bill you actually paid.
Practice is the clearest place to feel it.
I walk into the men’s session Monday and the temperature drops a couple of degrees.
It happens when people have been discussing you and stop.
A couple of the guys nod, careful. One doesn’t.
Coach Leon watches me hit for a while and then wanders over during water and says, “Heard you made a whole speech.”
“I did.”
“Long overdue, some of it,” he says, and leaves it there — which, from Coach, is a eulogy and an absolution in one breath — and goes back to worrying about a sagging net, because a sagging net is the only kind of drama he acknowledges.
The old me would spend the rest of the session winning the room back, one joke at a time, until everybody remembered why they liked me. I hit my baskets and go home. It’s a strange muscle, letting people think a true thing about you and not rushing to soften it.
I’m still sore from using it.
***
Cole comes back on a Thursday.
I hear the key and I don’t get up too fast this time. I just wait, and he comes in, and he stands in the living room where his shelves are still half empty, and he looks at me for a second.
“You told a whole building it was you,” he says. “That I didn’t get pitied. That she never knew.”
“Because it’s true.”
“You made yourself the bad guy in front of everyone so my name and hers would come clean.” He sets his bag down.
Not to leave. To stay. “Jack found me. Told me to go ask Coach how long Indie watched me do sprints. So I did. And Coach looked at me like I was stupid and said, preseason, kid. Everybody knew. I moved her court.” His voice does something.
“She liked me before anybody schemed anything. She’d have liked me anyway.
All you two did was get me to open a door I was too scared to knock on. ”
“That’s all it ever was, Cole.”
“I know that now.” He rubs the back of his neck, the way he does.
“I’m sorry I called it the meanest thing anyone ever did to me.
I was hurt. Which is — that’s kind of your whole lesson, isn’t it.
I did the thing you did to Jack. Aimed a bill at the guy who happened to be close. ” He almost laughs. “Small school.”
I don’t smooth it over. A month ago I’d have made a joke to skate us past the feeling.
I let it sit there instead. “You get to be angry that we meddled. That part’s fair.
We should’ve told you both a long time ago and let you decide what to do with it.
The scheming wasn’t the crime. The keeping it from you was. ”
“Yeah.” He picks his bag back up — and this time it’s to carry it to his room.
“I’m moving back in, by the way. Reyes snores like a chainsaw and he’s got opinions about the thermostat.
Also I missed you, which is annoying, given everything.
” He stops in the doorway. “And I mean this, so don’t make it weird.
The guy who stood up in that gym is somebody I’d choose as a friend.
The guy from six months ago, I was friends with by habit. I like the trade.”
He goes to unpack, and a minute later I hear him complaining at the empty fridge, which is the sound of Cole being home, and something in the apartment goes back to the right shape.
I sit there and let myself have it, one thing back.
Earned, not charmed. But I don’t let myself pretend it’s the rule.
Cole came back because our friendship is a healthy thing that took one bad hit; you can set a clean break like that, and it knits.
What I did to Jack wasn’t a clean break.
It was two years of slow weight, and some things that get crushed slowly don’t knit.
They just stay crushed, and no amount of being sorry now changes the shape they set in.
I’m about to learn that from Jack directly, and I already suspect it, sitting on the couch listening to Cole rediscover we’re out of milk.
Some of the people you hurt come back. Some don’t.
You don’t get to know which in advance. And the whole point, the thing I’d have called sucker’s math six months ago, is that you do the right thing for the ones who won’t come back too.
Especially for them. Because if you only do it for the ones who might reward you, it was never the right thing.
It was just a longer play.
***
Jack doesn’t come back. I want to be honest about that, because the version of this where he does, where the apology lands and the music swells and we’re doubles partners again by spring — is a lie, and I’ve told enough of those.
He finds me outside the library a few days later. He doesn’t sit. He stands with his hands in his pockets, like a man who has rehearsed the length of the conversation and means to keep to it.
“I told Cole,” he says. “Did it the way you said. Led with Coach. It worked — Whitman went and asked him and came back white as a sheet. So. It’s done. Her name’s clean. You can stop looking at me like you owe me a fruit basket.”
“Thank you. Actually. It mattered.”
“Yeah, well.” He looks off across the lawn. “I didn’t do it for you. Wrote that down somewhere, did you?”
“I know you didn’t.”
He’s quiet for a moment. Then he says the thing he clearly came to say, and he says it without heat, which is how I know he means every word.
“You want to know the part that actually messed me up? It wasn’t the match.
People lose matches. It was after. That you didn’t even notice you’d done it.
For years. You’d wave at me across the quad, all friendly, no idea.
Like I was a guy you used to know who got weird — instead of a guy whose whole life you were still standing on top of.
That’s what I couldn’t put down. Not that you wrecked it.
That wrecking it didn’t even register.” He lets that sit.
“The thing at the equipment desk — you goading me, me lighting up Cole — that was me finally getting to make it register. Ugly way to do it. Hurt people who didn’t earn it.
But I’d stopped being able to think of another way to make you feel a single ounce of it. ”
“I felt it,” I say. “For what it’s worth. I feel it now.”
“I know. That’s why I’m standing here instead of avoiding you for the rest of the semester.
” He nods once, settling something. “But we’re not going to be friends again, Ben.
I need to say it out loud so you don’t spend the next year being extra nice to me hoping it turns back into something.
It’s not going to. You said sorry, and you meant it, and I believe you’ve changed.
None of that gives me my scholarship back.
Or the ranking. Or the version of my life where I didn’t spend a year handing out towels to guys I used to beat while the guy who did it to me stayed golden.
The apology was real. It just doesn’t come with the friendship stapled to it.
” He looks at me. “You good with that? Because I need you good with that. I don’t want your project energy pointed at fixing me next. ”
A month ago I’d have argued. Turned the warmth up, made a case, tried to charm the door back open, because I have never in my life met a door I didn’t assume I could get through. I don’t do any of it.
“I’m good with that,” I say. And I find, saying it, that I am.
Not happy. But good. “You don’t owe me a friendship.
I torched that one myself, a year ago, and I don’t get it back just because I grew up.
That’s the actual cost. I’ve been learning what those are.
” I mean the next part, and I make sure he can see that I do.
“I hope you land somewhere that has no idea who I am. I think you’d be lighter there. ”
Something in his face eases, a fraction. Not warmth. Just the look of a man who braced for a fight over a thing and got handed it clean instead.
***
“There’s one thing,” I say, before he can go, and I make myself say it right — as an offer he can refuse, not a favor I’m doing him.
“You don’t have to take it, and I won’t be weird if you don’t.
As far as the department knows, you’re the guy who couldn’t hold his ranking.
A choke. That’s what the paperwork says, and that’s what a reference would say.
It’s not what happened. What happened is your partner didn’t show up the one week it counted, and I have never once said that out loud in a room that mattered.
I will. To Coach, to whoever runs the paperwork, to anybody you point me at.
Not to get you back on the team — I know you’re past that.
Just so that if you ever want a reference or a coaching spot, the version they’ve got isn’t a lie about you.
It’s a truth about me.” I shrug. “It costs me nothing you’d want me to keep.
It might be worth something to you. Your call.
Say no and I’ll never bring it up again. ”
He studies me a long moment. I can see him checking it for the catch, the angle, the way you’d expect from a guy who trusted me once and learned better.
“I’ve been coaching juniors,” he says finally.
Slowly. Like he’s deciding whether to let me have it.
“Little club across town. Turns out I’m good at it.
Better than I ever was at playing, maybe.
I’m applying to a couple of programs to do it for real.
” A pause. “A letter that says I didn’t choke would help.
So — yeah. Okay. Do that. Not because we’re square.
We’re not square. But because it’s true, and I could use it. ”
“Consider it done. I’ll go to Coach this week, and I’ll write whatever you need, and I’ll copy you on it so you know I didn’t soften my own part.”
“You’d better not soften it. I want the ugly version in writing.” He almost smiles, and doesn’t quite let it land, and I respect him for guarding it. “And Ben.” He’s already turning to go. “This doesn’t mean call me. It means write the letter and let me be.”
But there’s no cruelty in it. It’s just a man setting a boundary he’s allowed to set. I nod, because I’ve finally learned that respecting the boundary is the apology.
The rest was just words.
He walks off across the lawn, hands in his pockets, toward a life that’s going to have less of me in it. Which is the correct amount. I watch him go, and I don’t feel like I won, and I don’t feel like I lost.
I feel like I paid, in full, for a thing I spent two years pretending I hadn’t bought.
***
I stand outside the library after he’s gone, and for the first time in weeks I’m not fixing anything, or owing anyone, or bracing for the next place the mess will open up.
Indie’s clean. Cole’s home. Jack is walking toward something better without me in it, which is right.
I’ve done every hard thing I could find, and none of them came with a prize, and I did them anyway, and I’m still standing.
I keep waiting for the reflex to kick in, the one that has run my whole life, the one that looks at any situation and immediately starts angling it toward the outcome I want.
It doesn’t come. Jack walked off and I didn’t reach after him.
Cole came home and I didn’t perform my way into it.
Something in me has genuinely stopped grabbing.
And I understand, standing there, that this is the only version of me that has any business anywhere near Charlotte Astor, because she has spent her whole life being grabbed at, wanted, angled toward, and the last thing on earth she needs is one more person with a plan for how to get her.
There is exactly one thing left in the world that I want, and it isn’t a thing I’ve earned or paid for or can scheme my way into. I told her the truth about that in the half-empty apartment, in her own words handed back: no prize. I do it for free now.
But wanting isn’t scheming. And standing on a cold library step, un-golden, light, finally honest — I let myself want it. All the way. With no plan attached, and no idea whether it will ever be mine.
I want Charlotte. Not the win of her. Not the chase, which was always the part I understood, the no that made her interesting, the wall that made her a project.
I’m done with all of that. I just want her.
The actual her. At six in the morning, with a drooled-on shirt and a serve she’d hit at my head.
And for the first time, I can think it without immediately reaching for how to get it, which means, I’m starting to understand, that I might finally be a person she could actually keep.
Whether she wants to keep me is hers to decide. I’m going to have to do the hardest thing left on the list. Harder than Jack. Harder than the gym. I’m going to have to want her, out loud, and then let her choose, and not touch the outcome.
I don’t know yet that I won’t have to wait long. That she is, at this very hour, doing a thing on a tennis court she has never once done in her life, and that it will bring her to me before I’ve worked up the nerve to go to her.