Chapter Thirty-Two - Benedict
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Benedict
ONE YEAR LATER
The department runs a mixed-doubles charity exhibition every spring.
It’s the same event that paired me with Charlotte in the first place, back when the draw felt like a sentence and she looked at me across the net like something she’d scrape off her shoe.
A year later, they’re running it again — and this time nobody has to force the pairing.
We signed up together, on purpose, one name under the other, and Coach Leon looked at the sheet and then at us and said, “Well. That’ll sell tickets,” and wandered off to worry about a net.
Here’s the thing about me you’d have needed a year to believe: I trained for it.
A charity exhibition. A glorified fundraiser with a bouncy castle for the donors’ kids.
And I put in real hours, because I’m playing it next to her, and I am not going to be the weak half of anything with Charlotte Astor’s name over mine.
The old me played every match half-asleep, let the gallery laugh, called it charm.
I don’t do that anymore. I found out what it feels like to actually try at something, and I can’t go back.
It’s like tasting salt. Julian says he misses the lazy genius.
He’s lying. He watched me run down a ball last week that the old me would have waved at, and he had a look on his face I’d have paid money for.
The first chapter of all this, if you’d been watching, was me winning a match without breaking a sweat while a gallery of people who didn’t know me clapped for a guy who wasn’t really there.
I remember that version. He was very charming and very hollow, and he’d have told you he was the happiest man alive, because he never once let anything get close enough to test the claim.
If you’d told him that a year later he’d be nervous, actually nervous, palms damp — before a charity exhibition, because he cared about the outcome and cared more about the person he was playing beside, he’d have laughed and found somewhere better to be.
I don’t miss him. I understand him, which is different.
He was doing the only thing he knew how to do with a life nobody ever made him pay for.
It took getting gutted in a doorway and a debt at an equipment desk to teach him the trick nobody’s born knowing: the things you don’t earn, you can’t feel.
And a life you can’t feel isn’t the prize.
It’s just a very comfortable way to miss your whole one.
Julian had a line about us, back at the start.
One of us earned everything and couldn’t enjoy it; the other enjoyed everything and earned none of it.
He said it like a diagnosis of two separate diseases.
Turns out it was one disease with two faces.
And turns out the cure for both was standing next to the other one long enough to catch what you were missing.
She taught me to earn. I taught her to enjoy.
We met in the middle, a place I didn’t know existed, because I’d only ever lived at the easy end, and she’d only ever lived at the hard one.
The middle, it turns out, is the only part of the court where you can actually reach the ball.
***
The stands are the good kind of full, students, boosters, a knot of little kids who’ve escaped the bouncy castle.
Our people are down front, restored and rearranged.
Cole and Indie, together again, Cole’s arm around her and both of them a little disgusting about it, which they’ve earned, because he spent two months proving he’d choose faith over doubt every single day until she believed him, and she made him prove it, and now she lets him hold her at a tennis match like a man who knows exactly what he almost lost. Margo, with the coffee order written on her hand.
Tess, running a betting pool on our match, loudly, which I’ve stopped trying to stop.
Julian, arms crossed, pretending he isn’t proud.
Before the match, Indie comes down to the fence to wish me luck, which is a sentence I could not have written six months ago, when she was eating under a hood because of a fire I helped light.
It took time. I didn’t rush it, and I didn’t perform my way toward it.
I told her the truth once, that she’d been wronged by our mess and cleared by our mess and owed us nothing either way — and then I let her decide the pace. She decided it slowly.
And here she is, at the fence.
“She went first, you know,” Indie says, watching Charlotte stretch at the net.
“At your apartment. The doorway thing. Told me after. Charlotte Astor said it out loud before you did.” She grins at me, mischief in it, and something softer under the mischief.
“I’ve been waiting three years to see her hand somebody the ball and not snatch it back.
You did that. Not by chasing her. By finally being someone she could stop guarding against. So.
” She knocks the fence twice with her knuckles.
“Don’t fumble it, Prescott-Hawthorne. I gave a very good speech to get her to your door. I’m not doing it twice.”
“Wouldn’t dream of making you.”
Cole, behind her, gives me the nod, the whole-thing nod, we’re good, we’re better — and puts his arm back around Indie, and we’re whole again. Rebuilt in a slightly different shape. Which is the only way anything worth keeping ever survives.
Jack isn’t here. Jack’s across town most weekends now, coaching juniors.
Good at it. Lighter. I hear it secondhand, which is the correct way for me to hear things about Jack now.
Coach wrote him the reference. I wrote my part, the ugly version, in full — and copied him on it like I promised, and he sent back two words.
Got it. That’s the whole friendship now: two words, once, and a paper trail that finally tells the truth about who folded.
It’s not what we were. It’s honest, which we never actually were.
I’ll take honest over golden for the rest of my life.
We warm up. Charlotte at the net, me at the baseline, and she glances back at me the way she does now, not checking whether I’ll hold up my end; she stopped worrying about that months ago.
Just looking. Pleased to find me still there.
Still hers. Still inconvenient. I used to think that look was the most efficient lie in my arsenal, back when I was the one giving it.
Getting it aimed at me is a different thing entirely.
It’s the least efficient thing in the world. It doesn’t get her anything.
She just does it because she means it.
The other team warms up across the net, a good pair from the state school, and Charlotte and I fall into the thing without discussing it, the way we do now.
A ball comes back low and wide to my side and I stretch for it and shank it, and before it’s even off my strings she’s already shifted to cover the hole I left, because she reads my mistakes half a second before I make them, and I read hers, and the two of us cover a court like one slightly argumentative organism.
The first time we played, a year ago, we spent the whole session in each other’s way, two people who’d only ever played singles, both certain the smart move was to take every ball themselves.
Now she takes her side and trusts me with mine, and the trust is the entire game, and neither of us can quite believe we ever tried to do it alone.
“You’re crowding the middle,” she says, not turning around.
“I’m anticipating.”
“You’re crowding. If they lob you, I’m not saving you.”
“You’d save me. You can’t help it”
“I’m strategic. There’s a difference.” A ball comes at her and she puts it away, crisp, and adds, over her shoulder: “There’s nothing and no one getting past this net today, Hawthorne. Try to be worth standing next to.”
It’s the same trash talk she fed me the first time we won a doubles match together, back when winning next to her was the most confusing thing that had ever happened to me. It’s a bit now, like everything good. But she means the last part, the worth standing next to part.
I’ve spent a year making sure the answer is yes.
***
Then my phone goes off in my bag by the fence. Loud. Mid-warmup. In front of the whole stand.
“You are very handsome and the smartest boy in the world!”
Her voice, ringing out over the court, mortified and magnificent, eleven months old, the forfeit she paid me at a gala, the fourteen-cent loss, the recording she ordered me to delete and I’d sooner have deleted my own hands.
It’s still her ringtone. It will always be her ringtone.
The whole front row loses it. Tess screams. Somebody’s kid asks why the phone is yelling.
And Charlotte, at the net, does not threaten to end me.
That’s how you’d know, if you’d been there at the start and came back for the finish.
A year ago, that recording playing in public would have cost me a limb.
She’d have marched over promising murder, and meant it, and I’d have loved every furious second.
Now she just turns around, and finds my eyes across the court, and, this is the part, she smiles.
Not the private one she saves. The public one.
The one she used to ration like it came out of her own blood.
She lets a whole stand of people watch her be delighted that a boy kept a recording of her being soft.
Because it’s ours now, the whole ridiculous thing.
She has stopped being ashamed of the evidence that she loves me.
“You could change it,” she calls over, grinning.
“I’d sooner delete my own hands,” I call back. Same line as always. It’s a bit now. Every good thing we have started as a fight and turned into a bit. That’s the whole language of us.