Chapter 30
Carter
We answered the tabloid at three in the afternoon with eleven words Sloane wrote and I didn’t change: The campaign speaks for itself; the participants won’t be commenting further.
It ran at the bottom of a column nobody read.
That’s what four hours of my life being decided looks like from the outside: eleven words and a slow Tuesday.
The group chat has been a war zone since six a.m. because Mateo sent a photo of his breakfast and Earl replied that it looked like “a crime scene with avocado,” and now there are forty-one unread messages and not one of them is about football.
This is the part nobody films. Not the goals. This.
In the dressing room before training it’s the usual liturgy: someone’s got the speaker, someone’s hidden someone else’s left boot, Mateo’s doing the crossword in pen and refusing all help on principle, and Earl moves through it like weather, handing out kit and insults in equal measure, calling everyone son and meaning it.
“Reinhardt.” Earl drops a folded shirt in my lap. “You’re smiling at your phone like a man in trouble.”
“I’m always smiling, Earl. It’s the brand.”
“Mm. Not like that, it isn’t.” He’s already moving on. He doesn’t push it. Earl never pushes it — he just knows, the way he knows everything in this room, and lets me keep it until I’m ready to put it down.
Mateo looks up from his crossword. “Six letters. ‘Caught out completely.’”
“Exposed,” I say, without thinking.
He fills it in, then gives me the long unhurried look over the top of the paper, the one that’s seen everything and says nothing, and goes back to the puzzle. “Sí,” he says, to the crossword, not to me. “Exposed.”
I throw a shin pad at him. He doesn’t flinch. The room swallows it whole and moves on, and I sit in the middle of the only family that stayed and let it carry me the way it always does.
***
We steal an hour we aren’t supposed to have, in a taquería off the route between two campaign things, in a vinyl booth at the back where the light’s bad and the salsa’s good and nobody’s scheduled us to be anything to each other for sixty whole minutes.
This is the contraband I’ve started living for — not the rooftop, not the cameras, not the sanctioned moments where we perform the thing we actually are.
The ordinary ones. Sloane Vega arguing with me about whether a midfielder can be a striker’s problem, stealing a chip off my plate without acknowledging she’s done it, doing the crossword in pen on a folded section of paper she carries because she does the crossword in pen, the way she does everything, like the world owes her a permanent record.
She’s not in the blazer. Her hair’s down. This is the version almost no one gets, and I get it in a bad-lit booth because a bad-lit booth is the only place in either of our lives that no one’s monetized yet.
“You’re staring,” she says, not looking up from the crossword.
“I’m strategizing. Six across.”
“You don’t know six across. You don’t know any of them. You just like watching me get them.” She fills it in. “Inertia. It’s always inertia, with you people.”
“You people.”
“Strikers.” She finally looks up, and there’s a thing in her face that’s only ever in her face here, off the clock, off the record — something unguarded enough that I’d hand over the notebook right now if my hands knew how.
“You wait for the world to put the ball where you want it, and then you take credit for the run.”
I’m about to tell her that’s the meanest accurate thing anyone’s ever said to me when the man two booths over stands up, and turns, and lifts his phone.
It’s not even malicious. That’s the part I’ll carry.
He’s a kid, maybe twenty, and his face does the open delighted thing a fan’s face does, holy crap that’s Carter Reinhardt, and the phone comes up the way phones come up now, reflex, no thought in it, just the modern instinct to convert a moment into a thing you can keep — and he’s not pointing it at me.
He’s pointing it at us.
And the hour ends. Not in the viewfinder — in her, in real time, which is the worse place to see it.
Because Sloane doesn’t flinch — she never flinches, flinching’s a tell — but something underneath the unguarded thing comes up like a security shutter, fast and total and practiced, and by the time the kid’s got his shot the woman doing the crossword in pen is gone and the head of communications for the New York Sentinels is sitting in her place, spine right, face arranged, a professional caught in proximity to a rival’s centerpiece and already drafting the explanation in her head.
The pen’s still in her hand. It’s the only thing left of the last sixty seconds.
“Hey, man.” I give the kid the wattage, full beam, stand and turn my body so the easy shot is me and only me, the move I can do in my sleep, the move that exists precisely so the lens lands where it costs nobody.
“You want a picture? Come here, let’s do a good one.
” I get an arm around him, point us both at his own phone, away from the booth, away from her, and I am the most charming I have been all week and every watt of it’s a body I’m throwing across a grenade.
“What’s your name? Marco? Marco, you got a better camera than this on you? This lighting’s a war crime.”
Marco’s thrilled. Marco posts the selfie with me grinning like the fun one and gets four hundred likes and no idea he was ever holding anything dangerous. I sign his menu.
I send him off happy. I do my entire job, which it turns out is this: be so bright nobody looks at the person standing in my shadow.
When I sit back down the booth is a crime scene.
“We should go,” she says. Level. The closing-a-call voice. “That’s enough of an hour.”
“Sloane.”
“It’s fine. He got you, not me, you covered it, it’s—” She caps the pen. Slides the crossword into her bag, the unfinished grid, inertia sitting there in her handwriting, the last true thing that happened in this booth. “It’s fine, Carter. It’s the job. I knew the job when I took it.”
And here’s the thing that takes the legs out from under me, sitting in a bad-lit taquería with a happy kid’s selfie already climbing toward a thousand likes: it landed on her.
All of it. The lens swung wide and I threw myself in front of it and it still landed on her, because that’s the asymmetry, that’s the part I keep almost understanding and then getting to be too charming to feel.
If that photo had been us — her hair down, the crossword, the unguarded face — I’d have been Carter being Carter, forgiven by lunchtime. She’d have been the comms director who compromised a league initiative, finished by dinner.
We were never on the same ledge. I just got to stand on mine and feel brave about covering hers.
“I hate that I can’t give you an ordinary hour,” I say, before I can make it lighter. “That’s the thing I want most and it’s the one thing I can’t get you. Every hour I get you costs you one you can’t get back.”
She looks at me for a second, the shutter still down, and then — because she’s braver than me in exactly the ways I’m a coward — she lets it up half an inch, just for me, just here.
“You covered the grenade,” she says. “Most people reach for the camera. You reached for the kid.” He doesn’t answer right away, dry, hers. “Don’t make it a thing.”
We leave separately. Two minutes apart, different doors, the protocol we never agreed to out loud and both know by heart.
I take the long way to the car and I think about a woman doing a crossword in pen in the one room nobody’s monetized yet, and how I’d burn the whole campaign down for the right to give her that hour clean — and how the want and the cost are the same thing wearing two faces, and I’ve started, finally, to feel the second one in real time.
It’s progress. It’s the worst kind. The kind that only shows up as the size of what you can’t give somebody.