Chapter 5
Robbie lowers his voice on the phone when I catch up to him down the hall. We push through glass doors to exit the building, and I duck my head, ready to squeeze through the crowd—then immediately stop.
Mom and Charlotte are standing just outside. I turn back to Rob. “You called them?”
“They wouldn’t let us come up to see you,” Charlotte says, shooting daggers at security.
Mom hugs me. “Are you okay?” She squeezes me extra tight, and now I’m no match for the tears. For a second, I feel safe again.
“It was supposed to be a girls’ day. What are you doing here?” I say, wiping my face. “You’re supposed to be having fun.”
“Being here is fun,” Mom says.
Robbie grunts.
I hug Char, and she takes my face in her hands, studying me for any hint of what’s wrong. “They checked me out. I’m all clear,” I tell her. “Just a little blip.”
I can see Robbie’s soul leave his body each time I insist that. “We’re headed this way,” he says. “This feels quite…public.”
We follow Robbie through the crowd of tennis fans.
He flashes his badge and says a few words to a security guard, and we climb a set of stairs to enter a vacant Louis Armstrong Stadium.
It’s just us and fourteen thousand empty seats.
Charlotte stops and rests her forearms against a railing, looking out across the freshly painted court—untouched, unmarked by the shoes and sweat and racket scrapes of the two weeks ahead.
“Remember when we saw Eriksson here?” she asks me as I join her.
“How could I forget,” I say. Widely considered the greatest male player of all time, Lucas Eriksson had an absolute choke hold on tennis until he retired and pretty much disappeared from the public eye.
He was my idol—still is. The only time I saw him in person was that exhibition match he played here.
The four of us take scattered seats toward the back of the stadium, in the shade. We sit there in silence for a moment, but it’s not long before I can’t take it anymore. I know why we’re here.
“So, this is an intervention,” I say.
No one responds. Suspicion confirmed.
“I didn’t think we should be here in the first place,” Robbie says, quietly.
“Here we go,” I say, rolling my eyes.
“You shouldn’t have dropped out of college.”
“I was there one semester! Does that even count as dropping out?”
Mom and Char shift in their seats. They’ll probably let Robbie and me fight this out, and they’re smart to stay out of it.
I got a partial tennis scholarship to Arizona State, and every day I was there, all I could see was Dad’s life insurance wasted on a place where I didn’t want to be.
He left it for me to jump-start my career, not to wake up every morning in a musty dorm room, with a loneliness I could never shake.
And on top of everything else, I was the freshman on the team who was better than everyone else, and no one really liked that.
“You could be there,” Robbie continues, “living a nice, normal life, slowly ramping up to this. But now…this is too much. It’s too much, too fast, and it’s hurting you. We aren’t ready.”
“You say we, but you mean I’m not ready. Just want that for the record, ’cause if this is an intervention, language might matter here.”
“Don’t be a dick,” Robbie says.
“You don’t be a dick,” I fire back. “You’ve been an asshole since practice.”
Robbie stands sharply. “You scared me!” His voice booms across the stadium. “I’m not in your brain, Austin! I told you that. I can coach you, I can help you, but I cannot be in your brain,” he says. “I don’t know what’s going on in there. I wish I did.”
I laugh—no one deserves to be in my brain. This makes him angrier.
“You have to tell me when it’s getting bad again, and we’ll adjust. You could hurt yourself!”
“It wasn’t that bad.”
“You were blinking and you were dizzy and you weren’t focused. Those are the signs.”
“And you pushed me anyway!”
“And I shouldn’t have! I’m sorry!” he says, plowing through the words.
Fuck, I shouldn’t have said that. He’s always been afraid to push me to my limits, and blaming this on him isn’t going to help with that.
Robbie takes a second, then starts again more softly.
“The pressure…the pressure here is sickening. I know it is, because I lived it. I didn’t want you to do this.
This is why. You have to be crystal clear mentally.
You have to be locked in. And now we’re dealing with viral videos, and history, and—and—” He stutters, shaking his head. “It’s too much.”
“I’m not dropping out. I know that’s what you’re gonna say I should do, and I’m telling you that there’s zero chance of that.
First gay guy to play in a Grand Slam becomes…
not the first gay guy to play in a Grand Slam?
That sounds fucking stupid. I made it. I made it all the way through qualies. All of that for nothing?”
“You went down, Austin. It took you down!” He turns to Mom, looking for backup. “He was knocked out—”
“I wasn’t knocked out, Mom. I closed my eyes for, like, a second.
I got dizzy, I tripped, and it went away.
I feel perfectly fine now. The doctor said I am—the medical doctor,” I add for emphasis, directing it straight at Robbie, who apparently thinks he’s a doctor too.
“I dealt with it in Cleveland, and I almost won the tournament. It comes, it goes, and it’s over. I’ll lay off the caffeine again.”
“And there’s gonna be more of this…noise,” Robbie says, gesturing. “Video of the whole thing is probably out there already.”
“ ‘The whole thing’? Is there more?” Char asks, looking up from her seat.
Robbie turns to her. “Austin goes down, and Diego fucking Cruz leaps over the net and runs to him.”
“He leapt?” Char asks.
“Leapt. He was on his own court, opposite side of Austin, and all of sudden he’s running past me like a paramedic.”
He did what? My head spins as I try to process this.
“And we were right next to the cameras, and all the people in the stands,” Robbie continues. “There’s probably a hundred angles of it.”
Char’s face is already buried in her phone, her thumbs flying. If anyone can find something on the internet, it’s her.
“Holy shit, Auz, he did,” she says. “Do you know him or something?”
“Lemme see,” I say, reaching for her phone.
She pushes me away, her eyes glued to her screen. “Why is his shirt off?” she says to herself.
I turn back to Robbie. I can try to wrap my head around this grand gesture later.
“Rob,” I say. We look at each other. “I’m not dropping out. It’s not up to you.”
He sits down again, and as he sinks into his seat I stare at the small bald spot on the top of his head.
I let out a long breath, hoping it will slow my brain so I can be careful here. This is my decision, but I am extremely aware that it would be very hard to do this without Robbie.
“I need you to talk to someone,” he says softly, looking out at the court.
“Like who?”
“I don’t have what it takes to get you through this,” he says, even more softly.
“So, like…a therapist?”
“If you’re not gonna tell me things, you’re gonna have to talk about them with someone else.”
“We can’t afford a therapist.”
“No, she’s a friend. She lives in the city. She won’t charge.”
“Rob, no. I’m not taking a favor from someone else. It sucks enough that you’re not taking a salary.”
Mom looks down at her feet. Char looks to Mom, then to Rob, then to me. After a moment she ducks back into her phone in an attempt to give us privacy.
“This is my requirement,” he says.
“Or what?” I ask. “You’ll walk?”
He doesn’t respond, and that’s answer enough.
“Auz, just go talk to someone. It’s not a big deal,” Char says.
“I know it isn’t. It’s…We have time for this?”
“We make time for this,” Robbie replies.
“So, I say yeah, and what? You won’t be a dick anymore?”
“Austin,” Mom says.
“You’re good with this plan, Mom?”
“I tried to get you to see someone, but you weren’t interested.”
“I wasn’t interested because I can handle it myself.”
“Clearly,” Robbie says, and I whip back to him.
“Rob,” Mom says sternly, calling him out on going a step too far. Over the years, there have been plenty of times when all of us have said things we regret, especially during impossible conversations about Dad.
Robbie hangs his head.
Mom reaches toward me and gives my neck a gentle squeeze. “I’m leaving tomorrow, and I need to know you’re okay,” she says.
“You couldn’t change your flight?”
“The school year just started. They never would have approved this trip if I didn’t do summer school. I can’t ask for more time.”
“What if you call in sick?”
“And show up on TV watching you play?”
“Just cough every once and a while.”
“Once in a while—remember?” she replies. Mom is an English teacher.
She smiles. “I’m sorry, Auzzie. I wish I could stay.”
“All right,” I say, finally letting it go. I’m grateful she was able to be here at all. We tried so hard to make this New York trip work because she’d have a free place to stay with Char and wouldn’t feel guilty about spending too much money.
“You’ll be playing miles away, on the classroom TV. And I’d feel a lot better if you made a smart choice here. I want you to be careful.”
After every match, I leave the court and find a text from her waiting for me, even after the matches in different time zones.
She doesn’t come close to loving tennis as much as Dad did, but she loves me.
It was one thing when I left for college, but being away on the tour, constantly traveling, barely knowing what city I’m in…
I know it kills her when we’re apart, when she’s sitting there in our empty house. Some nights it kills me too.
“Okay, yeah,” I say. “I’ll talk to…the therapist.” I can’t say no to the sadness in her eyes that she tries so hard to hide from us.
“Forty thousand views on one of these videos already,” Char interjects.
“And we have to do something about that, get ahead of it,” Robbie says.
“I’m not saying it was an anxiety attack. I can’t be the gay guy with anxiety.”
Everyone sits with that for a moment.
“I don’t want anyone to know,” I say.
“I mean, anxiety is totally normal, and you shouldn’t have to hide it…” Char says, choosing her words carefully. “But yeah, it would bring more attention,” she continues. “We don’t want more of that right now. And I know that’s rich coming from me.”
Charlotte’s career as a publicist has already landed her a spot on Gotham Scene’s annual Top Thirty Under Thirty list. And while no one has heard of that website, we sure hear a lot about it from her.
“No. No more attention. No more distractions,” Robbie says.
“We can say it was…heat exhaustion? Yeah…” Charlotte follows this thread. “Keep it short, sweet, a quick post, something like Hey, don’t worry about me. Just overheated. Thanks for the assist, Diego. Heart-eyes emoji, xoxo.”
“I’m not using heart eyes.”
“Okay, eggplant emoji?” she asks with a smirk.
“Stop. No, just, like…a handshake emoji, something chill.”
“Yeah, good. That works too,” she says, jotting notes in her phone, fully entering work mode. “I’ll draft it and send it to you.”
“You’re writing it for me?”
“This is literally what I do all day. Let me help.”
Most of her clients are in tech or fashion, far from professional athletes, but some things are universal, and I will absolutely take what I can get.
“Fine,” I say, and secretly I’m grateful to have her.
Charlotte was away at college in the months before Dad died.
We barely talk about it, but one night she got drunk back home, and as fireflies lit up our overgrown yard, she told me how the guilt around that still haunts her.
She wasn’t there when she needed to be. But she’s here now.
I turn to Robbie. “So we’re agreed here?”
He grunts, which is basically Robbie for yep, and it looks like we have a deal.
“Rob, I’m sorry for letting that happen. I mean it,” I say. And I actually do. He nods and finally meets my eyes. “Handshake emoji?” I ask.
I don’t get a laugh, but I do get a shake.