9. Beau #2
I’m walking the path back toward the house, bag over my good shoulder, the afternoon gone gray and cool, and I’ve got my phone out before I’ve fully decided to, and I’m doing a thing I have never once done, which is look someone up.
It takes a second to find her. I don’t know her last name spelled out the way you’d type it — Cash said Beckett, and I trust Cash, but typing is its own adventure for me and search bars are not forgiving — so I go at it sideways, through the bookshop’s account, which Mormor makes me follow, and there she is, tagged in a photo behind the counter.
@sloane.in.the.margins. Of course. A book joke.
I’d roll my eyes if I weren’t, against my will, a little charmed by it.
I open the profile.
It’s curated. That’s the first thing I notice — not in a fake way, in a deliberate way, the way a stage is deliberate.
Books, mostly. Stacks of them shot in good light.
A paperback open on a windowsill with a coffee.
The new arrivals wall at the shop, the one Mormor cried about, and it’s genuinely beautiful, the spines arranged by color into something that looks less like a store display and more like a thing somebody made.
Photos of her and the three roommates — Margo mid-laugh, the dark-haired one I now know is Wren looking unimpressed, the quiet one with the coffee, June.
Sloane in the middle of them, or off to the side of them, never quite the center, always a little angled away from the lens even when she’s smiling.
There’s nothing about her family. Anywhere.
I scroll back a long way and there’s not a parent, not a sibling, not a hometown tagged, not a throwback to anything before Whitmore.
Two years of a life that apparently started at eighteen.
I notice it the way you notice a held breath — not the thing itself, but the shape of the space where the thing would be.
And then there are the performance videos.
Last spring’s show. The department did Much Ado About Nothing, and Sloane played Beatrice, and somebody filmed clips, and I stand on a campus path in the cold and watch them with my thumb hovering, not scrolling.
She’s good.
I don’t know anything about theater. I can’t tell you what she’s doing in any language that would mean something to her.
But I know what it looks like when somebody’s the best one on the ice, the one your eye goes to without being told, the one moving a half-beat ahead of everyone else like they already know where the play’s going — and that’s what she’s doing up there.
There’s a clip where she’s sparring with whoever’s playing Benedick, fast, dry, the whole audience laughing, and she’s not playing it big, she’s playing it exact, every word landing like she set it down on purpose, and I think: that’s the same voice.
That’s the voice she used on the sidewalk.
If you want this to be believable, you cast for it.
She wasn’t being modest. She was telling me she knows precisely how good she is, and she’s right.
I watch the clip twice.
Then I catch myself watching it a third time and stop, because that’s — no. There’s a line and I’m standing on it.
But I need her number. That’s the practical thing, the thing under all the not-scrolling.
I can’t show up at the game tomorrow and hope to corner her.
I can’t run a plan through carrier pigeon.
And there are exactly two ways to get a junior theater major’s phone number when you don’t have it, and one of them is my grandmother.
I think about that for approximately four seconds.
If I walk into Margaret’s Books and ask my grandmother for Sloane Beckett’s number, I will not survive it.
Not because she’d say no — she’d say yes so fast it’d leave a mark, and then she’d never, ever let it go.
She’d bring it up at Christmas. She’d bring it up at my wedding, to someone, someday, theoretically.
Remember when he came in and asked me for her number, Erik, do you remember?
No. Absolutely not. I’d rather lose a tooth.
Which leaves the other way.
I scroll to Margo.
We’re not friends. We’re not not-friends either — Margo Ashby runs in the cheer-and-athletics ecosystem that I’m theoretically the king of and have never once enjoyed being the king of, and our paths cross at parties and team things often enough that we’ve got each other’s numbers from some logistics thing sophomore year.
I’ve maybe spoken forty words to her in two years.
But she’s Sloane’s roommate, and she’s the kind of connected that means she’ll have the number, and she’s not my grandmother.
I type it out slow, deleting twice, getting the words to sit still:
Hey Margo, it’s Beau. Random ask — could I get Sloane’s number? Need to reach her about something.
I hit send and put the phone in my pocket and keep walking and figure I’ll hear back in an hour, maybe, if at all.
The phone rings in my pocket forty seconds later.
It’s her. Margo calling. I stop on the path and look at it for a second, and then I answer, because not answering would be worse.
“Hello?”
“Beau Sorensen.” There’s gym noise behind her — the clank of plates, somebody’s music, the mechanical rhythm of a treadmill.
She’s clearly mid-workout and clearly not the kind of person who lets a workout stop her from conducting an interrogation.
“I’m going to need you to explain to me, in detail, why the captain of the hockey team is texting me at four in the afternoon asking for my best friend’s phone number. ”
“I need to reach her about something.”
“Yeah, you said that. ‘Something.’ Love that. Very specific.” A grunt, the clank of a weight going down. “Try again. What’s the something?”
“It’s between Sloane and me.”
“Nothing involving Sloane is between you and Sloane until I’ve cleared it. That’s how this works. I’m the gate.” Another clank. “You don’t get to the princess without going through the dragon, and I am a very small, very angry dragon, and I have a lot of free time and an excellent memory.”
I find, standing on the path, that I’m smiling, which I did not expect to be doing. “You’re at the gym.”
“I’m always at the gym. Don’t change the subject. What are your intentions with my best friend?”
“My intentions?”
“You heard me.”
“Margo, you’re — what, five-five?”
“Five-five and a half, and I will end you, height is not a personality, Sorensen. I’ve made men twice my size cry. Answer the question.”
I lean against a lamppost. The afternoon’s gone cold and I should be walking but I’m not, because this is, against all odds, the most entertaining conversation I’ve had all day.
“Okay. My intentions. I intend to —” I think about how much to say.
I land on the truth, mostly, which is the version you don’t trip on.
“I intend to spend some time with her. Be around. Take her to some things.”
“’Take her to some things.’” Margo repeats it with deep suspicion. “You realize she hates athletes.”
“I’ve gathered.”
“Like, specifically. On principle. She has a whole framework.”
“I’ve experienced the framework.”
“And you, an athlete — the head athlete, the alpha athlete, the one all the other athletes report to —”