31. Sloane #3
Margo finds me upstairs the next afternoon. She has a key, because the lines between the Sailmaker and the rest of my life stopped being lines somewhere this fall and nobody bothered to redraw them.
“You’re not answering your phone.” She drops onto the end of the bed, coat still on, cheerleader posture even in a crisis.
“Which, fine, finals, whatever, but Sloane.” She stops.
She’s bad at the part where you slow down to hand a person something gently; Margo takes the whole world at a sprint.
“Okay. I didn’t know if you already knew.
I didn’t know if I was even supposed to be the one to—”
“Margo.”
“Wren told me. She got it from Cash, so it’s real, it’s not Sailmaker telephone.” She rips it off like tape. “Beau had surgery.”
The radiator ticks. I set down the mug I’d been holding, carefully, on the windowsill.
“His shoulder. The one he hurt against Kingsbury — it was way worse than they put out. A tear, the kind you need a knife for. He’s done for the season, and they’re saying the draft’s an actual question mark now, not a PR question mark, a real one.
It was three days ago.” Her hand finds my knee.
“I didn’t know if you’d want to know. I decided you’d rather. ”
Three days ago. While I was pricing a dead man’s Penguin Classics and feeling exactly nothing about Yale, two miles from here they were opening Beau’s shoulder with a knife and setting it back in an order that would hold.
“How does Wren even have Cash’s—” I start, and don’t finish, because it doesn’t matter, except it does, it’s the whole thing.
“They’ve been—” Margo waves a hand. “Orbiting. Wren keeps turning up on the Raven House porch and calling it film review. It’s a whole situation.
” She drags herself back on track. “The point is there used to be two groups, and now there’s nine people who all know each other’s bad news.
That’s how it got to me before it got to you.
You’re in the middle of it whether you came back or not, Sloane. ”
“Who’s with him?” I don’t decide to ask it. It’s just out.
“Everybody, that’s the thing.” Her voice goes careful.
“His sisters came up from Greenwich. His mom’s here.
The house rotates through — Wren says Cash slept in the chair the first night and won’t admit it.
” She watches my face. “He’s not alone. He’s got a full room.
That’s just not the same as the right person being in it. ”
I look at the window, where it’s finally snowing in earnest, fat and slow through the streetlight.
The Yale email is gone from my phone and its absence still doesn’t hurt, and that is the cleanest proof I own of anything: I gave up the wrong thing to keep safe.
I spent twelve days congratulating myself for getting out of his way so his bright untaxed life could stay bright — and the boards found his shoulder anyway, in a corner, with my name presumably nowhere near his head, and you cannot stand far enough back from a person to keep the world from reaching them.
The leaving bought him nothing. It only cost me the chair I’d have had a right to in that waiting room if I’d stayed.
“Say a word.” Margo doesn’t take her hand back. “You’ve got the face.”
“I’m glad you told me.” My sentences go clean and correct and parade-ground, the way they do when I’m performing fine, and I can hear myself doing it and I cannot stop. “Thank you. That was kind of you.”
“That is the least fine a human being has ever sounded.” She squeezes once. “You don’t have to do the voice. Not with me. I sat through the Yale thing and you did the voice then too, and I let it go, but I am not letting this one go.”
“I don’t get to go.” It comes out without the contraction, the one dropped word the only crack in the whole wall. I do not get to go. “I’m the one who left, Margo. You don’t get to leave a person and then turn up in his waiting room like the chair has your name on it.”
Margo is quiet for a second, which for Margo is a full monologue.
“Maybe,” she says. “I love you, and I’m not going to sit here and call you a coward.
” She says it plain, the way she says everything.
“You’ve survived things that would’ve folded me in half, and I won’t pretend I know what they weigh.
But I watched you be happy this fall. I’d never once seen it on you before.
I didn’t know that’s what your face did.
” She stands and fixes my collar, because Margo cannot leave a room without straightening something in it.
“Just don’t decide it’s too late while it’s still only hard.
Those aren’t the same thing. You’re the one who taught me that. ”
I don’t answer her. Outside, the snow keeps coming down through the light, and across town a phone I am not going to call sits face down on a counter, and I sit on a borrowed bed with my whole body pointed at the door, holding the one thing I sacrificed everything to protect — which turned out to be the wrong thing entirely, and didn’t even have the decency to hurt.