Alonso and LeGrand were together again. I wasn’t sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing. I also wasn’t sure why LeGrand even bothered with the program, he seemed so genuinely uninterested. With his family contacts, I was pretty sure he didn’t have to worry about getting into the college of his choice. He probably had a spot reserved for him at Yale or Princeton or Duke, something that came along with a generous donation from his father to the school of LeGrand’s choice. But when I thought about it, Alonso and LeGrand were the perfect match—both equally contemptuous of the Friends Across the Bay program.
At the beginning of the second week, Alonso showed up with his ankle wrapped with a compression bandage, claiming an injury, which I seriously doubted. It seemed to suit both of them just fine. They spent a lot of time in the tennis clubhouse with me serving them cokes that LeGrand signed for on his father’s account. They didn’t exactly have deep conversations, but they seemed to be having fun.
In a strange way, those times the three of us spent together helped to create a bond. And somewhere along the way, the bond turned into an actual friendship. LeGrand asked a lot of questions about life in California, almost fixated on the subject. I told him what I knew about the real California—life and the people outside the country club gates. If he wanted to know about country club living, he had to look no further than Crystal Point. He asked me if I surfed (which I didn’t). If Californians did a lot of drugs (no more than anywhere else from what I could tell). If everyone there was a vegetarian and a hippie. He was pleased to learn I was a former vegetarian, confirming at least one of his California stereotypes. The fact that I’d lapsed after moving to Florida only reinforced it in his mind.
“If you only eat vegetables, you’ll turn into a vegetable,” he warned me.
“So what happens if I only eat animals?” I came back at him.
“You’ll be an animal,” Alonso said with downcast eyes and a wicked grin.
LeGrand laughed so hard, I had to join in. It was unusual, but gratifying, to see Alonso come out of his shell around us.
LeGrand was funny and entertained us with crazy stories about his world in the sheltered South of the uber wealthy. He rarely had anything nice to say about it, but at the same time he definitely took advantage of all the perks that came with it.
“Walk away if it’s so terrible,” I only half-kidded him. This was on a day when he’d just bought the most expensive tennis racket we carried—signed for, of course, using his dad’s account.
“Maybe I will one day.” It was the only time I ever saw the little smirk disappear from his face. But I knew he’d never walk away. People who get used to money don’t know what to do without it.
Alonso was a good listener but still too shy to participate much in conversations that included me, a girl. He didn’t have an eye contact problem with LeGrand, but he never looked me directly in the eye, not even once.
One day, after I shooed them out of the clubhouse claiming there were things they could work on even with Alonso’s taped ankle, they dragged two chairs out on either side of the net and playfully hit the ball back and forth until Mattie Lynn yelled at them to get the chairs off the court and go home if they couldn’t think of anything better to do. I was glad she did it because otherwise I would have had to put a stop to it myself. But I was happy for the company of LeGrand and Alonso. They made the time at work go by faster and distracted me from the frequent headaches which lasted longer and longer into the day. I hoped Alonso wasn’t picking up on the smell of alcohol I frequently detected on LeGrand’s breath, even though I didn’t see how he could miss it.
I was living my days just for my nights.