Page 77 of On His Mind

“She’s basically staff, she’s invited.”

“She’s a freshman, Stanley.” Benson doesn’t turn around. “She’s not allowed here. That’s the end of it.”

“I’m asking about her general availability—”

Benson glares at him. Stanley puts his hands up and laughs.

Then their conversation rolls into an argument about whether the transfer defenseman can actually skate. Rowan walks over and tells them to keep their voices down because he should be here any second now.

Stanley listens, for once in his life, but it’s bad news for me because he looks over and smiles. He slings an arm around my neck and announces to a group of girls that I am the one making the juice for the party, and if they have any complaints, to report it to him, and he’ll take care of it. A year ago my whole body would have gone to wood under his arm, under the attentionhe’s pulling my way, but tonight, I let it happen. My jaw’s loose. Blue’s across the room, and when I find him, he lifts his chin an inch.

Somebody tells me,good juice, Deveroux,on his way to get more. I swear Stanley is going around and telling everyone to compliment me as some kind of joke. Stanley grabs the back of my neck and hangs off me, grinning, all his weight on it. That does it. The hand on my neck, the weight, the noise — I thought I could handle it, and my body decides before I do. My vision goes first. I get his arm off me, and he laughs like it’s nothing. I’m already looking for the exit. The side door. I push toward it with no air getting in. My pulse is in my ears, loud enough that it drowns the room, and the mouths around me are moving, and I can’t hear any of them. I reach the side door and step out into the night.

I thought I was past this. My vision still isn’t right, and I stand in the cold and work at it, in for four, hold for four, out for six.

Someone comes up behind me, and I’m back a step, arms out, before I’ve seen who it is.

“Water,” Blue says, holding it out.

I take it.

He doesn’t say anything else. He stands out there in the cold with me while I drink it and waits for my breath to come back.

“You good?”

I nod. “Yeah. Going to bed.”

I go up to my room and nobody makes anything of it, and I’m glad. There’s a magazine on the desk. I bought it on Tuesday, stood at the rack on Ninth long enough that the woman at the register started watching me, counted the bills out in ones, and carried the magazine home like it was worth something. Fourteen dollars on houses I’ll never stand inside.

I sit on the edge of the bed with it and turn the pages, my hands not all the way steady yet. There are kitchens the size ofmy living room downstairs. A wall of glass with a lake behind it. Rooms photographed empty on purpose. Then on page sixty-four, there is a house cut into a hill, and the caption says the main room takes its light from a band of high windows under the roofline, north-facing, so it stays even all day and never glares.Clerestory.

My hand stops on the page.

I get my phone out.

Me:The light thing. Clerestory.

It’s gone before I’ve read it back. It just sends. And then it’s out there. My gut turns over because I can’t unsend it. I read it four times like the fourth time might give me the option.

The house is still going under the floor.

I hold the phone in both hands in the dark and I wait for it to buzz.

It doesn’t.

Chapter 22

Penelope

Iwakeupatten-forty.

Not ten-forty like a slow Sunday. Ten-forty with the light already gone flat and high in the room, three alarms slept clean through, my mouth dry, the whole morning simply missing — my workout, my lemon water, the good gray hour at the table I no longer sit down at. Gone. I lie there for a second, not knowing what day it is, and then I do know, and I’m up too fast, and the room tilts. I press the heels of my hands into my eyes and tell myself it’s the party, the drinks, the late night, and I get up, annoyed at myself.

I grab my phone off the nightstand to see how bad it is.

Mara (9:14): Good morning to my new best friend

Mara (9:15): Coffee. The place on the 8th. I already told Sofia you’re coming, so you have to now.