Page 101 of Across His Line

“Water?”

I shrug.

He goes to a little refrigerator I didn’t notice, built into the cabinet under the TV, because of course there’s a refrigerator in his bedroom, and he gets out a bottle of water and brings it to me and puts it in my hands without letting his fingers touch mine. I hold it. It’s cold. I press it to the side of my neck.

Rafe looks at the TV. Then at me. And then he says, with a totally straight face, like it’s a serious proposal, “Do you want to watch something?”

And I almost laugh. It’s so stupid. It’s the stupidest question. An hour ago, he was punching my cousin and his friends into a wall in my grandma’s living room. And now he’s standing in his bedroom in his socks asking if I want to watch TV, like we’re two people who do this. Like it’s a normal thing.

“What?” he asks like he could read my mind. “A movie? Something. I don’t know.”

He looks at the floor as his jaw works. And I realize, watching him, that he doesn’t know what to do. He knows how to fight. He knows how to play hockey. He apparently knows, now, how to offer somebody a ride and let them say no. But he has no idea how to make somebody feel better. So he’s offering me the TV.

And it’s the kindest thing anybody’s offered me all week.

“Okay,” I say. Then, because I can’t help it, because something in me needs to lighten the mood, “A musical.”

“Absolutely fucking not.”

And I laugh. It comes up out of me before I can stop it. A real one. It hurts my throat, and it hurts my ribs, and I have to put my hand over my mouth. It’s the first time I’ve laughed since a car on a highway, and it feels like breaking a window to let air into a room.

“You survived the first one,” I say through my fingers.

“Barely.”

And the corner of his mouth moves.

Just a little. Just once. It isn’t a smile. Rafferty Waleska doesn’t smile. But it’s closer than anything I’ve ever seen on his face. It’s close enough to loosen the knot in my chest.

“Fine,” I say. “You pick.”

He picks up the remote. He turns on the TV. He scrolls for a while without saying anything, and lands on something old, some action movie with explosions and a man running down a hallway. He doesn’t ask if it’s okay. He just puts it on.

Then he goes to the bed, pulls the dark blanket off the end of it, and throws it at me.

It lands on my head. I pull it off. He’s already sitting down at the other end of the couch, as far from me as the couch goes, with his feet on the coffee table and his bandaged hand resting on his thigh, his face turned to the screen.

I pull the blanket up over my knees.

The movie plays, and for a long time, I look at the TV stand because it’s filled with things. His bedroom is like a studio.

I wonder what my grandma’s doing right now, and if Dylan is losing his mind, plotting something with his friends.

I look at Rafe. He’s sitting at the other end of a couch with dried blood still in the corner of his mouth, and I don’t want him to go anywhere.

“Rafe?”

He doesn’t take his eyes off the screen. “Yeah.”

“What changed?”

He turns his head to look at me. For a long moment, in the flickering light, he just looks.

And my heart starts racing when I notice his eyes are green.

16

That’s Capitalism