Page 10 of Across His Line

“When I come to visit, I’m going to key his expensive ass car,” Elsie says.

“I don’t know which car is his,” I say.

She rolls her eyes. “The most expensive one in the lot.”

I laugh, and Payton finally smiles. Elsie says she has four minutes and one eyebrow and loves me, and the screen goes dark.

I sit there for a second with the phone warm in my hand and my goggles in my lap.

Then I go to lab.

Lab is lab. I titrate something until it turns the faint, embarrassed pink it’s supposed to turn, and my lab partner, a boy named Harry who has never once looked up from his own hands, says “nice” to the beaker instead of to me.

Micro is in the big lecture hall in the business building, the one with the seats that fold up and slap you in the back of the legs if you stand too fast. I sit where I always sit, on the aisle, two-thirds of the way up, close enough to see the slides and far enough back that nobody behind me can watch me take notes.

Forty minutes in, the professor stops in front of a graph and asks the room why the firm in her example keeps producing at a loss in the short run instead of shutting its doors.

I know the answer. I knew it before she finished asking. But out of habit, my hand doesn’t go up. I look around the room, willing someone to answer it.

My body stays where it is, like it did in high school, in every class, with every answer I ever knew. Somewhere around the tenth grade, a hand in the air turned into a thing that got remembered, and a thing that got remembered turned into a thing that got used against me. So I stopped. I took the B-plus in participation. I wrote the answers in the margins of my notebook instead, where nobody could see me be right.

The professor waits. The silence goes on long enough to get uncomfortable.

I look down the steep rows of the lecture hall, at the backs of a hundred and forty heads that have never once thought about me, and something in my chest says, quietly and very clearly, there’s nobody here.

I put my hand up.

My heart leaps.

“Yes, on the aisle,” she says, pointing at me.

“Because the revenue still covers its variable costs,” I say, and my voice comes out steadier than I thought it would. “It’s losing money either way, so it keeps going as long as it’s losing less than it would if it shut down. The fixed costs are already gone.”

“Exactly,” she says. “The fixed costs are sunk. Thank you.” And she clicks to the next slide.

I blink, looking around. That’s it. Nobody turns around. Nobody whispers. Nobody is going to be waiting in the hallway when class lets out, leaning against the wall with his hands in his pockets, ready to say it back to me in a voice that makes it sound stupid. The girl next to me types something into her notes. The boy in front of me yawns. The room just keeps going, the way rooms do, carrying my small correct answer along with everything else.

I sit there with my hand back in my lap and my heart pumping like I’m going cliff jumping. And I think that might be the strangest thing about being safe. Nothing happens. You brace and brace for an impact, and it never comes, and you don’t know what to do with it.

Kylie finds me in the dining hall at twelve-thirty, which is impressive, because I sit at the table in the back corner by the dish return precisely so that people won’t find me. I have my back to the wall.

She drops into the chair across from me with a tray that’s half fries and half a salad she won’t touch, and her hair is in a claw clip. She’s wearing a sweatshirt that’s definitely not hers. It comes down past her hands.

“So,” she says. “I love seeing you here.”

I look at her.

“I’m respecting your boundaries,” Kylie says, stabbing a fry into ketchup. “But I can tell that my little hermit crab is leaving her shell.”

Even though I’ve kept my wall up with Kylie Vandercook, I must admit that I can see myself being her best friend. She’s strong-willed, which I like, says whatever’s on her mind, and is persistent about the things she cares about. I knew all these things about her within the first week, and after her asshole boyfriend cheated on her, I watched her peel back a layer and pull one back on that was stronger and better. I think she’s a good person.

“I’m no hermit crab,” I mutter.

She shrugs. “You came out of one shell and went into the other. This one’s prettier. I like it.”

She smiles, so I smile back.

She says, “I think you found a new shell, and I’m here to offer a new one.”