Page 115 of Across His Line

“If you find out you were wrong about someone,” I say, “what are you supposed to do?”

He blinks.

He drives. A mile. Two. The song changes. His thumb moves on the steering wheel, back and forth, like he’s rubbing at something on the leather.

I don’t take it back. I don’t fill it in.

“Nothing,” he says.

I look at him.

He keeps his eyes on the road.

“You can’t do anything with it,” he says. “Whatever you already did, you did.”

Another mile.

“You just don’t do it again.”

He doesn’t say anything else.

I look out the window.

I watch the trees. I watch him, a little, in the reflection in my window. His hands on the wheel. His jaw. His eyes on the road.

“Seven?” I say, after a while. “The game.”

“Seven.”

I nod. I already know I’m not going.

Not because of him. I don’t hate him. I don’t know what I feel about him, but it isn’t that anymore. I’m not going because this weekend was too much, too much of everything, and I want my room. I want my bed. I want to sit at my desk and print shipping labels and not be in anybody’s car or anybody’s house or anybody’s anything.

Woodbury comes up out of the gray at two-forty.

The campus is almost empty. The quad is just frost and a couple of people with their hoods up. The dining hall by the library has a sign on the door. The student center is dark.

And Corvin Hall.

It’s so ugly. I’ve never noticed how ugly it is. Brown brick and narrow windows, a broken blind on the second floor, a bike locked to the railing that’s been there since September with no front wheel. It’s small and plain and a little sad, and it looks like a building nobody’s ever loved.

I’ve never been so glad to see anything in my life.

He parks in the lot behind it, in his spot under the light. He gets out and goes around to the trunk and opens it and takes out my duffel.

I come around the back of the car.

“I got it,” I say.

He looks at me for a second. Then he gives it to me.

We stand there in the lot. The cold coming off the asphalt. His bag still in the trunk. My duffel in my hand. Neither of us says anything, and it’s not like the driveway on Wednesday, with text me and call if you need something. He doesn’t say any of that. He doesn’t offer anything.

He gets his bag out and shuts the trunk.

We go in together. Up the three flights, his steps behind mine, neither of us talking. The building is quiet. Somebody’s left a TV on somewhere on two. The heat ticks in the walls.

The third floor hallway. The carpet that smells like wet dog. Somebody’s whiteboard. A door with a flag on it.