Page 116 of Across His Line

His door.

Mine.

Three doors.

A month ago, it was the distance I measured my whole day by. I knew it in my sleep. I listened for it.

Now I stand at my door with my key in my hand and look down the hall at him standing at his, and it’s just three doors.

He looks at me.

“See you,” he says.

“Yeah.”

He opens his door. It sticks. He yanks it. It closes behind him, hard, the way it always does.

I go in.

My room is exactly the way I left it on Wednesday. Kylie’s bed with three outfits on it. My bed by the window, made. The sticky note on the inside of my closet door. It smells like my shampoo and Kylie’s perfume and dust.

I put the chain on.

Then I sit on my bed with my duffel next to me, and I don’t unpack it. I just sit there. My throat hurts. My ribs hurt. My finger has a scab on it in a ring.

I take out my phone.

I open the map. I don’t decide to. My thumb just does it.

There he is. Three doors down. A little blue circle, almost on top of mine, sitting still.

I leave it on.

18

No, I’m Trafficking Sweaters

Rafe

I liked it better when I knew what I thought of Tessa Canten.

For four years, it was easy. She was the girl at the end of the lunch table. Quiet. Poor. In the way. Then she was a liar, and then she was a stalker, and then she was a problem three doors down that I could pay to make go away. Every time I looked at her, I knew exactly what I was looking at.

Now I don’t. And there’s nothing to put in its place.

We beat Providence four to two on Friday night. I tape my hand in the locker room before warmups, two strips across the knuckles, and Berwyn looks at it and then at my face and doesn’t ask. I get a goal and an assist. Kennebeck gets two. Greeley takes a stupid penalty in the third and nobody’s surprised.

Tessa isn’t there.

I know she isn’t, because I look during warmups, skating the circle in our end, my eyes go up to the student section, to the seats Kylie’s friends always take, a few rows up behind the glass. The seats are just seats, full of people I don’t know.

I’m annoyed that I looked. I skate harder for the rest of warmups.

Campus fills back up on Sunday. The hallway gets loud again. The guy across the hall with the four songs plays the four songs.

We play twice the next weekend. Home both nights. Kylie’s in the student section both nights, with Paige and Kenzie and Bianca, in a row of four.

Tess came to a game in October. She sat in that row with her coat zipped to her chin and stared at the ice for two periods, and she hated me the whole time, and she came anyway.