Page 117 of Across His Line

Now she doesn’t hate me. At least, I don’t think she does. And she doesn’t come. I don’t know what that means. I don’t try very hard to figure it out.

I don’t sit and stare at the dot on the map anymore. But it’s there, every time I unlock my phone, and I know her days now the way I know my own. Library in the afternoons. The business building Mondays and Wednesdays. The dining hall by the library at twelve-fifteen. The post office on Main almost every afternoon, for ten minutes, which I didn’t used to know and know now.

And I start doing something I don’t think about until I’ve done it three times.

I go around her.

The first time, it’s the student center. I’m on my way to get lunch, and I check my phone at the corner of the quad. Her dot is sitting right on top of the café. So I go in the side door by the mailroom instead and get a sandwich from the other place, the one with the bad bread. The second time, it’s the library. I need a book for a paper, and she’s on the third floor, so I go to the first floor and find it in a different edition and leave.

The third time, I’m standing at the corner by the business building, waiting to cross, and I see her dot inside and turn around and walk the long way around the science building, and I’m halfway there before it occurs to me what I’m doing.

She used to do this. She used to know which door I’d come through and use the other one.

I’m doing it because I think she probably wants to not run into me for a while. After all of it. After my house, and my mother, and her cousin. After a whole weekend of me. So I go around. I don’t think about it too much. I just do it. And she doesn’t reach out, which proves my point.

One night, the first week of December, I’m on my bed with a reading for my econ class open on my laptop, and I check the time, and her dot isn’t at Corvin.

It’s off campus. Out on Route 9. Not at the Goodwill. Past it. A strip of something I don’t recognize, a gas station or a laundromat or a liquor store. It’s nine-forty at night, and it’s twenty degrees out.

I put the phone down.

I pick it back up fifteen minutes later. Same place.

My brain’s already gone straight back to that couch and his hand on the back of her neck because I’m never going to get out of my head.

I don’t call her. I don’t text her. I don’t get in my car. I just sit on my bed and watch the dot.

Eventually, the dot moves. Back down Route 9. Onto campus. Corvin.

I hear the stairwell door at the end of the hall. Footsteps. A door, three down, opening and closing.

I put the phone face down on the comforter and read the same paragraph four times.

We pass in the hallway on a Tuesday. She’s coming out of the bathroom with her shower caddy and her hair wet. I’m going in.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hey.”

She keeps going. Her door opens and closes.

And I stand in the bathroom doorway with my towel over my shoulder.

We sat on my couch until two in the morning. She told me about sold listings and shipping weight and how I was lucky about the box. She fell asleep six feet from me with her mouth open. I drove her two hours with her bus playlist playing out of every speaker in my car.

And now it’s hey.

She doesn’t look scared. She doesn’t look at the floor. She looks right at me when she says it, like it’s a normal word to say to a person you see in the hall. And then she’s gone.

I don’t know what that is. It isn’t the cafeteria. It isn’t the couch. It’s somewhere I don’t have a word for, and I don’t know how you’re supposed to stand in it.

I shower. I don’t figure it out in there, either.

Barnes finds me on Thursday night. He comes into our room without knocking, which is how Barnes always comes in. He drops onto the end of Kennebeck’s bed. Kennebeck isn’t in it. Kennebeck’s three doors down.

“Come with me Saturday,” he says.

“Where?”