Page 119 of Across His Line

“Because she’s working really hard not to look over here.”

Barnes is quiet for a while.

“Huh,” he says.

We leave at one. Barnes didn’t talk to Paige once. Paige didn’t even look at him. He seems weirdly satisfied with that.

The next Wednesday, I come in the back door of Corvin from practice with my bag on my shoulder and my hair still wet, and Tess is on the landing between the first and second floors with her arms full.

I didn’t check the map. I was thinking about a drill Berwyn ran wrong. I just come around the corner of the stairs, and she’s there.

She’s carrying more mailers than one person should carry. A stack of gray ones and a stack of white ones, held against her chest with both arms, a tote bag on her shoulder bulging with more, and her phone balanced on top of the pile with a list open on it. She’s coming down sideways, feeling for each step with her foot because she can’t see over the top. The top one slides.

I catch it before it hits the stairs. It’s soft and lumpy, a sweater, maybe, or a scarf, and it has an address on it in her small, square handwriting, going to somebody in Michigan.

She stops and looks at me over the pile.

“Thanks,” she says.

“Yeah.”

I hold it out. She can’t take it. She doesn’t have a hand. We both look at that for a second.

Then she just turns sideways, a little, and holds out the top half of the gray stack toward me, without saying anything.

I grab half. And she holds the other half, and we go down the stairs together, her ahead of me, and her ponytail bounces on every step.

“These are all yours?” I say.

“No,” she says, without turning around. “I’m trafficking sweaters.”

I look at the back of her head.

“Yes, they’re mine,” she says.

At the bottom of the stairs, in the lobby by the mailboxes, she puts her stack down on the little table by the RA’s board, and I put mine next to it. She starts going through them, checking addresses against the list on her phone, moving them into piles. Gray ones on the left. White ones on the right. A third pile I don’t understand.

I look at the table and count without meaning to. Gray, white, the stuff in the tote. Twenty-something. Twenty-three, maybe. Michigan and Ohio and Texas and somewhere in Canada with a customs form taped to the front. A whole table of other people’s Christmas presents, cleaned and folded and taped up and labeled, with her handwriting on all of them.

“How many orders this week?” I say.

“Thirty-one.”

She says it without looking up. And my brain just goes. I can’t stop it. Thirty-one. Call it twenty-five average, minus fees. Minus the mailers. Minus the tape. Minus—

“Stop,” she almost laughs.

I look at her.

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You’re calculating.” She still hasn’t looked up. “I can see it in your eyes.”

I don’t have anything to say to that. I put my eyebrow back where it goes.

She tears a strip of tape off a roll with her teeth because the tape gun in her tote is broken. It’s the cheap kind, the clear plastic one with the little teeth on the end, and the teeth snapped off, and every time she tries to use it, the tape folds over on itself and sticks to everything. She tries it once while I’m standing there. It sticks to her sleeve.

“That thing is garbage,” I say.