Page 163 of Across His Line

He stares at it. “For that?”

I laugh. I can’t help it. It comes out loud in the middle of the aisle. He’s looking at the bass like he can’t believe it, and when I look up, he’s not looking at the shirt anymore. He’s looking at me.

“Yeah,” I say, and then walk away.

At the register, he steps up beside me with his hand already going to his back pocket. I don’t think he even decides to do it. I get my card out of my coat, and he sees it, and his hand stops. He just stops, puts it back, and stands there while I pay eleven dollars and ninety-eight cents for two shirts that are mine. He doesn’t say anything about it. He takes the bag from the woman before I can, carries it out to the car, and puts it on the back seat next to his mother’s skates.

He pulls out of the lot and turns back toward the highway, and I sit with my hands in my lap and look at the side of his face. He doesn’t know what he just did for me. I don’t think I could explain it to him if I tried. Nobody’s ever driven me anywhere for something that was only mine.

The lake is fifteen minutes out of town, down a road that turns to gravel and then to two ruts through the snow, past a mailbox shaped like a bass. The Palinskis house is up on a rise above it, a big old farmhouse with a wraparound porch and a line of cars already parked along the drive, trucks mostly, mud up to the doors.

And below it, the lake.

It’s far bigger than I thought. White all the way across, with dark trees standing around the edges. Near the shore, somebody’s shoveled a long rectangle down to the gray ice, with banks of snow pushed up on all four sides for boards, and two nets made out of PVC pipe and fishing net at either end. There’s a fire pit on the shore, already going, smoke going straight up in the cold. Folding chairs around it. Coolers. A row of sticks leaning against a picnic table. Somebody’s truck is backed up to the edge with the tailgate down and music coming out of it, something country I don’t know.

I like it immediately. I don’t want to, but I do. It isn’t anything fancy. It’s a bunch of kids from a small town on a frozen lake with a fire.

There are five guys on the ice already, in jeans and hoodies and beanies, passing a puck around without any nets, just messing around. One of them sees the car and stops.

Lucas Palinski.

He looks the same. Bigger, maybe. He was always big, a defenseman, the kind of loud that fills up a hallway. He skates over to the edge of the snowbank with his stick across his shoulders, grinning, already yelling Rafe’s name.

And then he sees me get out of the passenger side.

He stops yelling.

He looks at me, and I can see him not understand it. I can see him trying to put me together with the car, with Rafe, with this lake. I can see him trying to find why the hell I’m here.

“Canten?” he says.

I smile shyly. “Palinski.”

He blinks. Then he looks at Rafe.

Rafe gets his bag out of the back. He doesn’t look at Lucas. He gets my skates out, too, and holds them out to me, and I take them.

“Tess wanted to see the lake,” he says. Like it’s the most normal thing in the world. Like there’s nothing else to know.

He doesn’t say I’m staying at his house. He doesn’t say I couldn’t go home. He doesn’t say anything about Thanksgiving, or Dylan, or anything at all. He just hands me a pair of skates and says I wanted to see a lake, and lets Lucas think whatever he wants.

“Oh,” Lucas says. “Sick. Okay. Cool. Cool.”

It’s awkward, but I can handle it. I go sit on a cold folding chair by the fire to put on the skates. Two pairs of socks. Rafe was right; they’re a size big. I lace them as tight as they’ll go, the gray laces cutting into my fingers.

And behind me, at the snowbank, I hear Lucas drop his voice.

“Hey, man. I didn’t know she was coming.”

“So?”

“Emma’s coming.”

My fingers stop on the laces.

Emma Cole. Blonde. Green eyes, like Rafe’s. Like they belong together. The perfect couple. I spent a lot of tenth grade watching them in the cafeteria. Rafe has dark hair, but she still matched under his arm.

I pull the lace tighter.