Page 168 of Across His Line

“You were so quiet back then,” Brianna says. She’s holding a marshmallow over the fire on a stick, turning it. “In high school. You never talked.”

“Yeah, not really,” I say.

“No, you never talked.”

“To you,” I say.

She stops turning the marshmallow.

I don’t say it mean. I say it like I’d say it to Kylie. It’s just true. I talked. I talked to Payton and Elsie until three in the morning. I talked to my grandma every night. I talked to the librarian and the lunch lady and the woman at the Goodwill who always saved me the bins in the back. I just never talked to any of them.

The marshmallow catches fire. She blows it out.

Emma doesn’t say anything for a while. She looks at the ice. She pulls her coat tighter around her.

“We were kind of assholes,” she says. Not to me. To the fire. “In high school.”

She says it lightly. Like she’s making a joke about it. Like it’s something everybody was, and it doesn’t mean anything, and now we can all laugh.

I don’t laugh.

“You were kind of mean,” I say.

She looks at me.

“Yeah,” she says.

I don’t need her to apologize. I don’t need anything from her at all.

Rafe comes off the ice a few minutes later. His cheeks are red from the cold and his hair is wet under his beanie and sticking out at the sides, and he’s breathing hard.

He stops by my chair. He doesn’t look at Emma. He doesn’t look at any of them.

“You good?” he asks me.

“Yeah.”

Emma’s right there, and she hears it. Not the words. The way he says it. The way I answer. I watch her look at him, and then at me, and then back at him.

“Hi, Rafe,” she says.

His eyes flick up once, barely. “Hi.”

He holds out his stick to me. “Want to get back on?”

I look at it, and I stand up and leave the blanket on the chair. I don’t think about how it looks. I just would rather be out there than here, so I go.

He skates backward in front of me with a puck while I wobble after him in his mother’s skates.

“Take it,” he says.

“Take what?”

“The puck. Take it from me.”

I reach for it with the stick. He pulls it back. I reach again. He pulls it to the side.

“Stop moving it.”