Page 265 of Across His Line

“At?”

“At Barnes.”

I look at her. “That’s not really a Paige problem.”

“Apparently it is.”

She says it flat. Like she doesn’t know any more than that and isn’t going to guess. I look down the hall at Barnes’s closed door.

Paige. I don’t know what that means. I don’t know Paige, really. She’s just Kylie’s friend who studies on Kylie’s bed and doesn’t say much and once told Barnes his fantasy team was “a cry for help.”

I think about Barnes leaving lunch on Wednesday with half his sandwich on the tray.

I don’t think about it very hard. I’m too tired. And it isn’t my business.

Kennebeck comes up behind us with his bag, and Kylie comes out of her room at a run in her socks and takes his face in both her hands and looks at his eye and says something low and furious to him that I don’t hear. Then she takes his bag off his shoulder, takes his hand in hers, and walks him down the hall to our room.

Tessa looks at me.

I look at her door.

She goes in first. She leaves it open.

I stand in the doorway with my bag still on my shoulder. Her room. Her mailers stacked by size. The tape gun on her desk.

She’s already in bed. She got in fast with her back against the wall and her laptop open again on her knees.

“You want me here?” I say.

She looks at me over the laptop.

“You’re going to bleed on my pillow.”

“That’s not an answer.”

She looks at me a second longer.

“Get in,” she says.

I’m still wound up. It’s a problem.

I take a shower and stand under the water until it goes cold. It doesn’t help. I keep seeing it. Five on top of Kennebeck. Barnes’s face behind his cage, blank. Berwyn pointing at me. You counted them, Waleska. The scout writing something down while I sat in the box with a towel on my face. And on my phone, when I come back, a text.

Dad: I saw the game.

That’s all. Four words. He doesn’t need any more. I know exactly what all the other ones would have been.

I sit on the edge of her bed with my hair wet and my phone in my hand and my knuckles throbbing.

She’s still on her laptop. She doesn’t look up. She says, “You didn’t have to go in.”

“Yeah, I did.”

“Kennebeck was already there.”

“He had a guy on his back.”

She’s quiet. Then she says, still not looking up, very calm, “You didn’t have to. You wanted to.”