Page 272 of Across His Line

Paige doesn’t look up.

She doesn’t say anything. She keeps writing on her box. WHY SO MANY. She goes over the letters again, darker, the Sharpie squeaking.

Koda stands there. He looks at the top of her head. He opens his mouth.

Paige caps her Sharpie and stands up.

“I have to go, Kylie. I forgot I have a thing.”

She gets her bag off the bed and walks past Koda in the doorway without touching him, without looking at him, so close her shoulder almost brushes his hoodie, and goes down the hall.

He watches her go. Then he puts the tape down on the floor inside the door and leaves, too. The other way.

Kylie sits up on the bed.

“What was that?” I ask.

Kylie doesn’t say anything. Normally she says she doesn’t know, but maybe she does now, and I’m still in the dark about all of it.

I look at the roll of tape on the floor by the door, which nobody needed. I think about Paige in March, her highlighter stopping. Did he. I think about Koda taking a suspension for fighting.

I pick up Paige’s Sharpie and finish the box.

My grandma calls on Sunday. I take it on the back steps of Corvin in the sun with my knees pulled up. It’s warm for the first time since October, warm enough that people are out on the quad in shorts that it isn’t warm enough for, lying on towels on the grass that’s barely green.

She asks about finals. She tells me about the woman from church with the new hip, who’s walking without the cane now. She tells me the tomatoes are in the cages in the backyard early because she couldn’t wait.

She sounds tired, but she sounds like herself.

“So when are you coming home, sweetheart?” she says. “When do they let you out? I’ll clean out the sewing room. I’ll make you the bed up with the yellow sheets.”

I look at the quad, at a girl lying on her stomach on a towel, reading.

“I’m not coming home for the summer, Grandma,” I say.

She doesn’t hear it. Or she hears it wrong.

“Well, after finals. I know you have finals.”

She’s quiet on the other end. She doesn’t mention Dylan, and I don’t ask. Same about my mom.

“I’m not,” I say.

“Oh,” she says.

Something makes my stomach twist. Maybe it’s because I didn’t eat or maybe it’s because I didn’t expect to have this conversation.

“Where are you going?” she asks.

I swallow. I don’t have an answer.

“I have time to figure it out.”

“Time to figure it out?” she scoffs. “It’s just the summer, then you start school in the fall. Come home if you have nowhere else.”

I stare at nothing. I didn’t tell her. And I’m not going to.

“Well,” she adds when I don’t say anything. “You know you always have a room here.”