Page 59 of Across His Line

I click confirm.

That’s all it is. A button. A little green check mark on a screen in a hotel lobby. And something in my mind goes very quiet and very still, like right before a faceoff.

I don’t text my parents. I don’t text his assistant. I close the laptop and drink my bad coffee.

Kennebeck drops into the chair across from me with his bag and his hood up.

“What are you doing?”

“Changing my major.”

“To what?”

“Business.”

He looks at me. “Didn’t you tell me in September that you’d rather die than do business?”

“I changed my mind.”

He considers that. He takes a long sip of his own coffee.

“Terrifying how much you’re changing,” he says.

I glare at him.

We get back to Corvin at six on Sunday night, and the hallway is the hallway. I’m halfway down it with my bag over my shoulder when her door opens. She comes out with an empty water pitcher in her hand and her hair wet and twisted up in a towel, in the cream sweater and a pair of gray sweatpants with a hole in the knee, and she stops. I stop. We’re ten feet apart.

And it’s strange. For three days, she’s been a dot on a screen. A blue circle on top of a library, a thrift store, a building. I knew where she was every second I bothered to check, and I didn’t see her once. And now she’s just standing there, an actual person, with a towel on her head, and she’s a lot more than a dot.

“How was Massachusetts?” she says.

I look at her.

She checked on me. She knows exactly where I was all weekend, the same way I know she was standing outside a Goodwill at nine fifty-eight this morning.

“Cold,” I say.

She nods, like that’s a reasonable answer. “You won.”

“Twice.”

“Nice.”

And she walks past me down the hall toward the kitchen with her pitcher.

I stand there with my bag on my shoulder.

She knows my scores. I know her bus schedule. She knows I won twice. I know she sold a jewelry box for fifty dollars. We’ve never once had a real conversation that didn’t end with one of us walking away, and somehow, without either of us saying a word about it, we’ve been picking up pieces of each other’s lives like change off the sidewalk.

I go into my room and shut the door.

The week goes by.

Classes. Practice. A paper I write at two in the morning and turn in at nine. Greeley tries again on Tuesday, something about my father buying the team a Zamboni, and I don’t even look up from my skates. After about a minute, he gets bored and goes and bothers Mathers instead. Barnes and Paige are either together or at war; nobody can tell, including Barnes. Kennebeck’s girlfriend lives on his bed.

The dot lives its life. Library. Corvin. The business building, Monday and Wednesday at eleven. The student center, Tuesday at ten-thirty, at the table by the glass, with the rower. I see it. I don’t do anything about it. I check the time on my phone, and there she is, and I put the phone away.

I pass her twice in the hallway. Once, she says, “Hey,” and I say, “Hey,” and that’s it. It’s the first time either of us has ever said hey to the other one. It’s the most normal thing that’s ever happened between us, and it takes up about a second and a half, and I think about it for the rest of practice.