Page 60 of Across His Line

Thursday night, my mother texts me.

Mom: Happy almost birthday, sweetheart! 19!! I can’t believe it. We’ll celebrate at Thanksgiving. I love you so much.

Nineteen. Tomorrow.

I don’t care about my birthday. I never have. It’s never felt like mine. It’s a day when my mom throws a dinner for my father’s friends and puts a cake in front of me in a room full of people I don’t know, and my father hands me an envelope at the end of the night like he’s settling a bill. That’s my birthday. It’s just another dinner.

I lie in bed with the window open and the cold coming in, and I go to sleep.

Kennebeck says, “Happy birthday,” at seven-thirty in the morning while he’s brushing his teeth, without looking at me. I say thanks. That’s all either of us needs.

Barnes sends a picture of a cake shaped like a baby in a diaper with my face badly photoshopped on it and the words big boy in frosting. The team chat goes off for an hour. Somebody tags Greeley, and Greeley sends a single thumbs-up.

My mom calls at eight and sings the whole song while I stand in the hallway in my socks holding the phone away from my ear.

There’s an envelope for me at the front desk by noon. Heavy cream paper. My name on the front in the handwriting of my father’s assistant. Inside, a card, also signed by my father’s assistant, with my father’s name. And a check. I don’t look at the number. I put the thing in my desk drawer.

It all just washes over me, like it always does.

At four, I’m on my way out to the rink when Tessa’s door opens. She’s got her backpack on and her coat half zipped with a mailer under her arm, and she’s already looking down at her phone. She almost walks into me. She stops. Looks up.

And then she says, like it’s nothing, “Happy birthday, Rafe.”

I stop. Not like in the hallway on Sunday. Not walking past. I actually stop, all the way, and turn around and look at her.

“You know?”

She gives me a strange look. “We’ve known each other for a long time.”

“You know my birthday?”

Her chin comes up a little. Defensive. “It’s November twenty-first. Isn’t it?”

I don’t say anything.

And I watch her look at my face and figure it out. She reads me, the way she always reads me.

“You don’t know mine?” she asks.

I don’t answer. There’s nothing to say. Of course I don’t. I know her shoes. I know what she looked like walking across a gym floor by herself with a loose piece of hair down the back of her neck. I never once in my life thought about the day she was born.

She doesn’t look hurt or surprised. She just nods a little, to herself, like I’ve confirmed something she already knew.

“It’s opposite yours,” she says.

I wait.

“Just switch your numbers. You know, the two and the one.” She nods like it’s easy to remember. “The twelfth.”

I don’t say anything. It sounds like she’s thought about this.

“December twelfth,” she says.

Eleven twenty-one. Twelve twelve.

“December twelfth,” I say.

She shifts the mailer under her arm and starts down the hall toward the stairs. And then she stops and looks back at me over her shoulder, the same way she did in the stairwell, when she told me I was going to be late for class.