Page 73 of Across His Line

She has a backpack on one shoulder and a small black duffel in her other hand, the kind you get free at an orientation fair, with somebody’s logo on the side half peeled off. And a plastic grocery bag looped over her wrist. That’s everything she’s taking home. I could fit all of it in my garment bag.

She stops on the bottom step.

She’s seen the car before. Everybody in Corvin has seen the car. But she stops anyway and looks at it, and then at me standing next to it, and I can see her deciding, all over again, right there on the step. It’s one thing to say yes in a text. It’s another thing to walk across a parking lot and get in.

Then she comes down the last step and walks across the lot.

I pop the trunk.

“I can do it,” she says, before I’ve moved.

I step back. I don’t take the bag. Every part of me wants to take the bag. It’s how I was raised: you take the bag, you open the door, you put your hand on the small of her back at the top of the stairs. My mother would have a stroke watching me stand here with my hands in my pockets while a girl lifts her own duffel into my trunk. But she said she could do it, so I let her.

She puts the duffel in next to my garment bag. She looks at the garment bag for a second, at the dry cleaner’s tag hanging off the hanger, and doesn’t say anything. She keeps the backpack. She keeps the grocery bag, too, holding it against her stomach like it’s something that might break.

I see what’s in it through the plastic. A red box. A can. A big sweet potato. A bag of mini marshmallows. She’s taking it home.

I shut the trunk and don’t say a word about it.

She goes around to the passenger side. And she opens the door, and gets in, and shuts it behind her. I get in the driver’s seat.

The car smells like me. I’ve never noticed that before. Leather and the mint gum in the cup holder and the cologne I put on this morning, and now, underneath it, something else, something clean and a little like cheap laundry detergent, and it’s her.

She’s sitting very straight. The seat’s all the way forward, because I threw my hockey bag on the floor behind it last week, and her knees are about three inches from the dash. She doesn’t adjust it. She just sits there, folded up, with her backpack on the floor between her feet and the grocery bag on her knees, like she’s trying to take up as little of the car as she can.

“Move it,” I say.

She goes stiff. Her whole body. Her shoulders coming up, her hands tightening on the plastic bag. I watch her hear it the way she’s heard everything I’ve ever said to her. Move, Tess.

“The seat,” I say quickly. “Move the seat. There’s a button on the side.”

She looks at me. Then she finds the button, and the seat slides back with a low electric hum, and her knees come away from the dash, and she sits back. Not all the way. But some.

“Better?” I say.

“It’s fine,” she mutters.

That means better.

I put the car in reverse. My phone’s in the mount on the dash, still open to the map from the parking lot, and I look at it before I back out.

Two dots. Right on top of each other. So close they’re one circle with two names under it, sitting in a parking lot behind Corvin.

For three weeks, I’ve been watching that little blue circle move around a map, trying to figure out where she was and what she was doing. And she’s been watching mine.

She notices it.

I close the app.

We pull out of the lot. Past the rink. Past the dining hall by the library and the student center with the glass wall, empty now, chairs up on the tables. Out the main gate and onto Route 9.

Neither of us says anything for a while. And it’s the most uncomfortable silence I’ve ever sat in. She looks out the passenger window, and I look at the road. The heat comes up through the vents, and the tires hum, and I can hear her breathing. I’ve never been close enough to her to hear her breathing. In four years. Not once.

We pass the Goodwill. She looks at it as we go by. I see her look.

Finally, at a red light, she says, “Do you have music?”

“Pick something.”