Page 20 of On His Mind

I look toward the hall. She’s walking out of it with her friend still talking at her. The front of the navy dress has gone dark from her collarbone to her hip where somebody’s tried to work at it with a hand towel. It looks worse than it did before. Anybody could see it from across the room.

She’s got one hand resting flat over it. Not hiding it. Just resting there, the way you’d hold a hand over a bruise while somebody talks to you about something else. And then she looks up and her eyes catch mine. Straight through the room, over the top of about nine people, no searching, like she’d already known where I was standing.

Everything in me goes still. I feel it in my throat. Actual pressure. Over adress. I don’t know what my face is doing, but she holds it. One second. Two. Then Ivory says something, and she turns back to her, and that’s it. That’s all it was. I don’t know what I wanted it to be. Then Theo’s there, one hand on the wall beside her head, saying something that makes her friend, Ivory, laugh.

Penelope isn’t laughing. She’s listening, though. Head slightly tipped, hand still flat over the front of her dress.

I put the napkins in the trash and go find the stairs. Somebody’s making out at the top. Somebody else is hanging over the railing yelling at the living room.

My door shuts, and the sound drops by about half. I stand in the dark with my back against it. The bass still comes up through the floor. It’s in the soles of my feet. Hawthorne House doesn’tknow how to be quiet. I get the wet shirt off over my head and it takes a layer of cold with it. My collarbone’s sticky. I throw it into the mesh hamper Mary made me pack, which I told her I did not need, which I have now used four times in a week. I find a clean shirt and throw it on. Then I sit on the edge of the bed with my elbows on my knees and look at the floor. I got what I wanted. Quiet room. Nobody in it.

It doesn’t help. Because now the whole thing is running on a loop with commentary, and the commentary is not kind. A dress like that is — what. A hundred dollars? I don’t know. That’s the thing that’s actually crawling on me. I don’t know what a dress like that costs, because I have never in my life been in a room where anybody would tell me. And I keep coming back to the same eight seconds. Her hand on my forearm. The nails. The ice in the fold of the fabric at her waist.Désolé, out loud, in a kitchen, like an idiot. And her soft voice sayingit’s okay.

She had every right to make that into something. I gave her a free shot and she didn’t take it. I can’t work out why that’s sitting on my chest heavier than if she’d just yelled at me, except that I think I know exactly why. I have never once collided with a person off the ice. I keep a few feet between me and everybody, always. It has never failed before. Tonight it failed.

Tu ne regardais pas.I was looking at the floor so nobody would talk to me.

There’s a knock at my door, so I sit up. “Yeah?”

The door opens four inches, and it’s Blue Golding, the other freshman, who moved in the day before I did and has said maybe sixty words to me total, which is roughly fifty-eight more than I’ve said to him.

“You good?”

“Yeah.”

He looks at my shirt. “You changed.”

“Yeah.”

“Stanley?”

“No.”

“Shocking.”

I almost smile.

He stays in the doorway. He looks around the room — bare walls, one duffel still half-unpacked in the corner — and then back at me, and then down at the floor where the bass is coming through.

“Too much?”

I nod once.

He leans his shoulder into the frame.

“Same.”

I look up at him.

Downstairs somebody yells Stanley’s name. Then there’s a crash. Then Benson, at a volume that carries through two floors, “Are you kidding me?”

Blue stares at the wall for a second.

“The side door’s better,” he says. “Nobody uses it once the keg goes out.”

“Side?”

He nods. “Past Rowan’s bedroom door.”