Page 31 of On His Mind

“Yeah,” Benson says as Stanley jumps over the couch and runs over to the keg with the entire party chasing after him. “We should make sure he doesn’t––”

Rowan nods. “Yeah.”

Blue looks at me. I shrug. We follow.

The next Hawthorne party is two weeks later, and final exams are close enough now that my head won’t shut off.

This is the last party of the year, according to Stanley and Benson, because winter break is coming up, and everyone will be gone. The house is celebrating like it never has. Keg stands in the kitchen. Beer pong played like there’s a title riding on it. At some point, Stanley is wrestling one of the senior d-men across the living room floor, and both of them are laughing too hard to win it. People are dancing on the furniture or losing their minds, and I last about an hour before the noise gets into my teeth and I have to get the hell out.

The little concrete step off the side of the house has become my spot for this, the same way the dining table’s my spot for everything else. I can sit out here for hours with the party roaring behind the wall. Except tonight, when I walk out, there’s a circle of people out here passing a joint, and I can smell it before I’m through the door.

I stop in the dark just short of the light, where they don’t see me right away. Drew’s got an arm around Ivory. Theo’s got his arms crossed.

“So you just let her walk off,” Ivory says.

“She told me to fuck off,” Theo says, grinning.

Ivory scoffs. “And you’re not going after her?”

“She. Told. Me. To. Fuck. Off.” He laughs. “You go after her.”

Ivory frowns into her cup. “You shouldn’t let her walk home alone. It’s like a twenty-minute walk.”

“Fifteen.” Theo shrugs. “If she walks fast.”

Drew catches me standing there and lifts the joint. “You want a puff?”

I shake my head, and I’m already moving — off the step, around the side of the house — and behind me I hear Theo say, he’s fucking mute, that one, and I don’t care, because there’s a picture in my head I can’t put down. Penelope walking alone for twenty minutes.

I hit the sidewalk and don’t know which way to turn. One direction runs toward campus, the other bends off toward the rink if you take enough of the right turns. Twenty minutes, Ivory said. I try to think of what’s around campus and which way I’ve seen her leave before. I walk left on a guess and a bad feeling in my gut.

The street’s empty and cold enough that my breath shows in front of me. The party falls off behind until it’s just my own footsteps and the buzz of the streetlights. I walk faster than I have any reason to, and I don’t let myself think about what I’ll actually do if I find her. I keep walking anyway. A block, almost two, and I see a shape under the next streetlight. But I’d know it anywhere — the long neck, the square set of her shoulders, the way she holds herself like she’s a ballet dancer. Something in my chest turns over. Then I get closer and see she isn’t moving. She’s standing dead still in the middle of the sidewalk with one handflat against a low brick wall and her head down, and my heart drops clean out of me.

I close the distance fast, and somewhere in the last twenty feet, my nerve goes completely, so I decide I’ll just walk past her. Pretend I’ve got my own reasons to be out here. Loop the block and get her home from a distance like some kind of — I don’t even know what. I don’t have a plan. I’ve never done a single thing like this in my life. This life is dangerous for me. I’ve been on pure survival mode up until now, and now that I have Hawthorne, I have time for things I didn’t know were possible for me.

I’m about to pass her when she says, “What are you doing?”

There’s pure annoyance in her voice, like I’ve interrupted her.

“Walking,” I answer.

She lifts her head, and it takes her a moment to find my face. That second tells me most of what I need to know about how much she’s had to drink.

“You, too, huh?” She pushes off the brick wall.

I slow to her pace without meaning to. My heart won’t sit down.

“Hawthorne really knows how to throw a party,” she says. “I think I’m done coming to them.”

I don’t answer. I’m watching her feet, and the wall she keeps drifting toward.

“Unfortunately for you,” she says, “you live there.”

“Yeah.”

She laughs, low in her throat. “God, why are you all like this?”

I look at her straight on then. Her makeup’s sitting high on her face like a sunburn, her mouth the color of fruit punch, a red cup still in her hand out here on an empty street. Her shirt’s slipped off one shoulder. She’s a wreck and she’s put-together at the same time. She’s drunk, and she’s alone on a dark road, and every part of that makes something go hard and steady in me.