Page 34 of On His Mind

“What are you drawing for you?”

She looks at me for a second and quietly sighs. “Do you want to see?”

I nod.

She still has my jacket around her shoulders as she crosses to the table, and I follow, leaving the water on the counter. The desk is covered in paper — lines, tiny numbers, whole pages of them — and I don’t understand any of it, but it stops me cold when I see how talented she is.

“These are incredible,” I say, and I mean it before I’ve thought about whether to say it.

“Thank you.” She flips through a book and lands somewhere in the middle and turns it to face me.

“You drew this?” It comes out dumb, but the drawing looks like a real place. An old building with a shop tucked into the bottom of it, the shop lines drawn darker on purpose so your eye goes straight there.

“A corner coffee shop. Books, hopefully. Locally owned. Something that could fit right into Portland, Maine.” She turns the page. “I laid it all out, did the dimensions, and — yeah.”

I stare at the lines. I can’t get my head around it, that a whole place could come out of her and land on paper looking like something you could walk into.

“May I?” I ask.

She nods and sits on the stool while I stand there and turn the pages myself. Sketches and numbers and ideas, page after page. I stop on one. A house with a wide yard drawn out around it.

“One day,” she says, “I want to help build a whole new neighborhood.”

Something pulls tight and low in my chest, so tight it’s hard to breathe around. A girl drawing houses with yards, dreaming of creating homes for people. And she says it easy, like of course, the future is a thing you plan for. I’ve never once thought about the future as somewhere I get to put anything. I don’t have a single word for what’s happening in my chest, so I close the book, carefully, and set it back exactly where it was in the corner.

“Everything okay?” she asks.

“Yeah.” I don’t look at her. I look at the loose pages instead.

She looks down and says, “Maybe one day you can show me around Portland.”

A huff comes out of me before I can stop it.

“Are you going home for winter break?”

“No.” I shake my head. “I’m staying here.”

“Me too.” She says it to her papers.

I look at her now. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” She turns a pencil over in her fingers. “Maybe we could hang out. When I’m not working.” She nods. “You don’t seem like the kind of guy who gossips.”

I hold still and watch the side of her face and try to work out how much of this is her and how much is the drink.

Her eyes come up to mine. “I could use that. Not — not that I’d use you. But I could use a friend.”

A friend. I watch her watch me.

“Yeah,” I say, quiet. “I could use a friend too.”

“Percy.”

When I look at her, I can tell she’s teasing the name, rolling it around for the fun of it, and I like the way it sounds coming off her more than I should.

“Is it short for anything?”

“No. Family name.”