Page 36 of On His Mind

I grab it and say, “If you get more than five of these wrong, I’m not visiting you in Paris.”

She rolls her eyes at me and answers the first question correctly.

Christmas break does not go the way I planned, because Julia put me on the December schedule without mentioning that Whitmore closes for the holidays. I don’t know if it was a joke, but I fell for it. I learn this at the office Christmas party, which I have shown up to in a blazer that my mother bought for me, ready to work. Oliver finds me inside the hour. He hands me a small box with a ribbon, and I feel the room tilt a degree.

“I didn’t get you anything,” I say politely as I look down at the gift.

His eyes meet mine. “That’s alright. Open it.”

I pull at the ribbon and open the box. It’s a drawing pencil. A beautiful one, weighted, the kind I’d pick up in a shop and want and make myself put back.

“Thank you,” I say. “It’s lovely.”

“Are you busy New Year’s Eve?”

Lyla appears at my shoulder before I can answer, and her eyes drop to the pencil. “That’s a nice gift.”

“White Elephant,” Oliver says, half a second too fast.

“I didn’t know we did White Elephant this year.” Lyla’s smile doesn’t move. She looks at me. “Who did you get?”

“You,” I say back quickly.

“You have a gift for me?” she asks, perking up.

I nod.

Oliver clears his throat and finds somewhere else to be.

When he’s out of earshot, she says, “Are you serious?”

“Yeah,” I say. “It’s at my place. Let’s get out of here.”

Outside, in the cold, Lyla threads her arm through mine. “He is obsessed with you.”

I counter, “He’s our boss.”

“He got one person a gift in all the years I’ve known him.” She stops walking. “You.”

Lyla doesn’t end up coming over, so I walk to my car and drive home. The thing is that I love the pen. I’m going to use it. Maybe that’s my problem.

Ivory leaves for home that weekend, and then it’s just me and the snow, which doesn’t stop for days.

Theo texts once. I feel nothing about it, which tells me everything the last few months should have. Taylor doesn’t offer to visit, and I don’t ask. The town empties until it feels like somewhere that’s been evacuated and no one told me to go.

I don’t remember most of that night at Hawthorne. I remember pieces. A jacket that smelled masculine going over my shoulders, and the boy who put it there didn’t turn it into a move. A single glass, in the morning, washed and set in the rack that I hadn’t washed. And in all the weeks since, not one person has said a word to me about a freshman goalie walking me home in the dark, which means he never told a soul, not even the house he lives in.

Everyone I know wants something from me. My mother wants an image. Oliver wants me to perform. Theo wanted sex. Even Ivory, who I love, wants me to study abroad with her. And somewhere in this dead town is a boy who wanted nothing. Who saw me at my worst and asked me for nothing.

I look him up. I’m not proud of it. He has no presence anywhere I can find, which doesn’t surprise me. I click Stanley’s profile instead, since I already follow him, and it’s all hockey, every post — which I’ll give him credit for, he has the face and the arrogance to do worse with it. Benson barely exists online either. I put the phone down before I embarrass myself further and pick up my sketchpad, because drawing has always been the thing that kills the hours.

My mother calls a few days before Christmas.

“Penelope. I’ve heard through the grapevine that Whitmore is closed, and you aren’t working. Come home.”

“Hi, Mom. I think I’m snowed in.”

“That’s nonsense.”