Page 57 of On His Mind

Blue leans on his stick and looks at me. He doesn’t ask this time. “I’ll shoot.”

I nod.

He sets the bucket at the top of the circle and starts feeding them at me. It’s forty minutes of pure bliss. Neither of us says a word. He racks his stick when he’s done, and I sweep the last pucks into the bucket. We walk down the tunnel with our bags on our shoulders.

At the door, he stops. “You weren’t in your bed Sunday night.”

I look at him.

Blue looks back, and he holds it, and there’s nothing in his face at all. He’s the one person in that house who’d notice, and the one person who’d never ask.

He shoulders the door open and holds it for me.

“It’s cold out,” he says.

We walk home.

The house is loud by nine. Stanley has some of the team over, music going, somebody burning a frozen pizza, all of it coming up through my floor while I lie on my bed with my hands behind my head. When it got too loud, I came upstairs.

It’s after eleven when the house has finally gone quiet, but behind my eyes, there’s a valley in Montana, and it comes back every time I close them. Blue snow at the bottom of it. A window somebody built on purpose, for somebody to stand at.

I sit up and get my phone. It opens to the window where I researched magnesium tea. It’s eleven dollars for a tin. There’s three hundred and forty in my drawer from the Camerie. It’s the most money I’ve ever had at one time in my life.

I open up Penelope’s text messages and scroll through them until I reach the top, and I stare at the period she sent herself when she saw me at the Camerie. And then I close all of my apps and stare at the ceiling.

Chapter 14

Penelope

Theteaarrivesinthe mail on a Tuesday. It’s in a padded envelope, and I stand in my kitchen holding it for ten minutes without a single idea what to do next.

It cost fourteen dollars with shipping. That is not a number I have ever thought about in my life. I once bought a scarf in Milan that cost more than my car insurance, but my mom handed me her credit card and said to get something special.

I open the package and stare at it.

So.

How do I give it to him?

I could just hand it to him — no. He’d take it and think that he owes me something back. I don’t want to play that game with him. I know he’d say thank you in that flat voice he uses when he’s gone somewhere behind his own eyes. I could leave it at hishouse. Also no. There are four other, very loud hockey players who live there. I could tell him I bought two, and one was extra. He knows the price of organic strawberries. He’d know exactly what I was doing.

I stare at it again. For the first time in my life, giving somebody something might be a hard thing to do. In my house, gifts were a normal thing. They arrived from people with money at appointed times, and vice versa. My mom buys me a new piece of clothing once a week. I’m always getting something in the mail from her.

But Percy is different. He walks in the snow with no gloves. He’s quiet and observant. He’s not easy to crack.

So it’s solved. I don’t give it to him.

I put it in the cabinet, second shelf, next to my other tea.

And on Wednesday, when I sneak him into my room again, I make two mugs of it and set one at his elbow and sit on the stool next to him.

He drinks it and doesn’t mention that it tastes different than last time. I bought a different blend. I read about eleven of them and picked the one with vanilla in it, because he told me the last one tasted like dirt and drank all of it anyway. He drinks the whole thing. The next time he’s over, I make it again, and he drinks that too, and neither of us ever says a word about it.

On Friday, the weather has finally turned to early spring, so I take him to the Bellweather Hall before his hockey game. It’s the oldest building on campus, and nobody uses the north wing because the classrooms are inconvenient and the radiators clang like something’s trapped inside them. It’s my favorite building in Camden, and I have never brought anyone here. It’s cold enough that the air hurts. His hands are shoved in his jacket pockets, and he has no hat, and he doesn’t appear to register the temperature at all, which I’ve stopped commenting on.

“What’s in it?” he asks on the steps.

“Nothing,” I answer.