Page 79 of On His Mind

I’m here because I earned it.

“You must be Penelope.” A woman in her fifties, reading glasses pushed up into gray hair, a mug in one hand, walks over. “I’m Renata. You’ll mostly be with me. Sit there.”

She points at a desk with a dual monitor older than the ones I used in studio and walks off before I’ve said anything. That’s the whole welcome. There’s no tour. There’s no we’re so glad to have you, no lunch, no story about how she started exactly where I’m sitting. She comes back with a stack of red-lined sheets and drops them beside the keyboard and starts talking — the file structure, their layer conventions, the way this office marksa revision, which is different from how Whitmore did it and different again from how studio taught it. She talks fast and flat and does not once check whether I’m charmed. She is entirely uninterested in me as anything but a set of hands that will either work or won’t.

And I could weep with the relief of it. Because Oliver was charming. Oliver remembered the trace paper I liked and put it on my desk. Oliver knew it was Studio II and knew it was Adler and gave me the best pencil I’ve ever owned. Every single kind thing he ever did turned out to be a hook with a line running back to him. The most frightening thing about that place was that everything nice meant something. Here nothing is nice, and Renata would not remember my coffee order if I worked here for the whole year, and that is the cleanest air I have breathed since I was fifteen.

“This is the Halvorsen block,” she says, dropping into the chair beside me and pulling the sheets over. “Mixed-use, four over two, going up on Larchmont. These are the CDs. You’re going to help me get them clean.”

She walks me through it once. The plan, the core, the way the units stack, where the structural grid fights the parking below, and who won that fight. I keep up, absorbing a system the way I absorb everything, fast, cleanly, and without needing it said twice.

She hands me the ground floor and a list of markups and leaves me to it.

Renata glances at what I’ve done, hums, moves one dimension I’d placed a hair off, and doesn’t correct anything else. And an hour later, working the second-floor plan, I find a door that swings into the path of another door, a small thing, the kind of thing that survives three sets of eyes because everyone’s looking at the big moves.

I fix it, and I say it once, quietly, when she passes. “The unit doors on two were fighting. I moved the closet swing.”

She looks. “Good,” she says, and keeps walking.

That’s it. That’s what I came here for. Be good. Be treated as good. Nobody gets sentimental about a pencil.

There was a thing that used to happen when I drew. The room would fall away — the noise, the light, the hour — and I’d surface at some point startled, with three pages filled I didn’t remember filling and a crick in my neck and no idea it had gotten to be five o’clock. It happened in studio. It happened at my own table before the summer. It is the only reliable joy I have ever had, the one thing in my life that asked nothing and gave everything back, and it is the whole reason I did any of this — the applications, the fight, the thing with my mother.

But I’ve lost it. I do the work well. The lines are clean, the markups are right, and Renata moves exactly one dimension all afternoon. But it’s dead in my hands. I watch the clock. I have never once in my life watched the clock while I was drawing, and today I know that it’s 2:40 and then that it’s 3:15 and then that it’s 4:00, because the hours are not disappearing the way they’re supposed to, they’re just passing, one after another, while I do good work and feel no relief at all.

Something is wrong. I tell myself it’s the first day, that first days are always strange, that I’m running on no sleep, a hangover, and a summer that took more out of me than I’ve admitted. The same things I told myself about the pencils I couldn’t pick up all last week. It’s the adjustment. It’s the tiredness. It’s temporary.

I finish the ground floor. I square my markups. At five, Renata says, “Same time tomorrow.”

I go down the worn stairs and out past the hardware store into the evening.

I got the life. I chose it, I earned it, I’m good at it, and I walked out of it at five o’clock feeling emptier than I ever have before.

Chapter 23

Percy

Sheansweredafewdays later. It gave nothing away. One word — something like,yeah.Like she was just being polite. I know better now. I texted first, and I got days of silence. So I’m back to not texting her first.

That was August.

It’s October now.

Hutch is the starter. It’s his senior year, so it’s his net. He’s good enough to keep it, and I’m the backup. Which means I dress. Every game. I’m not in the stands anymore in the tie Josh bought me at a Kohl’s. I’m on the bench in full pads with my mask on my knee, six feet off the ice, one bad hit away from the game.

Behind me, there’s the freshman. Tyler Forleo. Fourth round, Nashville, third string right now, the way I was third string ayear ago. Except nobody in this building thinks Tyler stays third string. The net that’s coming isn’t coming for me. Everybody knows it. So I’m the backup, for a year, maybe. I climbed from the bad end of the ice to a spot on the bench, and the spot has a ticking clock on it. He’s eighteen years old, drafted, and better than any other goalie I’ve ever played with.

There are men in suits in the stands with laptops. They’re here for Stanley Ermington and Benson Reeve. Everybody knows it. Stanley’s gone quiet about it, which is new, and Benson won’t talk about it at all, which is how you know it’s real.

There are many players that went pro after playing for the Camden Wolves. So the fact that I’m sitting on a scholarship here blows my mind. Last year I didn’t take it very seriously, but when I’m on that bench, I watch the scouts take notes on Stanley. Now, I’m close enough to feel the heat coming off that world. I’ve never been this close to it. And I want it.

I want the net. I want whatever thing the drafted kid has — I want to be the guy they put scouts in the stands for. It comes up in me at practice, hot and sudden, watching Tyler take reps in the good net, and I don’t call it jealousy because it isn’t. It’s the other thing, the wanting it so bad you feel it rushing in your blood. I put it to work. I beat every odd there was against me, and there’s no rule that says I have to stop here.

I watch Tyler Forleo closely. He does everything better, cleaner, like it was built into him. I take what I can off the end of his stick, and I don’t say a word about the fact that I’m learning from someone younger than me. This is the only way I’ve ever known how to learn anything. You watch the person who has the thing you want, and you take it, and you say nothing.

This weekend it’s a home game, a conference game, a ranked team in town, and the barn is full. The suits are here for the guys I moved in with a year ago. Benson. Stanley. Blue’s got a fourth-round tag on him too. Three of the men I eat breakfast with haveteams that want them, and I’ve got a scholarship and a spot on the bench.

There’s a real crowd tonight. I take my spot at the bench. Hutch goes in the net, and I put my mask on my knee and get ready to watch a game I’m dressed for and won’t play.