Page 98 of On His Mind

“So Drew’s got a game tonight,” she says, not looking up. “Seven o’clock. We should go.” She wiggles her toes. “The whole crew’s going out after. Theo, all of them.”

“Mm.”

“Speaking of.” She sets the phone in her lap. “Drew keeps saying Theo’s still into you. Like it’s his personal mission now. He brings it up constantly. It’s honestly embarrassing for both of them.”

I keep my eyes on the water. “There’s nothing there.”

“That’s what I said. I told him you’d have to be brain-dead to go back to Theo Marsh, no offense to the month you spent —”

“None taken.”

“— but Drew’s got it in his head that he’s, like, a matchmaker now.” She rolls her eyes. “He’s back with me for the plot, apparently. His word.”

“That’s romantic.”

“Isn’t it.” She grins, and then it goes softer. “It’s not serious, me and Drew. I know what it is. I’m probably leaving anyway.”

I turn in the chair. “Leaving.”

“Yeah. Study abroad next fall.” Her whole face lights up. “I finally sent everything in. I applied to three — Paris, London, and Rome — and now I just wait and see who takes me first. Whichever one comes through, I go.”

“All three?”

“You’re supposed to apply to a few. It’s competitive.” She’s scrolling through something, showing me a photo of a courtyard, a school building, I can’t tell. “Paris is the dream. But London,the studio’s supposed to be incredible, and Rome — Penelope, it’s Rome. I’d learn to draw a building on a two-thousand-year-old street. I don’t care which one. I just want the email.”

“When do you hear back?”

“Spring. It’s forever away.” She sighs. “But it’s real now because the applications are in, and now it’s out of my hands.” She grabs my wrist. “I’m going to Europe for a whole semester. Say you’re happy for me.”

I chuckle. “I am happy for you.” And I am — and then it lands that next fall her side of the apartment is going to be empty for a whole semester, and I hadn’t thought about that until right now.

“You’re going to have to find a subletter,” she says. “Or you get the place to yourself for a semester, which, honestly, is living the dream.” She goes back to her phone, then stops. “Wait. That’s what I keep meaning to ask you.”

“What?”

“Is there someone?”

I look at her.

“You’ve been —” she waves a hand, searching, “— different. You’re up at all hours, you’re glowing, you’re drawing again, you keep having these nights you don’t really account for. I’m not interrogating you.” She holds her hands up. “I just know what you look like when nothing’s going on, and this isn’t that.”

For one second, I actually consider telling her. But it isn’t only my secret. There’s a whiteboard in a house on Hawthorne Street, and a boy who cares an awful lot about the guys he lives with, and it isn’t mine to tell.

“I switched firms, remember,” I say. “That’s what’s different.”

She studies me for a second. Then, because she’s Ivory, because she’s already halfway to Paris in her head, she lets it go. “Okay. Keep your secrets.” She points at me. “But whoever he is, he’s got you drawing again, so I like him already.”

I don’t correct her. Something in me eases at how easy she made that — at not having to lie, just having to say nothing.

“Come to the game,” she says. “Please. I just applied to move to three different countries, you have to celebrate me.”

“I’ll think about it.”

Gianna and Mara texted me all afternoon about going to the hockey game, and then Ivory asked again the second we got home, so it was three against one, and I lost. That’s how I end up here — walking into the rink at quarter to seven, following Ivory through a set of doors into a cold that I wasn’t expecting, because I didn’t know an arena would be cold, which in hindsight makes sense, there’s ice in it.

It’s bigger than I thought but smaller than a football stadium. The seats go up steep on all sides, most of them are full. There’s a smell — cold and rubber and popcorn and something underneath it, sweat maybe, old and worked into the building. The ice is very white and bright under the lights. Everything around it is dim, so the rink looks like the only real thing in the room. Music’s playing loud between whistles. People are yelling. I’ve genuinely never been to a hockey game or set foot in a place like this.

“Penelope!” Gianna’s behind one of the benches, and she’s waving both arms over her head like I might miss the only person standing up in a section. “Penelope! Ivory!”