Page 142 of Across His Line

My father takes a sip of his drink.

“The dime-store diamond,” he says lightly. Pleasantly, almost.

And I hate it.

I hate it so much my hand tightens on the strap of my bag. Not because he’s wrong, in whatever world he lives in. Because I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want it in this hallway. I don’t want her reduced to two words in his mouth, a thing he looked at once through a windshield and priced.

I don’t say anything.

“She got into Woodbury?” he says.

“Yeah.”

He nods slowly, like that’s interesting. Like he’s surprised. That’s the part that gets me. He’s surprised.

“What’s she studying?”

I don’t want to tell him. I don’t want him to have anything else.

“Business.”

“Hm.” Another sip. “Smart girl?”

“Very.”

It comes out before I can think about it.

He looks at me over his glass. Something moves in his face. He doesn’t say anything about it.

He looks up the stairs, where she went.

“She’s in the guest room?”

“Yeah.”

He keeps looking at the stairs. And something about the way he’s looking, the way he asked, makes my jaw go tight.

“We’re just friends,” I say.

“Good,” he says.

That’s it. Good. Like I gave the right answer on a test. Like he was waiting for me to say it and I finally did.

I want to take it back. I don’t know why. It’s true. We are friends, or we’re something I don’t have a word for that’s close to friends, and there’s nothing else, and I just told him so. And he said good, and now I want to take it back just so he can’t have it.

“You don’t need distractions right now,” he says. “Mark Morley called me last week. You’re on more lists than you were in November. Draft’s in June. If this season goes the way it should, you’ll be gone soon enough.”

He finishes his drink.

“You’ll have to leave her behind,” he says, and he goes down the hall toward his study. The door closes behind him.

I stand in the front hall with my bag.

Leave her behind.

I don’t know why it gets under my skin like that. It doesn’t mean anything. We’re friends. Friends go to different places. People graduate and get drafted and move. That’s just how it works. That’s all he meant.

But I don’t like the way he said it.