Page 177 of Across His Line

“No.”

“Never?”

“No.”

“Why?”

She almost laughs. “I don’t know,” she says. “It just never happened. Nobody asked, and I didn’t ask anybody. I was busy.”

And the lake comes together in my head. She wasn’t saying no to Palinski because of me. Or because of anything. She was sitting by a fire in front of the girls from the center tables with a loud boy she’d known for four years asking her out, for the first time in her life, and she had no idea what you do with that. Nobody ever asked.

She was overwhelmed. That’s all.

I read it right. And I don’t know why that’s the thing that feels good. Not that she said no. That I knew. That I looked at her and knew what was going on behind her face before anybody else did.

The game goes on. Somebody scores. Neither of us says anything about it.

“Is it true what you said at dinner?” I say. “That you might not be at Woodbury next year?”

She goes still. “Yeah,” she says.

“How likely?”

She pulls the blanket up. “I don’t know. I knew when I took it. It said in the letter. First-year award, nonrenewable. I applied for the continuing-student money in November. I applied for four outside scholarships. I’m waiting to hear back on all of it. If enough comes through, I’m fine. If it doesn’t—” She stops. “Then I’m not.”

“You never said.”

“You never asked.”

She doesn’t say it like a dig. She says it like a fact because it is one.

I sit there.

“That’s why,” I say.

“Why what?”

“The notebook. The ceiling. The millionaire thing. Thirty-one orders in one week.”

She’s quiet. Then she nods. “Partly.” She looks at the TV without watching it. “I’m trying to learn everything I can while I’m there. Every class. Every person. If I only have until summer—” She shrugs. “Then I have until summer.”

If I only have until summer.

“If you couldn’t stay,” I say. “Would you come back here?”

She doesn’t answer for a long time.

“I hope not,” she says.

And something in me just—no.

No.

I think about the couch in that living room and wonder how many times her face was shoved into it. I think about the bus money, her business, her mom demanding money, and her grandma who can’t stand up for her. I don’t want her going back there.

I want her going forward.

And I don’t know how to do that. I know how I used to solve things. Pick up a phone. Write a check. Tell somebody where they’re going and wait for them to go there. Offer her a year’s rent in a stairwell. That’s what I know.