Page 215 of Across His Line

I sit there with it in my hand and my heart sinking.

I can feel my brain trying to run, looking for the number. The condition. The year. How much it would go for if I listed it tonight with good lighting. How many months of rent. How many bus tickets. How much I’d have to sell to make it back.

And I stop.

I just make it stop. I look at the watch in my hand, ticking, with its little gold face, and I let it be a watch. Something he gave me. Something I get to keep.

I don’t know if I’ve ever done that before.

“You wrote time,” he says to his mug. “In your notebook. You underlined it.”

I look at him.

He still isn’t looking at me. His ears are red.

I put the watch on. It’s loose a little on my wrist. It slides down over the bone, over the small black letters there. I don’t take it off.

My present for him is under the tree, too, at the very back, where I put it last night after he fell asleep. In brown paper from the Goodwill bag because that’s all I had with a bow I took off one of Mrs. Waleska’s.

He finds it at the end. He looks at the tag, which says R in my handwriting, and then at me.

I found it at the Goodwill on Route 9, the first week of December, in a box of old books on the floor in the back under a cookbook and two Bibles and a stack of National Geographics. It was a dollar. I almost listed it. I put it in my closet instead, and then I put it in my duffel when I packed for break, and I didn’t let myself think too hard about why.

It’s an old hockey book. A coaching manual from a long time ago with a red cover and diagrams on every page. Little Xs and Os and arrows, skaters drawn as circles, plays laid out on half-rinks. A whole book about where everybody goes when they don’t have the puck.

On the first page, inside the cover, in pen, I wrote: Most of the game is what happens before anybody gets it.

He opens it. He turns the pages. He stops on one of the diagrams and looks at it for a long time. Then he flips back to the front and looks at what I wrote.

He doesn’t say anything.

He sits there on the floor with the book open in his lap and his thumb on the inside cover, and his jaw does something. He doesn’t look up, and I watch the back of his neck go red all the way up to his hair.

His dad leans over from his chair to look. He looks at the diagram for a long second. Then at the cover. Then he sits back.

“That’s good,” he says.

That’s all. Two words. Rafe’s head comes up and he looks at his father, and I can see it go through him. I don’t think his father says that very often.

Then Rafe looks at me. Finally.

And I’m breathless.

I don’t know what happened to me last night, but I know I would do just about anything for those eyes on mine.

And I’m blindsided. I can’t tell if he likes it or hates it, and I’m not sure that it matters because what’s happening inside of my chest is a whole new problem I didn’t know could exist.

“Okay,” his mom says, standing up with her phone. “You two. Over by the tree.”

Rafe glances up at her. I go red.

“Mom.”

“One picture. It’s Christmas. Stand.”

We stand. By the tree, in front of it, with the lights on behind us and the potato hockey player somewhere around my left elbow. I’m wearing the gold watch, and he’s holding the hockey book.

We don’t touch. We stand about six inches apart, like two people who’ve been told to stand next to each other by somebody’s mother.