Page 234 of Across His Line

Kylie turns her whole body toward him. “You did?”

Nash’s mouth pulls at the side. “It’s fucking obvious.”

Barnes is pushing Palinski back into the snowbank and laughing so hard that there’s no sound coming out.

I stand there on the ice in one glove and want all of them to shut the fuck up. Every single one of them. Kylie. Kennebeck. Barnes. Palinski, who’s bitching at Barnes. The two hometown guys who don’t know any of us and are watching like it’s TV.

Tessa turns back around and looks at me, mortified and laughing.

Kylie comes down off the bench and across the snow at a speed that seems unsafe in those boots. She takes Tessa by the arm, starts pulling her back past the fire, and up the hill toward the farmhouse, talking the whole way, fast and loud, both hands going.

Tessa looks back at me once over her shoulder. Then they’re up the hill and gone around the corner of the porch.

“She’s about to hear your whole criminal record,” Kennebeck says.

“She knows it.”

He turns his head and looks at me. He doesn’t say anything.

I skate over to Barnes and push him with my stick until I can lay him flat into the snowbank. But he gets me in the knee, and I go down instead. Barnes skates off laughing towards Palinski.

When it gets dark and the hometown guys go up to the farmhouse for food, the three of us stay down by my car. Barnes sits on the hood with a hot dog in each hand. Kennebeck leans on the side with his arms crossed. I sit on the cold bumper with my skates still on, my one bare hand going numb.

The fire’s down to coals. The lake’s gone gray and then blue. The farmhouse lights are on at the top of the hill, and somewhere up there Tessa is with Kylie.

“How the fuck did this happen?” Barnes says through a hot dog.

I don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about, so I say, “I don’t know.”

He swallows. “You don’t know?”

I look at him. “I don’t know.”

“You’re fucked,” Barnes says, delighted. “You’re so fucked. You’re already lighter.”

“He’s harder,” Kennebeck says.

Koda and Nash look at each other and lose it. I can’t help but smile because these two are fucking stupid.

“You bought her jewelry, didn’t you? That watch,” Koda says. “That’s you.”

I don’t answer.

“Jewelry, Kennebeck.”

“He’s gone,” Nash says, and he goes back to looking at the lake.

His phone buzzes in his coat. He takes it out. Looks at it. Dad. Declines it. Puts it back.

Barnes stops eating. I look at the lake.

“There’s gonna be a scout,” Koda says, and I lose the fucking rest of whatever he says because I’m looking up at the farmhouse and thinking about June.

June used to be a stage. A jersey. A city I haven’t been to yet. And now there’s another question inside it, sitting there next to the rest, that I didn’t put there. Where’s Tessa? I don’t know. I don’t think she knows either.

“You’re gonna have to kill me before I let Greeley think anything else.”

Nash just shakes his head.