Page 315 of Across His Line

Nash picks it up without saying a word and carries it down the stairs.

Paige comes out of her room in the middle of it. She doesn’t say anything to anyone. She just picks up the box marked DESK and starts down the stairs with it right as Koda’s coming up. He stops on the landing and reaches for it.

“I got it,” he says.

“I have it.”

“It’s heavy.”

“It weighs nothing.”

She doesn’t let go. Neither does he. They stand there on the landing, both of them holding the same box, not looking at each other, and the whole stairwell goes so quiet I can hear the fan running upstairs.

“You always do this,” Koda says.

“Don’t,” Paige says.

He lets go.

She carries it down. I look at Nash. Nash looks at me. Neither of us has any idea what the fuck was ever going on with them. Behind me, Tessa and Kylie are standing in the doorway with their eyes huge, having an entire conversation without making a sound.

It’s not my business, and I’d really like to know, but my time at Woodbury is done.

At the bottom of the stairs, Nash and I stand next to each other looking at the trunk of my car. It’s full to the roof. Her boxes and my bags. I’ve been standing next to Kennebeck since I arrived to Woodbury. In the locker room. In the hallway. At Corvin Hall. On the bench, on the ice, at the net, every time something went bad and every time something went good. Him going to the front of the net before I even look up. I don’t have a word for what he is, but he’s a good one. I know that much.

We don’t hug. We stand there with our arms crossed for a long time.

“Don’t blow it,” Nash says finally.

“Fuck you.”

He takes one hand out of his pocket and hits me in the chest with the back of it. I almost hug him. I really almost do it.

I was. He knows I was. He goes back up the stairs for another box, and I stand by the car for a second longer, looking at the ground, hating that this past year seemed too fucking fast.

Tessa calls her grandma from the porch while we load the last of it.

“I will.” A pause. “I’ll call, Grandma.” A longer pause, and she laughs, small. “By the window? Okay. Good.” And then, “I’ll text you when we get there,” and it’s the we that gets me. Just that. She doesn’t even notice she said it.

After she hangs up, she looks at her phone for a while. There’s something else on the screen. I can tell from her face, the way it goes flat and still and very far away, the way it used to go at Corvin before I knew what it meant. She looks at it long enough that I almost get up.

Then she puts the phone in her pocket. She doesn’t answer whatever it is. She sees me watching, and her face comes back.

I don’t ask. She’ll tell me.

The last box is on the floor of her empty room, by the door.

The room looks bigger with nothing in it. The slanted ceiling. The blue desk somebody painted before her stays. There’s a square on the windowsill cleaner than the rest of it where the frog sat all summer.

She bends down to get the box. I come up the stairs and reach past her and pick it up first. It’s light. It’s her notebooks.

“I can carry that,” she says.

I look at her over the top of it.

The first time I ever carried anything of hers, it was her duffel at Corvin in January, and I didn’t ask. I just took it off her shoulder and walked. She followed me down the hall with her whole face shut like a door, hating me for it. I didn’t get it then. I thought carrying something for somebody was the same as being good to them. I didn’t understand that for her, somebody taking her bag out of her hands was the worst thing in the world.

“I know,” I say. “I know you can.”