Page 34 of Across His Line

Rafferty Waleska: That’s not weird at all.

Me: Neither is standing outside the business building on a Monday when you don’t have a class there.

The dots come up. Go away. They don’t come back.

I look at the picture I sent him. The grid. The straight lines. And I can already see the problem with it, the way I see the problem with a listing before I post it. Schedules change. Practices move. Professors cancel class. I get hungry at the wrong time. He decides to go to the library for the first time in his life on the one afternoon I’m there. A schedule is a promise about the future, and the future doesn’t keep promises any better than he does.

I type it before I can think it through. Which is the second time in two days I’ve done something with Rafe before thinking it through, and I should stop it, but I don’t.

Me: Better idea.

Rafferty Waleska: No.

Me: Temporary location sharing. If we can both see where the other person is, we don’t run into each other. No guessing.

This time, the dots take a long time. Long enough that I put the phone face down on the desk and pick it back up twice.

Rafferty Waleska: You want my location.

I can feel the accusation in it, even through a screen, even with no punctuation, even three doors away. You want my location. Like I’m the one who’s been sitting on library steps at seven-fifty in the morning.

Me: You already think I stalk you. At least this way you’ll know when I’m not.

I hit send, and I put my hand over my mouth. I’m shaking.

No blue dots. I put the phone down again and wait.

Rafferty Waleska: Send yours first.

I read it more times than I’d like. He’d rather die than go first at anything with me, and he knows I know it. I think this is his way of agreeing with me, so I open the settings. I find the correct button. My thumb sits over it.

Four years of making sure he never knew where I was. Two months of a chain on my door. And I’m about to put a dot on his phone with my name on it that follows me everywhere I go.

I press it.

For three seconds, nothing happens. Then my phone buzzes, and there it is, at the top of my screen.

Rafferty Waleska started sharing location with you.

I open the map.

Two dots. One is me. The other one is right next to it, in the same building, almost on top of it, so close the little circles overlap. Three doors. That’s all it is. On the map, it’s nothing. A few pixels.

His name sits under it in small gray letters.

I look at it for a long time. My heart is doing something slow and heavy, the way it does right before a test you know you didn’t study for.

For four years, I had to guess where he was. I had to read it off the hallways and the noise in the cafeteria and the way the air changed before he came around a corner. I built my whole life around a boy I could never quite see.

And now I can see him all the time.

I close the app. I turn off the lamp. I lie in the dark with the phone face down on my chest, and I don’t sleep for a long time.

Now I can stay away from him like I swore I would.

I check it at seven-fifteen on Wednesday morning, before I’ve even sat up. He’s at the rink. Okay. This is nice. It’s settling. I shower and get dressed and walk to lab the normal way, across the quad, in the open, because the dot says I can, and it’s the first time in two months I’ve crossed that grass without my shoulders up around my ears.

I check it again before lunch. Still the rink. I eat my sandwich at my table by the dish return and look out at the room for once instead of down at my tray.