Page 56 of Across His Line

Fifty. Obviously.

Rafe

Back at home, the neighbors across the street have a German shepherd named Bishop who used to lose his mind at me every morning when I ran past their house before school.

As soon as I’d hit the corner, I’d hear him before I even saw the fence. He’d come tearing across the yard, throwing himself at the iron bars hard enough to rattle them, barking like I was about to climb over and murder everybody inside.

I never stopped and never looked at him. I’d just keep running.

Every morning, it was the same thing. For months, Bishop went to war with me before seven in the morning while I ran past carrying absolutely nothing but headphones and a bad attitude.

Then one day, maybe a year into it, I came around the corner, Bishop lifted his head from the grass, watched me go by, and put it back down.

Nobody trained it out of him. Nobody did anything. He just figured it out that I run past, the gate stays shut, and nothing happens. You can only throw yourself at a fence so many mornings before even an animal realizes there’s nothing coming for him.

I’m not a fucking dog. But Tess has been three doors down from me for eleven weeks, and nothing has happened.

Tuesday, I’m on the floor of the hallway tying my skates to my bag when her door opens, and she comes out with her backpack on one shoulder and her keys in her hand. I’m in the way. My legs are halfway across the hall. A month ago, I’d have left them there and made her step over them.

I pull them in. She walks past. Neither of us says anything.

Wednesday, she’s in the lounge at the big table with her mailers and her little scale, and I go to the kitchen and fill my water bottle and walk back past the door. She doesn’t look up, and I don’t stop.

Thursday, I come around the corner by the laundry room, and she’s coming out of it with a basket on her hip, in that cream sweater with the sleeves pushed up. She sees me. I see her. We both keep walking. Her hair smells like whatever shampoo she uses when she goes past, something cheap and clean, and then she’s gone around the corner, and I’m standing in front of the dryers for no reason.

Turns out we can live in the same building without ruining each other’s lives. Revolutionary. Somebody should fucking applaud.

I’d like to say I decided that. That I sat down and thought about it and came to some conclusion like an adult. I didn’t. It just stopped being worth it. You can’t stay pissed at somebody for sitting in a lounge. Not when she’s just sitting there, weighing envelopes, and everybody on the floor uses it, and there’s nothing to do about it except either walk past or make it a thing.

I made it a thing, and it didn’t do anything except make me look like a guy who loses his mind about a lounge.

And she isn’t here for me. That’s the other part. I don’t know why it took me this long to see it. I spent all fall acting like she showed up at Woodbury just to stand at the end of my hallway, and she doesn’t even look down it. She’s got classes. She’s got the rower and their coffee dates. She’s got Kylie dragging her to the dining hall. Paige and Kenzie and more girls whose names I don’t know. And she has a whole business running out of a cardboard box. She’s got a life, an actual one here, and I’m just in the building.

In high school, she was the girl at the end of the lunch table. That’s all she was. I never saw her anywhere else, so I decided that was all there was to see.

My father sat in a car in a wet parking lot and called her a dime-store diamond. It’s the setting, he said. The setting’s everything. And I took that home and believed it the way I believed everything he said in that voice, like it was a law of physics. She was cheap because of where she was sitting. So I made sure everybody remembered where she was sitting.

He was right. That’s what gets me. The setting is everything.

He just never thought about what happens when somebody picks the stone up and puts it somewhere good.

She’s good in her classes. I know that because the rower won’t shut up about it at the student center, loud enough that I hear it walking past. People here like her. Kylie’s friends like her. She laughs now, in hallways, where people can hear it. She’s funny, apparently, which I’m still not over. Nobody at Woodbury knows where she was sitting four years ago, and nobody cares, and without the cafeteria around her, she just looks like what she is. I don’t know what that is yet. But it isn’t cheap.

I don’t like where that thought goes, so I stop following it.

We spend the weekend in Massachusetts and win both.

Friday is ugly. Three–two, in a building that smells like fryer grease and old ice, with a student section that spends the whole third period chanting something about Kennebeck’s mother. Saturday is cleaner. Four–one. Somebody tells me on the bench there are two scouts in the press box with laptops, and I don’t look up. I just play.

And I fucking pass the puck.

I come down the right side on a two-on-one in the second on Saturday, and Kennebeck’s wide open on the back door, and for once in my life, I give it to him instead of shooting it myself. He buries it and skates past me afterward with this look on his face.

Kennebeck finishes Saturday with three points. He spends the entire bus ride back to the hotel acting like he doesn’t care, which is how Kennebeck is smug.

“You’re welcome,” I tell him somewhere between the rink and the hotel.

He doesn’t take his earbuds out. “For finally figuring out hockey’s played with a team?”