This was nothing.
The engine rumbled to life. Thunder Bay scrolled past the window—Tim Hortons, the arena, and the alley behind The Drop where Biscuit had once treed a raccoon for forty-five minutes while Hog tried to coax him away with beef jerky.
There would be no Adrian leaning against the boards this morning. No quiet gray-blue eyes tracking me across the ice.
I pressed my forehead against the cold glass of the bus window.
It’s five days, I told myself. I’ve had leftovers in my fridge longer than this. I can survive Kalamazoo.
I didn’t feel abandoned. Unmoored was more like it. Someone had untied the rope holding me to the dock, and I was drifting in open water.
It wasn’t fun, but I didn’t quite hate it.
My phone buzzed.
Adrian:Safe travels. Text me when you get there.
Pickle:we barely left the parking lot
Adrian:Then text me when you hit the highway
Pickle:demanding. bossy. I like it.
Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.
Adrian:Focus on your game. I’ll be here when you get back.
I stared at that last sentence until the screen dimmed.
I’ll be here.
A small thing to say, but a huge thing to mean.
The hotel in Kalamazoo had Wi-Fi that worked in bursts. I lay sideways across the bed and watched Adrian’s face pixelate mid-sentence on FaceTime.
“—and then Naomi said—” His image froze, mouth open, one eye larger than the other. He looked like a Picasso painting, those weird Cubist ones.
“You’re buffering.”
The screen unfroze. “—which I told her was unrealistic, but—what?”
“Nothing. You were saying.”
He paused. Studied me through the tiny screen.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
Nothow was the drive?Notare you ready for tomorrow?
“Weird,” I admitted. “Good weird. I keep waiting for the crash, but it hasn’t come yet.”
“Maybe it won’t.”
“It always does.”
“Maybe this time it won’t.”
The screen froze again. I thought about how easy it would be to fill the silence with a joke. Adrian never asked for that.
