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“I told him that. He says it doesn’t matter.” Dad says something in the background, and she turns away. “I’m talking to him. Stop.” Then, to me, she says, “I’m giving you back before he starts yelling from across the room again. I love you.”
“Love you too.”
Dad comes back. I can hear keys clicking slowly on his end. “Hey. How’d Greeley take it?”
“He didn’t say anything. Got changed. Went to the shower.”
Dad is quiet long enough that I check the screen. “He’s not done. Guys like that figure out what gets a reaction and keep doing it, and you give them one, and it’s theirs after that. Doesn’t matter what they did first. Everybody remembers the guy who loses his shit.”
I stare at the opposite wall.
“Yeah,” I say.
“You’ve got people watching you who aren’t watching him. So don’t give him anything he can use.”
“Okay.”
“I’m serious, Nash.”
“I said okay.”
“And don’t get pissed at me for saying it.”
“I’m not pissed.”
“Okay,” he says, in the voice that means he doesn’t believe me, and for some reason, that makes me angry. I stand up and walk down two steps and back up them. There’s nowhere to go without leaving the stairwell, and I don’t want the hallway yet.
“I’m trying to help you,” he says. “You’ve got what you wanted. Don’t fuck it up because some asshole knows how to push your buttons.”
“I know.”
“Then we’re good.” More slow typing. Then his voice changes, not completely, just enough. “Hey. I’m proud of you. Second line as a freshman. That’s fucking huge. You earned that. Everything we did, all those nights. This is why.”
My side pulls. It doesn’t hurt anymore. Grafted skin doesn’t, not in the normal way. I put my hand there anyway, over my shirt, and leave it for a second. “Yeah.”
“You hear me? I’m real proud of you, bud. Love you.”
“Love you too.”
He hangs up, and the stairwell is quiet without him in my ear. The light at the top flickers once. I look at my phone until the screen goes dark. Then I stand, and my side aches the way it does sometimes, tight and hot along the edge of the graft. I run my fingers over it through my shirt, the place where my side caves in. Nothing’s wrong with it. Hasn’t been for years. It still fucking hurts.
I push through the stairwell door and walk down the hall, and I stop at Kylie’s door. There’s light under it. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, but I lift my hand to knock, and then I hear her laugh through the door, clear as anything.
“Oh my God,” she says, laughing.
I keep walking.
23
That Was Probably Nothing
Kylie
Dr. Nakamoto spends fifty minutes on the word nonviolent, and by the end, three people have changed their minds about something, which as far as I can tell is the entire point. Elias argues with her, because he always argues with her, and today he loses so badly that at the end he says, “Okay, that’s fair,” out loud in front of everybody, and the girl next to me writes ??? in the margin of her notes.
I walk out into a gray Thursday with my coffee gone cold and a good mood I can’t shake. I keep thinking about Nash knocking on my door to tell me he got the spot. He was clearly excited, and I didn’t congratulate him. I go back and forth about whether I should, all the way to the dining hall, and I still haven’t decided when I sit down across from Kenzie.
She complains about her econ TA, who has assigned a group project, and then says, “Oh. What are you doing tonight?”
