Page 172 of Under His Jersey

Kylie’s sitting up beside me with the blanket around her, watching over my arm. It’s twenty-two seconds long. I watch it once, and then my hands are shaking.

He doesn’t live far, in the gray house with the sagging porch, fourth one down from the corner. Seven minutes from Corvin if I cut across the lot and behind the science building. He’ll be on the first floor, because their bedrooms are upstairs and nobody sits upstairs at seven on a Sunday, and there’s a screen door. I know exactly how hard I can hit somebody.

I clench my fists, trying to hold it in, because Kylie is right behind me, and this isn’t the fucking place. She puts a hand on my shoulder, skin to skin, and it takes everything in me to let her have that. She can think she’s comforting me. I already know what I’m going to do.

I stand and get my clothes back on.

“Nash,” she says.

I get my sweats on. I find my shirt inside out on the floor by her desk and pull it over my head.

“Nash. Hey.”

She’s out of the bed, pulling her shirt on fast, going for her leggings, hopping on one foot at the end of her bed. “Where are you going?”

“Greeley’s.”

“Okay.” She’s still dressing. “Then I’m coming.”

“Stay here.”

“I’m not staying here—”

“Kylie.” I’ve got my shoes on and my hand on her door. “You’re not coming.”

She stops with her leggings half up. She’s not scared of me. She’s never once been scared of me, not the first night, not in that house, not ever, and she isn’t now. She stands in the middle of her room and looks at me with her jaw working.

“Don’t hurt him, Nash.”

I look at her. She’s serious. And that breaks the sequence I had going in my head, because of everything in this room right now, everything I’m about to walk across campus and do, that’s the outcome he’s after. That’s what this whole thing has been. Seven weeks of him standing exactly close enough. He hit me with a stick in his kitchen, and then he kept the twenty-two seconds after it. He sat on it, he waited, and the only way any of it works for him is if I keep doing the part that’s on video.

“I’m not going to hurt him,” I say.

I don’t know if it’s true. I’ve got no idea whether it’s true. Then I’m out the door.

Koda comes through the stairwell door as I get to it, still in his travel pants with a hoodie on and his phone in his hand. Rafe’s two steps behind him. Neither of them asks where I’m going. They stop, and I walk around them, and they follow.

We step out of Corvin into the cold, and I head the quickest way to Greeley’s. We’re halfway there when Koda says, “It’s got nine hundred views on the one I saw. There’s three now. Somebody put it on the Woodbury page.”