Page 270

The hockey season ended four weeks ago in a rink in Connecticut I’ve never been to in the first round of the national tournament. I watched it on Kylie’s laptop with the volume too loud, both of us on her bed with our knees up. They lost two to one in overtime. Rafe had the goal. Barnes was back by then, after two games out, and he didn’t take a single penalty, and he didn’t say anything on the bus home, either, Rafe told me. Nobody did. Rafe came back at three in the morning and got into my bed in his clothes and lay there with his face in my neck and didn’t say a word.

And then it was just over. Just like that. No more games.

He still trains. He still gets up at six and goes to the weight room and skates with whoever’s around in the afternoons. But there’s nothing on Friday nights anymore. There’s no bus to catch. There’s nothing in front of him except June, and he can’t skate toward it any faster. I watch it make him restless in a way I’ve never seen. He paces. He checks his phone. He lies on my floor at night doing nothing, which Rafe never does.

I put the sticky notes in the trash. All except one. Aid email — Jan? I put that one in my notebook.

April is my best month.

I added it up last night, sitting on my bed before Kylie came back. After fees. After shipping. After everything I paid for everything. Two thousand two hundred and eighty dollars.

I didn’t do it twice this time. I believed it the first time. That’s new.

And my social media accounts. Worth It or Not. I don’t know what happened. I posted the same kind of thing I’ve been posting since March. My hands. A thing. Words at the bottom. A pair of rain boots in the bins at the Goodwill, three dollars, and I picked them up, and turned them over, and showed the bottom of the sole, the little molded logo, the date code next to it, and then put the sold listings on the screen. Paid: $3. Sold for: $95. Here’s the part everyone misses.

I posted it at eleven on a Tuesday and went to bed.

In the morning, it had forty-one thousand views.

I sat on my bed and looked at the number for so long that Kylie asked if somebody had died. People were commenting. Hundreds of them. Not just wow. Questions. Real ones. How do you know what’s worth checking? How do you price it?Do you count the fees before or after? What if it doesn’t sell? Do you have a guide? Can you look at mine? One of them, a woman who said she was fifty-three and had just been laid off from a job she’d had for nineteen years, wrote a whole paragraph asking where to start.

I answered her. It took me forty minutes.

There are four hundred and twelve people following my hands now. I don’t know who they are. I don’t know what they think I look like.

I haven’t made anything to sell them. I don’t have a guide. I don’t have a course or a list or anything at all. I just have my silly little videos, a Goodwill, and a lot of questions in a box at the bottom of a screen.

But I keep looking at them. All those questions, the same ones, over and over. And I think, for the first time: maybe I don’t have to choose. I thought the online part would have to replace the other thing. Like eBay was the first rung, and I’d climb off it. But it isn’t a ladder. eBay is what I stand on. It’s what pays for the ink. The account is what grows out of it, next to it, out of all the same aisles and the same bins and the same knowing.

One thing feeds the other. I don’t have to burn anything down.

“What are you doing next year?” Kylie says, from the floor. “For housing? Paige and I are trying to get a double in Hargrove. Like, we put in for it. But they have the good kitchens, and I was thinking if you wanted, we could do a triple, there’s one on the second floor with the bay window, Paige says it’s—”

I stop with my hand on the closet door.

She keeps talking. About the bay window. About how the kitchen in Hargrove has an actual oven, a real one, not a toaster oven, and how she’s going to learn to make bread. She’s sitting on the floor in a box of her own stuff, putting a candle in a shoe to keep it from breaking, and talking about next year like it’s a place she already lives.

And I haven’t told her.

I told Rafe on the quad in March. I told the notebook in January. I haven’t told anybody else, because if I tell Kylie, then it’s real, and she’ll look at me the way she’s about to look at me.

“Ky,” I say.

She stops. She looks up at me from the box.

“I’m not coming back,” I say, and as soon as I do, I shiver.

She stares at me for one shocked second.

“What?”

“In the fall. I’m not coming back to Woodbury.”

She puts the candle down. She puts the shoe down next to it.

“Since when?”

“January,” I say. “The aid came. It wasn’t enough. And then—” I stop. “And then I started thinking I didn’t want it anyway. Not like this. Not enough to owe that much for it.”