Page 71 of Across His Line

I go to practice.

It’s the last one before the break, and it’s twenty minutes of drills and Berwyn yelling about Friday’s game like we’re all going to forget how to skate over a four-day weekend. Greeley takes a swipe at my ankles after the whistle on a line rush.

I don’t look at him. I skate back to the line.

Kennebeck glides up beside me with his stick across his knees.

“Growth,” he says.

“Eat shit.”

I check my phone in the locker room. Nothing.

I check it on the walk back across the quad. Nothing.

I tell myself I don’t care. She can stay. She can sit in an empty dorm on Thursday with her red box of stuffing and eat her one fucking sweet potato all by herself. It’s her life. I offered. If she wants to be stubborn about it, that’s her problem, not mine.

By eleven, I’m so pissed I can’t sit still.

I sit at my desk and open my laptop, because I have to look at something besides my phone. I pull up my spring schedule, because it’s the only thing open in my browser.

Accounting. Analytics. Managerial econ. A writing seminar. A stats class at nine in the morning that I’m going to regret.

I met with the business advisor on Monday afternoon. He had reading glasses on a chain and a tie with little ducks on it, and he signed off on the change in about four minutes and then talked to me for an hour about what I wanted to do with it. I didn’t know what to say. I said I didn’t know, and he said that was the right answer for a freshman, and then he told me which accounting professor actually likes students and which one grades like he’s getting paid per F. I went to the bookstore after and bought the accounting book a month early, because I wanted to see what was in it.

I’ve read the first three chapters. I don’t know why. It’s a textbook. It’s about debits.

I liked it. And that’s what’s eating me. Because when my father finds out I’m a business major, he isn’t going to see a guy who sat in a hotel lobby and picked it himself. He’s going to see me finally doing what he wanted. Falling in line. He’s going to sit at the head of the table on Thursday in front of the Ashbys and look at me like I came around, like the prodigal son came home and asked for a desk, and he’s going to take it. He’s going to take it and put his name on it, the same way he did with Morley.

Can something still be mine if he wanted it first?

I don’t know. I sit there with the schedule open and look at it, and I think it has to be. It has to be mine, because I’m the one who clicked confirm. Because nobody told me to. Because I sat there and picked it, and I liked picking it.

It doesn’t matter who wanted it first. It matters who chose it.

My phone buzzes against the desk.

It’s twelve-forty. I pick it up so fast I almost knock over my water.