Page 9

I’ve known Payton since we were seven and Elsie since we were nine, when she moved in two streets over and announced on the first day that she was going to be my best friend whether I agreed to it or not, and then just was. They went to the girls’ school across town, the one with the plaid skirts and the chapel, and every afternoon at three-fifteen, I walked out of one life and into another. In the second one, I talked too much. I did voices. I was the one who knew all the words to everything and made them sit through movies they didn’t want to see and fell asleep first at every sleepover. In the second one, I was funny. I was a little mean, in the way you can only be mean with people who know exactly how much you love them.

They know about Rafferty. They only know what I’ve told them, which is that he was an asshole to me for four years, that he picked on me, and that I hated him. Payton refuses to use his first name and says his last one like it’s a disease. They know I applied to the same school he was going to, and they thought that sucked, and said so, loudly, and then they drove me to Target and helped me pick out a comforter that matched the school colors.

What they don’t know is the stairwell. Or the hallways I stopped walking down, or the hand I stopped raising, or the way I learned to read his eyes. They don’t know how much of me he had. I never gave them that part. Not because I don’t trust them. Because some things, once you say them out loud become part of the story, and I was really hoping that this one was going to have a different ending.

“A bagel,” I tell Payton. “And half a salad. And a cookie Kylie stole from the dining hall for me.”

Payton narrows her eyes and decides to allow it. Elsie snatches the phone back.

“Okay, so why did you ignore my text last night? Full report. Not a thumbs-up. Sentences.”

“So, my roommate, Kylie. She made me go to a—”

“Wait.” Elsie freezes with the brow pencil in the air. “Kylie? Your roommate made you what?”

I look down. “Go to a hockey game last night.”

There’s a second of silence, and then both of them scream at the exact same time, so loudly that my phone speaker crackles, and I have to hold it away from my head.

“A hockey game?” Elsie gasps.

“On a school night?” Payton shouts at me.

Elsie nods. “Who are you?”

“Was there a Jumbotron? Were you on it?”

“There was no Jumbotron,” I say. “There was a scoreboard. And a man on the loudspeaker who yelled ‘Grizzlies’ so loud that I wished I had brought my noise-canceling headphones.”

Elsie loves this. But Payton takes the phone again, and her face has changed. She’s always the pessimist.

“Hold on,” she says. “Woodbury hockey.”

“Yeah.”

“Was Waleska playing?”

I go still, just a small hitch somewhere between my lungs and my mouth, but Payton’s known me since we were seven, and I watch her see it.

“Yeah.”

“Did he see you?”

I think about the glass. The long white sheet of the ice, and the noise of the building, and the exact second the noise changed, because his skates stopped. I didn’t look. I knew anyway. I felt the hair on my arms standing up before my brain caught on. And then he tapped on the glass. Every face in my row turned toward it, and mine stayed exactly where I’d put it, on a single scuffed point in the middle of the ice, until it went blurry and white and I couldn’t have told you where I was because it felt like I was back in high school again.

“Yeah,” I say.

“And?” Elsie says, leaning into the frame.

“He was playing,” I say simply. “Nothing happened.”

I’ve always given people truths small enough to carry. It isn’t lying. It’s packing. You decide what someone has room for, and you hand them that, and you keep the rest.

Payton looks at me through the screen for a long second.

“You’d tell us,” she says. It isn’t quite a question. “If he did anything to you.”

I nod. “I’d tell you.”