My hand goes still on the handle of my locker. “Tell him thanks.”
“Tell him yourself. You’ve got his number.”
“Yeah. I will.”
He says something about my mother and her flight tabs. I crack jokes back, and he hangs up, easy, the way he ends everything.
I sit down on the bench in my stall, half out of my gear, and I don’t scroll down two names below hers to her father’s contact because that is a line, and even I know where it is. She keeps an image of him winning the cup on her damn desk, and I know exactly what that man’s approval is worth to her. I know she’d skate through a wall for one sentence of what he just handed me for free.
Her father is proud of me.
I would never tell her that. Not in a war, not in a hundred wars.
That’s the second one now. The second piece of real dirt I’m holding on Aspen Linwood — the shark is the first — and I take this new one and put it in the same vault, in the dark, with the door shut, where I keep the things I’m never going to use.
Then I stand up and snap my bag shut, because sitting with that is a sucker’s game, and I’ve got a poster to make.
I come through the front door of Hawthorne House with the gleam of a man with a plan. I go straight up the stairs, into my room, and shut the door before anyone can ask.
I open my laptop, and I pull up a photo of myself from media day — a real one, a magazine shoot, the smize cranked all the way to a hundred, holding my now-retired gamer across my chest with both hands like a debutante posing with a bouquet. Gorgeous. Tragic. Perfect.
I open a Word doc. I drop the photo in dead center.
Across the top, two-hundred-point font: MISSING.
Underneath: Last seen Friday night, Camden Arena. Believed to be taken by a known accomplice operating out of Hawthorne Street.
And along the bottom, smaller, where the phone-number tabs would go.
REWARD:A moment of my time.
I sit back and look at it, and I grin so hard it hurts.
Six copies. I print six, because I can use all of them.
I go downstairs and ask the room for the laminator with total sincerity.
Benson, who has stopped questioning my intentions, answers, “Hall closet, top shelf.”
Perfect. I find it easily and laminate all six, one at a time, watching each one come out the far side, hot, glossy, and permanent.
I’m mid-laminate when there’s a knock on my door.
“Stan?” Rowan sticks his head in. “You good in here?”
“I’m elite, Row.” I don’t turn around.
“What are you doing?”
“Memories.”
A long pause. He’s in the doorway now. I can feel him taking in the laminator, the glossy stack of my own grinning face fanned out on my bed, the second-degree premeditation of it all. He opens his mouth. He closes it. He decides that he is happier not knowing. He leaves.
I gather my posters and walk out the front door. I put my hood up and shove the roll of tape in my pocket. Cold air is on my face, and the whole street is asleep.
Three doors down, the house is dark except for the porch light, and her window is dark too. The curtains are drawn this time. Smart girl.
I’m grinning the whole way. When I get to her window, I check the street, up and down. It’s quiet as a held breath. Nobody’s around. I pull four strips of tape, and I press the laminated sheet flat to the outsideof her glass, photo facing in, top corners, bottom corners, all four, snug enough to hold against the wind. I put the rest of them up and smile.
