“That.”
“Found it.”
“You found it?”
“On the table. After you left yesterday.” He keeps bending it. Out and back. Slow. “Figured somebody might want it back.”
“It’s a paper clip. It’s worth half a cent.”
“Then you won’t mind that I keep it.”
And he doesn’t stop. He just keeps doing it, the bend, out and back, watching me watch him, and I get it all at once. He’s not fidgeting with a random paper clip. He’s doing my thing. The thing I thought was invisible. He saw me do it under the table yesterday, the one move I have left that’s just mine, and now he’s standing here at six in the morning doing it right back at me like it’s the most normal thing in the world.
What is this?
Is he fucking with me?
“Stop,” I say.
It comes out smaller than I want, but he stops right away, and sets the paper clip flat on the top of the boards between us, careful, not pushing it at me, just leaving it there.
“Yours if you want it,” he says. “No big deal either way.”
He doesn’t watch me look at it. That’s the part that gets me. He turns his eyes back out to the ice on purpose, so I can decide without somebody staring at me while I do.
“Why would you keep a paper clip?” I say.
“Why’d you bend it in the first place?”
I don’t have an answer for that one.
I don’t take it. I can’t take it. Taking it would mean admitting I know exactly which paper clip it is, and that he knows, and that the two of us are now people who share a paper clip thing between us.
“I have to go,” I say.
“Walk-through?”
“Walk-through.”
He pushes off the boards and skates backward toward center ice, easy, grinning at me the whole way like he’s got all the time in the world.
“See you Tuesday, Dixon,” he calls. “Bring a pen. I’ll be the one being very compliant.”
“Just be the one being on time.”
“I’m always on time. It’s the rest of it I’m bad at.” He spins a lazy circle. “I’ll bring the coffee. Sugar. A lot of sugar. I got it.”
“That’s not information you need to remember.”
“Too late. Already got it.” He taps the side of his head. “I notice everything, remember.”
I make myself walk out at a normal pace. Not fast. Normal. I get all the way to the parking lot before I realize I left the paper clip sitting on the boards, and that I am, for some insane reason, a little bit sad about it.
I drive home with the air off and the window cracked, trying to cool down whatever is going on in my chest.
It doesn’t work.
A boy noticed me. Picked up my junk off a table and kept it. Quit doing a thing the second I ask, no questions, and no judgey face about it.
