Page 40

The back room is small. A desk, a window that looks out on the alley, more boxes, a kettle, a chair with a sweater thrown over it that I’d guess is hers. There’s a wall of small wooden drawers, the old kind, each one labeled in handwriting. A bulletin board with a schedule on it. The light is dim and gold, late-afternoon, coming sideways through the alley window.

“You can put them down anywhere,” she says. “Margaret will reorganize wherever you put them within the hour regardless.”

I set the boxes down. Go back for the third. When I come back she’s crouched over the first box with a box cutter, slicing the tape in one clean motion.

“You didn’t have to do that.” She doesn’t look up.

“The boxes?”

“The boxes. The intervention last night. The —” she gestures vaguely with the box cutter “— the general showing-up.” She pulls the flaps open. “You keep doing things you don’t have to do.”

“I like doing things.”

“That’s a non-answer.”

“It’s a true answer.” I lean against the desk. “I’m bad at sitting still. Ask anyone.”

She glances up at me. Then back at the box. “You came here to see your grandmother.”

“I did.”

“And the rest of it is incidental?”

“The chai wasn’t incidental.”

She goes quiet for a second, focused on the box, and I watch her unpack it — books stacked and sorted into piles by some system I can’t see but that she clearly can, her hands moving fast and certain. She’s good at this. The same way I’m good on the ice — not thinking about it, just doing it, the body knowing the work.

I look at my own hands instead.

“Can I ask you something?” she says.

“Sure.”

“The plan.” She sets a book on a pile. “The — being seen together thing. If I said yes.” She looks up. “Hypothetically.”

“Okay?”

“How does it actually work? Logistically. Because I’ve thought about it for —” she checks an invisible watch “— forty minutes, and the more I think about it the more questions I have, and most of them are not romantic.”

“None of it’s romantic.” I keep my voice even. “That’s the point.”

“Right. So. Logistics.”

I push off the desk and crouch down on the other side of the box, because it feels strange to be standing over her while she works, and start handing her books from the stack so she can sort them. She lets me. She doesn’t tell me how to do it, just takes what I hand her and slots it where it goes, and we fall into a rhythm without discussing it.

“Logistics,” I say. “We’d have to be seen. Together. In the places people see things. Games, parties, around campus. Enough that it’s not a rumor, it’s just — a fact people have absorbed. You don’t announce a thing like this. You let people figure it out and feel smart about it.”

“You’ve thought about this.”

“I think about systems. It’s a hockey thing.”

“It’s a manipulation-of-public-perception thing.”

“Same thing, in a smaller rink.”

The corner of her mouth moves. Not a smile. The neighborhood of one. “Go on.”

“We’d need a story for how it started. People are going to ask. It has to be simple, and it has to be mostly true, because the mostly-true ones are the ones you don’t trip on.” I hand her another book. “We met at my grandmother’s shop. That’s true. We met at the party. Also true. I stepped in with your ex — half the party saw that, so we can’t pretend it didn’t happen, which means we use it. Captain steps in for a girl, turns out he already knew her, turns out there was already something there.” I shrug. “It writes itself. People love that one.”