7. Chapter Seven #3
The second I step through her door, the place hits me square in the stomach.
She isn’t just well-off. She’s rich in a way I’ve only ever seen through windows.
I know what Goodwill furniture looks like, what a room looks like when everything in it came from somebody else’s house first, and this is the opposite of all of that.
She goes straight to the fridge and pours me water without asking, and I take it, and I watch to make sure she drinks some of her own.
“So,” she says. “Where are you from?”
I don’t know how to answer that one honestly, so I give her the state where my father handed me over to the state; where Josh and Mary are. “Maine.”
“Maine.” She lights up a little. “I’ve always wanted to go. It’s beautiful up there, isn’t it?”
I shrug.
“I’m from Chicago.”
I nod.
She sips her water. “So why Camden?”
I look at her, wondering how drunk she really is. I don’t do small talk, or any kind of talk for that matter. My nerves are high. I rub my hands together, wishing I hadn’t come up.
“Hockey.” I reach for the glass of water so that I stop rubbing my hands like a fucking weirdo. “You?”
“I don’t know.” She smiles softly. “Close enough. Far enough. Good school. Though maybe I should’ve gone to Maine.” She points across the room, toward a long table set up under the window. “I looked hard at Portland. I’m an architecture major.”
I turn and look where she’s pointing. “What’s that over there?”
“My drawing table.”
When I look at it, I picture her sitting there day after day while the light comes through that window and changes on her, drawing whatever it is she draws.
“What are you working on?” I ask.
“Drafts, for finals. Then the internship at Whitmore.” She says the name flat, like she doesn’t like it.
“What are you drawing for you?”
She looks at me for a second and quietly sighs. “Do you want to see?”
I nod.
She still has my jacket around her shoulders as she crosses to the table, and I follow, leaving the water on the counter. The desk is covered in paper — lines, tiny numbers, whole pages of them — and I don’t understand any of it, but it stops me cold when I see how talented she is.
“These are incredible,” I say, and I mean it before I’ve thought about whether to say it.
“Thank you.” She flips through a book and lands somewhere in the middle and turns it to face me.
“You drew this?” It comes out dumb, but the drawing looks like a real place. An old building with a shop tucked into the bottom of it, the shop lines drawn darker on purpose so your eye goes straight there.
“A corner coffee shop. Books, hopefully. Locally owned. Something that could fit right into Portland, Maine.” She turns the page. “I laid it all out, did the dimensions, and — yeah.”
I stare at the lines. I can’t get my head around it, that a whole place could come out of her and land on paper looking like something you could walk into.
“May I?” I ask.
She nods and sits on the stool while I stand there and turn the pages myself. Sketches and numbers and ideas, page after page. I stop on one. A house with a wide yard drawn out around it.
“One day,” she says, “I want to help build a whole new neighborhood.”
Something pulls tight and low in my chest, so tight it’s hard to breathe around.
A girl drawing houses with yards, dreaming of creating homes for people.
And she says it easy, like of course, the future is a thing you plan for.
I’ve never once thought about the future as somewhere I get to put anything.
I don’t have a single word for what’s happening in my chest, so I close the book, carefully, and set it back exactly where it was in the corner.
“Everything okay?” she asks.
“Yeah.” I don’t look at her. I look at the loose pages instead.
She looks down and says, “Maybe one day you can show me around Portland.”
A huff comes out of me before I can stop it.
“Are you going home for winter break?”
“No.” I shake my head. “I’m staying here.”
“Me too.” She says it to her papers.
I look at her now. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” She turns a pencil over in her fingers. “Maybe we could hang out. When I’m not working.” She nods. “You don’t seem like the kind of guy who gossips.”
I hold still and watch the side of her face and try to work out how much of this is her and how much is the drink.
Her eyes come up to mine. “I could use that. Not — not that I’d use you. But I could use a friend.”
A friend. I watch her watch me.
“Yeah,” I say, quiet. “I could use a friend too.”
“Percy.”
When I look at her, I can tell she’s teasing the name, rolling it around for the fun of it, and I like the way it sounds coming off her more than I should.
“Is it short for anything?”
“No. Family name.”
“A family guy,” she says.
“No.” I shake my head.
“Okay.” She lets it go easy. “Everybody’s got a complicated family situation.”
I look at the floor. “I should go. The guys’ll be wondering.”
She nods. “Can you not mention this to anyone?”
I look down and nod. “Yeah. I promise.”
With that, I walk to the counter, finish the water, wash the glass at the sink, and set it in the rack. She comes over and slides my jacket off her shoulders and holds it out.
“Thanks for making my night better,” she says.
I take it and pull it on. It’s still warm from her, and then I head for the door.
“Percy?” she calls out.
I turn.
“I’ll see you around?”
I nod once, and then I’m out.