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It’s sitting differently because for the first time in my life there’s a second variable. The draft is the only door I’ve always said, the only thing that matters this year, the only acceptable answer when someone asks what I want — and that’s still true. But underneath it now there’s something else, something I don’t have a name for, and naming it means deciding what it is, and deciding what it is means it becomes real, and I’m not ready to have it be real in a year where I can’t afford distractions.

So I close the laptop. The tally and the game-dev build and the project folder that’s become something else entirely, all of it. I close the laptop and I sit in the quiet of my room and I hold all of it at once.

She texts at eleven. Not the ask — I’ve been reading the shape of her long enough to know she’s been building toward something, the same way she builds toward everything she doesn’t want to want. But not tonight. Tonight it’s small.

Margo

Adler assigned reading for Thursday. It’s about whether a story can be morally neutral. Your half of the argument, not mine.

I read it twice. Then:

how convenient for you

Margo

Very. I’m going to defend the concept of moral neutrality extremely loudly and you’re going to have to argue against it and we both know you’d rather die.

I don’t argue against things I believe in

Margo

Exactly my point :)

I put the phone down. Pick it up. And I know — I’ve known since the hotel corridor in Burlington, since come here and the room closing around us and the whole weight of that night — that when she asks about Charleston I’m going to say yes. She hasn’t asked yet. She’s building toward it in the Margo way, the organized-terrified way, running the angles before she commits. I know this because I’ve been watching her since October and she always does it this way: she plans the thing, she runs the plan, and the last step is asking out loud, and right now she’s not at the last step yet.

But I know what I’m going to say. Not because it’s smart. Not because it fits any term on any list. Because she said we’re okay in the dark without flinching. Because Beau said she’s good for you and he’s right. Because there’s something in Charleston that made her go real-quiet in a way she can’t manage, and I am not sending her into that alone.

Margo

you’d rather die

probably

Three dots. Then:

Margo

get some sleep, Mercer.

I almost correct her. The name thing — we’re not doing that anymore, she said so herself. But I let it go, because she does it when she’s tired or fond, and I’ve learned the difference, and right now I think it’s both.

I put the phone on my nightstand. The agent card sits next to it — Dan Reiss, Boston, a door I haven’t opened yet. The tally’s closed on the laptop. The coin’s still in the air.

I almost believe I can keep all of it separate. The scout and the draft and the money and the girl and the degree and the father texting from a rink I’ve never been to with two kids I’ve never met.

Almost.

I turn the light off and I lie in the dark and I think about a girl in a passenger seat somewhere on the I-91, taking pictures of Vermont highways and sending them to a team bus.

Sleep takes a while.

I don’t mind.

Chapter 11

Margo

Sunday night I repin the corkboard.