Page 184

“Write in them,” she says. “I did. It’s fine.”

She looks at Rafe still leaning in the doorway, and then at me, and something passes over her face that I can’t read.

“Good night, you two,” she says. “Turn off the lamps when you go.”

And she leaves.

Rafe finally walks over. He sits next to me while I stare at the covers. Tony Robbins smiling face looking right at me.

I open the pricing one to chapter four.

For a while, I just read.

The pricing book is better than I expected and worse than I hoped. Chapter four is about how people decide something is expensive, which turns out to have almost nothing to do with the number and almost everything to do with how they feel. I underline that. Mrs. Waleska underlined it, too, in blue pen, a long time ago, and wrote yes next to it in the margin, small and slanted, and I underline it again in black under hers.

Rafe has the one about standing out. He reads the first chapter with his elbow on the arm of the chair and his head propped on his fist, frowning at it. Then he flips big chunks of pages at once.

“You’re skipping,” I say, without looking up.

“It was thirty pages saying the same thing.”

“What thing?”

“That if you try to sell to everybody, nobody cares.”

“That’s what it’s about.”

“Then he could’ve said it in one page and saved a tree.”

I laugh into chapter four, and he turns another chunk of pages, and keeps reading.

At some point I need his book, because chapter six of the pricing one keeps referring to something I don’t understand, and I go over and sit on the floor next to the armchair with my back against the side of it, so I can reach over and point at the page in his lap. At some point after that, he gets tired of the chair, or tired of leaning over, and slides down out of it onto the floor next to me, and stretches his legs out across the rug, and we put the book open between us, on his knee and mine.

I show him a paragraph about a store in Japan that only sells one kind of pencil. He reads it, leaning in, and his shoulder comes against mine, and stays there. He reads the whole paragraph.

“That’s insane.”

I say, “It must be some pencil.”

He doesn’t move his shoulder, and I don’t move mine.

We read like that for a long time. My notebook fills up. His handwriting ends up in it, too, because I hand him the pen and tell him to write something down because my hand hurts. What problem? Who needs it? Why would they pay? Margin. Recurring? And then one he writes without me asking, under my Revenue ≠ Profit box, with the question mark gone over twice: Can it work without you every hour?

Around midnight, I stop writing.

The pen is still in my hand. I’m looking at the page, at all of it, at his handwriting next to mine and Mrs. Waleska’s HELP ONE > HELP MANY in her neat, slanted letters, and the blue yes bleeding through from the book underneath.

“Why are you doing this?” I ask quietly.

He looks up. “Doing what?”

I wave the pen at all of it. The books. The notebook. The two of us on the floor of his mom’s reading room at midnight three days before Christmas with a plate of cookie crumbs.

“Because I want to,” he says and goes back to the page.

I know a lot about why people do things for me. Most of it is because they have to, they feel guilty, or I’ve become their problem. And even better, because they want something out of it, or it’ll make them look good. I know how to read all of those, and I know how to pay every one of them back.

Because I want to doesn’t make any sense, especially coming from him.