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I go get the tape measure out of her box marked DESK. I hold the end of it against the wall where she points, and she reads the number off and writes it on her hand in pen because her notebooks are still in a box.

“This is yours,” I say, while she’s writing. “The whole room. I don’t come in without knocking.”

She snorts. “You never knock.”

“I knocked once.”

She stops writing. She looks up at me. And I watch it hit her, what night I mean, the hallway and the shut door and her face fixed for me on the other side of it, and her eyes go wet all at once.

“Don’t,” I say. “Don’t, or I’m going to, and we’ve got the whole truck still downstairs.”

“It’s a car.”

“We’ve got the whole car still downstairs.”

She laughs and wipes her eyes with the back of the hand with the numbers on it, and smears them, and swears, and I kiss her in the middle of her empty room with the tape measure still hanging out of my hand.

We eat pizza on the floor of the living room out of the box because the plates are packed somewhere and neither of us can find them. My expensive couch comes Thursday. We sit against the wall with our legs out and her feet on top of mine. She tells me where everything’s going to go, and I let her because I don’t care where anything goes.

We sleep on the mattress on the floor of the bedroom with the window open because the air conditioning makes a noise like it’s dying. There aren’t any curtains. The streetlight outside comes straight in and lies across the blanket. Somewhere downstairs, the dry cleaner’s machines are still going, a low hum through the floor and a bus goes by.

She’s almost asleep. I can tell from her breathing. She’s curled into my side with her face on my chest, and her hand flat over my heart.

My phone lights up on the carpet next to the mattress.

I reach for it, quiet. It’s an email. SENTINELS ROOKIE CAMP — REPORTING INFORMATION. I open it with one thumb. September eleventh. A hotel. A schedule. Ten days, and then main camp, and then they decide where I play.

I lie there and look at it for a long time.

I’m scared I’m not good enough yet. I’m scared of the kid from Finland and every other kid like him who’s going to be in that room, faster than me, hungrier than me. I’m scared the way I’ve never let myself be scared in my life, because I always had somebody standing over it, deciding for me, and there was nothing to be scared of except letting them down. Now it’s just me. My name on the line. My first three steps. And I want it so bad my hands hurt.

“What is it?” she mumbles against my chest.

“Rookie camp. The eleventh.”

She’s quiet. I feel her go still. Not much. Just a little. Just enough that I know.

“How long?” she says.

“Ten days. Then main camp. Then they tell me where.”

I wait. I hold my breath and wait because now I know what a packed bag does to her. I know what a door does. I know what my walking down a flight of stairs did to her, and I’ll know it for the rest of my life.

“Okay,” she says.

“I’ll call you every night.”

“I know.”

It’s the same as the sixth of July when I said it was only a week and she said I know and didn’t believe a single fucking thing I’d said. It’s the same word. It doesn’t sound anything like it.

“Just—” she says, and stops. Her fingers move a little against my chest. “Don’t leave your bag by the door. The night before. Keep it in the closet till you go.”

I close my eyes.

She’s never asked me for anything. Not once. Not a ride, not money, not a single thing she couldn’t figure out how to get herself. And she’s lying here in the dark asking me to keep a duffel bag in a closet, and she’s telling me why without telling me why, and it’s the most she’s ever trusted me with.

“Okay,” I say. “Closet.”