The List on the Gym Door

The fluorescent light above the door

flickers once. I count it.

She moves her finger down the page—

slowly, the way you move it

when you already know

what the page is doing.

She stops.

Not at her name.

Below where her name would be.

Her shoulders don't drop.

That's the part I keep coming back to—

how still she went,

her finger lifted off the laminate,

not pulling back,

just lifted,

and then she turned.

Her face was doing something

I wasn't supposed to see.

I know, she said.

It's fine.

And we walked back to the car

in the specific quiet

of a building going on around us—

the radiator at the end of the hall,

a locker shutting somewhere

in a room we couldn't see,

the school already

past it.