He looked at her and thought about the boy who had been standing at a locker in a hallway in 2006 bracing against the usual noise, and the girl who had walked through it like it had no jurisdiction over her and taken his hands in front of everyone.
She had not made him popular. She had not rescued him in any dramatic, cinematic sense. What she had done was more specific and more permanent than that.
She had treated him like a person when the hallway had decided he wasn’t.
She had danced with him in the middle of the floor.
She had said the thing that had lived in him for twenty years: You looked like someone who needed to be chosen out loud.
He
intended to spend the rest of his life making sure she knew that sentence had never left him. He also intended to be the kind of person who chose her out loud, in front of everyone, consistently, without waiting for a slow song or a porch light or a rainy night on a delivery run to do it.
