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“Is it...” She drags her attention back up to my face like her eyes don’t want to obey.

I don’t want them to either. I want her to keep looking at me like that. I want her to keep looking at me for so long one of us has to do something about it.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

Part of my brain is blaring a warning siren, but it’s not loud enough for my body to listen.

“Is it from a poem?” she finishes.

Once again, it takes me a few seconds to get any meaning from the words.

“Oh. No. It’s a song, actually.” I find a white t-shirt in one of my bag’s pockets and knead the fabric in my hands as I keep talking. It’s easier to fight the urge to move towards her if I’m talking. “By Ben Howard. You probably know it. Keep Your Head Up? It’s like his biggest hit, which makes it kind of basic that it’s my favourite by him, but it is.”

“I don’t think I know it,” she says, a trace of embarrassment in her voice. “I’ve heard of Ben Howard, but I don’t think I actually know any of his songs.”

She chuckles, and I pause long enough to look down and realize I’ve been coiling my t-shirt into a rope.

“Sorry. I sounded kind of douchey there, didn’t I?” I laugh too, and it gets a little easier to breathe.

“We all have our douche moments. Is that your only tattoo?” she asks. “Besides the lobster, of course.”

“Never forget the lobster.” I shake my t-shirt rope out, and she leans against the row of lockers behind her. “But yeah, that’s my only other one.”

“I figured. There’s not much else of you left to see.”

I freeze.

She freezes.

Her eyes look like they’re about to bulge out of her head, and her whole neck and the skin above her t-shirt collar are now a burning red.

“Uh, wow. I just said that, didn’t I? I just meant, uh...umm...”

I let out a laugh that’s borderline frantic. “Ha. It was funny.”

I busy myself with getting my shirt on. I’m so distracted I almost try to shove my head through one of the sleeves.

“The one on your arm,” I say after getting all my limbs through the correct holes of the shirt. “It’s really nice.”

“Oh, thanks.” She strokes the ink on her left bicep. “Chickadees are my mom’s favourite, and I guess somewhere along the line, they became my favourite too. I got it just before I left home. We have a lot of chickadees where I’m from.”

“Ontario, right?”

I don’t know where I pull that information from, but it seems like a safer subject than asking about the location of any other tattoos she might have.

“Yeah.” She grins. “A little no-name small town no one has ever heard of. We’re basically a village.”

“That sounds really nice.”

I mean it. Growing up on the outskirts of Calgary didn’t have much of a community feel to it.

Then again, my own family didn’t have much of a community feel to it.

“It is.” Hope nods. “I make fun of it a lot, but only because I love it so much.”

“Do you miss it?”

“Hmm.” She drums her fingers on a locker. “Less now than I did when I first moved away. Halifax feels like home now too, in a way. I do always love going back, though. It feels weird when it’s been more than a few months. In second year, I went to Ethan’s for Christmas, and—”