Page 108

Apparently she just didn’t talk to me.

The movie ends. Another one starts on its own, something with a dog in it, and neither of us reaches for the remote.

The water bottle is empty on the coffee table. Downstairs, the party noise has thinned out to nothing. A car door, out on the drive. Then another. Then the house goes quiet.

The clock on my nightstand says eleven-thirty.

The next time I look, it says one.

We talk about stupid things. The dining hall by the library and the pasta there. The walls in Corvin, and how thin they are, and how Kennebeck’s girlfriend’s laugh rings through my head. Kennebeck, who folds his socks into pairs like he’s defusing them. Barnes, who ate an entire bag of gummy worms on the bus to Massachusetts and then choked on the last one.

She tells me about Payton and Elsie. Not much. Just that they’re loud and that Elsie said she’d key my car.

“She doesn’t know which car is mine.”

“She said she’d key all of them.”

“In the whole lot?”

“She’s thorough.”

She argues with me about cranberry sauce, the canned kind with the ridges. She says it’s the best part of Thanksgiving. I say it’s jelly shaped like a can. She says that’s the point. I give up.

I tell her the musical in the car was the worst two hours of my life.

“It was ninety minutes.”

“It felt like a lifetime.”

“You didn’t turn it off.”

I don’t have anything for that. She looks pleased with herself.

At some point, I almost say it. Little Tessa. It’s right there, the old way.

I don’t.

The clock says one-forty.

“Why Woodbury?” I say.

She doesn’t answer right away.

“The scholarship,” she says. “They gave me the most.”

I wait to see if there’s more. She doesn’t give me any. She looks at the TV, where the dog is digging under a fence.

I don’t push.

“You really thought I followed you there?” she says.

I put my head back against the couch. “Yes.”

And she laughs. Not mean. Just at how stupid it is.

“I was an idiot,” I say.

“You were such an idiot.”