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I go to the front door and hold it open. She comes through it sideways, with her arms full and her chin on top of the pile, and the cold comes in around her.

“Bye,” she says, from the steps.

I watch her go down the walk. Thirty-one packages and a broken tape gun and a ponytail coming loose, walking a mile in December to a post office on Main Street, because that’s where the post office is.

Then I go upstairs.

And I can’t stop thinking about how I was so sure I hated her for so long, but that’s gone now. I don’t know what she is now. It’s a whole problem. It isn’t that I like her. I don’t know if I like her. It’s that every single thing I was sure about got taken out of my hands, and nothing came to replace it, and every time I see her, there’s a little more of her I didn’t know about, and I don’t know what to think of it. I’m not used to not knowing where to put things.

December gets cold. Not October cold, where you’re annoyed about it. December cold, where the windows in Corvin frost on the inside overnight and the heat in our room bangs at three in the morning and we finally, finally shut the window.

We play two more. A road game on a Friday in New Hampshire that we lose three to two in overtime, and a Saturday at home that we win. Greeley doesn’t dress for the Saturday. Nobody asks why. Barnes takes a puck off the shin in warmups and plays anyway and limps for three days and won’t admit it.

Finals are coming. Everybody in Corvin turns into a ghost. The lounge fills up with people at all hours, sitting on the couch nobody sits on, eating dry cereal out of the box. I write a paper for econ at two in the morning and read the accounting book for fun.

I let my phone sit next to my books and watch the little dot. Library. Library. Library. Corvin. The post office on Main, every afternoon, ten minutes. Library.

I see her four times in nine days. Twice in the hallway. Once at the dining hall by the library, across the room, eating with Kylie, laughing at something with her hand over her mouth. Once in the lounge at eleven at night with her laptop and three highlighters and a face like she wanted to set the textbook on fire.

“Hey,” she says, the time in the lounge. She looks up at me with a soft expression. It’s one I don’t know what to do with.

“Hey.”

I get my water. I go.

I don’t know if I’m relieved or what.

Late on the eleventh, I’m on my bed with my laptop open, filling out the form for spring parking, because my father’s assistant forgot to do it and I’m not going to remind him.

The form wants a date. It fills one in for me, at the top, in gray.

12/11.

I look at it.

Eleven twenty-one. Twelve twelve.

Tomorrow is her birthday.

I sit there with the cursor blinking in the box.

I could say happy birthday. People say that. It’s two words. She said it to me in the hallway. But she knew mine for four years. I know hers because she told me, three weeks ago, outside my own door. And if I say it, she’ll know I remembered. She’ll know I’ve been carrying it around.

And if I don’t say it, she’ll know that, too.

I look down the hall in my head. Three doors. The light under hers, probably, on low.

I close the laptop.

Fuck.

19

Your Tape Thing Sucks

Tessa

I wake up on my birthday to Kylie standing over my bed holding a plastic clamshell of grocery-store cupcakes with one candle stuck in the middle one, unlit.