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I clench the phone.

“You know what? Forget it. I know where I stand with you now.”

I laugh. “Are you serious, Mom?”

“I’m so fucking serious, Tessa.”

“You act like you’re in my life. I don’t need your bullshit. Bye!”

I end the call and walk faster to Corvin.

20

Good Eye

Rafe

I’m here because of Barnes.

Paige’s friend’s house, again, a different one this time, blue, three blocks off campus, with half the Christmas lights on the gutter burned out. Paige is somewhere in the back. Barnes needs a reason to be here that isn’t her. I’m the reason. I’ve been the reason for forty minutes, standing against the wall by the stairs with a beer I don’t want, listening to him explain why he isn’t looking at the kitchen while he looks at the kitchen. I’m not looking at Paige. I don’t care about the games they are playing.

Barnes says something about Paige’s new haircut, and I look where he’s looking, and Tessa’s right there in the kitchen doorway with a red plastic cup in her hand.

She’s laughing. I stare at her. Paige has her by the arm, and there’s a girl I don’t know holding onto the fridge like she can’t stand up, and Tessa’s doing something with her face and her hands in some voice I can’t hear it from here over the speaker. Whatever it is, it’s working. Three people are dying of laughter.

Then Kenzie grabs her by both hands and drags her into the living room, and she dances.

She’s bad at it. She’s really bad at it, all elbows and no rhythm, with her hair sticking to her neck, and she doesn’t care. She’s laughing the whole time.

So this is what she does when I’m not around.

“That’s Kylie’s roommate, right?” Barnes says.

“Yeah.”

“The one that didn’t know you.”

I look at him.

Barnes shrugs and goes back to not looking at the kitchen.

I stay where I am.

Later, Tess is back in the kitchen doorway with two guys I sort of recognize from somebody’s econ section. One of them asks her something. I can’t hear it. I don’t have to. Her hands come up, and she starts counting something off on her fingers, and her eyebrows go up in the middle, and the guy’s face goes slowly blank.

Somebody asked about eBay.

I don’t even think she’s seen me. I’m just standing here, keeping an eye on her. And then her hand goes to her back pocket.

She takes out her phone and looks at it, and I watch her face change.

It’s fast. Nobody else would see it. Nobody else has spent four years looking at that face across a cafeteria, figuring out what it was going to do. But I see it. The laugh goes out of it. Something goes in instead. Her shoulders come up a quarter inch, and she holds the phone up away from her body, like it’s hot, and she pushes through the kitchen and the living room and goes out the front door.

I don’t follow her.

I want to. I can feel it in my legs. I watch the front door swing shut behind her, and I stand there with my back against the wall and my beer going warm, and I don’t move. She got a phone call. People get phone calls. She went outside to hear it.

It isn’t my business.