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After dinner, we go up the stairs side by side. At the top, by the two open doors, I stop.

“You want to hang out?”

“Yeah.”

She goes into my room and sits on her end of the couch. I sit on mine. I put on a game, some team from the West, because it’s on and I don’t have to think about what to put on. She pulls her feet up under her. And I can’t watch it. I can’t watch anything.

Don’t ask.

A penalty. A power play. A shot off the post.

Don’t ask her.

She picks at a thread on the blanket. She yawns. She says something about the goalie, who she thinks looks sad, and I say something back, and I don’t know what I said.

Commercial.

Don’t fucking ask.

“Are you gonna go out with Palinski?” I hear myself say.

She looks over at me. “No.”

And there it is again. That thing in my chest, letting go.

Relief.

That word is starting to sound pretty fucking thin.

“Why not?” I say.

She shrugs. “I don’t want to.”

“He’s a nice guy.”

She turns her head all the way and looks at me.

“Then you hang out with him,” she says.

I look at the TV.

She keeps looking at me. I can feel it on the side of my face. I can feel her deciding something.

“Are you gonna hang out with Emma?”

I wasn’t expecting that. “No.”

“You two were cute sophomore year.”

“It was a long time ago.”

She waits, like there’s more. There isn’t. There’s nothing. Emma Cole was a girl with green eyes who sat on my lap in the cafeteria for four months and then told everybody I was emotionally unavailable, and she was right, and I didn’t care then either.

Tessa looks at me for a second longer. Then she looks back at the TV. Something at the corner of her mouth.

I should leave it there. I don’t.

“Have you ever been on a date?”