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“This is Tessa,” he says. “My little college girl.”

The girl on the couch looks at me. She doesn’t smile. She looks at my coat and then my bag and then my face, and her eyes do something I don’t like, something quick and pricing, like she’s working out what’s in my pockets.

Dylan’s eyes go to my sweater. The cream, seven-dollar one. I’m wearing it under my open coat, and it suddenly feels like the most expensive thing I’ve ever owned.

“That your rich boyfriend’s?” he says.

“I don’t have a boyfriend.”

“Sure,” he says, and the one in the recliner laughs.

I go to the kitchen and put my grocery bag on the counter. I open the fridge to put the cranberry sauce away, and I stop.

There’s almost nothing in it. A carton of milk. Half a stick of butter on a saucer. A jar of mustard. Some takeout container. A bag of carrots going wet and brown. That’s it.

I close it. I open the cabinet next to the stove where grandma keeps the cans. Two cans of soup. A box of saltines. A jar of peanut butter scraped almost to the bottom. I open the next one. Coffee, the cheap kind, almost empty. Sugar. A box of tea bags.

I stand there with the cabinet open.

Stop trying to be forty. Keep your money. I’m fine, honey. It’s handled.

She isn’t fine. Two cans of soup and a scraped-out jar of peanut butter, telling me to spend my money on myself.

And all of a sudden, the number I’ve been so proud of, the two hundred and sixty-eight dollars, feels like nothing. Like a handful of change. I stood in a grocery store in Woodbury and spent twenty-three dollars on Thanksgiving for one person and called it a whole holiday, and here, right now, in this kitchen, it wouldn’t fill one shelf.

I put the stuffing in the cabinet. The cranberry sauce. The marshmallows. I put the sweet potato on the counter next to the bread box, where my grandma always keeps her potatoes, and I stand there and look at it.

“Damn,” somebody says behind me. The one from the recliner, leaning in the kitchen doorway. “She’s cooking already. Look at that.”

I don’t turn around. I fold the grocery bag into a square and put it in the drawer with the other grocery bags, where it goes.

Then I get my duffel and go down the hall.

My room is at the end, on the left. It was mine since the night my mother dropped me off on this porch with two trash bags of clothes and drove away. The door sticks a little at the bottom. You have to push it with your hip.

I push it with my hip.

And it isn’t my room.

The sewing machine is back. My grandma’s old Singer, on a folding table under the window where my desk used to be. There are clear plastic bins stacked against the wall, full of fabric folded into squares, every color. A cutting mat. A dress form in the corner with half a quilt pinned over its shoulders. A basket of thread. A pincushion shaped like a tomato.

My bed is gone. The little daybed with the white metal frame. Gone. My dresser’s still here, against the far wall, but there’s a stack of patterns on top of it, and when I pull the top drawer open, it’s full of zippers.

I stand in the doorway with my duffel in my hand.

And I feel my chest cave. I don’t know what I expected to walk into. Now that I know I was expecting my old room, I realize how ridiculous that expectation was. Dylan has the other bedroom, and my grandma deserves space for herself, but seeing it like this––like it was before I lived here, like I wasn’t here at all––cuts into my soul like nothing else ever could.

This was always my home. At least I always thought so. And now it looks like the entire four years of my life, which feels like half of my life, is gone.

I’ve always been tossed to the side, never put first, and I think I’ve been lying to myself about it because I know that if I walk a few feet down, Dylan’s room will be exactly the same. When he hadn’t come home for months after dropping out of high school, she didn’t touch his room.

I feel like crying, but I know tears won’t come. I stopped crying three years ago, but this doesn’t hurt any less.

It was never mine. It was just where I was put.

I don’t live here anymore.

I go back down the hall.