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But she isn’t here. She can’t answer. She’s sitting in my passenger seat looking at nothing with a ring of teeth marks on her finger, and somebody has to decide where she sleeps tonight, and right now, I make the choice for her.

I hate that I do it, but I do it.

“I’m taking you to my house,” I say. “There’s a gate. Nobody’s getting in.”

Nothing.

“And if you want to go somewhere else once we’re there,” I say, “Anywhere, I’ll take you. I promise. Okay?”

She doesn’t answer. I don’t know if she heard me.

I drive.

And I think about what I’m driving her into.

My father, at the head of the table, with his napkin still in his hand, where I left him. My mother, half out of her chair. Graham Ashby and his wife and their daughter in her correct black dress. The chandelier. The china with the gold rims nobody’s allowed to put in the dishwasher. The whole careful, polished, beautiful house where nothing is ever out of place, where nothing ever bleeds.

And I’m about to walk into it with blood on my teeth and my shirt torn at the collar and my knuckles split open, with a girl from the east side of town who has a handprint on her face and her neck going purple, who smells like weed and that house.

My father is going to look at her. He’s going to look at her the way he looked at her through a rainy windshield when we were fourteen. Dime-store diamond. He’s going to look at me like I brought something in on my shoes.

I don’t care.

I realize it on the hill up from the golf course, with the big houses starting to go by. I don’t fucking care. Not about the Ashbys. Not about the china. Not about my father’s face. For the first time in my whole life, it isn’t even close. Whatever he thinks, whatever he says, whatever it costs me later, she’s getting out of this car and into my room with a lock on the door, and nobody in that house is going to tell me she can’t.

The gates come up in the headlights.

Black iron, twice as tall as the car. Lit from underneath. The little camera on the post turns to look at us. I punch the code in with my bloody thumb, and they start to open slowly the way they always open, one inch at a time.

I look at her.

She doesn’t look at the gates. She doesn’t look at anything.

“Tess,” I say.

She turns her head slowly like it’s heavy. When she looks at me, her eyes are there, finally, sort of. Somewhere at the back.

“You’re safe,” I tell her.

She doesn’t say anything. She just looks at me for a second longer, and then she turns her face back to the windshield.

And I can’t breathe.

15

These Pants Cost More Than My Laptop

Tessa

The gates close behind us.

I hear it more than see it. A low electric hum and then a heavy iron clank, the sound of something very large settling into place, and it goes through me like somebody shut a door in a hallway. I turn my head. In the side mirror, two black gates lit from underneath are closing, the gap between them getting narrower and narrower until it’s gone.

The first thing I feel is my throat. A hot, raw ache all the way down when I swallow. Then my finger, pulsing in time with my heart. And my ribs on the right side, where the counter caught me.

Then I see the house.

I knew Rafe was rich. I knew it in high school. I knew it when I saw his car. Rich enough that nobody in his family uses the word. I said that to Kylie on the sidewalk, and I thought I knew what I meant. I had no fucking clue it was like this.