Page 178 of Across His Line

I can’t do that. Not with her. She’d hate it, and she’d be right to, and I’d be the guy from the stairwell again.

I can’t solve her.

I get up and go across the hall to the guest room into the open door, and her notebook is on the end of the bed, the black one, where she left it. I pick it up and bring it back. And I sit down in the middle of the couch right next to her, and I’m close enough that my knee is against hers through the blanket. I don’t think about it. I open the notebook past NO CEILING to a clean page. I take the pen out of the spiral and hold it out to her.

“Let’s figure out what you need to do,” I say.

She looks at the pen, then at me. And her face lights up.

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“You want to help me?”

She asks it like that’s the part I need convincing about.

It isn’t.

The part I don’t understand is why I want to so fucking badly.

27

Ask What They Keep

Tessa

He doesn’t answer the question. He takes the pen back out of my hand, uncaps it with his teeth, and writes WOODBURY across the top of the clean page in square capital letters that lean slightly to the right.

Then he looks at me with the cap still in his mouth.

“What does it actually cost?”

I’ve been carrying the numbers around since March of senior year when the envelope came and I sat on the floor of my grandma’s kitchen and read the financial aid page six times before I read the letter. I could recite them in my sleep. Some nights I think I have.

So I tell him. Tuition first because it’s the biggest, and it’s the one that made my grandma put her hand over her mouth. Then housing, which is Corvin Hall. The meal plan, the smallest one they let first-years pick, which I picked, and I still run out of swipes on by the second week of every month. Student fees. Books.

Rafe writes it all down in a column. He doesn’t round anything. When I say a number, he writes the number.

“And the scholarship covered—”

“Most of it. All of tuition, almost. Most of housing.” I pull my knees up under the blanket. “The rest was me. The summer job, and the money I saved. And a small grant I won for a poetry contest.”

“How much was you?”

I tell him. It’s not a big number compared to the others, but I watch him write it, and it looks bigger in his handwriting than it does in my head.

“And next year,” he says, “if the continuing money comes in at what they usually give.”

I tell him that, too. I looked it up on the business school’s website in October, and then I found an old forum post from three years ago where a girl complained about it, and then I emailed the financial aid office with a question I pretended was about somebody else, and they answered.

He writes it under the first column.

“And worst case,” he says. “If none of the outside ones come through.”

I tell him.

He does the subtraction on the page right there in that leaning handwriting and draws a line under it, and then a second line under the first one and turns the notebook a little so I can see.