Page 26 of Across His Line

I put it in the cart.

And then, at Corvin, on my bed, I don’t photograph it. I don’t weigh it. I don’t write it on the spreadsheet. I pull it on over my T-shirt, and it comes down past my hips and over my hands. It smells faintly like cedar and somebody else’s house, and I sit there with my knees pulled up inside it.

I’ve never kept anything I could sell. Not once. Anything good that ever came into my hands, I sold. This one I’m keeping. It’s seven dollars. It’s barely anything. But I sit there in it with my hands lost in the sleeves, and it feels like the first thing I’ve bought in years that was just for me.

Kylie comes in at eight with her hair wet and a face mask on, the kind that makes her look like a ghost in a horror movie and drops onto her bed with her phone.

“Okay. Bianca finally sent the Halloween pictures, and I need you to see them.”

She crosses the room and climbs onto my bed without asking, which she’s started doing, and I let her. She holds her phone between us. I look at the pictures.

Nash, in the leather jacket and the aviators, indoors, at night, under a string of orange lights, with an expression like he’s being held for ransom.

“Forty minutes,” Kylie says. “He kept them on for forty entire minutes. Somebody asked him if he was blind and he said yes.”

I laugh.

Paige, on a kitchen counter in a sparkly devil headband, pointing at the camera with a bottle of something. Kenzie and Bianca as two halves of something I can’t identify. Koda, in the background of one picture and missing from the next six, and then back, standing next to Paige, both of them very deliberately looking in opposite directions.

“And that,” Kylie says, tapping it, “is something I still know nothing about and it’s killing me, Tessa. She won’t tell me a single thing about what’s going on.”

She continues to scroll. There are forty-one pictures, and she narrates every single one of them, and somewhere around picture twenty, she leans her head on my shoulder and keeps going.

She notices the sweater halfway through. She pinches the sleeve between two fingers.

“This is new.”

“Goodwill.”

“Cute.” She rubs the wool.

She drops the phone on her chest and sighs at the ceiling.

“You should’ve come,” she says. Not pushing. Just saying it.

I think about the chain on the door. The shadow underneath it. Counting to sixty in the dark with my phone on my chest.

And then I think about Nash in his sunglasses, and Paige on the counter, and forty-one pictures I’m not in.

“Maybe next year,” I say. And I mean it.

Kylie turns her head on the pillow and looks at me like she heard it, too.

“I’m holding you to that,” she says.

She goes back to her own bed and peels off her mask.

At eleven-ten, my phone buzzes on my desk.

Elliot: Coffee tomorrow? I promise I actually need help with sunk costs and am not just using it as a line.

Elliot: Although if it was a line it would be a pretty good one.

I smile at the screen in the dark. I type.

Me: Yes. 10:30, the café in the student center.

Elliot: You’re a saint.