Page 80 of Across His Line

His friends laugh and watch me.

I had a few months of remembering exactly what it’s like not to be in a room like this, but I force myself to be comfortable.

“He studying business too?” Dylan mocks.

“No.”

Dylan looks at me. “Sure.”

The friend in the recliner says something under his breath that makes Dylan snort.

And I go quiet.

I look down at my wrist. This too shall pass. I rub my thumb over it, willing myself to be okay. I’m okay in this room. I’ve spent years in here, scrutinized and torn apart by Dylan and his friends. This feels like one last hurray.

They leave at one in the morning. All of them, finally, the girl last, looking at my backpack on the floor by the couch on her way out the door in a way I don’t like at all. Dylan goes to bed, complaining about his back the entire way down the hall. My grandma kisses my forehead and tells me she’s so glad I’m home and goes to bed.

I make up the couch myself. Sheets that smell like dust and something gross. The orange blanket, still warm from Dylan. I turn off the TV. I lie down with my backpack on the floor next to me and the strap wrapped around my wrist.

The living room smells like weed and old smoke. The streetlight comes through the front curtains and lays a stripe across the ceiling. The furnace kicks on, rattles, goes quiet.

I can’t sleep.

I take out my phone and look up bus tickets back to Woodbury. I know it’s stupid. I just got here. Rafe offered me a ride to save ninety-four dollars, and here I am at one-thirty in the morning on my grandma’s couch pricing out the ride back. Friday is sold out. Saturday morning, there’s one seat left, for sixty-one dollars, one way.

I look at it for a long time. My thumb hovers. I don’t press it. I don’t close it, either.

And then, without deciding to, I open FindMy. He’s across town on the north side, past the golf course, where the houses stop being houses and start being mansions with gates. His little blue dot, sitting on top of a gray shape on the map that’s so big it looks like a school. He isn’t moving. It’s one-thirty. He’s probably asleep in some room with a ceiling twice as tall as this one.

He’s fifteen minutes away from me. A thin line of streets between his dot and mine, across the bridge and past the pharmacy and up the hill.

He’s close, and if I needed something, if something happened, if I had to get out of this house in the middle of the night, he’s fifteen minutes away. He said so himself.

That brings me comfort in a way that is uncomfortable. I don’t know when I started to see Rafe as something more than a bully. I don’t know exactly when the switch flipped, but I’m staring at his dot, knowing that it has, and I’m grateful for it.

It’s a dangerous thing not having anyone.

I pull the orange blanket over my head like I’m nine, and I don’t sleep for a long time.

My grandma is in the kitchen at seven on Thanksgiving morning with the radio on low, and for ten minutes, I get exactly what I came home for. I hear her before I’m fully awake. The cabinet that squeaks. The coffee maker gurgling. The clock over the stove ticking four minutes ahead of everything. I come in with the orange blanket still around my shoulders, and she’s at the counter in her robe, slippers, and glasses pushed up on her head, peeling my sweet potato.

“Come here. You’re doing the marshmallows. You always did the marshmallows.”

So I do the marshmallows.

I stand next to her at the counter with my hip against hers and lay them out on top of the sweet potatoes one at a time, in rows, the way she taught me when I was fourteen, the way she said made them brown even. The radio plays something old with a lot of saxophone in it. She hums along wrong. The coffee is the cheap kind and too strong and the best thing I’ve tasted in three months. She makes my stuffing out of the red box on the stove and tells me it’s an abomination and eats it out of the pot with a spoon when she thinks I’m not looking.

And I think, this. This is what I’m here for. This is why I have the sticky note for Christmas.

It lasts ten minutes when I hear the cot squeak at the end of the hall, and Dylan’s voice, thick with sleep, calling, “Grandma, is there coffee?”

She puts down her spoon and goes.

His friends come back around noon. Both of them and the girl in the gray sedan, carrying a case of beer and a bag of chips like that’s their contribution. They take the couch. They take the recliner. They put a football game on so loud the windows hum, and by one o’clock, the kitchen has turned into a place they come to get things.

And they talk. All day.

“Look at this,” the one from the recliner says, leaning in the doorway with a beer while I’m basting the turkey breast. “I like a girl who can cook.”