Page 81 of Across His Line

“Domestic,” says the other one. “Look at her. Little housewife.”

Dylan laughs. “Bet the rich dude’s love that up there, don’t they?”

They laugh. All three of them.

“Grandma’s been trying to teach her something useful since she was a kid,” Dylan says. “Took a fancy college to do it.”

“Dylan,” my grandma says from the stove. “Leave her alone.”

But she’s smiling a little when she says it, shaking her head like he’s a puppy that chewed a shoe. She doesn’t understand how it lands. She just hears a boy teasing his cousin. Nothing new.

I baste the turkey and don’t say anything.

At two, Dylan comes into the kitchen, opens the fridge, and stands in front of it with the door open, letting the cold out, the way my grandma used to yell at me for doing.

“There’s nothing to drink.”

“There’s milk, honey.”

“I don’t want milk.”

She goes and gets her purse. She digs out the twenty-dollar bill she tucked away last night and holds it out to him. He takes it and goes out the front door to the gas station. He comes back with an energy drink and a bag of beef jerky and no change.

At two-thirty, he tastes the gravy off a spoon and makes a face. She adds salt.

At three, he says, loud enough for the whole house, that he’s short on his phone bill this month, and he doesn’t know what he’s going to do, and my grandma says, “We’ll figure it out, honey. Don’t you worry.”

I stand at the sink with my hands in the dishwater and watch her.

This is the woman who sat on the phone with me a week ago and told me to keep my money, I mean it, buy shoes, buy pizza, buy concert tickets. And she’s standing in her kitchen on Thanksgiving, telling a twenty-two-year-old man she’ll figure out his phone bill, like he’s twelve.

Dylan gets rescued, again and again and again, and I get told I’m strong.

Being the one who doesn’t need anything means you don’t get anything. I learned that a long time ago in this kitchen. I just forgot it for three months.

Around three-thirty, I’m bending down to check the rolls in the oven, and Dylan walks behind me and tugs my ponytail. Hard. Just once, the way you’d ring a bell.

“What happened to your hair?” he says. “You look like a librarian.”

It’s nothing. It’s such a small thing. A tug and a stupid joke. His friends don’t even laugh. But my whole scalp goes hot, and my hand goes to the back of my head, and I’m ten years old in this same kitchen.

He used to do it all the time. Pull my hair. Flick my ear when I walked past. Take the last of the cereal and hold it over my head where I couldn’t reach. Stand in the doorway of the bathroom so I couldn’t get out until I said please, and then he’d say say it nicer, and then he’d say say it like you mean it. Tell the kids on the street I still wet the bed. Call me Tess-the-mess until it caught on at school. And when I cried, he’d laugh, and then sometimes, hours later, he’d come find me and hand me a pack of Swedish Fish without a word, and I’d take it, because he was the closest thing I had to a brother.

I’ve spent four years thinking Rafferty Waleska was the worst thing that ever happened to me in a hallway.

But he wasn’t my first.

Rafe taught me how to disappear at school. Dylan taught me how before I ever got there. By the time Rafe looked at me across that cafeteria, I already knew how to put my eyes on the floor. I already knew how to stand still and wait for it to be over. I already knew how to say okay when someone told me a lie.

Rafe didn’t teach me any of that. He just found a girl who’d already learned it. It doesn’t make what he did any smaller.

I close the oven and stand up.

And the friend on the recliner is in the doorway, looking at me. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t do anything. He’s just leaning there with his beer, and his eyes are going over me slowly, down and back up. And it lasts a little too long.

My instinct doesn’t care what my mind knows. My body says go to your room and lock the door. Except I don’t have a room anymore. I don’t have a door. My bed is gone, and there’s a dress form in the corner where it used to be, and tonight I’m sleeping on a couch in the middle of the living room, where everybody walks past.

I turn back to the sink. I put my hands in the water. They’re shaking. I hold them under until they stop.