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I look down. Of course, she is.

Kylie’s the only blonde girl that has ever been nice to me. I don’t have anything against blondes, but when the entire blonde squad in high school bashes you for no reason, I learned quickly to avoid them. She’s not so bad after all.

“There’s a party Thursday,” Kylie says, standing up with her tray. “Pre-Halloween. Two streets off campus. You should come.”

“No, thank you.”

“No, no.” She doesn’t even blink. “This is the new shell I’m offering. You came to football, you came to hockey, and now you’re eating at the dining hall with me. I love this. You’re going to come.”

“I’m not.”

She shrugs. “I’ll ask again tomorrow.”

She will. That’s the thing about Kylie. She just will.

I’ve spent most of my life around people who wanted things from me. Information, mostly. Where I was going. Who I talked to. What I’d said. What I’d meant by it. The blonde girls at the center tables wanted to know what Rafe had said to me in the hallway so they could decide what it meant about them. Teachers wanted to know if everything was okay at home in a voice that made it clear they hoped it was. Even kindness, in that building, usually arrived with a question attached, and the question was always the price.

Kylie doesn’t want information. Kylie wants me to come to things. She wants me at the table. She wants me to eat the cookie she stole and tell her she’s right about the rabbit. As far as I can tell, there’s no secret agenda, and she genuinely wants a friend.

I didn’t know there was a difference between people wanting to know you and people wanting you around. I’m only now learning that the second one doesn’t come at a cost.

I spend the afternoon in the library at the desk by the window that looks out over the quad.

I’ve spent the past two months learning where it’s safe and where it isn’t. It isn’t hard to collect information when you room with the girl who spends half her life in his room. Kylie talks about Nash’s roommate the way you’d talk about a very large dog that lives in the apartment next door. Rafe said “out” when she asked where he was going. Rafe ate four chicken breasts in one sitting. Rafe opened the window again. Rafe told Nash his girlfriend laughs like a car alarm, and Nash told him to go fuck himself. I listen to all of it with my face pointed at my laptop, and I never say anything, but I keep every piece.

I’ve already looked twice everywhere I go, and Woodbury is no different. At one point, I followed Rafe to get a real idea of what his schedule was like. Before Kylie got into the picture, I already knew their hockey schedule as best as I could. But now the season has started, captain skates are done, and the weeks leading up to the game has changed the schedule again. Now that it’s settling in, I don’t know what the schedule is anymore, but I know that I can breathe a little more since they will be traveling often.

I just didn’t anticipate that going to the Tuesday hockey game would have blown my cover.

High school Rafe would have tracked down my dorm and demanded an answer.

College Rafe hasn’t come to my dorm yet, and I’m praying it stays that way.

I’ve been listening around campus to see if anyone’s talked about Rafe yet, but there’s been nothing. Kylie is my only direct relation to him.

I close my laptop. I leave this thought on an open loop, and I double-check as I walk back to Corvin Hall because I’m scared that he’s looking for me.

I lie on my bed that night with the lamp on low. At ten-forty, a door down the hall opens stiff and closes hard.

Three doors down.

The footsteps go the other way, toward the stairwell, and fade, and I lie there and listen to the building be quiet, and I tell myself the thing I’ve been telling myself all day.

This isn’t high school.

Kylie won’t be on Rafe’s side. She’s already told me I can keep the chain on, and it’s currently on. She’s also said that Rafe doesn’t like to be in the room when she’s there, and she doesn’t know where he goes.

I lie there, staring at the ceiling and wonder if he’s out looking for me. I wonder how long it’s going to take for him to figure out that I’ve been three doors down all this time.

Kylie asks Thursday morning again while I’m brushing my teeth. I say no, thanks, around the toothbrush. She asks again at lunch. I say no, thanks to my sandwich. At six-thirty, she comes back from Nash’s with her hair wet and sits down on the end of my bed, where she isn’t technically supposed to sit, and looks at me with enormous, pleading eyes.

“Tess,” she says. “The boys have a team thing tonight. It’s dinner with their coach at some restaurant. So, it’s just us girls.”

I look at her.

“I swear,” she says. “Pinky swear. Paige is coming, and Paige has been avoiding Koda for ten days, so if Paige is going, believe me, they’re not going to be there.”

I’m going to say no. I’m already shaking my head. And then I think about the lecture hall when I raised my hand to answer the questions, and nothing happened. How I’ve been checking both ends of the hallway before I open my door, and the chain I put on every night, and the way I’ve started to time my trips to the bathroom by the sound of a door three rooms away.