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She stamps them and slides them into the bin behind her, and I walk back with an empty tote bag over my shoulder and feel lighter than I have in weeks.

My birthday already feels like a while ago. The cake is gone. The tape gun lives on my desk now, next to my laptop, like it’s always been there.

“Tonight,” Kylie says, when I get back. She’s on her bed surrounded by three open duffels and nothing in any of them. “Party. Paige’s friend’s house. Everybody’s going because everybody’s leaving tomorrow.”

“You’re not packed yet.”

“You’re coming, right?” she asks.

When I don’t answer right away, she shoots me a look. “Tessa?”

I nod. “I’m coming.”

She smiles.

The house we end up at is three blocks off campus, a narrow blue one with a string of colored Christmas lights stapled along the gutter, half of them burned out. Inside, it’s so hot that everybody’s coats end up on a bed in a back room in a pile as tall as me. The living room is wall-to-wall of people. Somebody’s hooked a phone up to a speaker that’s too big for the room, and the bass is coming up through the floor. The kitchen is packed so tight you have to turn sideways to get to the counter, where there’s a punch bowl of something red and a stack of plastic cups and a bag of tortilla chips.

A guy by the fridge is wearing a Santa hat. Everybody’s talking about leaving. What time their flight is. Who’s driving who to the train. How many hours to Ohio, to Jersey, to North Carolina. Somebody’s mom is picking them up at seven a.m. and they’re going to be so hungover and their mom is going to know. Everybody’s tired, the kind of tired where you laugh at everything, because finals are over and none of it matters for three whole weeks.

I have a cup of the red punch. It tastes like cough syrup and Hawaiian Punch. I drink it anyway.

Paige finds me in the kitchen and makes me do the impression of my chem TA for a girl from her floor who doesn’t believe it’s that good. It’s that good. The girl laughs so hard she has to hold onto the fridge. Kenzie pulls me into the living room by both hands during a song she loves and makes me dance, and I do, badly, for one whole song, with my hair sticking to my neck. Bianca introduces me to two guys from her econ section who want to know if it’s true I run a reselling business, and I tell them about the boots and the jeans, and one of them asks what my margins are. I tell him, and he looks at me like he can’t believe it.

I’m happy. I notice it, standing in that hot kitchen with my cough-syrup punch, the way you notice your feet are warm. I’m happy, and I’m with people, and I know their names, and they know mine.

At eleven-twenty, my phone buzzes in my back pocket.

I almost don’t take it out. It’s probably Elsie, sending me a video of Payton asleep in a weird position, which she did for midterms.

I take it out.

Mom.

I look at it. It keeps buzzing in my hand.

She never calls. She texts, sometimes, late, short, with too many exclamation points. She called once in July and once before Thanksgiving. She doesn’t call on a Friday night just to call.

But she’s calling.

Something in me drops, a little, before I can stop it.

I push through the kitchen with the phone held up so nobody knocks it out of my hand. Through the living room, past the speaker, past Kenzie dancing with her eyes closed, out the front door and onto the porch.

The cold is so sharp after the house that it takes my breath. I’m in Kylie’s black top again and nothing over it, and the air goes straight through it like it isn’t there. The porch is empty except for a broken lawn chair and a couple of cups somebody left on the railing. The colored lights over my head blink, the ones that still work.

I answer on the last ring.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Hi, baby! Hi. Are you out partying? It sounds loud.”

“Yeah, I’m at a party. I stepped outside.”

“A party! Look at you.” She laughs. It sounds okay. It sounds like her laugh. “How is college?”

“Good. This morning I took my last exam for the semester.”

“How’d you do?”