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I take my makeup off. I clean one eye, wipe at the corner of the other, and then stop, cotton pad in hand, looking at myself in the mirror on the back of the closet door. One eye done. One eye smeared. I swipe off the eyeliner and then sit at my desk.

I pull my notebook out from under the stack of mailers and open it to the next clean page. I put my hair up to get it out of my face, and then I take a different pen, and I write.

I don’t write anything good. I don’t write anything that makes sense. I write four hundred dollars. I write the fifth. I write he was laughing. I write she didn’t say no she didn’t say no she didn’t say no until the line runs off the edge of the page. I write Grandma and stop and look at it and write that’s my smart girl under it and press so hard the pen goes through to the next page. I write I don’t have anywhere to go.

I look at that one for a long time.

It isn’t true, exactly. I have my grandma’s house. I have a bus ticket and a present wrapped in the back of my closet. I have the couch, and a cousin who knows where my money is, and a mom who wants it.

I have somewhere to go. I just don’t want to go there.

I’m still looking at it when somebody knocks.

One knuckle. Once. Flat. Not hard.

I stop breathing.

There’s no voice that says, little Tessa, behind it. No shadow standing still under the door for a full minute. Just the one knock, and then nothing.

I get up and go to the door. I put my hand on the chain, and I slide it off.

I’m so out of my own mind that I feel like I’m watching myself do it. I’m not thinking it through. I just want to know what he wants and why.

I open the door.

Rafe is standing in the hallway in his T-shirt. No phone in his hand. His hair is a mess like he’s been lying down with it against a pillow. He looks at me, and his eyes go over my face for a moment. The entire thing like he can read me.

“Can I come in?”

I look at him.

He’s asking. He’s standing in my doorway at midnight and asking to come in like we’re friends.

I blink.

Then step back. I open the door the rest of the way.

He comes in like it might be a trap. Two steps inside the door, and then he stops, and stands there, with his hands at his sides and his shoulders up a little, and he looks around.

I watch him look. I’ve never had him in here. And I can see him taking it in, all of it, the way I took in his room at Thanksgiving. Kylie’s disaster of a bed. My bed by the window with the corners tucked under. The mailers stacked on the shelf by size. The sticky note on the inside of my closet door, crossed out and written over. The stack of notebooks on the floor. The one open on the desk, with my handwriting pressed into it so hard you can see the ridges from across the room. The tape gun, sitting next to it. His eyes stop on it. Just for a second. Then they move on.

He doesn’t sit down. He doesn’t touch anything. He doesn’t go near the desk or the notebook. He just stands there.

I close the door behind him and don’t put the chain back on.

I cross my arms and wait.

And he puts his hand on the back of his neck. He looks at the floor. He takes his hand off his neck.

“I was—” he says.

Then he stops.

My stomach tightens because I’ve never seen this. I’ve never once seen Rafferty Waleska not know what to say.

He’s nervous.

I don’t know what’s happening.