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“Tess had coffee with Elliot today,” she says.

She isn’t saying it to me. She’s saying it to Kennebeck, who’s on the floor stretching his hip flexors and paying exactly as much attention as he pays to everything she says, which is a lot, quietly.

“Who’s Elliot?”

“From her micro class. Curly hair. He rows.” She waves a hand at the ceiling. “He’s nice.”

My pen stops.

I don’t look up. I look at the paper. The sentence I was writing ends in the middle of a word.

“She said it wasn’t a date,” Kylie goes on, “but he definitely likes her. He walked her all the way back here after. In the cold. He offered to walk her up to her room, but she said no.”

Nash doesn’t say anything.

“Isn’t that romantic?” she says.

I look up.

It just happens, the same way it happened on Friday, my head coming up before I can stop it. And Kylie is already looking at me, upside down, her head hanging off the end of Kennebeck’s bed.

She doesn’t say anything. She just looks at me. Then she looks at Kennebeck. Then back at me. Then she rolls over onto her stomach and picks up her phone like nothing happened.

I pick the pen back up. I finish the word.

It’s spelled wrong.

Later, I go to fill my water bottle, because the fountain by the stairwell tastes like a penny and the one in the kitchen at the end of the hall doesn’t.

The lounge is on the way. It’s a room with a broken TV, a couch nobody sits on because of what might be in it, and the only table on the floor big enough to put more than a laptop on.

Tess is at the table, and I clench my jaw because she’s not avoiding me anymore, is she? She’s being careless.

She’s still in the cream sweater, with the sleeves pushed up now, and her hair in a knot on top of her head. There’s stuff everywhere. Gray plastic mailers in a stack. A roll of packing tape. A little digital scale like the ones the trainers use to weigh our water. Tissue paper that’s clearly been used before and smoothed out again. A pair of old jeans folded into a perfect rectangle. A wallet. A scarf. A small wooden box with a brass latch. Her phone propped against the napkin dispenser with a spreadsheet open on it, every cell full.

I stop in the doorway.

She sees me. Her hands stop on the tape. For a second, she goes completely still. Then she pulls the tape across a mailer, tears it on the teeth of the dispenser, and smooths it down with the side of her hand, like I’m not there.

I should keep walking. The kitchen is right there.

“What are you doing?” I say, and I’m not talking about the shit in front of her.

She replies quietly, “Working.”

She doesn’t look up.

I look at the table. The jeans. The scarf. A belt with a cracked hole coiled next to the scale.

“You sell used shit?”

“Yes.”

“People buy that?”

Now she looks up. It isn’t the stairwell look, or the kitchen look. It’s flat and dry and almost bored, the look you’d give a little kid who just asked why the sky is blue.

“Yes.”