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And I get there first. I can’t help it. I’ve had an hour and twenty minutes to get it ready, and it comes out of me before he can say anything else.

“I know the spreadsheet is weird.”

He looks at me.

“It’s fucking weird,” he says.

I open my mouth.

He comes in, but he doesn’t sit down. He stands in the middle of my room between the pile of Sentinels shirts they sent home with him and the blue desk, with his hands hanging at his sides like he doesn’t trust them, and he glances at the closed laptop.

“One more question,” he says. “And then I’ll quit asking you questions, I swear.”

I don’t say anything.

“School. The community college. Do you actually want that? Or did you put it in there because you think you’re supposed to?”

I make myself think about it, honestly, because he asked me honestly. I think about the cell that says maybe spring? and how I typed it at midnight with my thumb dragging on the trackpad, and how I didn’t feel anything at all when I did it, not hope, not dread, nothing. I put it there because everyone assumes education.

“I don’t know,” I say. “The second one, I think.”

He nods slowly, like he’s checking it against something. “Okay, so the guide works anywhere.”

“What?”

“Your guide. The videos work anywhere, too.” He starts counting on his fingers, and his voice gets faster, the way it does on the bench when he’s explaining what the other team keeps doing wrong. “There’s a Goodwill in every city in America. I looked it up on the walk. There’s nine of them where I’m going. Nine. I counted. There’s estate sales. There’s a post office, obviously. You’re not enrolled anywhere, and you just told me you don’t want to be.”

I sit very still on the bed and listen to him take inventory of my life. I have done this myself a hundred times, in a hundred rooms, but never like this. I always counted what I had to see how little I could survive on. He’s counting to see what I could carry. And it turns out everything I’ve built this year fits in a box of shipping labels, a ring light, and a notebook, and I always thought that meant my life was small. I thought that was just what it looked like when you’d never been allowed to stay anywhere, everything I owned fitting in a trunk with room to spare. It never occurred to me that a life with nothing nailed down might just be a life you could pick up.

“Tess,” he says again.

He still hasn’t moved. His hands are still at his sides, and his jaw is going, but his eyes are green all the way through. He looks more scared than I have ever seen him. More scared than he was in the hallway before the draft. More scared than he was of his father.

“Come with me,” he says.

I hear the words, and they don’t go anywhere. They just sit in the air between us with the fan pushing at them.

“To camp?” I say. “Rookie camp? In September?”

“No.” He swallows. “When I go. When I actually go.”

There has only ever been one rule in my life. Nobody had to say it out loud. I learned it the way you learn a stove is hot, early and once and permanently. People leave. My dad left before I was old enough to remember what he sounded like. My mom left a hundred times, out for cigarettes and back three days later asking why the dishes weren’t done, until the last time when she just didn’t come back at all. My grandmother never went anywhere, she was right there in her kitchen the whole time, and she left anyway, because all she had to do was stand on Dylan’s side of the room and let my side go empty. The person leaving gets to go. The person left figures it out. That’s the deal. That’s always been the deal, and I’ve gotten so good at my half of it that I sat up here at midnight, next to a boy who sleeps with one arm thrown over me like I might float off, and planned the bus routes for after he was gone. I priced the flights. I worked out exactly how often I could afford to see him. And not once, not one time, did it cross my mind to ask him what he wanted, because in my whole life nobody has ever stood in front of a door with their bag packed and turned around and said come with me. I don’t even know the grammar of it. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with my face.

I want to say yes.

It comes up out of me before I can think, so fast and so hard it almost hurts. And that’s what scares me. It’s a reflex. I don’t trust reflexes. Every one I have, I got in a parking lot or a stairwell or a kitchen at two in the morning, and they’ve kept me alive, but they were never built to tell me what I want. They were built to tell me what I can survive. And I can’t tell, sitting here, which one is saying yes. I can’t tell if I want to go because I love him and I want the life he’s describing, a new city, nine Goodwills, my business growing somewhere I’ve never been, or if I want to go because I watched his duffel by my door two weeks ago and fell apart on a curb, and I would rearrange my entire life, I would give away every single thing I built this year, rather than ever be the one in the bed again watching somebody leave again. Those are two different reasons. From the inside, right now, they feel exactly the same.

And under that, the questions keep coming, the practical ones, the ones I’m good at. What if I go, and his money pays for the apartment, and my name isn’t on anything? What if I get used to it? What if I forget how to do it all myself, and then one day he doesn’t want me there, and I’m in a city where I don’t know anyone with nowhere to go and no one to call? Kylie calls her mom about everything. Parking tickets. Whether she should get the lease with the washer in it. Whether the guy at the bar is weird or just shy. I’ve stood next to her while she did it and pretended to look at my phone. If I make the wrong decision here, there’s no one on the other end of that call. I have Google. I have spreadsheets. I have myself. I’ve always had myself, and I’ve always been enough, and I’m so tired, suddenly, of having to be.

“I need to think about it,” I say.

I watch it land. His jaw goes tight. He turns away from me, toward the window, and puts both hands on the frame on either side of the fan and drops his head between his arms.

He says, very quietly, “Fuck.”

That’s all it takes. Before he’s even finished saying it, I’m already reading it the way I read everything. He regrets asking. He said it in the heat of the moment on a walk with his blood up, and now he’s standing at my window realizing what he’s offered. He’s going to turn around and be kind about it, and that’s going to be so much worse. My body knows how this part goes. It starts packing before anyone’s told it to.

“It’s okay,” I say. My voice comes out steady, which is how I know it’s bad. “It’s okay. If you want to go without— we can just do long distance. People do long distance all the time. I already looked at the flights, it’s really not that expensive if I book three weeks out, and if this is too much right now, you don’t have to—”