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“Fifty.”

“Nobody’s paying fifty dollars for a jewelry box from the Goodwill on Route 9.”

“Nobody knows it’s from the Goodwill on Route 9. Call it vintage.”

“It is vintage.”

“Then why is it thirty-five?”

“Because I looked up what the other ones sold for, and they sold for thirty to forty, because I’m not an idiot—”

“Is this the only one like it?”

She stops. For one second, she looks down at the box like she’s actually considering it, like I’ve said something worth hearing, and then she looks up at me. I know Tessa’s looks. I’ve had four years to learn them. There’s the one where she wishes we’d never been born in the same zip code, and the pointed, quiet regret she gives me whenever I catch her looking. This isn’t either of those. This is annoyance. Plain, ordinary, irritated annoyance, like I’m a fly that won’t stop landing on her sandwich.

“Do you mind?” she says, and I watch her brow try its hardest not to give me attitude.

That’s when it hits me how long I’ve been standing here. I’m leaning on the back of a chair I don’t remember pulling out. Her box is in my hand. I’ve spent minutes arguing with Tessa Canten about the resale value of a jewelry box from the Goodwill like we’re two people who do this, like there’s no stairwell and no seven months and no I’ll withdraw sitting on the table between us. For a few minutes, I forgot I can’t stand her. I don’t forget things. Nobody gets me to forget things. She sat here and let me walk in and talk to her like a normal person, and I did it, and I hate her more for that than for anything she’s done since August.

I put the box down. Hard enough that the latch clicks.

“Little Tessa,” I say. “You’re getting careless.”

Her shoulders pull in half an inch. Her mouth closes. Whatever was in her face a second ago goes straight back behind the door it came out of, and there she is, the girl from the end of the lunch table with her eyes on her hands. That should make me feel better. It’s exactly what I wanted. Instead, it feels like I knocked something off a shelf on purpose, and that pisses me off even more.

She swallows. I watch her throat move. “You already know I’m here.”

“Then what part of I don’t want to see you don’t you understand?” I lean down and put both hands flat on the table between her mailers. “Hm?”

She doesn’t answer right away. She looks past me first, at the dead TV and the couch nobody sits on and the open doorway at my back, and then her eyes come back to mine, and I can see the answer sitting right there in her face. This is a common room. You walked in here. The kitchen is the other way. She doesn’t have to say a word of it. She’s already made me hear it. I’m the one who stopped in the doorway. I’m the one who asked what she was doing, picked up the box, and pulled out a chair. She’s been sitting here taping envelopes this whole time, and I’m the one standing here.

I see her open her mouth, and I know whatever comes out of it is going to be honest, and I don’t want to hear it.

“Send me your schedule,” I say, “like you promised.”

“I didn’t promise,” she says quietly.

“You gave me your word.” It comes out lower than I mean it to, rough at the edges. “If it wasn’t a promise, then don’t say things you don’t fucking mean, Tessa. You’ve done that to me enough.”

That one goes in. I watch it land. Her eyes drop to the label in her hand, and she smooths it down with both thumbs, slow and careful, and she doesn’t answer me. Good. I don’t want an answer.

I look at her things one more time. The scarf. The jeans folded into a perfect rectangle. The box I just priced for her like a fucking idiot. Her shoes under the table, the same canvas ones she wore all through high school, gone gray at the toes. Then I straighten up, pick my water bottle up off the floor by the door, and walk out without filling it.

Here’s the thing I know about Tessa Canten. She doesn’t do anything by accident. Not one thing. Four years, and I never once saw her make a move she hadn’t already walked through in her head three times first. She knew which stairwells I took. She knew which lunch tables to stay away from. She knew my door, my schedule, and my roommate’s girlfriend well enough to disappear inside the building I sleep in for two full months. A girl like that doesn’t spread her whole life out on a table in the middle of my floor at ten o’clock at night by mistake. She knew there could be a chance of an encounter, and she sat there anyway.

Yesterday, she stood in a stairwell and told me she’d make sure I never had to see her again. Said she was good at it. Twenty-four hours later, she’s thirty feet from my door with a roll of tape, acting like she lives there.

So she lied. Again. That’s three.

My door sticks when I shove it open, and I yank it, and it slams behind me hard enough to rattle Kennebeck’s skates on the towel. I sit on the edge of my bed with an empty water bottle in my hand and a paper due Friday, and I’m so angry I can feel it in my blood.

Fine. If she isn’t going to keep her word, I’ll keep it for her. She wants to sit in the middle of my floor like she belongs here, she can sit there.

She’s about to find out exactly how careless that was.

7

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