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The apple goes down the wrong way, and I cough so hard that Payton actually sits up, and Elsie starts screaming. It takes me a full ten seconds to get enough air to say, “No. I’m not.”

Which is true, in every way that counts. And completely false in the only way that matters, which is the dot.

“Is it the rower?” Elsie says. “The curly hair.”

Payton nods. “It’s the rower.”

I told them about Elliot on Sunday, in a voice note that was only four minutes long, which for me is practically a memoir. They’ve decided they like him based entirely on the fact that he called me the sunk costs girl and owns no hats.

“The rower is my friend. We’re studying together.”

“That’s how it starts,” Elsie says darkly.

But Payton is looking at me, and Payton doesn’t look at me like Elsie does. Payton looks at me like she’s reading the back of a box.

“Okay,” she says. “If he’s nice and friendly, let him be nice and friendly. Date somebody normal for once.”

She means it kindly. For once. Like there’s been some other kind. Like she knows something I don’t. And normal, which I don’t understand because I’ve never dated anyone in my life, so why in the world is she even saying that?

“He’s my friend,” I say again.

Payton lets it go. Elsie doesn’t, but Elsie never lets anything go. She goes on about the scarf, and now she’s going to keep track of how many he wears.

After they hang up, I call my grandma.

I’ve been meaning to call her all week. The number on the inside of my closet door has been sitting in my head since Monday, and I want to hear her say the word Christmas out loud, so I know it’s real, so I know I’m wanted somewhere.

She picks up on the fifth ring.

“Hi, honey.”

That voice. I close my eyes. It’s rough at the edges from forty years of menthols she quit twenty years ago, and it sounds like her kitchen, like the TV she keeps on low and the clock over the stove that’s always four minutes fast.

“Hi, Grandma.”

She asks if it’s cold up here. I say it’s freezing, and she says she told me, and I say she did. She asks about my classes, and I tell her about micro, and she says she doesn’t understand a word of it but she’s proud of me, and she says it the way she always says it, like it costs her nothing. And then, somewhere in the middle of me telling her about the Goodwill, her voice goes a little thin.

“Grandma.”

“Mm?”

“What happened?”

“Nothing happened, honey. I’m just tired.” She says it too fast. The way people say things they’ve already practiced.

“Grandma.”

A long breath on the other end. I can hear the TV. I can hear the clock. I can see her at the kitchen table in her robe, with her glasses pushed up on her head, looking at the window over the sink.

“It’s handled,” she says.

And I know. I know before she says another word. Because it’s handled is what she says when it isn’t. It’s what she said when my cousin had her car get towed from illegal parking, or when the school called because he did something that got him suspended, or when the police brought him home at three in the morning junior year and she made pancakes the next day like nothing had happened. Every time my cousin does something, she handles it. That’s the job she’s given herself.

“What did Dylan do?”

She doesn’t answer for a second, and that’s an answer.

“The money,” she says finally. “Out of the can on top of the fridge. It was just sitting there. I should’ve put it somewhere else. That’s on me.”