Page 124 of Across His Line

“You...bought me a tape gun.”

“Happy birthday, Tessa.”

I stand there and look at it. I don’t know what my face is doing.

People have given me presents. Socks. A gift card. A scarf from my grandma that she knitted while she watched her shows. Elsie gave me a necklace once with half a heart on it, and she wears the other half. Those were all nice gifts. But nobody’s ever paid that much attention to something I use daily.

“You didn’t have to get me anything,” I say quickly.

He shrugs. “It was twelve dollars.”

It was not twelve dollars. I know what a tape gun like this costs. I’ve looked at them. It’s at least twenty with the extra rolls.

He knows I know. I can see it on his face. He said twelve anyway, like it was nothing, so I wouldn’t have to do the math on it. So I wouldn’t have to stand on the stairs adding it up and feeling like I owed him something.

I don’t say anything about it. I let him have the twelve dollars.

“Thank you,” I say.

He nods. He looks at the packages in his arm. “Is the post office open on Saturdays?”

I nod. “It closes at one.”

He comes down the two steps and puts my four packages back on top of my pile, carefully, so they line up. Then he goes past me, up the stairs, two at a time, with his bag over his shoulder.

He doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t look back.

I listen to him for a moment, and then I go to the post office.

The whole walk there, the bag bumps against my leg. I keep looking down at it. I look at it in line. I look at it while the woman behind the counter weighs each package and prints the labels. I look at it on the walk back.

It’s so specific. He didn’t buy a thing for a girl. He bought a thing for me. Nobody really buys me anything, and if they do, I still have it and cherish it. But this feels like something else. I can’t imagine him going to the store just to get it in time for my birthday. Am I overthinking? I am so overthinking.

When I get back, Kylie’s on her bed painting her toenails. She sees the bag before I can put it down.

“What’s that?”

“A tape gun.”

She doesn’t seem interested. To her, it’s just supplies.

I put it on my desk. “Rafe got it for me.”

She stops painting. She looks at me with the little brush in the air.

“Rafe bought you a tape gun for your birthday?”

That was not the reaction I was searching for, but it is the one I needed.

She looks at me for one more second. Then she closes her mouth and goes back to her toenails, very slowly, very carefully, with her eyebrows all the way up.

Kylie dresses me for dinner. I let her, because it’s my birthday and because she’s going to do it anyway.

She puts me in my own jeans and a black top of hers that’s a little too nice for the diner. She does my eyeliner, sharp and long at the corners, and when I look in the mirror on the back of our door, I look like somebody who goes places. I look like it’s my birthday.

We go to the diner on Main, because I picked it, because it’s the only place I like where I won’t spend the whole meal doing math on the menu. The five of us squeeze into the big round booth in the back. Paige sits on the end with her legs crossed and her coat still on. Kenzie takes the middle. Bianca comes in five minutes late, holding a white bakery box in both hands like it’s a baby, and won’t let anybody see inside it.

“Order something expensive,” Kylie says.