Page 131 of Across His Line

Barnes is talking about the drive home tomorrow. Six hours. His dad’s making him take the turnpike. I listen. I say that sucks. I look at the front door.

Three minutes.

Kenzie’s still dancing. Kylie’s on the bottom step of the stairs with Bianca and a plate of chips, laughing at something on Bianca’s phone. Nobody’s looking at the door but me.

Five minutes.

She doesn’t come back.

And I take my phone out.

I’ve been doing better about checking on her. Some days I go the whole morning and don’t open it once. When I do, it’s because I want to know which door to use, not because I want to know where she is.

I open it now.

She isn’t on the porch. Her dot is already a block and a half away, on the sidewalk, moving toward campus. Moving fast.

Alone.

I look out the front window. There’s snow on the ground. Old snow, gray along the curb, and new stuff coming down thin in the streetlight. It’s fifteen degrees out. I checked it on the way over, because Barnes wanted to walk and I didn’t.

And I think about her going out that door in a black top with her arms bare.

She didn’t have a coat on.

I go to the back bedroom. The coats are piled on the bed as tall as I am, a whole mountain of black and gray and navy, and I dig. I don’t have to dig long. I know the coat. I’ve known it since I was fourteen. Dark brown, wool, worn shiny at the elbows, with a button on the left cuff that’s been sewn back on with the wrong color thread. I saw it across a whole hockey rink in October. It’s at the bottom. It’s cold in my hands, even in here.

I come back out into the hall with it over my arm, and Barnes is in the doorway of the living room.

“Where are you going?”

“Corvin.”

He looks at the coat. “That’s not yours.”

“Good eye.”

He opens his mouth.

“Tell Kylie that Tess went back,” I say. “So she doesn’t worry.”

And I go out the front door into the cold.

The cold hits me like a door. I don’t have a hat. I have her coat over my arm and my own zipped to my chin, and my breath comes out in white clouds that hang in front of me under the streetlight.

I check the map at the bottom of the porch steps. Her dot’s at the corner, turning toward campus.

I don’t drive. It’s three blocks. And if I pull up beside her in a car, it’s a different thing than walking. I know that much.

I walk fast.

I see her before the second block. She’s just one person on a long empty sidewalk under the streetlights, with the snow coming down thin and slow around her. She has no coat, just the black top and her bare arms. She’s walking so fast she’s almost running, with her head down and her shoulders up, her phone gripped in one fist.

She isn’t crying. I can see that from here.

She’s pissed.

I know the difference now. I don’t know when I learned it. Scared Tessa goes still. Scared Tessa gets small and quiet and looks at the floor. This is the opposite. This is every part of her pointed forward, fast, like she’s trying to walk out of her own skin.