Page 151 of Across His Line

I sit on the floor by the boxes with my knees pulled up, folding the tissue paper back into squares so it can go back in the box for next year, because somebody has to and my hands want something to do.

While I do, I keep looking up at the tree.

I always thought money was the line that made people like Rafe and me so different. I thought what separated us was the cars, the clothes, the gates at the bottom of the drive, and the fancy Christmas decor. But that’s not it at all. What makes us different is—this.

When I walked down that hallway to the original part of the house, it felt like I had been transported. I saw his mother’s pencil marks up the doorframe for every year until he was fourteen, and I knew the difference right away.

That’s the line.

Not money. It was never about money.

It’s having somebody with a pencil in a doorway, every year, making sure they remembered how tall you were. Somebody you can call and come home to. Somebody keeping the ornaments you made in kindergarten even when they look like a potato, and putting them in front, where people can see years later.

Nobody measured me. There isn’t a doorframe anywhere with my name on it. Not at my mother’s multiple houses and apartments. Not in my grandma’s sewing room. We moved too much, or nobody thought of it. I don’t know. I just know I have nothing like this.

I sit on his parents’ rug, folding tissue paper, and something comes up in me that isn’t sad.

It’s angry.

I know it isn’t that simple. I know that. I’ve heard people say it my whole life, at school assemblies, in pamphlets in the counselor’s office, in the voice my grandma uses when she talks about my mother. Addiction is a disease. She can’t help it. It isn’t a switch you just turn off. I know all of that. I even believe some of it.

But sitting here, watching Mr. Waleska eat a fourth cookie while his wife pretends not to see, I don’t care about complicated.

Why was it so hard for her to love me?

Why couldn’t she just come home? Every night. Not some nights. Every night. Why couldn’t she make dinner, any dinner, the worst dinner, and sit at a table with me and eat it? Why couldn’t she remember my birthday before nine-forty at night? Why couldn’t Dylan just stop taking things that weren’t his? Why couldn’t my grandma, just once, look at him and say no instead of we’ll figure it out?

It isn’t that nobody loved me. I know that. My grandma loves me. My mom loves me, in whatever way she can, on the days she can. The thing is that nobody ever chose me enough times in a row for my life to be like this—ordinary.

That’s all I wanted. Ordinary. A doorframe. A box of ornaments with tape on the side that says Old house. Three people being annoying to each other on a Saturday, and nobody leaving or crying about it.

I put the last folded tissue in the box, and I put the lid on.

And then something else comes up, under the anger. Something I don’t expect. I glance at his father. He built this. Rafe’s father. The man who looked at me in the front hall like he was reading a menu. The man who said something about me to Rafe when we were fourteen. Rafe said he sold insurance. He had one car with the heat broken on one side. He wasn’t born behind these gates.

He built the gates.

He built the business, and then he built the bigger house right next to it, and the one after that, and the whole new part of the house, around the old one, room by room. None of it was handed to him. He started in an office over a dry cleaner and kept going until there was a ten-foot tree in a room with windows that go to the ceiling.

I don’t know if I like him. I don’t think I’ll ever be around to find out, but he built this life for himself and his family.

And for my whole life, I’ve looked at money like it belonged to other people. Like it was something some families had and some families didn’t, like eye color. Rafe had it. I didn’t. That was just the shape of the world.

It isn’t. It’s a thing you can make. You can start in a small room and make it.

I sit there on the floor with the tree lights move on the ceiling, and I feel it go through me, slow and hot and sure, like I’ve finally woken up. I glance around the room and what I see fills me to the brim.

“Tess.”

Rafe’s standing over me with green eyes. I look at him.

“My mom made soup,” he says. “She says if we don’t eat it, she’s going to cry.”

“I did not say that,” his mother says from the doorway.

He hides his smile and nods for me to follow.

I eat the soup, which is delicious. The bread tastes homemade, and to a store-bought, broke girl, it’s not that good, but I eat it because I bet it’s healthier than anything I’ve ever had in my life.