Page 25 of Across His Line

His jaw works.

“If it helps,” I say, “I can give you my schedule. Then you’ll know exactly where not to be.”

It’s the most polite thing I’ve ever said to him. I watch it land. And I watch him decide to hit back.

“You already know mine,” he says.

I go still.

He comes down a step. Not close. He doesn’t come close. But his voice drops, and it goes soft the way it goes soft right before it hurts.

“You’ve known for months. When I leave. When I get back. When we’re on the road. When Kennebeck’s girlfriend is in my room, and I’m not.” He tilts his head. “You’ve been sitting behind that door with your ear against it since August, Tess. That’s fucking disgusting.”

I don’t defend myself. Defending yourself means you’re under attack. He isn’t wrong, so there’s nothing to argue.

“I was avoiding you,” I say quietly.

“Call it whatever you want.”

I look at the time. “I have to go.”

“I’m serious about the apartment.”

I’m already at the top of the next flight down, my hand on the cold railing. I stop and look up at him.

“Then take your money,” I say, “and move off campus.”

Silence.

Real silence. The wind whistles through the gap in the window, and somewhere above us a door bangs, and he just stands there on the step with his hand on the railing and his mouth slightly open, like nobody’s ever said that to him before. I don’t think anybody has. I think his whole life, when Rafferty Waleska had a problem, somebody else moved.

I go down three steps. Then I stop again, and I look back up over my shoulder, and I make my voice light.

“Shouldn’t you be heading to your next class?” I say. “It’s on the other side of campus. You’re going to be late.”

His face goes hard.

I don’t wait to see what he does with it. I go down the stairs, all the way down, and push out the door at the bottom into the cold, and I keep walking. My hands don’t start shaking until I’m in the lecture hall, sitting next to Elliot.

After class, I take the bus to Goodwill. It’s twenty-two minutes away on the Route 9 bus, in a strip mall between a nail salon and a mattress store that has been having a going-out-of-business sale since I got here.

I usually go on Wednesdays, but I need something to take my mind off things.

I’ve been doing this since I was fifteen. It started with a pair of jeans I found for six dollars that turned out to be worth ninety. I listed them on eBay under my grandma’s name until she helped me open my own bank account and I could set up my own account in my name. The jeans sold in a day, and I decided right there that I was never going to be without money ever again.

Now I have a spreadsheet. I have a drawer in my dresser and a trash bag in my closet. I keep a box of mailers and a little scale under my bed, next to the notebooks. I’ve figured out what sells and what’s worth selling, because I have to think about things like weight and size. If it doesn’t look good in photos, it won’t sell.

I get a cart with a bad wheel and start at the back, in accessories, because accessories are light. There’s a silk scarf with no label, but I rub the corner between my fingers and turn it over, and the hem is hand-rolled, tiny even stitches, and the print is a hunting scene in faded navy and gold. Three dollars. A brown leather belt, real leather, a little cracked at the third hole, with an old Coach buckle. Four dollars. A small black Kate Spade wallet with the lining still clean. Five. A plain cream blouse with a label I recognize, the kind that sells to girls who want to look like they work in publishing. Four-fifty. A little wooden jewelry box with a mirror inside the lid and a brass latch that still clicks. Three. And, in the men’s jeans, where nobody under fifty ever looks, a pair of old Levi’s with the red tab and the button fly, worn soft at the knees. Six.

Twenty-five fifty, plus tax. I do the math in my head standing in the aisle, the way I always do. If the scarf goes for what I think it goes for, and the Levi’s go fast, which they always go fast, I’ll clear a hundred and forty before shipping. Maybe a hundred and sixty if I photograph the jewelry box right.

I need six hundred dollars by mid-December. I did the math and wrote it on a sticky note inside my closet door in September, and I look at it every morning when I get dressed. Six hundred is the bus home and back, a present for my mom and my grandma, and enough left over for a nice dinner on Christmas.

I’m at three hundred and twelve.

I’m turning the cart toward the front when I see a sweater. It’s on the end of a rack in men’s knits, half falling off its hanger. Thick cream wool, cabled down the front, the old kind of cable that somebody’s hands actually made. I pull it off the hanger, and it’s heavy in the way good things are heavy, and when I put my hand inside the sleeve, it’s so soft that I stand there for a second with my arm in it like an idiot. There’s no label. There’s a tiny darn at one cuff, in slightly different thread, where somebody fixed it once instead of throwing it away. Seven dollars.

I know exactly what it would sell for. Vintage hand-knit, cream, oversized, cable. It would go in a day. Forty, easy. Fifty, if I styled it on the bed with a candle and a book and made it look like a life.