Page 8 of Across His Line

There’s a point on a mountain where trees stop growing.

It’s called the tree line, and for a long time, I thought it existed because the trees weren’t strong enough to climb any higher. That the ones near the top had simply given up, the way people do, a few hundred feet short of something.

That isn’t really it.

Up there, the wind changes. The soil thins to almost nothing. The temperature drops in a way that nothing with roots can argue with. A tree that thrives a thousand feet below, tall and green and certain of itself, can’t survive at that height no matter how badly it wants to. It isn’t weak. It’s just standing in the wrong place.

Sometimes survival has nothing to do with strength.

Sometimes it’s just knowing what environment you’re standing in.

The University of Woodbury isn’t high school. I keep having to remind myself of that. The air is different here. The hallways are wider. Nobody here watched me eat lunch alone for four years, and nobody here knows which stairwells I used to take or why.

Rafe is different here, too. Or at least, from everything I’ve been able to gather from a safe distance, he’s quieter. Calmer. A boy who stands in doorways instead of filling rooms.

And maybe I’ve spent two months crouched low against weather that already passed.

Elsie FaceTime’s me on Wednesday morning, which means she’s doing her makeup. She props her phone against the mirror in the bathroom she shares with Payton, and I get a close-up of her nostril, and then her whole face, half finished, one eyebrow in and one eyebrow out, like a before-and-after photo of herself.

“Okay, I have eleven minutes,” she says. “Talk.”

“Good morning to you, too.”

“Is it? Is it a good morning, Tessa?” She leans into the mirror with the brow pencil. “Because I sent you a voice note last night that was fourteen minutes long, and you sent me back a thumbs-up.”

I smile. “It was a sincere thumbs-up.”

“You seriously had nothing to say?”

From somewhere behind her, Payton yells, “Is that Tess?”

“It’s Tess,” Elsie calls back.

“Tell her she’s dead to me.”

“Payton says you’re dead to her.”

“I heard her.”

Payton comes into frame in a sports bra with a towel wrapped around her head, takes the phone off the mirror entirely, and holds it two inches from her face, which is how Payton always talks on FaceTime. Her eyes are still puffy from sleep. She has the face of a girl who would fight a bear for you and lose and not regret it.

“Hi, baby. You alive?” she says.

I laugh. “I’m alive.”

“Eating?”

“I’m eating.”

“What’d you eat yesterday?”

“Payton.”

“Answer the question.”

I’m sitting on the edge of my bed with my lab goggles in my lap and my hair still wet, and I’m smiling at my phone so hard my cheeks ache, and across the room, Kylie’s bed is empty and made, which means she slept down the hall. It’s quiet. It’s just me and them.

This is the part nobody at high school ever saw.