Page 78 of Across His Line

“Where am I sleeping?”

Dylan looks at me like I’m stupid. “Couch.”

The couch he’s on. The couch his friends are on. With my grandma’s blanket over his legs and a joint in his hand and the TV too loud.

I stand there in the living room of the house I spent three months dreaming about, and I think, very clearly, like somebody said it out loud: I should have stayed at Woodbury.

I shouldn’t have come.

“So how’s the fancy school?” Dylan says. “They teach you how to be better than us yet?”

“It’s fine.”

“It’s fine,” he says, in a high little voice, and his friends laugh. “Listen to her. It’s fine. She sounds rich already.”

I hear a car door outside, and I’m out the front door before I’ve decided anything. Down the porch steps, into the cold, across the yard. My grandma’s old Buick is in the driveway behind the gray sedan, where Rafe’s car was twenty minutes ago, and she’s getting out of the driver’s side with two plastic grocery bags looped over her wrist.

She sees me.

She stops with one foot still in the car.

“Tess?”

I smile. I make myself, even though I wish I was at Woodbury right now. “Surprise.”

She doesn’t cry. I thought she might. Some part of me was waiting for it, for her face to crumple, for her to drop the bags and hold out her arms. She just stares at me in the porch light for a second with her mouth open. Then she puts the bags down on the hood and hugs me.

It’s real. Her arms are real, and they’re strong, still, and her coat smells like her, like menthol and Pine-Sol and the cold. I put my face against her shoulder and hold on.

And it’s awkward. I don’t know why it’s awkward. My elbows are in the wrong place. She pats my back twice, the way you’d pat somebody you want to let go, and pulls away before I’m ready.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she says. “Honey. Why didn’t you call?”

She isn’t mad. She’s just asking. She’s already looking past me at the house, and I can see her feeling like I caught her in a lie. She said Dylan was gone, and he’s not.

I wanted her to be happy. Just happy. For one second, I wanted to matter.

I don’t know when this house stopped feeling like home. I don’t know if it was the day I left for Woodbury or the moment I walked into that sewing room or just now, in the driveway, with her looking at the house instead of at me. But I feel it down to my marrow. I swallow it down as much as I can, but my gut is twisting.

I shouldn’t have come.

I want to curl up into a ball somewhere and disappear.

No. That isn’t it.

I want to go back to Corvin Hall.

I want to be on the other end of that highway, two hours north, in a place where all of this is so far away I can pretend it belongs to somebody else.

I grab the groceries and follow her inside. I put the things on the kitchen counter and help put them away. Then I follow her.

“Oh, honey, I didn’t know you were coming,” my grandma says in the hallway, standing in the door of the sewing room with her hand on the frame. “I put my machine back in September. I’ve been doing the church quilt, I didn’t think—”

I say, “It’s okay.”

“If I’d known—”

“Grandma. It’s okay. Really.”