Page 94 of Across His Line

Rafe doesn’t look at them. He doesn’t look at anything. He goes straight through the room to a door in the far wall and opens it onto a narrow staircase, wooden, with a plain iron rail, going up into the dark.

“Back stairs,” he says. “Nobody uses them.”

I follow him up.

And I hear somewhere below us, through the walls, the party’s still going. Laughter. A man’s voice, telling a story, and then a whole table laughing at the end of it. Glasses touching. Music, something with a piano, low and polite. Somebody calling out Margaret, do you want another? and a woman’s voice answering yes, why not, it’s a holiday.

It’s still Thanksgiving down there.

At the top of the stairs, there’s a corner. Rafe’s hand comes to the small of my back to steer me around it, but it hovers. He doesn’t actually touch me. I see it, but he doesn’t lay a finger on me.

I ruined his Thanksgiving.

His family is downstairs, having a nice time. His mother, his father, and their friends. He was sitting at that table when I texted him. And now he’s bleeding and hiding. I wish I could take it back.

We go down a long hallway with a runner on the floor, past a lot of doors. He opens one at the end.

I don’t know what I expected. Something cold. Something out of a catalog, with a gray bedspread and nothing on the walls and a single expensive lamp. A room for a boy who doesn’t smile.

It isn’t that. It’s huge. Bigger than my whole dorm room twice over. But it’s messy in a way the rest of the house isn’t. There’s a hockey bag dumped on the floor by the closet with a stick leaning against it. A hoodie on the back of a chair. A pair of sneakers kicked off under the window. Books on the nightstand, more than I’d have guessed, stacked crooked, with the spines cracked. There’s a shelf over the desk crowded with trophies, but they’re all shoved together at one end, crooked and dusty, like somebody put them there to get them out of the way and never looked at them again. The furniture is beautiful, dark wood, heavy, and none of it looks like he picked it.

There’s a door to a bathroom. There’s a sitting area by the window with a couch and a TV on the wall. There’s a bed in the middle of it all, big and made, with a dark comforter.

He puts my duffel down by the door.

“Lock it,” he says.

And then he hears himself. I watch it happen. His jaw goes tight. His eyes close, just for a second.

“I’m going to get you some clothes,” he says, slower. “You can lock it. If you want.”

I notice the correction. I don’t say anything.

He goes out. The door closes behind him.

And I’m alone in Rafferty Waleska’s bedroom.

I don’t lock it. I just stand in the middle of the room where he left me. It’s so quiet up here. The party is gone, swallowed by the walls. All I can hear is a clock somewhere, and the heat moving through a vent, and my own breathing, which still doesn’t sound right. It catches at the top every time, like there’s a hook in my throat.

There’s a mirror on the back of the closet door. A long one. I walk over to it because I can finally look.

And I don’t know her.

Her hair is everywhere. Her sweater, the cream one, the seven-dollar one I wasn’t going to sell, is stretched out at the neck and has blood on the cuff and on the front, a long smear of it, and I don’t know if it’s mine or Rafe’s. Her lips are puffy. Across her mouth and her left cheek, there’s a mark, pink going red, the exact shape of four fingers and a palm. And her neck.

I pull the collar of the sweater down. It’s red all the way around the front, blotchy, darker in places, the beginning of purple at the edges where his forearm was. It hurts when I touch it. It hurts when I swallow. It hurts when I don’t.

My finger is still bleeding a little, a ring of tiny marks around the second knuckle. My wrist is red in a band. When I breathe in too deep, my right side stabs.

I stand there and look at myself for a long time.

I don’t cry. I don’t feel like crying. I don’t feel like anything. I just look at this girl in a stretched-out sweater in a boy’s mirror, with somebody else’s handprint on her face, and I think, very calmly, that’s me, and it doesn’t feel true.

Then I hear voices in the hall. Rafe’s, low. And a woman’s.

“—what do you mean, upstairs? Rafferty, your father is—oh my God, your face—what happened to your—”

“Mom.”