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He looks at me for a second. At the eyeliner. At the black top that isn’t mine. At the little paper napkin with a piece of chocolate cake folded inside it that Bianca made me take home, which I’m holding in my other hand like it’s something important.

“You had fun,” he says.

It isn’t a question. I answer it anyway.

I nod. “Yeah, I had fun.”

He doesn’t move. I shift the napkin to my other hand.

“The tape gun is actually good,” I say. “I used it before dinner.”

“Good.”

I roll my eyes. I can’t help it. He sees me do it, and something happens in his eyes.

“How did you know mine was broken?” I ask. “I never said.”

“It stuck to your sleeve,” he says. “Saw you having a hard time with it.”

We stand there in the hallway, three doors apart, with the dim lights humming. He doesn’t come closer. I don’t either. It’s quiet, but it isn’t the kind of quiet I used to wait inside, listening for what came next. Now, I’m anticipating something else.

“Happy birthday, Tessa.”

“Thank you.”

He goes down the hall toward the kitchen with his water bottle. I watch him go. Then I unlock my door and go in.

I don’t put the chain on right away. I stand there in the dark for a second with the cake in my hand. Then I turn on the lamp by my bed.

There are two packages left on my desk. Orders that came in this afternoon, after I’d already gone to the post office, a pair of gloves and a little wooden box. I planned to do them tomorrow.

I do them now.

I wrap them in tissue. I fold the mailers. And I pick up the tape gun, heavy and cold in my hand, and I pull it across the first seam.

It makes a long, clean ripping sound, and the tape goes down flat and straight, and the blade cuts it off in one pass. No folding. No sticking. No teeth.

I do the second one. Then I just sit there at my desk with the tape gun in my hand.

And I laugh because it works stupidly well.

I put the chain on.

I get into bed in Kylie’s black top with the lamp still on, and I lie there looking at the tape gun on my desk, sitting on top of two finished packages, where I left it.

He remembered.

My last final is Friday at nine in a lecture hall so cold everybody takes it in their coats. I finish with twenty minutes left, check my answers twice, and walk out into a morning so bright and freezing it makes my eyes water. And that’s it. It’s just over. One semester, done, in a blue book with my name on the front.

By the afternoon, Corvin is coming apart.

There are suitcases in the hallway again, like Thanksgiving, except more of them. People are carrying out things that don’t come back until January. Mini fridges. Laundry baskets of winter coats. A girl on four carrying a fake Christmas tree down the stairs with the ornaments still on it. Somebody’s dad is in the lobby with a hand truck and a face like he’s done this before. Doors are propped open up, and down the hall, music coming out of every one of them, all different, so walking from the bathroom to our room is like turning a radio dial.

I ship six orders at the post office on Main, the last ones I can get out before Christmas. The woman behind the counter knows me now.

She says, “Busy season.”

I smile. “Yeah. Busy season.”