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“I can’t go home for Christmas,” she says.

She doesn’t look at me when she says it. She says it to the red light.

I don’t say anything. I wait.

“I don’t even know why I thought it was a good idea,” she says. “Even after Thanksgiving—I thought. I don’t know what I thought. The bus and the present and—” She stops. Laughs, once. “It’s stupid, Rafe. It’s just stupid family shit.”

“Your cousin sat on your back and tried to take your money,” I say.

She turns her head and looks at me.

“That’s not even—” She stops. She looks back at the light. We can walk now, but she doesn’t move. “My mom called.”

The snow comes down between us.

“She needs four hundred dollars,” Tessa says. “For her car. She’ll pay me back on the fifth. She says the fifth like she’s so sure she can pay me back, and she knows where I keep my money. She knows I don’t keep it in the bank. She said Dylan told her.”

I don’t say anything.

“I never told Dylan that. I told my grandma, though.” She starts walking across the street, and I go with her. “One person. I told one person. And it went to him, and he told her, and now she’s calling me to ask for it.”

“He was with her,” she says, on the other side. “When she called. I could hear him. He was laughing in the background.”

Something goes cold in my stomach.

“And I asked her.” Her voice catches, just for a second, and she kicks it back down. “I asked her if they were using together. And she told me that I don’t know anything.”

She looks at me, finally.

“She didn’t say no.”

I don’t know what to say to that. I don’t have anything. I don’t know what that’s like. My mom has never asked me for anything in my life but to wear a color.

We walk.

The thing that comes up hot and fast and all the way up my throat is that I want fix it. I want to tell her she’s not going back there. I want to say you’re done, you’re not going, that’s it. I want to get in my car and drive two hours and stand on her grandmother’s porch until Dylan comes out, and I want to put him back into that wall.

I keep it to myself.

She’s her own person. My mother said it at a breakfast table three weeks ago with her coffee in both hands, and I closed my mouth. If you find out you were wrong about someone, Tessa said in my car, what are you supposed to do? And I told her. You just don’t do it again.

I don’t get to decide for her where she goes.

I don’t know what I’m supposed to do instead. I just walk next to her.

“She thinks you’re my boyfriend,” Tessa says.

I look at her.

“Apparently everybody back home knows you came to my grandma’s and beat up Dylan.” She says it to the sidewalk. “My mom heard about it, and now she thinks you’re my rich boyfriend, and that I should ask you for the money.” She scoffs and shakes her head.

We walk half a block without saying anything.

Her phone buzzes in her coat pocket.

She takes it out. I see the screen. Mom.

She declines it. She puts it back in her pocket.