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It buzzes again.

She takes it out. Looks at it. Declines it. Her hand’s shaking. I don’t think it’s the cold.

It buzzes a third time.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” she says, and holds down the button on the side until the screen goes black and shoves it back in her pocket so hard I hear the seam strain.

The campus comes up ahead of us. The quad, white and empty. The library, dark. The crooked wreath on the student center door.

“Don’t go back for Christmas,” I say. I say it carefully. Not an order. I hear how it could be an order, and I try to keep it from being one.

“It’s not that simple.”

“Why?”

I’m not arguing. I really want to know.

She doesn’t answer for a while.

“They close the dorms on the twentieth,” she says. “Everybody has to be out. Kylie leaves tomorrow. Everybody leaves. And I have a bus ticket for the twenty-second to my grandma’s, and that’s the only place I can go. I don’t have anywhere else.”

She says it like it’s a column of numbers that only adds up to one thing.

And I walk next to her and I think about my house.

I don’t want to go back to the gates, the long table and my father at the head of it. Every time I go through those gates, it’s like walking into somebody else’s idea of my life.

But it’s there. It’s always there. There’s always a bed. There’s always heat. There’s a room with a lock on the door. I’ve never once in my life not known where I was sleeping on Christmas.

She doesn’t know if she has one.

I don’t say anything. I can’t think of a single thing to say that wouldn’t sound like money.

“I knew better,” she says.

We’re crossing the quad now. The snow on it is untouched, smooth, and we’re leaving the only two sets of footprints.

“About what?”

“Going back. Thinking it would be—” She stops. “I lied to myself. I knew better.”

I want to tell her it isn’t her fault. It isn’t. But I don’t think she’d believe it, and I don’t think it would help.

“You wanted to see your grandma,” I say.

She’s quiet. “Yeah.”

Corvin comes up out of the dark, with half the windows lit and a pile of somebody’s boxes on the front steps waiting for a car.

She stops at the bottom of the steps. Takes her hands out of her pockets. Looks down at the coat, zipped to her chin, like she’d forgotten she was wearing it.

“Thanks for bringing it,” she says.

She means it this time. I can hear the difference.

I nod. “You gonna be okay tonight?”

She looks at me. And I can see her hear what I’m actually asking. Not are you okay. She’s not okay. Nobody would be. Just tonight. Just whether she’s going to be all right between now and the morning.