Page 15

Then I walk out of the kitchen.

I don’t run. I walk down the long hallway past the bathroom line and the ugly sailboat and the boy from class, who smiles at me, and I don’t stop. Through the front room, past the couch, past Paige with her hands in the air, dancing against a boy that Koda looks furious about. Through the front door, and out onto the porch and down the steps.

The cold hits me like a slap.

And that’s when my body catches up.

It all comes at once, everything I held still in that kitchen. The blood rushes back, and I feel light-headed. My hands are numb and buzzing. My breath coming in short white clouds that won’t go all the way down. The sidewalk tilts a little, the way the deck of a boat does, and I keep walking anyway, because walking is a thing I know how to do, one foot and then the other, away.

Behind me, the front door opens. The music spills out and gets cut off again.

I don’t have to look. My gut knows. It twists like a knife.

I keep walking.

His footsteps come down the porch steps.

“Hey, little Tess.”

My heart stops.

“I told you not to come here,” he says.

I keep walking. I don’t turn around.

“You lied to me.”

I don’t turn around.

“Look at me, Tessa.”

His oldest command, and my body wants to obey it so badly that my shoulders actually start to turn before I catch them and make them stop.

You don’t get to tell me where I can exist anymore. You don’t get to tell me where I can sit or what I can say or which name I answer to. You don’t get to tell me which mountain I can stand on. Or where I look.

The only answer he gets from me is my back, walking away from him under the streetlights, and I give it to him all the way to the end of the block.

He doesn’t follow.

“I don’t like liars,” he calls out.

And that one makes me tremble.

I walk the two streets back to campus with my arms wrapped around myself and the cold coming through my coat. Somewhere around the library, my eyes start to burn, and I let them, because nobody’s here to see.

I was wrong about the tree line.

I thought I’d climbed high enough. I thought the air had changed, and the soil, and the weather, and that I could finally stand up straight in it. And maybe all of that is true. Maybe the mountain is different.

But sometimes you climb high enough for the environment to change.

And sometimes the thing you were hiding from climbs right up with you.

4

Nowhere in Particular to Be

Rafe