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“January.”

He doesn’t say anything about that. I tape the box shut and pull another one toward me.

“How bad?”

I tell him the number. Then I tell him what it means, which is loans, or thirty hours a week of work on top of classes or saving every dollar to afford it with three more after it.

He’s quiet for a while.

“What are you going to do?” he says.

“I don’t know.”

He looks at me a second longer. Then he rewinds the film, and the six seconds start over.

That’s it. That’s the whole conversation. I sit there on his floor with a shipping label stuck to my finger. He didn’t make it bigger. He didn’t make it smaller. He didn’t solve it. He didn’t have the opinion I was worried he would.

I peel the label off my finger and put it on the box.

I go to the Goodwill on Route 9 twice a week around classes and his schedule. Tuesday mornings because they put out new racks on Monday night and nobody else has figured that out yet. And Friday afternoons when he’s on the bus. I take the 4 to Main and transfer, which takes forty minutes each way, and I do homework on the bus with my backpack strap around my wrist. When Rafe’s in town and offers to drive, sometimes I say yes. Mostly I say I’ve got it.

The woman at the register on Tuesdays has reading glasses on a beaded chain and a cough that sounds like a car that won’t start. By the third week, she says back again when she sees me. By the fifth, she tells me there’s a whole box of shoes in the back that came in from an estate on the lake, which isn’t allowed, and she’s not supposed to tell me, and I buy her a coffee the next Tuesday without saying why.

I’m getting better at leaving things. In the fall I bought everything that could maybe, possibly, if I photographed it right, sell for more than I paid. Now I walk the racks with my hands at my sides and touch almost nothing. I leave with one coat and a pair of boots, or a single sweater with the tags still on, and I know before I get to the register what each one will list for and how long it’ll sit. My spreadsheet has fewer red cells in it every week. The stuff that comes in goes out.

Kylie comes with me once and buys a lamp shaped like a mallard that I tell her not to buy. Paige comes with me once, on a Friday, and doesn’t talk for forty minutes, and then pulls a camel trench coat out from under a pile of windbreakers and hands it to me without a word. It’s Burberry. It sells in two days.

Kylie gets me to one party.

It’s a road weekend at a house that some of the lacrosse guys rent, and she says I have to come because Bianca’s going and Kenzie’s going. So I go. I wear jeans and the cream sweater. I hold a can of seltzer for two hours and drink about half of it. It’s loud and hot and smells like beer and somebody’s vape.

A girl from my accounting section recognizes me and we stand by the fridge complaining about the same professor for twenty minutes. A guy I don’t know says oh, you’re Waleska’s girlfriend, and I say I’m Tessa, and he says right, yeah, Tessa, and asks me if I know where the bathroom is. Nobody looks through me. That used to be the thing I was best at, being looked through. Now people say hi.

I leave at eleven-thirty when Kylie gets up on the table and shouts something inaudible. Paige is on the porch already with her coat on, like she was waiting. We walk back to Corvin together in the cold without saying much. I don’t mind the party. I just like the walk home better.

The next weekend we go to a women’s basketball game because Kenzie’s lab partner plays, and we sit in the student section in four free T-shirts that are all extra-large. Bianca catches a fifth one out of the air during a timeout and puts it on over the others. That I like.

On a Sunday near the end of February, a girl from down the hall is sitting in the window seat by the stairwell on the phone with her feet up, saying Mom. Mom, I know. I know, and laughing.

I go back to my room and look at my phone.

My grandma’s last text is from eleven days ago. Ice on the church steps this morning. Be careful out there. I wrote back I will with a snowflake. Nothing since. Nothing from my mom since before Christmas.

That’s a normal thing. It’s always been like this. I say something that offends her and then there’s a long quiet stretch until one of us breaks or needs something. It’s nothing new.

I put my phone down on my desk and go to dinner. Kylie’s saved me a seat. Koda looks annoyed about something, Rafe appears smug, and whatever hockey thing is going on, I stay out of it. Nash is being the level-headed one tonight, and Kylie is loving it.

Towards the end of March, it snows twice more and then stops. I attend all of Rafe’s games, wear his jersey, and he always comes off the ice with bright eyes and lots of energy directed towards me. I know how to deal with that energy now.

I end up buying a few online courses about how to start a business online, and every night without fail, I write in my journal. Tonight with Rafe asleep next to me, I write:

You have no idea the danger you’ve put me in.

The hope

That someone can change after all,

And decide not to.