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“I love you, Grandma. I’ll call you next week.”

“Love you, too, honey. Enjoy yourself up there, now.”

I lie back on my bed with the phone on my chest and look at the ceiling.

The room is quiet. Kylie is at Nash’s. I enjoy this silence more than anything I’ve ever had in my life.

I don’t know where my mom is. I don’t know if she’s in her apartment or somebody else’s, or if she’s okay, or if she thinks about me at all. I don’t know where my cousin is right now, with my grandma’s money in his pocket. I don’t know where any of the people who are supposed to be mine are. I never have. My whole life has been listening for footsteps and guessing.

My thumb opens the map before I’ve decided anything.

He’s at Corvin. Three doors down. A little circle sitting right next to mine.

And something in my chest—I don’t know what to call it. It isn’t comfort. I would rather die than call it comfort. It’s just that he’s exactly where he’s supposed to be. One person in the whole world whose location I know for sure, right now, to the room. I don’t have to guess. I don’t have to listen. He’s just there, and the knowing settles something in me since I arrived at Woodbury.

The one person I’ve spent four years running from, and he’s the only one I can find.

I close the app so fast my thumb slips.

I turn the phone face down on my chest and press it there with my whole hand, like I can hold it shut.

The next morning, I call the electric company.

I know the number by heart. I’ve known it since I was fifteen and found my grandma at the kitchen table with a past-due notice and a calculator, pretending she was doing a crossword. A woman named Donna answers, and I give her the account number, my grandma’s address, and the long sixteen digits of my debit card, and Donna says, “That’s two hundred sixty even, hon.”

I hang up. I open my bank app. Forty-two dollars and nineteen cents.

Grandma’s going to be furious. I don’t care. The electricity doesn’t turn off or go overdue during the winter months, and that’s all that matters.

I cross out the old total on the sticky note. I write the new one underneath it, small. Then I stand there in front of my closet and look at it, and for a second, my eyes sting, and I make them stop.

Then I go to class.

On Friday, Kylie decides at noon that we’re going to get food later, and that dinner is going to be at two-thirty, because Paige has a thing at six and Kenzie has a thing at seven and Kylie has decided that eating dinner at two-thirty in the afternoon is “European.”

“That’s not what European means,” Kenzie says.

“It’s what it means to me.”

It’s the diner with the cracked red booths and the pie case by the register and a waitress named Carol who calls everybody kiddo. The four of us squeeze into one booth, Kylie and me on one side, Kenzie and Paige on the other, coats piled on the end of the seat like a fifth person. It’s warm and loud and smells like coffee and fryer oil, and the windows are already fogging at the bottom.

I order a grilled cheese, because it’s the cheapest thing on the menu that comes with fries, and I do the math on it without meaning to. Seven forty-nine. Plus tip. That’s a Kate Spade wallet.

Kenzie talks about class. Paige gets a milkshake and drinks it too fast. Somewhere in the middle of it, Kenzie asks her about Koda, and Paige says, “Who?” with a perfectly straight face, and then puts a fry in her mouth so she doesn’t have to say anything else. Kylie and Kenzie look at each other across the table like they’re passing a note.

We split three orders of fries. Nobody keeps track of who eats what. When the check comes, Kylie grabs it before anybody else can, and Paige snatches it out of her hand, and Kenzie says something about Venmo, and in the end, we each put cash on the table, and I put mine down with everybody else’s.

I’m quieter than usual. I know I am. I laugh at the right places, and I steal one of Kylie’s pickles, and I say no, he didn’t when Kenzie gets to the second ending, but there’s a part of me that’s still sitting on my bed last night with the phone pressed against my chest, and I can’t get it to come to dinner.

Halfway through the fries, Kylie knocks her knee against mine under the table and leaves it there. That’s all. She doesn’t ask. She doesn’t look at me. She just keeps her knee there against mine for the rest of the meal, like she’s holding something in place.

I look down at my plate so nobody sees my face.

My grandma’s money is gone. My cousin is wherever my cousin goes. My mom is somewhere I don’t know. And I’m in a red vinyl booth with three girls I’ve known for ten weeks, splitting fries, with somebody’s knee against mine.

I don’t know what to call it. I’ve never had a word for it, because I’ve never had it.

We leave at a quarter to four. It’s already getting dark. November is like this. The sky goes from gray to a deep bruised blue all at once, and the streetlights come on while you’re still blinking. The cold is the wet kind that gets in under your coat. Paige walks with her hands shoved up her own sleeves. Kenzie complains about it the entire way. Kylie hooks her arm through mine and doesn’t let go.