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The car pulls away from the curb. The taillights go red at the corner, and then it turns, and it’s gone.

Nobody says anything for a second.

“Nash said his dad pulled him out of tomorrow’s game,” Kylie says finally, still looking at the empty corner. “Like, his father called the coach himself. Nash said Rafe didn’t say a word about it. He just—” She stops. “I thought it was a hockey thing.”

It isn’t a hockey thing.

“Okay, that was the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen,” Kenzie says, and Paige says she’s freezing. Kylie pulls on my arm, and we go inside, into the warmth, and up the three flights to our floor.

I walk past his door and don’t look at it.

In our room, Kylie starts talking about what she’s going to wear tomorrow to the party. I sit on the edge of my bed with my coat still on and take out my phone.

“You’re coming to the game and the party, right?”

I look up quickly, recalling that she said Rafe won’t be there. I smile. “Yes, count me in.”

She smiles. “I love you. That makes me so happy.”

I smile and glance down at my phone. The map is still open. I never closed it. Rafe’s dot is already off campus. It’s on Route 9, past the Goodwill, past the mattress store having its going-out-of-business sale, moving steadily away from everything. I watch it reach the highway. I watch it turn south. I watch it get smaller as the map zooms itself out to hold it, until our building is just a gray square and his dot is a little blue circle sliding down a long yellow line, farther and farther, all on its own.

For four years, I only ever wanted to know where he was so I could be somewhere else. That’s all this was supposed to be. Two dots. A system. A way to make sure I never had to stand in a stairwell with him again.

I sit there and watch him go.

And the question in my head isn’t where is he.

It’s where are they taking him and why.

8

Nothing to Do With Her. Nothing.

Rafe

The text from my father came Thursday night, and it was five words long.

Dinner Saturday. People you should know.

That’s all I know. That’s what I traded a game for. Not who, not why, not what kind of people, just the shape of it, the way he always gives you the shape of something and lets you walk into the rest of it with the lights off. I know what people you should know means. It means men with the same watch as him. It means a table where somebody asks me what I’m studying and doesn’t listen to the answer, because the answer is going to be whatever my father decides it is in four years. It means the firm.

So I’m standing on the steps of Corvin at four o’clock on a Friday in a navy suit my mother picked, with a tie I didn’t pick, in front of a car I didn’t call, and Martin is holding the door.

Martin’s been driving for my father since I was eight. He has never once asked me how I am. I’ve always respected that about him.

I’m halfway down the steps when I see four girls coming up the walk from the street, arm in arm, red in the face from the cold. Kennebeck’s girlfriend. Paige. Kenzie. And Tessa, with Kylie’s arm hooked through hers, in that same coat.

They’re all staring at me. That part I could handle. People always stare. What stops me is that three of them aren’t staring at me anymore. They’ve turned. They’re looking at her. And her mouth is just closing, like she’s finished saying something, and whatever it was, it’s sitting there in the cold between the four of them, and I can’t hear a word of it.

She said something about me.

She looked at this car, this suit, Martin holding the door, and she opened her mouth and told them something about me, and I don’t know what it was. I don’t know what she knows. That’s the problem with Tessa Canten. I never know what she knows.

And then she looks at me.

Not at the car. Not at the suit. At me. Straight on, with her head a little tilted, the way she looked at me in the stairwell on Monday right before she told me to take my money and move off campus. Like she’s reading something written on the inside of my face.

I look away first. I hate that I look away first. I get in the car, and Martin shuts the door. The glass is tinted so they can’t see me. I watch them. They stand there for a moment until we drive off.