Epilogue
Tessa
Kylie leaves for the Halloween party at nine-fifteen in a wig with Nash Kennebeck’s practice jersey pulled on over all of it, and she stops at the door with her hand on the knob and looks back at me three separate times.
“You’re sure.”
“I’m sure.”
“You could come for twenty minutes. Ten. You could stand by the door and judge people.”
“Kylie.”
“Okay. Okay.” She points at me. “Laundry.”
“Laundry,” I agree, and she goes, and I get up and put the chain on before her footsteps reach the stairwell.
The building empties out after that. I can hear it happen. Doors on four, a group going down the stairs laughing, somebody’s speaker getting farther away. By ten, the hallway is quiet enough that I can hear the heat come on in the vents. I like Corvin like this.
I do my chemistry. I finish the problem set and check it twice, and then I check the chain, which I know is on, because I put it on, and I watched myself do it.
Kylie’s side of the room looks like a small storm came through it.
There are three rejected outfits on her bed, an eyeliner with the cap off, and a bag of Doritos folded shut.
There’s a water bottle on my desk that she left there before she went out, full, with the label turned toward me.
She doesn’t know I noticed. She did it the way I did it for her in August, the night she came home from that first party with her mascara down her face, and I hadn’t known her long enough to say anything. So I put water on her desk instead.
She gave it back. I don’t know what to do with that. I’ve never had anybody to give anything back.
I’m not supposed to be here at Woodbury.
I was told at a party the summer before senior year, in front of people, with a hand on the back of my neck that didn’t need to be there, that if I came to Woodbury I’d regret it.
I came anyway. I had my reasons, and they were good ones, and they still are.
The plan was simple. Stay in this room. Go to class.
Eat with my back to the wall. Never walk down the hallway without checking both ends first. Keep my head down for four years, and it would be like I was never here at all.
Then my roommate turned out to be Kylie Vandercook.
She made me go to a football game. She made me cut sandwiches. She made me watch hockey on a laptop. She didn’t ask me one thing about that night Rafe came following after me. Not that night, and not all day today. I watched her not ask.
Thursday is a pile of pieces I haven’t put back together yet.
The kitchen. The two-liter. Move, Tess. Kylie calls me Tess now.
All my close friends and family do, but there was only ever one person who said it like that, like it was something that belonged to him.
Four years. Tell your new friend, Tess. And my own voice, saying I have no idea who he is to the one person on this campus I think I can trust.
I walked out. He followed me as far as the porch light and stopped, the way he always used to stop, right at the edge of where people could still see him. He said a few different things, but I didn’t turn around. I’ve been hearing it for a whole day.
I told you not to come here.
At eleven-forty, I turn off my desk lamp and turn on the small one by my bed, the one I leave on low when Kylie’s out, so she can find her way in without turning on the big light. I get into bed with my book. I read the same page four times.
I have spent two months learning the sound of every door on this floor. Three door’s down, it opens stiff and closes hard. And tonight his roommate’s girlfriend is at a party in his roommate’s jersey, which means tonight he has nowhere in particular to be.
At eleven fifty-two, I hear a door open stiff and close hard.
I put my book down.
The footsteps are slow. They aren’t going to the stairwell or the bathroom. They come down the hall one door, then two, then three, and they stop.
Nobody knocks. For a long time, nothing happens at all. There’s just the vent and my own heart and a shadow under the door, two dark shapes breaking the strip of hallway light where somebody is standing still.
Then, very quietly, one knuckle. Once. Flat. The way you’d tap a stick against glass.
“I know you’re in there, little Tessa.”
I don’t move. I don’t breathe. The chain is on. I put it on. I watched myself do it.
“You can pretend you don’t know me in a kitchen,” he says through the door. His voice is low and even. “You can pretend all you want. I’ll still be three doors down.”
The shadow under the door stays where it is.
On my desk, my phone lights up once, a text from Kylie.
It’s a blurry picture of Nash in a leather jacket and sunglasses, indoors, at midnight, clearly under protest, and three crying-laughing faces.
I look at it from my bed. My thumb finds the keyboard without my permission, and I type the one word we agreed on, the one that means come get me, the one nobody ever questions.
I look at it. I look at the shadow under the door. I don’t send it.
Outside, Rafe Waleska waits another full minute. I count every second of it. Then the shadow moves, and the footsteps go back the way they came, one door, two, three, and his door opens stiff and closes hard.
I lie there with my phone on my chest and the unsent word glowing on the screen until it goes dark.
At one-fifteen, the door rattles against the chain and Kylie whispers, “Tess? It’s me,” and I get up and let her in.
She’s pink-cheeked and giggling, holding her boots in one hand, and she tells me in a loud whisper that Nash kept the sunglasses on for forty entire minutes and that Paige and Koda left separately and came back together, and isn’t that insane?
She drinks half of her own water bottle off my desk without noticing it was the one she left for me.
“Anything happen here?” she asks, climbing into bed with the jersey still on.
I look at the door. The chain is on.
“No,” I say. “Nothing.”
“Nash is coming here tonight, okay?”
I nod.
I’ve been lying to her since I met her.
I hide in here because I’ve always known that Rafe Waleska was three doors down.
I also know what he’s capable of.