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And she laughs.

Her head goes back. Her eyes close. She covers her mouth with the sleeve of the sweater like she wants to hide it. She keeps laughing into it while he looks at her through his fingers and starts laughing, too.

I stand on the walkway with a box under my arm, watching her.

I know a lot of versions of Tessa Canten. I know the one at the end of the lunch table with her eyes on her tray. I know the one in class that doesn’t participate in anything. I know the one that was being pushed around by girls and not standing up for herself. I also know that she’s wearing the same disgusting shoes she had in high school.

But I don’t know this one.

I’ve never seen her laugh. Not once. I didn’t know she was capable of it.

Somebody bumps my shoulder going past, and I glare at the girl who turns around and apologizes like she didn’t see me fucking standing here. I don’t move. My eyes flick back up to Tess.

She hands the pen back. He says something, and she rolls her eyes, and the guy grins at her like a dog that’s been told it’s good. She doesn’t look shy. She doesn’t look careful. She looks like somebody sitting in a chair, drinking a coffee, with nothing in the world to watch out for.

Maybe that’s it.

Maybe she knew him before. Maybe he’s from home. Some guy from some other school she’s been talking to since junior year, and that’s why Woodbury. That’s why she applied, and lied, and came anyway. Not because of me. Because of a guy in a rowing jacket who can’t do his homework by himself.

I stood in a stairwell seven months ago and told her she was obsessed with me.

If she came here for him, then she wasn’t. Then she never was, and she just told me the truth that day, and I was too busy telling her what to do to hear it. That’s fine. I wanted her nowhere near me, and if she’s near him instead, then she’s nowhere near me, and that’s the whole point.

I walk away before she can look up. I tell myself it’s fine the whole way back across the quad. By the time I get to Corvin, I’ve said it enough times that it should feel real. It doesn’t feel like anything.

I throw the box on my bed without opening it.

My phone buzzes in my pocket, so I pull it out.

One new email. Tessa Canten. No subject.

I tilt my head at it.

Did she see me?

I changed my mind.

I read it again. Then again.

She changed her mind?

No, she doesn’t get to change her mind. She offered. You don’t offer something to someone and then take it back because you feel like it. That isn’t how anything works. That isn’t how she works. For four years, she did what I said, and the one time she didn’t, she lied about it.

Now she isn’t even lying. She’s just saying no.

I type: You offered.

I send it.

I stand there and wait for it to do something.

Nothing comes back. Not five minutes or an hour later, when I leave for class and check it on the stairs, and then on the quad, and then under the desk while a professor talks about something I’m going to have to read again later.

I don’t know what to do when Tessa Canten says no. She never has.

At practice, I keep the puck. Kennebeck tells me I’m fucking hogging it. Barnes tells me. Berwyn tells me with his whistle and then with his whole mouth. I score twice, and after that, nobody tells me anything.

By seven, I’m at my desk with the paper that’s due Friday and a pen I keep clicking, and Kennebeck’s girlfriend is on his bed, as usual, with her feet on his wall and her hair all over my floor.