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I watched her in the side mirror until we turned out of the lot. She was still standing there, under the light, getting smaller, holding her certificate against her chest, and nobody was coming.

He moved on to talking about how he does the work that he does so that we would never amount to something like that, and I couldn’t get the image of her out of my head. Her shoes were hideous. Dad wasn’t wrong. But I’d seen her. I’d seen her the first week of ninth grade, at the end of the long table under the cafeteria windows, reading a paperback with the cover bent all the way back, eating her lunch like she was the only person in the room. I’d noticed her way before my father saw her that night, and it bothered me, and I didn’t know why.

But that night, my father sat in a car for ninety seconds and put a price on it.

He took the thing I’d seen and said it out loud in the language of our house. Real stone. Cheap setting. Wrong street, wrong people, wrong shoes. Worth something, and worthless, at the same time, because of where it was sitting. That’s how he sees everything. That’s how I was raised to see everything. And from that night on, I couldn’t look at her without hearing him say it.

The Monday after, I walked past her table, and she looked up from her book. Just for a second. Brown eyes. Brown hair. And I heard my father say pretty girl, and something in me went so hot and so ugly that I couldn’t breathe around it.

“Don’t fucking look at me,” I snapped.

And she put her eyes down.

That was the first time.

“Rafferty?”

Caroline. She’s smiling at me. She’s asked me something. Her diamond is catching the fire.

“Sorry,” I say. “What?”

She asks again. Something about the lake next summer. I answer it. I don’t know what I say because I’m looking around this room, at the dark wood and the fire and the women in their grandmothers’ diamonds and Caroline Ashby in her correct black dress, and every single person in it fits. Every one of them was made for a room like this. And my brain, without asking me, without permission, hands me a cream sweater with the sleeves pushed up. Tape stuck to the side of her hand. Those same fucking shoes. And her face through the glass of the student center café, laughing so hard at that curly-headed rower that she had to cover her mouth with her sleeve.

I put my fork down.

Why the fuck am I thinking about her?

I’m in my father’s club, at his table, with his friends and their daughters, in the one place on earth she would never be let through the door. She doesn’t belong in here. I don’t want her in here, and she’s in here anyway, at the forefront of my mind.

I take my phone out under the table.

I don’t even pretend I’m doing anything else.

She isn’t at Corvin.

Her dot is a mile off campus, on Greer Street, on top of a house I know. Everybody on the team knows it. It’s the Theta house. Greeley and Mathers and half the D go to their parties because the beer is free and the basement is big. Three floors. A hundred people on a slow night. Guys who have played beer pong since they were fourteen and girls who don’t know where the bathroom is, and a staircase in the back that goes up to the bedrooms, with nobody watching it.

And Tessa Canten is in it.

The girl who puts a chain on her door when I’m standing outside it. The girl who stayed quiet in the dark rather than tell me to fuck off through a door. She’s at Theta, on a Saturday night, in a house full of drunk guys she doesn’t know.

I don’t like that.

I don’t know why I don’t like it. It isn’t my business. I’ve never once in my life cared where she went on a Saturday night. But I’m sitting at my father’s table looking at a little blue dot on a frat house, and my jaw is so tight it hurts.

Is the rower there?

That’s my next thought, and it comes so fast I don’t see it coming. The curly-headed fuck. Is that why she went? Did he ask her? Did she put on something that isn’t that coat, and walk over there with him, and is she laughing at something he said right now behind her sleeve?

I lock the phone and put it face down on my thigh, and I’m so angry I can’t taste the food. Not at her. At myself. Because apparently my brain now keeps track of who Tessa Canten goes to parties with, and I didn’t sign off on that.

It buzzes against my leg. The team chat.

Kennebeck: 1-0 Barnes

Barnes: Your replacement sucks btw.

Barnes: Layous PASSES to me though so idk.