Page 53 of Don't Fall

Tessa’s natural beauty is breathtaking at any given moment of the day, even though she rarely smiles unprovoked. Truth is, I think it’s my favorite thing about her. She makes me work for it. Makes me earn that smile, and God, it’s so worth it.

“You must really like egg rolls,” I tease, soaking in the genuinely pleased expression on her face and fully taking in the knowledge that I put it there. That I have the ability to do that.

She shrugs, a mischievous flare flashing in her bright green eyes. “Sure. It’s the egg rolls.” Then she just stands there, taking in the scene before her.

It’s right around now, I start wondering why I laid out all the food on the floor, as if we’re kids about to have some sort of picnic. It seemed natural in the moment, plopping down here in the center of the room, where all of her stuff is still spread out. “We can move to the table,” I point out, already reaching for the closest takeout box to get moving.

“Why?” She plops down across from me, legs crossed in her lap, and starts to examine her choices. “This is perfect.”

I watch her one handedly track down the box of lo-mein she ordered, while using the other to snag an egg roll, which she proceeds to move to her mouth, holding it there with her teeth temporarily until she gets one of her large textbooks situated in her lap and can make use of her egg roll hand again. She fascinates me. The way she does everything to her own liking, never caring what’s expected and striving only to meet her own standards, which ironically are higher than most.

“Are you going to eat?” she asks, pointing her half-eaten egg roll at me.

“Is that your subtle way of letting me know there won’t be much left if I don’t hurry?” I joke, picking up a set of chopsticks and a random box of food before I lean back against the inside of the sofa.

“I’m not nearly as concerned about you getting your share of dinner as you might think, roomie. Mostly, I just want you to stop staring at me,” she mutters, eyes sweeping over the pages of her open textbook while she blindly stabs away at her noodles.

“Worried I’m psychoanalyzing you again.” I pop a piece of orange chicken into my mouth and wait for her next comeback.

“Not as worried as you should be about becoming the star of this assignment if you don’t quit.”

“Why, what’s the topic? Sexy professors? Hot casual hookups? Roommates you want to see naked?” I can keep these coming all night.

She looks up, clearly fighting a smirk and definitely losing. “Famous Psychopaths in History.”

I take a second, rolling my lip over my teeth while I decide how I want to take that one. “Think I have what it takes to be famous?”

She shakes her head, laughing, then returns her attention to the book she’s reading. Guess we’re calling that round a tie.

“So, this the stuff you want to write about when you’re a journalist?” I ask, apparently incapable of entertaining myself when she’s sitting right across from me and far more interesting than anything else I can think of.

She peers up at me, lifting only her eyes to meet mine. “Psychopaths specifically? Not so much. But, people, yeah.”

That explains the few hundred biographies she has stashed around this apartment. “How long have you known this was what you wanted to do?” Because I’m several years older than she is, and I still haven’t got that shit sorted out.

She sits up taller, abandoning her research efforts for the time being and I internalize the satisfaction of knowing I rate higher than school work. “When I was nine I had to write a paper on my hero. I spent all weekend trying to come up with someone to write about only to keep winding up with fictional superheroes I knew weren’t meant to be included. So, Sunday evening, I walked down to the library and asked to see the heroes section.” She grins, remembering her nine-year-old self, “Anyway, I was blown away with the stories I found. Stories about real people. People who didn’t look so special or different from the people I knew in real life, but who had clearly made very different choices. And thus, began my obsession.”

“With biographies?”

“With people.”

I set down my box of dinner, hand resting in my lap while I make no bones about studying her and the story she just shared. “You were nine?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And when asked to write about your hero, you didn’t just...write about your mom? Or your dad?” That’s what I did. Wrote about my father. Though, it’s not a mistake I would make a second time.

She laughs harshly. “Yeaaah, no. My parents were never my heroes.”

“That how you wound up living here? With your aunt?” I should stop asking questions. I know that. It’s getting too deep. Too personal. Even if I try to spin it as a roommate conversation, we’re stepping way out of bounds for the second time tonight already.

Tessa sighs, the sort of sigh that escapes when the moment you’ve been dreading but always knew would come eventually, finally arrives.

“More or less. My mother was hot mess while I was growing up, mostly still is, though she’s supposedly sober now and I’m told that makes a difference. I wouldn’t know. I haven’t seen or spoken to her in years. My dad was some UPS dude who would make deliveries at the liquor store she was working at when she got pregnant with me. She never saw him again after that. Social Services tried finding him once but, given all my mother could tell them was, ‘the name on his patch said Steve’ there wasn’t quite enough to go on. So, I was born to a young single mom with four babies already in tow before I ever came along, who had no steady job, no steady home and no steady frame of mind. By the time I was twelve, I’d been bounced around from one family member to the next for four years before landing back with my mom for yet another split second only to wind up getting hauled off by a social worker when someone caught wind of the fact we were all living in a broke down car in the parking lot behind the convenience mart she was running at the time.

“By then, my two oldest brothers were already over eighteen and living on their own. They petitioned to have my seventeen-year-old and fifteen-year-old brothers move in with them and the judge went for it, which left just us girls. My sister, Riley, hadn’t ever been split from my mom, and my mom finagled a deal to get her back. So then it was down to just me. Me and this really rockin’ social worker who sat with me until I believed her when she told me, I wasn’t the problem, they were. That I wasn’t too broken to be loved, they were just too broken to know how to love me.

“She searched hell and high water, and somehow tracked down the only family member, I’d never lived with, other than my dad. My great Aunt Edi. After her, I never saw my social worker ever again. But I guess the seed was planted, you know? She was there in this pivotal moment of my life. It could have gone in so many different directions, none of them good, and there she was, like my real-life fairy godmother, saving me. Sending me home for a happy ever after.” On the outside her smile stretches over her teeth, but on the inside, I know another small part of her is dying, remembering how happy ever after wasn’t nearly long enough. Because her Aunt Edi’s gone. And she was it.

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