Free How to Build a House by Dana Reinhardt Page B

he could find his own way home.
    I didn’t say any of this to Tess because I couldn’t even figure out what it was I was feeling. And anyway, with her gone only about ten days, there was too much to fill her in on standing in the hallway between classes.
    “It was okay,” I lied.
    There was an awkward silence. I suddenly felt like a shy boy trying to muster up the courage to ask an untouchable girl out on a date. I didn’t know how to begin. Was the cooling-off period over? Could we start talking again?
    Tess and I never had to part not knowing when and where we would see each other again. We always knew we’d meet up back home, in the kitchen.
    “So, maybe we could hang out later,” I said.
    “For sure. You know, you should come by our new place. Check it out. Cole has a terrarium with a tarantula in his room. Mom’s overcompensating. You know how freaked out she is by spiders, so she must really be worried about him.”
    “That’d be nice,” I said. “And you can always come by the house too. You know how to find it.”
    Her face fell. She was suddenly Tess from the party again.
    “I can’t do that. I won’t do that. If you want to hang out it has to be at my place, or somewhere else, anywhere but your house.”
    It was as if she’d slapped me. Kicked me in the gut. Yet she hadn’t moved.
    Tess was still far, far away from me.
    “But …” But I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t understand.
    “I don’t want to go to that house ever again.”
    In a second, a whole world was revealed.
    Tess blamed Dad.
    I let this wash over me. I soaked in it as the bell for fourth period rang and Tess disappeared down the hallway.
    I was never late. To anything. Ever. But today I was going to be late.
    No, today I was going to miss class altogether.
    I leaned against my locker and slid down.
    I started to get angry. I started to think of things in terms I’d never had to think of them before.
    My father. Her mother.
    Is that what this was going to come down to?
    You didn’t see me refusing to go to Jane’s. In fact, I’d gone to lunch with Jane, and I let her hold my hand and tell me she still loved me.
    I was trying to be generous. I was trying to stay above all that, the mine and the hers .
    But not Tess.
    I sat on the cold stone floor of the empty hallway.
    HERE
    This morning the heat came early.
    By ten, my hair was soaked through. I lifted up my goggles to wipe away the sweat that had pooled just below them, and like an idiot, or maybe like someone in the throes of heatstroke, I forgot to put them back on before returning to the worm-drive saw.
    I got some dust in my eye. At least, that’s what I assumed it was, but now it’s after lunch and my eye is still stinging and tearing and nothing seems to make it stop.
    I can’t check if it looks okay because one of the many drawbacks to portable toilets is that they don’t come equipped with mirrors.
    I need to have someone look at my eye.
    Stacey is my partner this week, but she’s nowhere to be seen. Probably snuck off to the woods to be alone with Jared.
    I go find Teddy. He’s hammering with total concentration and precision. He works like his life depends on it, and in a way, it sort of does.
    “Can you look at something for me?” I ask.
    “Sure.” He wipes his hands on his shorts and I take a step closer to him.
    “It’s my eye.”
    “What about it?”
    “It won’t stop tearing.”
    “Maybe you’re just overly emotional. Or maybe you’re hormonal? I hear chicks get that way sometimes.”
    “Seriously, does it look okay?”
    He takes my face in both hands and looks closely.
    “It does look red. And kind of sad. What happened?”
    “I forgot my goggles.”
    “You? Impossible!”
    “I think there’s something stuck in there.”
    He pulls down my lower lid and then lifts my upper one, exposing the red ugly part around my eye. He’s dangerously close to my eyeball, but somehow it doesn’t freak me out.
    “I don’t see anything, but I