“I knew I was taking Molly,” he confesses.

  I swallow and look down at my lap. I ball my fists together and nod, only vaguely knowing what Molly really is. Alice told me over the summer that if she caught me with it, she’d pull me out of Satis House and put me back in Public.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Lily,” his voice is quiet. The shadow of his lowered head moves on the table. My eyes flit to his profile in shadow first, then to his actual face.

  His eyes are weighed down at the sides, heavy with guilt. My parents used to look at me like that when I wanted something we couldn’t afford.

  “Why did you even invite them?” My shoulders inch up high with discomfort and I barely look at him. I’m almost warding off his answer before he can give it, terrified he’s going to say it’s because they were pretty or because he likes them. It’s the question I really wanted to ask, but yet now I wish I didn’t ask it.

  “To be an asshole, I guess,” he says with a short laugh. His mouth retreats back to the same soft line—the guilty one. I didn’t laugh back. Nothing about any of this is funny.

  “You think they’re pretty.” I look down at the crumbs we’ve left on the table. I didn’t ask, instead just stating it for him. It’s easier that way.

  “I guess…yeah,” he says.

  It isn’t easy to hear at all.

  I nod slightly and run my teeth over my bottom lip, sad there’s no more chocolate. Nothing sweet to be found.

  “You want to know what Elena gave me for my birthday?”

  I look up and he draws his hands away from me, sitting up straight before looking off to the side, shaking once with an amused chuckle.

  “Keys to the kingdom!” he bellows, his voice filling the empty dining space and drawing the attention of the clerk counting down until her shift ends. She goes back to counting the money in her drawer.

  “What does that mean?” I’m not good at Henry’s riddles.

  He leans to the side and pulls his wallet from his pocket, unfolding it and slipping out a black card. He slides it over to me and turns it for me to read.

  “It looks expensive,” I say, taking it in my fingers and feeling the thick card stock. Gold lettering impressed along the front reads HAVISHAM and Henry’s name is embossed below, along with the words CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD.

  “Wow.” The word just slips out because I’m pretty sure the only card I’ll get for my birthday will have a fart joke printed on one side and a check for twenty bucks along with a note not to cash it until Friday.

  “Youngest board member of any major Chicago holding company ever. My future is written, and Havisham Industries is my ship to drive as soon as I graduate from Harvard Business School or Yale or whatever other college Elena has lined up for me.”

  He takes the card back into his hand and stares at it while I spin his words around in my brain.

  “Henry…that’s amazing,” I say, quickly realizing he doesn’t agree when I catch the ghost-white color on his face. His eyes gloss over, still staring at the card.

  “Yeah,” he eventually says, sniffing and running his arm over his face before putting the card back in his wallet. He shakes his head a few times and flits his gaze up to me. His eyes show traces of red. He isn’t happy about any of it. The world served up to him, but he doesn’t want it. I don’t get it.

  “You’re not happy…” I state the obvious, and Henry just glances up at me, the same straight dash on his lips.

  “I know, right?” He leans back in the plastic cafeteria seat and stretches his arm across the back of the open chair next to him, thrumming his fingers along the edge. “I got a car too. Multi-million-dollar company…car…cash, and a credit card.”

  “Okay, you can quit now,” I say, laughing it off like I’m not offended by any of it, but really—it’s so much that it is a little offensive.

  “I’m just hoping to teach music somewhere, like a grade school, I guess,” I say.

  Henry’s mouth forms an instant crooked smile.

  “Yeah…that would be just about perfect. You…you would be a great teacher.”

  I settle into his gaze for a minute, shifting in my seat under his attention. His eyes do this thing with me sometimes—they move around tiny parts of my face, taking in one eye at a time, a cheekbone, my chin, my lips, an ear. He’s doing it now, and I find my chin tucking into my chest a little to hide from his affectionate scrutiny, even though I do like it. I guess I just don’t want him to start finding flaws.

  “You know the moment she brought me home, the first thing Elena did was sit me down across from her in her office, at that big desk…”

  “The one with the quill?” I pipe in with an amused expression.

  Henry chuckles.

  “Yeah! I mean, who has a quill on their desk still, right? This is not the revolution!”

  We both lean forward and laugh at Elena’s idiosyncrasies. She has so many, and we spend the next few minutes running through them all, from the way she wears gloves when she goes out for a drive, to the actual teapot she uses to brew in every afternoon. It whistles, and the sound is infuriating when you’re trying to concentrate because she lets it just go on and on. She has a name plate on her desk at home, even though nobody, other than Henry, me and Alice, ever seem to come inside.

  The jokes at her expense keep tumbling out, and every little kernel Henry uncovers for me is more peculiar than the last, driving my laughter so deep that my stomach starts to cramp. Eventually, he gets back to that moment where he was a little boy, adoption ink still wet, staring at his new parent across a quill-topped cedar desk.

  “‘Young Henry,’ she said, ‘you will never feel pain or abandonment in your life again. Nobody will own you, because you will own it all. You’ll keep your heart, too, because giving that away is cheap, and we have to look out for ourselves. If you let your guard down in this life, someone will come in to steal what’s yours, and you want what’s yours…don’t you Henry?’”

  His laughter has stopped. His smile is gone. There’s a shadow to his eyes, too, from the way his head is tilted down in his stare at me. He says it all with a deep, commanding voice that echoes Elena’s, and I imagine a young Henry hearing it all while he sits in a chair too tall for his feet to touch the floor in a room gilded with gold.

  “She told me she would make every decision for me for the rest of my life, and you know what?”

  I can’t seem to speak. I only let out a tiny breath that begs for him to say the rest.

  “Up until I met you…she has.”

  The quiet is instant and thick. I know my heart is throbbing inside my body because I can feel it but there’s no sound, not even the expected rush over my eardrums or pounding in my head. It’s a choking silence.

  And then the last little fact he drops on me.

  “I called her Mom once. I was six, and I thought…ya know.” He leans his head to one side and smiles on the opposite, not a bright smile at a fond memory but the kind that comes with a lesson learned. “It seemed like enough time had passed, and other kids had moms or dads.”

  His eyes sink into mine, a long, hard stare that squeezes my heart more with every passing rise and fall of his chest.

  “She beat me with a carbon-steel piano string. Two lashings, here…” he draws a long line along his left shoulder, then reaches behind his neck to indicate where the second one was. “And there.”

  “Jesus,” my voice is barely audible. Henry’s eyes go void of anything. It isn’t a mask; it’s just emptiness, and I think maybe he’s a little shocked to be sharing these details.

  His eyes dart around the table between us, and his lips keep parting to speak, but nothing comes. Before he can cancel everything out, attempt to take it back and run from me, I try something desperate—I compliment him. No…I fucking fangirl!

  “You’re amazing at everything you do. When you row with the team…I mean…Henry,” I laugh out, bashful and sort of lost in my words. It’s too late to stop them from coming now, though. “It’s just really great. That’s all. You…you’re really great. At rowing, I mean! And…at other things. You know French…kinda. I mean, better than me. And everyone wanted to be at your birthday party…”

  I wince and start waving my hands in the air between us, as if I hold some sort of magic eraser.

  “I mean, you’re popular. But, not like a dictator, like someone people want to be around.”

  He hasn’t run away, but he’s also not moving…like, at all. I squint, realizing how much gibberish flew out of my mouth in under thirty seconds.

  “Dictators are popular?” Henry finally says, shaking lightly with his laughter at my expense, leaning back and rubbing his chin.

  “Gah! No, but…” I look down to my lap and bring my hands together so I can pick at my thumbs. I’m going to have sores by the time this night is over if I keep this up. I want to say something real to him, something that matters, but I know that it’s also going to need to be real for me. But maybe…just maybe that’s okay now. He said he chose me. I was a decision he made, and I’m not sure what that means, but it has to mean I matter.

  I matter to him.

  “It’s just, you’re saying all of these things, and I feel like maybe you don’t think you’re worth anything, or whatever. And I just wanted you to know that I think you are. I think…” I lift my chin and lock onto his eyes. They’re pained and hopeful, and he looks like he might bolt at any second. “Henry, I think you’re worth everything.”

  I shrug, my left eye starting to twitch, and my lips buzzing into numbness. My nerves are in defensive mode, ready to zap anything that touches them, like an electric fence. Yet, all I can seem to do is sit here like a schoolgirl, my ankles crossed and my hands folded in my lap, while I stare at the boy I want more than I’ve wanted anything in my whole entire life, more than I wanted to play that damn piano in that cold, dark house.

  “I think you’re great, and smart…and,” my lips shut tight, and I feel like I might vomit so I pause for a moment then keep going, ignoring the sting of tears pushing at the corners of my eyes. “I think you’re handsome. I came here…to Satis House…because of you. Not that I followed you, but I wanted to be near you. I wanted to know you more. It’s been two years, and I still hardly know you, Henry. But everything I do know—gah! You aren’t just the sum of Elena’s decisions, Henry. You’re more.”

  His eyes darken on me and don’t blink, and his mouth stays in this half-shocked, awe-struck position that I can’t quite read. His lips part, and his breath comes in and out at a steady pace, but quiet—soundless. I’m not sure if he pities me, or if he’s amused, but the longer he just holds me hostage with that stare, the more my knee threatens to bob me right out of the room, if a heart attack doesn’t take me first.

  “I am so fucking broken, Lily. You’re better off never knowing me at all.” He levels me with his words, blinking only when he’s done speaking. His expression stays ice cold. It isn’t cruel, but it hovers in the same territory.

  “No, you’re not.” I shake my head in defiance, and he blinks again, his lids closing slowly this time as his mouth bends into a practiced smile. It’s the smile Elena put there by force. I can tell the difference now.

  His head falls back as he looks up at the tiled ceiling and florescent lights buzzing above our heads.

  “Whatever you think you feel for me Lily…” His chin falls back to his chest in the small pause he makes. His eyes sweep around my face, just like before, but then they stop square on my gaze, and they become cold and rotten. “Don’t. Because I will never be able to feel anything for you.”

  His words wound me, surprisingly. I’ve heard him be mean before, but it’s never felt quite as personal as this. My forehead dents, betraying me, and I know he sees the little break in my armor.

  “I’m not like you, Lily. You…you’re always putting other people first. You didn’t want to go to my party, but you did…for me. You change your clothes for Nicki and me. You take French because Anya did and said you’d like it. You study the fucking piano, Lily! You do that because you were too afraid to tell Elena no when she insisted you learn!”

  I shake my head, a tear slipping out along my right cheek. I catch it with my palm and push it back into my hair.

  “No! That’s not true. I love the piano. I wanted to learn,” I say.

  Henry nods, a maniacal laugh bubbling out of his chest.

  “Sure, now you do. But none of that was your original thought. You are whatever we gave you—”

  “Fuck you!” I shout back at him before he can lash out at me anymore. I cup my mouth in shock and shake my head in tiny movements while his eyes lower on mine. His tongue makes a short pass at his lips, and his jaw works as if he’s sorting out the order for his words. My heart is beating so strongly that I feel it in the bottoms of my feet that are pressed hard against the floor, my legs flexed and ready to flee.

  Another tear forms, and I let this one go. I don’t want to uncover my mouth because I’m afraid if I do, more ugliness will come out of it.

  Henry’s eyes catch the movement of the beaded tears that form along my bottom lashes. The world begins to blur, forcing me to blink it away. Once I let it go, it falls down my face in a slow trail that feels like it’s slicing me open at every inch.

  “I should go,” Henry says, standing while he holds me down under the weight of his dark eyes. He dismisses his chair with a kick of his leg, sending it sliding into the table with a loud, clanging sound that draws the worker’s attention again. I start to shake my head, but he turns to throw away his uneaten donuts.

  The room lights up with a bolt just as he stops at the door, and the rain picks up outside, plastering the window until even the campus lights outside can’t shine through. It’s still inside this room—still in time.

  “Henry…” I croak out through my parting fingers.

  His shoulders sag, but he doesn’t move from his place by the door.

  “I feel nothing, Lily.” He shakes his head and holds out open palms to either side of his body, pressing his back into the door to push it open. “Just like Elena always wanted. I love nothing but myself.”

  He backs through the door to the roaring sound of thunder, water pounding his body like bullets. It doesn’t slow him down. Nothing does. The door latches shut behind him and a second later I can see his form passing along the sidewalk outside.

  I struggle to slow my breath. My fingers buzzing with energy, and unable to work properly. I follow his path until he turns around a corner, and then I hurry to gather my own trash and my book bag. My entire body is teeming with fear, and I can’t tell if it’s telling me to stay or go. Once I’m on my feet, though, giving into the chase is inevitable. It always has been—that part he was right about, sort of. I do things for Henry. But Henry also makes me do things for me.

  Shoving my arms through the straps of my backpack, I rush by the trash and discard my wrappers, then bust through the door, feeling the weight of it fight my push, the wind and rain barreling into it from the other side. My face stings from the rain slapping into my skin, and I shield my eyes as I begin to run down the same path Henry took.

  I see him the moment I round the corner, his legs taking long strides, his T-shirt plastered to his skin and pants weighed down, drenched with rain.

  “Henry!” My voice crackles out his name. I run faster, slipping and catching myself on my knee, ripping a hole in my jeans. I rub the raw spot and keep going, limping a little with my run.

  “Henry!” I shout his name again.

  This time he stops, and for whatever reason, so do I.

  His hands come up to his head, threading through his wet hair and pushing it back out of his face as he turns to me, body nearly drowned, just like mine. My hair is sticking to my face, and my sweater is heavy on my arms and back, the weight of the water pulling everything down.

  “What do you want, Lily?” Henry points to his chin, quirking his head a little as if he’s giving me a clear shot. He takes a few steps back in my direction. “You want to tell me to fuck off again, then slap me?”

  I shake my head.

  “No,” I say, not loud enough for him to hear. He cups his ear and takes another long stride, anger radiating off him. He’s a beast right now, wild in the elements and recovering from his honesty. He’s raw—I see it now. The dark eyes and stiff jaw are his way of shutting down, just like running is.

  “Go on, Lily, hit me,” he says, patting his hand along the side of his face. Water flings from his fingertips and chin, and he spits to clear his lips as he talks. The rain is so heavy it threatens to drown us where we stand, and the lightning is getting closer, his form glowing with a strike and the boom only a fraction of a second after the flash.

  “Henry,” I shudder, squeezing at the wet sweater smothering my chest.

  Henry closes the distance between us completely, hands outstretched again as he looks down on me, rain pulling his hair down to his face. He pushes it away as he bites the tip of his tongue then grits his teeth, practically daring me.

  “What do you want, Lily?”

  His chest rises and falls at an almost inhumane pace, rabid with emotion and his desperate need to run. There’s no abandoned house to go to now, though, and his rooftop is probably streaming with runoff water.

  “You…asshole!” I slam my fists against his soaking, wet chest and stare into his shocked face. His eyes move from my right to my left, a constant battle of his focus. His breath comes in hard and suddenly stops. I slam my fists into him again, this time leaving them there and opening my palms to grip at the wet threads of his shirt.

  “I want you! And I don’t believe anything you say. You aren’t those things, Henry. You just aren’t.” I step into him and let my head fall against his chest, a mix of cold and warm simmering right there on the surface. I turn my head so my cheek is flush with his body and I open my mouth just enough to let my lips drag open as I tilt my head to look up at him.