Careful to prove Isla Monroe right about me.
The auction is in six days.
I spend the next week in a strange state of anticipation, I refuse to examine too closely. Classes blur together. Legacy Council obligations. My father's increasingly insistent calls about "taking my place in the family business."
And through it all, I'm aware of Isla in a way that's becoming problematic.
I see her in the library Thursday night, shelving books with mechanical efficiency. She doesn't see me. I watch from behind a bookshelf like a stalker, and I'm aware how pathetic that is, but I can't seem to stop.
Friday, she's in our seminar. We're discussingWuthering Heights, and Professor Hendrix asks about destructive love. Isla argues that Heathcliff's obsession destroys him. I argue that it makes him who he is, that some people are defined by their wounds.
She gives me a look that could cut glass.
"Not everything is about pain, Thornhill," she says. "Some of us are trying to heal."
The class moves on, but those words stick with me.
Some of us are trying to heal.
What am I trying to do?
Saturday night, there's a party at the Legacy House. I'm expected to host. I stand in the corner with a drink I'm not touching, watching people get drunk on my family's money, and all I can think about is a girl who works two jobs and called me a heartless asshole.
She was right.
But what she doesn't know what no one knows except Marcus is that freshman year, before that party, before I approached her, I'd been working up the courage for weeks to talk to her.
I'd noticed her the first day of our shared English seminar. She'd challenged Professor Hendrix's interpretation ofThe Great Gatsby, arguing that Daisy was trapped by her own privilege as much as by Tom. It was brilliant. It was brave and when she spoke, she didn't look at me like I was a Thornhill. She looked through me like I wasn't there at all.
I'd never experienced that before. Invisibility. It was intoxicating.
So I watched her. Learned her schedule. Found out she worked at the library. Started showing up there, pretending to study, just to be in the same space.
It took me three weeks to work up the nerve to approach her at that party. Three weeks of rehearsing what I'd say and when I finally did it, when I finally asked if she'd like to get dinner sometime, I meant it. I wanted to know her. I wanted her to see me.
And she laughed in my face. Told me I was nothing but my father's money and a heartless asshole.
In front of everyone.
The humiliation was immediate and complete. I'd never been rejected before. Never been seen so clearly and found so wanting. And the worst part, the absolute worst part was that I couldn't even be angry, because some part of me knew she was right.
So I became what she thought I was.
If Isla Monroe wanted a heartless asshole with nothing but his father's money, I'd give her exactly that.
For two years, I've been proving her right. Every cutting comment. Every sabotaged opportunity. Every casual cruelty designed to remind her that in my world, she's nothing.
Except she never acts like she's nothing. She takes every hit and comes back stronger and I hate her for it.
Or I hate that I don't actually hate her at all.
"You look miserable." Cecilia appears next to me, drink in hand. "Trouble in the kingdom?"
"Just tired of parties."
"You're tired of everything lately." She studies me with those sharp eyes that miss nothing. "This thing with the scholarship girl. What are you actually trying to accomplish?"
"I don't know what you're talking about."
